Apart from the current administration's absolutely hilariously bad governing, the US economy really only cares about profit. The same is going to happen to any country with outsized income inequality.

> the US economy really only cares about profit

Which would be ok if we more effectively were able to include externalities into company's overhead, instead of constantly subsidizing them.

This argument would make more sense if Chinese companies were all going out of business due to their governments heavy investments in solar and batteries.

Which is a good thing because solar + batteries is literally the easiest way to make profit currently, and will get more profitable year over year.

>The “time” refers to a day of life for anyone, at any age and in any circumstance — not just the hours worked by someone with a job.

So it's how much you earn per day divided by 24, or maybe by yearly earnings and hours per year

>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.

Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?

Because they may have studied history... There are countless examples of eras of lost technology due to a stumble in society. Where those societies were never able to recover the lost "secrets" of the past. Ultimately, yes, humans can rediscover/reinvent how to do things we know are possible. But it is a very real and understandable concern that we could build a society that slowly crumbles without the ability to relearn the way to maintain the systems it relies upon, fast enough to stop it from continued degradation.

Like, yeah, you have the resources right now to boot strap your knowledge of most coding languages. But that is predicated on so many previous skills learn through out your life, adulthood and childhood. Many of which we take for granted. And ultimately AI/LLM's aren't just affecting developers, they are infecting all strata of education. So it is quite possible that we build a society that is entirely dependent on these LLM's to function, because we have offloaded the knowledge from societies collective mind... And getting it back is not as simple as sitting down with a book.

And we're still here right? We have more books and knowledge and capabilities than ever. Despite theoretically losing knowledge along the way, we're okay (mostly).

Society can replace the systems it relies on. The replacement might not be the best, but it'll probably handle things until we can reinvent a newer, better system. It probably won't be easy, but you can't convince me that humanity suddenly cannot adapt and fix problems right in front of them. How long does history have us doing that?

These are extraordinary claims that all of society will just become dumb and not be able to do any of this. History is also littered with people fretting about the next generation not being smart enough or whatever, and those fears rhyme pretty closely with what we're talking about here.

You could have lived 200 years. But instead, people decided they'd rather invest in crypto or LLMs instead.

Maybe humans will still be here in a century. But you won't be. It didn't have to be this way.

I don't see how they are actually exclusive in the long-term. Crypto investment isn't that big, and LLMs, or AI in general, may provide support for better treatments, thus possibly allowing people to reliably live onto 200 years.

>"That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. "

Yes we can but there is a big problem here. We will "learn it again" after something breaks. And the way the world currently functions there might not be a time to react. It is like growing food on industrial scale. We have slowly learned it over the time. If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it.

>It is like growing food on industrial scale.

How many people do you think know how to do that today? It's in the millions (probably 10s to 100s), scattered all across the globe because we all need to eat. Not to mention all of the publications on the topic in many different languages. The only credible case for everyone forgetting how to farm is nuclear doomsday and at that point we'll all be dead anyway.

>If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it.

I don't think there is a single piece of technology that is so critical to civilization that everyone alive easily forgets how to do it and there is also zero documentation on how it works.

These vague doomsday scenarios around losing knowledge and crashing civilization just have zero plausibility to me.

I imagine it being a "does anybody know COBOL?!" but much sooner than sixty years rom now.

COBOL also came to mind.

The COBOL thing seems to be working out just fine last I heard. Today a small number of people get paid well to know COBOL's depths and legacy platforms/software. The world moved on, where possible, to lower cost labor and tools.

Arguably, that outcome was the right creative destruction. Market economics doesn't long-term incentivize any other outcomes. We'll see the arc of COBOL play out again with LLM coding.

I know it's just anecdotal, but I looked for COBOL salaries a couple of years ago, curious about this "paid well".

The salaries were ok but not good for COBOL.

Here's an anecdotal Reddit thread about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/developpeurs/comments/1ixfpsx/le_sa...

I've been waiting for the article talking about how AI is affecting COBOL. Preferably with quotes from actual COBOL programmers since I can already theorize as well as the next guy but I'm interested in the reports from the field.

While LLMs have become pretty good at generating code, I think some of their other capabilities are still undersold and poorly understood, and one of them is that they are very good at porting. AI may offer the way out for porting COBOL finally.

You definitely can't just blindly point it at one code base and tell it to convert to another. The LLMs do "blur" the code, I find, just sort of deciding that maybe this little clause wasn't important and dropping it. (Though in some cases I've encountered this, I sometimes understand where it is coming from, when the old code was twisty and full of indirection I often as a human have a hard time being sure what is and is not used just by reading the code too...) But the process is still way, way faster than the old days of typing the new code in one line at a time by staring at the old code. It's definitely way cheaper to port a code base into a new language in 2026 than it was in 2020. In 2020 it was so expensive it was almost always not even an option. I think a lot of people have not caught up with the cost reductions in such porting actions now, and are not correctly calculating that into their costs.

It is easier than ever to get out of a language that has some fundamental issue that is hard to overcome (performance, general lack of capability like COBOL) and into something more modern that doesn't have that flaw.

>I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.

Yeah, shrinking revenue, lawsuits, death threats, buyouts and takeovers, government strong-arming all contribute to not really wanting to fight the fight that they need to.

There isn't a solution to this as you can't bankroll media outlets or journalists and not expect to be considered biased. The revenue has to come from every day people. So if the revenue isn't there to pay the best people, you're simply not going to have a good, independent media industry any more. Any very-rich person bankrolling that probably also has political affiliations, which again introduces bias.

With rising cost of living, the population will clearly cut out the media subscriptions thinking that the free journalism slop is enough to keep them informed.

I don't see this bubble really popping as-in sinking the economy. Some circular investing and enough write offs will happen to avoid the largest recession indicators from informing the general population that there's actually a recession. You also have a government willing to do shady shit for their own benefit at the expense of responsible governing and ethics, and we have already seen the business leaders of the biggest tech companies cozy up to the administration.

My guess is that cloud companies will scoop up the data centers for pennies on the dollar and the GPUs get written off or fire-sold to enthusiasts still wanting to run local models. Then they can offer exceptionally low initial prices to new customers and get more people to be locked in. Or maybe we see a couple of new cloud companies start up but that would likely need lower interest rates.

DC infra will be scooped up by cloud guys, that's a given. As for GPUs.. well low-precision tflops have other uses besides inference. You can run Doom for example.

You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'

yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.

How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.

And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week.

(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)

>trying to get visibility

They could review PRs and commits and specs to get visibility and reduce comms overhead, if they had the skills and time.

The non-technical manager also takes great conveniences in making technical people spend their time translating things. But no one ever asks the manager to learn new skills as much as they make developers do it.

This is a really interesting point that too often goes unexamined.

I don’t know how to design and integrate systems and products, and write code, because I was born that way. I had to learn.

Likewise, later on, I had to learn project management, and product management, and the language of business so I could communicate effectively with those lacking a background in technology. Again, wasn’t born that way: had to learn.

But in a quarter of a century, the number of people on the commercial side who’ve bothered to learn enough about the technology side to have an informed conversation? Very few. Probably count them on one hand (the naive way: not using binary).

And bear in mind we’re talking about businesses that were heavily if not totally reliant on technology and the delivery of technology solutions for their continued existence.

You’d think a few more of these people would want to take a bit more responsibility for those outcomes, and maybe be a bit less disruptive to productivity, given their livelihoods have often depended on the success of said outcomes.

Like I say: interesting, isn’t it?

Standups should eliminate almost all other meetings engineers need to attend. Except to go deeper on questions that came up in standup that cannot be instantly resolved.

Otherwise yeah there’s really no point.

I would be pleased with the standup if it eliminated other meetings, but that has definitely not been my experience.

there should be only 3 regular meetings in an agile engineering team - weekly iteration planning (1-2 hours max) - daily standup (15 mins max) - weekly demo & retro (1-2 hours max)

literally everything else is work off the kanban board or backlog.

in my teams everyone was told to decline all meetings unless it explicitly led to the completion of a weekly planned story/task. this way all meetings for the team have a clear agenda and end in mind.

for mandatory external meetings & running interference with external parties, there are ways to insulate the majority of the team from that.

Is that three kinds of regular meetings? Because I count 8 meetings (and four kinds, as I don't think I've ever had demo and retro combined due to different groups of people being in both).

Sure, I was being loose with my terminology, you are right to correct this.

the point was in a 40 hour work week, it's reasonable for 15% of it to spent in coordination meetings, while 85% is directly related to progress.

Usually the retro is after the demo when other folks leave the room / drop from the zoom :-)

Not correcting, just clarifying for myself. I sure wish I had such a controlled environment with only 15% of time in coordination and where standup actually was 15 mins and not a segue into the everything meeting.

Be the change you want to see.

Do you mean standups as part of Scrum? Scrum dictates several other meetings.

I will allow one more meeting to start a new sprint and end the previous one. Everyone should have prepared ahead of time to report on all their sprint items and whether they were completed, if not why not, and to present the work they will be doing in the next sprint.

If the Scrum Master or whatever their title schedules any other repeating process meetings, fire them.

But what about that meeting that starts with "how do you feel today?" and "if you were a car, what car would you be? And why?".

Well obviously that’s an exception and must be allowed.

In my last company (before I left tech forever) I would tell my team that I am blocked on something or my progress is slow because of whatever reason and it would all get ignored lol.

It was almost like they required the standup as part of the process but never used it the way it should be used.

I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer

aside from gedit and geany and nano and emacs and notepad and vsc and notepad++ and sublime text and...

what would you say about a EE that could not use a scope?

i would say that analogy was made by someone who seems to labour under the misunderstanding that you can only write code from within vi.

I'd say, their degree is BS. You can't finish Uni as a EE, without using a scope a few times.

what if I told you some people weren't baptised into the unix ecosystem. Wild, I know.

RTO would be much more popular if people were actually coming back to an individual office instead of the cubicle farm

Businesses and commercial real estate did this to themselves. I especially hope commercial real estate enters a death spiral and we stop building offices unless they are absolutely needed and free up some of the land for residential use (and not converting the buildings).