I'm surprised that founders still care about all that stuff. They already made tons of money, who cares. None of it means anything. Nothing is fair in this society.
They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
Currently, my experience is that spam filters often block non-spam messages and allow many spam messages through. Platform notifications are spam! Yes, even if I signed up for it, I agreed to be contacted by the company, I never agreed to be spammed by them 100 messages a day.
Platforms should aggregate all their notifications into a single daily or weekly email unless the thing is marked urgent! It's not difficult to do!
Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness.
In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.
My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.
I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.
The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
> In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Putting aside the numbers, how does your quality of life compare to decades ago?
It’s difficult to measure objectively, due to being physically younger and in an earlier stage of my career and so worser-paid, but adjusting for that, I think quality of life 20 years ago was pretty much the same as now, slightly better in some regards, slightly worse in others.
Of course there are fun new gadgets and gizmos and TV on demand and social media and such, but honestly they’re just toys, and in some cases have made my quality of life worse.
The biggest tangible improvement I can think of is one particular medical advancement, which has allowed a family member to survive a disease when they absolutely would not have 20 years ago. That’s incredible.
But otherwise the quality of life change over the last 20 years is minimal by most important metrics I can think of. Which makes one wonder what the dogged pursuit of GDP growth has achieved for the last decade or two.
It kept getting slightly worse every year since I joined the workforce. My salary is 2x when I started 14 years ago but it buys less than half what it could back then. Most of it goes into rent. It's almost impossible to save. I was never given a salary increase even with excellent reviews of my work as a software developer. I even built a popular open source project with 6k stars on GitHub which was a lot back then but it didn't yield any good opportunities.
I only got increases by changing companies which I did at least 10 times over the last 14 years (a lot of contract jobs). I also changed countries several times. I only worked for one company which grew pretty well and got some shares as early employee but they're not liquid currently and maybe worth $150k USD tops but who knows where it will end up with AI disruption. Anyway I can't cash out.
I work non-stop, still working side projects nights and weekends. Feels like there are no opportunities at all and all media channels are full of bots so I can't promote my product. When I tried social media ads years ago, it felt like it was only shown to bots so I've been skeptical of this approach since (especially now with LLMs around). Also, the internet is full of fake products which claim to have similar features as my product but they don't actually deliver so my target customer grew distrusting of all small projects like mine, making it impossible to gain trust.
So yeah my work life sucks. I struggle to save. Can rarely go on holidays. Can't even take leave without raising eyebrows at work. Day job is more demanding, less fulfilling. I don't have much personal life because I work weekends. If I started talking about my career in detail, it just gets awful and Kafkaesque.
So it's pretty bad. I regret having hustled so hard. While others were out partying, I was working and improving myself through open source, now my open source work was scraped by AI and sold for a profit while I get zero opportunities from it and copyright laws which I based much of my career strategy around are being dismantled.
Also, there is another terrible thing that happened to me in my personal life but it's just bad luck. So I can't blame that on "the system." I appreciate improvements to medicine like another commenter also said but that's essentially the only improvement.
I'm not worried about AI safety. People greatly overestimate the utility and capabilities of intelligence. I'm not afraid of intelligence, I'm afraid of idiocy.
We can't abolish it. That would be theft. A lot of people worked very hard based on the assumption that their work would be theirs and that they could monetize it.
It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.
If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
The post didn't say that it should happen in a single moment. It would likely take the form of heavily reducing the maximum duration across the board and then gradually decreasing it for anything new. For example, capping it entirely at 30 years and then reducing it by 1 year for all new works every year. It would then be abolished in 30 years.
>> JS... Because our strawman is a modern (shitty) language
This is an attitude I dislike from all these niche language communities. They give each other pats on the back for shitting on the most popular, versatile, compatible and adaptable programming language of all time.
I started using JS back in 2004 and, since then, I have watched it constantly being shat on by theoretically-minded folks. Before Node.js, people would keep pointing out "JS is a scripting language, not a programming language." Then, it became a programming language and went through the biggest adoption growth phase of any language in the history of mankind. I literally saw hardware manufacturers adopting JavaScript and even building custom JavaScript engines for their custom hardware, all while their academically-minded peers simultaneously shat on the language. They shat on it wave after wave, while it kept getting better and better and proved itself to be more adaptable than their own pet languages.
People are so hard-headed and biased against JS that the community literally had to invent a new label/wrapper; 'TypeScript' as a Trojan horse to get those stubborn folks to use it.
My view now is that JS critics are all talk. JS has been doing the walk; trampling all over their theories and abstractions and leading the way in many regards. Yes, it has bad parts, but all of these parts are avoidable; none of these parts are fundamental to the language. The matrix showing of how JS comparison operators down-cast everything to a string (leading to un-intuitive results) keeps being brought up but nobody asks the question "Why would anyone use a casting comparison operator to compare variables of two different types in the first place?". The fundamentals are excellent and proven as such.
That JS is the shittiest language is obvious to everyone who knows at least one other language. What it has is the ecosystem and in particular, it's the language that browsers use.
As someone who coded professionally in Python, C, C++, C# and Typescript, I disagree. JavaScript is my favourite language.
I just avoid the bad parts. Just like everyone else avoids the bad parts of their favorite programming languages. I compare languages based in the patterns and functionality that are actually used, not based on the sum of all its theoretical parts.
> They give each other pats on the back for shitting on the most popular, versatile, compatible and adaptable programming language of all time.
I don't see why C, C++ or Java wouldn't meet some of those criteria. Everything is written in those languages. As for most adaptable, I don't see how it's possible for JS to be more adaptable than Lisp. JS isn't homioconic. It doesn't have macros.
Part of my motivation for moving back to Australia was because the low population density means I could potentially survive on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
In the event of an apocalypse, I would probably move back with my parents as they live near a beach in Queensland which is a really good fishing spot. My parents catch big fish from the beach every week. They never buy fish. The area has lots of mango trees. Also, there are kangaroos in the area so there is no shortage of options.
I remember I was surprised when I moved to The Netherlands for a while and one of my colleagues said something along the lines of "As humans, we can't survive without each other." I was thinking to myself WTF? Of course you can. But in retrospect I think maybe Europe isn't quite in the same situation. Low-density nations with good weather like Australia and New Zealand are actually quite unique in that way.
Hunter gatherers live in a small village (the village moves, but it is still a village) and depend on other people in the village for things. There are only a tiny number of people ever who have lived all along for long.
Survival is not the problem if the land provides abundant resources. The limiting factor is procreation. Hermits don't tend to have children so they 'die out' as a species but they're fine as individuals. In reality there needs to be a balance; enough people to procreate but not so much as to take resources faster than surrounding nature can produce.
Of course, in densely populated parts of the world, society is completely dependent on modern farming because the 'surrounding nature' cannot provide anywhere near enough food for the population without advanced farming. A disruption in the social order or supply chains would mean that people would have to cannibalize to reach an equilibrium with the surrounding nature.
Survival is nowhere near as hard as most people believe, especially in a warm country without seasons. I used to do week-long camping trips to remote islands without any civilization there. There are people who have been living on remote islands by themselves without any issues for years. Australia is actually quite safe. The things which can kill you are pretty easy to avoid. Snakes are scared of you, crocodiles are only near rivers and lakes and only in some states, sharks and jellyfish are only in the sea, dangerous spiders are pretty rare and mostly mind their own business... No bears, no lions, no wolves (except dingoes but they're smaller and more like wild dogs), no nasty bug-borne diseases.
I didn't say it couldn't be done. I said that it wasn't commonly done. Procreation is one reason, but even if you have enough kids you generally want to talk to other people regularly.
In many cases I know of somebody did live alone for a few decades, but when they got old they eventually gave it up.
When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.
Germany is not so great either in that sense though at least in crypto sector, the pay was reasonable... Though as a job it was total BS.
UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations), The Netherlands was pretty good (especially contract roles thanks to big tax discounts for foreigners). But IMO, one of the best countries outside of the US for software work has been Australia. I actually came back to Australia because of it. Though it's not quite as lucrative today but it's certainly still much better paid than France and has potential.
That said, if you want to do your own startup and you do not have special business connections or pedigree, then the US is the only real option IMO.
I think it comes down to easy money. Easy come, easy go. To be rich enough to invest in startups in France, you need to be born into old money or be a complete freak of nature. These kinds of people don't part with their money easily. They need a guaranteed return and they can't rely on any media channel to bring traffic. If you live outside of the US, all media channels are essentially working against you; you can literally feel that and so everything is riskier. It's like playing the same game with a massive handicap.
> When I was in Germany a few years ago, I was browsing jobs available in France and most software development jobs were under $55K USD. I don't know how you're supposed to survive on that. You can probably make more money as a waiter.
Salaries are calculated differently in France, Germany, US etc. For example working in Germany you're likely to fork a huge amount monthly to your health insurance. It actually makes it difficult to negotiate comp across borders.
$55k USD brut in France is around 2.8k EUR / month after taxes in France, which counts as the upper bracket of Middle Class in most of the country outside of Paris. Paltry when you're used to tech comps but decent for the vast majority of people here.
On the whole I agree that it's not competitive regionally or globally, and as for myself I'd leave for Switzerland or Australia if I had the opportunity.
In Australia, house would be at least 50% more, apartment would be maybe 70% more. Beef is cheaper (about half price) and tastier (from my experience). Bread is probably half price and way tastier in France though.
Actually, after living in Europe and coming back to Australia, the quality and price of meat is what surprised me most. A lot of times in Europe, I would order a burger and the patty would basically taste like sausage meat; tough and flavorless. In Australia, beef is really good and cheap.
> UK was pretty good at some point (though all the really good jobs were gate-kept by IR35 regulations),
Then we got a PM, who's father in law is the founder of Infosys, who changed the law to favour the likes of Infosys (by making it too risky for smaller players to hire contractors). Scandalous corruption
Contracting was going to be my plan for buying a better house and early retirement, but that's gone now. Thanks Rishi
My wife and I love British culture, architecture, parks, etc... But compared to Australia, I felt like it was still feudalism over there. It's like everyone knew their place. I could feel the class system; the software contracting 2-tier system (inside IR35 vs outside IR35) really emphasized that.
Similar vibes in Germany though a more modern version.
The Netherlands seemed relatively egalitarian for Europe. It's what I like most about Australia. In Australia, there are no artificial social barriers, no class system.
After failing at startups after a decade, I had to live somewhere I would not be seen as a second-class citizen.
Britain is its own worst enemy. I'm convinced if there was a movement to destroy the intangible class-system the economy would grow big time. The lack of investment comes from old-farts getting away with lack of reinvestment due to a lack of competition - and nobody talks about it.
It's not spam if it's the first time I heard of it and it's useful. It shows they care about their project. This makes me want to try it out even more.
Meta and Google can spam their unsolicited ads to a billion users but regular people aren't allowed to promote their own projects on niche forums? This is bs. You're the problem here. Self-promoting your harmful values. You're the spammer.
Spam is, rather definitionally, undesired marketing.
If they don't desire it, it's spam for them. And they rather clearly do not desire it.
(You could also go with the stronger "unrequested marketing" definition, which makes this even more "definitely spam". CAN-SPAM rules define it this way, so that seems fair too)
They don't mind the system working unfairly in their favor; they only have an issue with it when it starts working against them. At that point, it's too late; you have no voice.
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