I want to focus on the "colleagues submit thousands of AI generated lines of code for review" comment.
Humanity developed Code and programming languages for people. They are supposed to provide sufficient expressiveness so that we people can understand what is happening, and 0 ambiguity, so that the machine can perform is instructions.
But computer code has been a way to communicate among us people on our intentions (what we intend the machine to do). Otherwise, we would still be writing in assembler.
But now, computers are generating code, A LOT of code. So much, that it's becoming more and more difficult to stay on top with our verbose languages.
We will need to develop a better way for the computers to a) produce the instructions to perform the tasks we tell them to , b) produce reports or some accessible way for us people to understand and share what the instructions are doing.
I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.
Because the job itself has now changed, and they haven't. Their output speed might have been eclipsed by that of the engineers who efficiently adopted the new tooling.
Where I work, the power dynamics have shifted wildly. There are a number of senior engineers who refuse to touch the stuff, and as a result, they can barely keep up with their peers. Some of our juniors are now running laps around them.
When a stranger to your craft can now teach themselves what you know, how to do your job, and even how to automate your tasks in the span of the same workday as you, all while reliably being able to gauge the innacuracy of the output they're reading, how much longer do you really hold relevance?
Because the job changed out from under them - it's now to use AI as much as possible and generate so much and so convoluted content that humans have no chance of keeping up the "velocity" without being entirely dependent on it.
So, yeah, the US is no "blanca palomita" at all. And those of us suffering from their actions have learned that all powerful nations have good and bad things. Here in Mexico, we've got BYD cars, and they are AMAZING. Also being able to use DeepSeek is so cool.
If your government refuses to stop the flow of drugs into the US by addressing cartels don't be surprised if the US delivers weapons to said cartels so they can have some infighting going on.
If the mexican government would actually make work of dismantling the organized trade, there would be no incentive to deliver them weapons to shoot each other.
supply is never an issue, USA would supply poison to entire planet if the demand was there. blaming Mexico for the sickness of our society is very rich (but often repeated)
This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before.
I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.
I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.
in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.
Using AI is fine. The key is to use it to build processes/Systems that solve problems deterministically. Instead of "asking them" to solve the problems non-deterministically themselves. It's way cheaper and robust.
As an example, we had to be able to parse most uses b2b bank statements. That means understanding the structure of around 30 different formats, some with very subtle differences within them.
The naive and expensive approach was to train an LLM to do it (after OCR).
Instead we used AI to generate a generalized python parser that is "configurable" for different structures. (And also extracts data from PDFs without OCR, unless they are pure images).
It covers the 99% of the cases. And for that 1% we pass it through AI for immediate solution, and to generate the additional deterministic config to cover it.
But I digress (lol). The point is, there are so many interesting problems that can now be solved. We should have teams of 3 to 5 people doing crazy stuff.
So, im working in some high performance data processing in Rust. I had hit some performance walls, and needed to improve in the 100x or more scale.
I remembered the famous FizzBuzz Intel codegolf optimizations, and gave it to gemini pro, along with my code and instructions to "suggest optimizations similar to those, maybe not so low level, but clever" and it's suggestions were veerry cool.
Moreover, I'm from a very hot and humid tropical region. Its normal to ne 40°C with 80% humidity there. And you dont see people having better health or longevity (Yucatan peninsula) .
Right, it's just that a sauna at 60 degrees is not warm, it's cold. Take a shower, go into the sauna at 60 degrees C, and it'll feel cold. Nothing happens in a sauna until you're getting near 80, and it's much better if you go somewhat higher (90 or more for active users). 60 is when a sauna will be closed off in public baths because there's a technical problem somewhere.
But that would be like exercise all the time which may not be optimal. (Not saying the theory holds that sauna equals exercise, but if it does, sauna all the time may not be great. Plus, there may be other confounding factors with living in various locations.)
The great but not super healthy Mexican diet might offset the potential heat exposure benefits! Although I’m basing that on the diet of my Monterrey-based in-laws, not sure how different Yucatan is.
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (im and 1981 kid). I loved going to the magazine stand and get whatever local programming magazine they had at the time.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
> One thing I miss from this type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it.
This was so important - you'd get your monthly copy, and you'd read all the parts you were interested in, but after a few days, it'd still be a month until the next issue and all that was left to read were the ads and the parts you weren't really into. But there wasn't anything else, so you'd read them, too.
> You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it provides some exposure of this kind. The SNR in any given post might not always be high, but the tangential discussions often lead to topics just as interesting, expanding my awareness of what I don't know. There are lots of rabbit holes to explore here.
Hehe
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