It's not just Thiel and Musk misreading classic sf/f. It's most of you.
How many you have actually read Mary Shelley closely enough to realize that Victor Frankenstein was the villain of the piece?
How many of you have read Michael Young closely enough to understand that "meritocracy" does not mean what you think it means?
How many of you read Snow Crash closely enough to understand that the metaverse only exists because capitalists ruined the real world for everybody?
You lot are the reason we even have the "don't build the torment nexus!" meme. After the collapse, the survivors might ask, "Who killed the world?"
The answer? It's you. All of you. The greatest act of loving-kindness or effective altruism you could offer the world would be to turn off your computers and never, ever write another line of code again.
Because none of you know how to read. I blame your parents. And the public schools.
As an independent contractor, I job hop regularly and use the expiration of every contract as an opportunity to demand a better deal for myself. I don't give a damn about "promotions"; what would I want to be besides a ronin?
The downside is taxes. Taxation on wages is indeed theft. Fuck the rich; tax them instead, for the same reason John Dillinger robbed banks: that's where the money is.
At risk of sounding like a typical HN pedant: you already had the words you needed. There was no need to use the word "content", or is the max size on the title textbox so small that there wasn't room for "Ask HN: where do you get news and entertainment?"
I don't consume content. If somebody calls themselves a content creator, I write them off as being unworthy of my time. If a writer doesn't believe in themselves enough to call themselves a writer, then why should I read them?
As far as I'm concerned, content creation is merely a euphemism for defecation. Everybody creates content; just do it in private and wash your hands afterward.
If you prefer to avoid Substack because they still host neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, you should avoid seeingthesystem.com as well because it's hosted on Substack.
Thanks for the correction, but I'm going to leave my original post alone even if I could still edit it.
I've no more use for Ronny Chieng's ideas as to what I should do with my life than I would Conan O'Brien's or Eric Schmidt's. Let them live their own lives according to their own ideas.
I'm not a boomer, but I've got my tiny violin. What I want to know is what this guy did to be tasked with writing for Fortune about the effects Boomers have on the economy. That has got to be the journalistic equivalent of a punishment detail.
Had I been part of Harvard's class of 2026, I'd boo Conan O'Brien on principle. He just stuck his head into Hume's Guillotine, trying to derive an ought from the "is" that is GenAI screwing over Hollywood, and I would happily pull the lever.
He does not get to tell me what my mission is, or dictate my generation's mission, or anybody's mission.
Speaking strictly for myself (something O'Brien should try for once in his life): I did not spend my life being told that because I'm a man my feelings don't matter, just so that everybody with an axe to grind can try to conscript my heart into the service of their idea of a good cause.
Besides, how does this clown know that AI won't eat itself without young people's help? Model collapse might already be happening, and I am so here for it.
I can understand this being your viewpoint. Nevertheless, I disagree with you.
I use Fastmail instead of Gmail or Outlook, but as far as I'm concerned, everything in your list but transactional messages is spam to me.
I don't want to hear anything from a business until I've bought something from them. When I make a purchase, all I want is my receipt, a shipping notification with a tracking number, and a reminder that the warranty period has expired and that all data pertaining me has therefore been expunged from their database.
If I cared about product updates, promotions, or information, I would visit the website; that's probably how I learned about the business and decided to make a purchase in the first place. Nor do I tolerate "nurture sequences". If I make a purchase at all, it will be before the business has sent me a single email. If a business intrudes on my solitude before I've decided to do business with them, there is nothing they can do to build trust with me.
Anything that comes from variations on no-reply@ or contains "notification" or "unsubscribe" in the body goes directly to trash and gets auto-deleted after 30 days. (Just in case there's a product recall.)
Why? Simple: My inbox, my rules. I decide for myself what is relevant to me. Not you. Not your clients. Not even God Herself.
I alone decide for myself.
If businesses can't accept that, I will dance on their graves. None of them are entitled to my attention or a moment of my time. I have no love for Google or Microsoft, but I'm always up for a rousing game of "Let's you and him fight."
TL;DR: your fundamental problem is that you stuck your head into Hume's guillotine. You're trying to derive ought from is, where the "is" is that your clients are trying to market by email, and your "ought" is that the rest of us should care that the monopsony resulting from the dominance of Gmail and Outlook makes things harder for your clients. You haven't persuaded me that I should care. Furthermore, your clients do not see me as a human being, but merely a means to their ends. I will not apologize for resenting that.
It's almost as if some lawmakers are the worst kind of cynics; they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But this is a democracy, and as H. L. Mencken put it:
> “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I would settle for everybody in tech reading Mary Shelley and realizing that Victor Frankenstein was the real monster. It won't even cost you money; the OG of science fiction has been in the public domain for decades.
And I don't blame them. If I subjected myself to that nonsense I'd start getting more misanthropic, too. Hell, I figured out years ago that if my primary form of engagement on a platform is blocking people I've decided are bozos, it's time to nuke my account.
My leverage is in not depending on "AI", and in possessing the experience, judgment, and discernment no LLM can emulate. That, and my willingness to maintain complete confidentiality; no LLM can be trusted to do that. Also, I can cope with Indian English and not get pedantic if somebody comes to me with doubts instead of questions.
Nor am I worried about being laid off, because I'm not a W2 employee. I'm a 1099 mercenary. I do the job, and then I get paid. If my contract doesn't get renewed, I take a week or two off and get another one. Every company is replaceable to me, and I'm replaceable to every company until they figure out I'm not, and then try to make me a FTE.
At which point I laugh at them, because I have no interest in being their idea of a culture fit, and I'm not passionate about tech. I'm passionate about getting paid. If the next gig wants me to babysit a clanker or give it instructions, that's what I'll do. If it requires reading reams of COBOL and JCL that nobody has touched in decades because it's a mind-shredding post-Lovecraftian horror, I'll do that. Hell, I'll even deal with VB6 if the hourly rate's high enough.
I refuse on principle to give so much as a damn. If there's a paycheck in it, and I don't regard the principal as unethical, I'll take the contract.
#RoninLife
Finally, I still don't think you've explained what it means for people to be agentic-native. I'm not convinced it's even possible to be that. Nor am I convinced that agents can do anything that a sufficiently skilled UNIX graybeard can't do with a makefile, a shell script, some awk, or some Perl. Except pass a culture fit interview at $STARTUP.
Honestly? I'm looking forward to somebody writing "Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your AI agent". Time will tell if LLMs are the new Hadoop.
> At the same time, companies are desperate for high-leverage hires. ClickUp, let go 22% of their workers, and introduced new $1M salary bands to attract agentic-native humans.
I'm sorry, but what does "agentic-native" even mean? Is the author assuming that for some people the ability to fluently manipulate AI agents is inborn behavior instead of learned. It sounds like a HR person writing a job listing that demands five years of experience with a framework that came out last week.
Furthermore, wouldn't it have been cheaper to retain and retrain existing employees? Laying off people to try to hire people who already learned AI elsewhere throws away existing institutional knowledge, seems like bad PR to me, and is immediately more expensive if you're introducing seven-figure salary bands to attract "fresh" talent instead of keeping the people you already have on the payroll.
Also, why should I even consider working for a company that laid people off to chase a trend. What's to stop them from throwing me under a bus when the next trend comes along?
Given that my playlists are hand-curated from MP3s I rip from CDs or buy via Bandcamp, I'd love to see AI slop even try to come for my playlists. This only a problem if you depend on streaming instead of picking artists and albums for yourself.
Being a metalhead, I've found that Angry Metal Guy (https://angrymetalguy.com) is a solid blog and a good discovery resource, even if they tend to lean more toward death metal and black metal than I'd prefer.