So you're saying companies correctly estimated the need to cut staff to remain competitive and did so -- or at least, some state of affairs empirically indistinguishable from this. Not much of an argument, sorry to say
So did typesetting. But now nobody wants me to ink pages with my bins of moveable type, so I have to go be smart somewhere else, in another field, where everyone is leagues ahead of me in all the ways that count.
Signed,
a fictitious 18th century typesetter, perhaps the best and smartest there ever was
Depends on the bigco IMO. I'm not sure what kind of layoff numbers for Year Three of genAI would grab your attention, but I assure you, hundreds of thousands have mine.
Fuck. If the tea is true, this is such a gross way of handling it. I get that they're in an existential battle rn, but they have just Streisand-Effected their own technological pusillanimity.
"Normal" here requires a time bound. I would say it's pretty abnormal if the window is "the last thirty years", and pretty normal if it's "the last thirty days."
Ads first, then surveillance, as always. Also, recall that there is no confidentiality privilege when talking to an AI; any proprietary cloud-hosted model gathers text to be read out in court. You can now have your convo about your ex wife read out by your ex wife, in front of a judge.
Finally, recall that the unique conditions that kept the USA from developing a culture of political disappearances and kangaroo courts seem to have ended. The state will love knowing who is thinking about abortion, for example, or attending a protest.
Just like it already does, but with so much more detail!
The barrier to getting a traditional therapist is enormous - for some problems you're looking at years, maybe decades of treatment, at anywhere from $150-250 a pop.
In the USA techworld, your insurance will likely not cover this unless you are fortunate enough to still be on a gold plated FAANG plan. (For now.) If you're elsewhere, or working elsehow, then it is often even less likely.
A second barrier, is the difficulty in finding patient-therapist fit; IMO it's worse than trying to find a kidney donor, unless your problems are very mundane (litmus: does a Hallmark card cover this?)
So, access to real therapy is already hard to secure. Talk bots offer a convenient and affordable alternative. Most people will thus be fobbed off on bots that are also snitches, sycophants, and occasionally incite violence and self-harm, but that's what we have personal responsibility for, hmm? It's terribly convenient for mis-ascribing blame.
Finally, there is every reason to expect that for many people there is no "transference" or deep therapeutic emotional connection with LLM therapy, and, if there is one, it's an attack surface now.
In other words, the new "therapy" will be risky, ineffective, manipulative and sycophantic, so it will, in the best case scenario, do nothing, and in the worst, quite a bit of harm.
You have a great narrative there, with villians and deception, and sensible heroes who dismiss the nonsense with fresh air and clear heads.
But do look at the actual data. The AMOC slowing is ahead of schedule. Carbon use is down, but atmospheric carbon is accelerating (!) , strongly suggesting that there are now active feedback loops.
"Ha! It is Tuesday and I am not yet dead! Those silly doctors!" Feels good to shout, but won't see you through Sunday.
Trust me, the climate is in as rough a shape as those so-called extremists would have you believe. You can quite literally read it off the veniers, or at least we could until we hired a strong man to smash them.
Nuclear is another matter -- I reckon the European anti-nuclear movement set climate change ahead by at least several years, but these days the cost/benefit leans solar, as political unrest pairs poorly with nuclear hazards, as Ukraine has learned in the past five years.
Nevertheless, the UK's administrative class' fetish for "sensible" solutions works great except during a generational upheaval, when they can't (to borrow a metaphor from aviation) see the horizon and must trust their instruments and the data they deliver.
It's the same here in Canada, I am sorry to report. A Commonwealth cultural tic we would all best be mindful of, lest we wear sensible shoes that take us all the way to calumny.
"Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.
I've been thinking lately that what underpinned the FOSS golden age was not actually decentralized VCS and high-quality forges, nor even ZIRP, but rather peacetime.
After a period of branches and patchsets, full national hard forks are going to become de rigeur, and linux-derived OSes across the world are going to bloom necessarily, as we no longer have the kind of ambient trust required to collaborate across borders.
Look forward to Euro-linux, Sino-BSD, and I guess probably some sort of GCC-area build as well.
Patches will be accepted across national boundaries with only the highest scrutiny, which itself will likely be provided by nationalized AI platforms.
'Barring the invasion of Taiwan' might actually be quite a lot to bar in mid 2026.
My hot take is that it's now or never for Xi, and from the specific things he is reported to have said to the US president at their last meeting lead me to think that he at least knows this is his big chance; whether or not it is taken is the part of the forecast that is opaque to me.
The expectation of linear presentation of change in a bistable system is gobsmacking here.
If this kind of argument were generally valid, it would imply that:
- all change neither accelerates nor decelerates, which is absurd, on the face of it;
- the initial stages of a deep change are always surface-visible; for instance, cancers announce themselves when they begin to gestate, rather than when they metastasize
- A few recent points of data of questionable significance outweighs a hypothesis with considerable support from reason, intuition, and other (unpresented) data. For example, the plight of recent CS grads, which _is_ new, and _is_ on graphs, just not the one the author here chose.
So, since these implied claims are self-evidently _false_, it means that the author would, at a minimum, need to provide an explanation as to _why in this one instance, these considerations do not matter_; for example, the author could have argued that the graph positioned at the center of their argument is the one to look at (as opposed to, say, recent CS grads,) but that _itself requires further argumentation._
It also does not account for the other obvious possibilities; e.g.,that there is a delay between the (as it were) lightning and its thunder; or that even strongly nonlinear effects would have shown up by now in the metric chosen; etc. But since these contributions were not included in the original post, I have no choice but to discount it.