Really enjoyed it, and went back and read "Programming Sucks" which is also full of delightful nuggets like this:
"The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad."
There is essentially zero accountability for harm.
There is no button on your toaster that blows up the toaster.
But there's a link in your email. And that's a button.
And no one has figured out how to punish Microsoft or Apple or Google for allowing that to continue, though we do this just fine elsewhere.
Someone or something has to be punished, regulated or otherwise hurt for anything to change here.
Gotta sue people and companies. Gotta get governments to do more regulation. I know this place is kind of allergic to that, but hey.
I’m being paid the same. I’m still doing 40 hours. The huge gains in productivity are not mine to enjoy, it seems.
Edit: To put a finer point on this, generally,employed people don't get paid more for the excess value they produce, they get paid more for for the delta in perceived value between them and the next best option to fill the position (on a grand statistical scale for careers).
* There are exceptions to this in the form of commission based jobs.
So all that productivity increase didn't result in higher profits either, end users mostly captured it by getting a lot of free services that previously used to cost money. International communication used to be extremely expensive but today I exchange hundreds of messages with people across the sea daily for almost nothing.
But, tech has been particularly monopolistic/duopolistic and anticompetitive in a lot of different ways. Avoiding being treated as a commodity the same way many of the employees of those companies have.
The productivity increase religion has never really been about workers. Any increase in productivity is used to reduce the workforce count and to bleed dry existing workers who now have to overproduce in place of their fired coworkers. Its sad how occasionally some people obsess about their productivity on HN as-if they're unaware that they're buying into the very thing that will get them fired and/or burned out.
Hell, I paid for my own programming environment (SlickEdit) years ago with my own money and still didn't expect to get paid more. I did it because it helped me deliver higher quality work more efficiently and I was proud of that.
Yeah man I don't know if mommy and daddy are paying your rent and healthcare (as I often see from people with this attitude). Or maybe you're one of the 45 year old tech workers whose mid life crisis involves a music project no one will listen to and going to work on some startups with your FIRE nest egg until you come crawling back to a big tech company. But for now I, like most millennial Americans, am reliant on wage labor to afford a dignified life in a tolerable town.
> But for I, like most millennial Americans
Someone who turns 45 in 2026 is a millennial though.
hell yeah baby, I'm a proud Luddite.
It raises the question of how much text I have read that I did not realise was LLM-generated. I think I have a decent nose for it but I’m not perfect, there must be false negatives (and false positives, as it certainly might be with this article). What will it mean when I can no longer tell the difference?
Edit: thinking on it a little more, I hope the author doesn’t feel insulted by my comment given the subject matter of the article at hand. Sorry, it’s early morning! I’m sure I am wrong about my assessment. Which now really makes me wonder about the above
No AIs were harmed in the writing of this post, either physically or by the sharing of earlier (cringe) drafts.
It just means that you will have to evaluate prose on its own merits (aesthetic, logical, etc).
The main problem with LLM-assisted writing is that effort-to-write is now much lower than effort-to-read -- the LLM-prose-style is simply an imperfection that can sometimes help the reader bail on a piece (and there might be false-positives).
Most people are already biased against reading long pieces, and seem to skim them more often than not. These people are _probably_ a little worse off than before, but they are not paying full-price for being hoodwinked. The people who end up paying full-price are probably going to become more sophisticated in how they choose what to read. I can't tell if this will be good/bad for publishers and/or advertisers.
I don't want to make any accusations, just give some evidence to the above comment.
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I'm absolutely tired at work on how many people are writing with em-dashes with obvious AI prose. I feel a little bit insulted but then I remember we all participate in this charade.
Nice article by the way!
As this post was inspired by "Programming Sucks," that the traffic generated by it made something break is quite on point.