The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.
> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.
NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.
Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump.
Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.
Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.
As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.
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That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.
And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.
Ah ok sorry missed that you were talking globally instead of just US.
In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.
Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.
> In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.
When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).
My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.
For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.
I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.
I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.
California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]
Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.
My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.
You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.
A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too.
I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.
Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book
I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.
In my experience the cost of a low deductible health plan is more expensive than a high deductible health plan + equivalent amount of a pre tax HSA.
I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.
Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead
A family making 40k a year qualifies for significant benefits and subsidies, even today. But don't let not knowing what you're talking about stop you from angrily talking about it.
This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.
When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.
You were working at a FAANG and had the enhanced subsidies? That strikes me as complete bullshit and non sequitur to the post.
ACA plans and LG/SG plans are not the same, and pretending they are is, frankly, a large part of why healthcare in this country is such a dumb discussion - those discussing it have no idea what they're talking about.
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.
And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…
Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
You illustrate the point perfectly. "Not living on the streets" is not exactly a measure of prosperity. With $55K, you cannot afford a decent place to live, a health event can and will bankrupt you, and retirement is out of the question.
If you go by the 30% of your budget guideline making $55K a year as a single person you can definitely find a place to rent for $1375 in a decent neighborhood.
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.
Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.
Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.
More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.
The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.
Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.
One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.
I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.
This is the small solace I take when it comes to climate change reducing arable land - almost all of our crops are grown to supply a luxury product (meat), so if we need to, presumably we could just eat the grains we grow directly, instead of turning them in to animals first.
I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.
I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?
We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.
But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.
I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.
And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.
I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.
If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.
AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.
FWIW this isn't even remotely close to what I was thinking - I definitely had no notions of AGI or 3d printing involved. You can do a lot with hand tools if you have plenty of time and a forgiving environment (access to water and trees for timber).
Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.
Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.
So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.
They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.
I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.
You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.
Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.
Most of them fried their brains with stimulants long ago. Thankfully for them, they no longer have to think. An LLM does it for them.
But it’s just the same idiots were rabidly cheering the latest JavaScript framework a decade ago, NFT’s and all manors or ridiculous things anyone with 2 working brain cells saw transparently though.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think this is actually good advice. It's great to be a free-thinker and question things, but I do think there is some (monetary) value in just not asking too many questions, but optimizing to be the best at whatever you're doing.
Edit: to give an example, I probably would have done better in school had I spent less time questioning the education system and more time just accepting it and trying to get good grades.
Yeah, succeed in the system, fuck everybody else. If the system is making the world a worse place, all the better, you can take advantage since you’re in the system. All that until you find yourself spat out by the system and get to experience what you’ve been part of with no recourse.
Historical data is never a guarantee of future performance. The downside of your attitude is that you can’t really point at the right thing to do, so then you invest your time and effort on the same things, when it could be the case that the rules of the game have changed.
I don’t see the comment as necessarily defeatist. If anything, it’s an invitation to rethink what might work instead, and whether there are things worth lobbying for/against beyond what can be solved at the individual level.
> I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
I'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.
And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical precedence as hope for humanity ‘an easily dismissed hot take’ doesn’t make you look very bright.
>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.
Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.
Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.
The articles argument is fine, but it takes as an axiom that AI is better right now at much cognitive work. I haven't found that to be true in the tasks I've looked at.
It's certainly cheaper and faster, so there's potential for it to unlock more demand but I'm sceptical that current models will replace a large fraction of knowledge work.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.
You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.
As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?
In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
What is the point of producing all this stuff now?
Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.
But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.
By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).
And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.
> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".
If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.
> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free
Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.
Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.
You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.
Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.
Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".
Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.
> Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people.
Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?
I would argue that most people already understand money in the way you describe it: as a medium of exchange. Your description of money just frames this function through the idea of an obligation of some sort which doesn't exist actually for anyone except the government.
There is no framing beyond my intent. One may originally misinterpret my intent, but that's again why communication is bidirectional. I am still unsure of your intent in this. My failed interpretation is that you are trying to invent some kind of hypothetical communication problem that isn't one, but what are you actually trying to get across here?
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers.
In fact, to address an earlier comment:
> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.
1. Well, cash is debt. Obviously all things in life are dependent on perspective, but the framing should be useful to separate the idea of a company seeking cash not because they want the raw silver, or what have you. If you try to think too hard about it you might end up confused, but then you ask for clarification and then are no longer confused. This is where I fail to understand what you are trying to say. We get it. You didn't understand the intent originally. That is why you asked for clarification. But your subsequent comments indicate that, upon receiving that clarification, that you do now understand. So the communication worked perfectly. My continued flawed interpretation is that you still seem to be trying to invent some contrived hypothetical, but that doesn't make sense, so I will have to ask you to clarify once again. What are you trying to say here?
2. At least where democracy is found, the government and the customers are the exact same people. The distinction you are trying to draw isn't clear either. What do you think government is if not people?
1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.
2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.
Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)
A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.
Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.
Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.
I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.
The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.
This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.
Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.
LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.
Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy.
You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money.
You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse.
My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it.
Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind.
(Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)
Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.
The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement.
It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.
Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.
All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.
you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.
And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger
Any solution needs the damping function to be intrinsic to the system, rather than tacked on as policy. Policy ends up being dictated by the powerful, so if your system's only check against runaway wealth accumulation is policy, eventually your guardrails will be demolished. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But eventually, self-propelled wealth wins.
There are models of currency that try to include such dampening intrinsically (Tankies love talking about various experimental forms of currency as "labor vouchers" to try and sidestep the "moneyless" pitch of Communism), but I've yet to see one that really addresses the "wealth begets wealth, hierarchy begets hierarchy" problem.
The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.
I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?
There won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation.
There is no future in which a human ruling class will be lording it over superhuman machine intelligence. I mean look at the clowns who run the world today. They won't be able to keep the machines from taking over.
I'd propose that the opposite is just as plausible. Look at the world today: compared to most of the people in charge, plenty in the underclass are superintelligent. Yet the rich remain that way, because the underclass are taught to play by the rules that were written by the rich. Who's to say the same scheme can't be pulled off against the machines?
Luckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas
I saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.
Says the person that gets rocketed in the next civil war.
The more unstable our country becomes the more meaningful weapons like this will develop.
Hell, if I were a nation that controlled my internet and other information, I'd start injecting effective versions into the internet of 'free' countries so they could take themselves out.
Compared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.
Service for citizenship, stationed along the border walls and manning really big fucking guns seems to be the place my brain always goes to in these sorts of conversations.
> Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities.
People keep saying this, but AI is making intellectual abilities more important, not less. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is like a supersonic fighter jet. You will still need plenty of ability to steer it properly for the foreseeable future.
I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.
> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves.
Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.
Only rich people can afford land now. The exception is some uninhabitable patches that would require you to give up your livelihood, except for the small amount of people who can work remotely and they can afford land already.
End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.
The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries.
But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope.
The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak.
The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it.
We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.
> The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones.
Which is why Iran bombing a few Western-run data-centers located in the Emirates was cheered by many of the normal people actually living in the West. I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
We're not in 2018 anymore, everyone is terminally online now, you must have missed the shift. I've seen mini-bus drivers watching social media videos (Tik-Tok, that is) while driving from all the way to Germany to here in Romania (from where I'm from), I noticed that because I was one of the passengers. Almost all of the remaining passengers (not middle-class, you can well imagine that) were on their phones for the majority of the trip (30-ish hours or so), that is when they were not sleeping.
However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.
As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late-Obama era.
Back to your question, the people I shared my ride with, the normal people, have started being very conservative, I would say even luddite, when it comes to their voting choices, if you live in Europe you might have noticed that.
> I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.
The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population
It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock
Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines:
The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!
I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs.
I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit.
Funny enough, I get this feeling with a lot of modern technology. iPhones, all the modern messaging apps, etc make it much too easy to fragment your attention across a million different things. It’s draining. Much more draining than the old days
Same feeling as pair programming in my experience.
If your consciousness is driving, your brain is internally aligned. You type as you think. You can get flow state, or at least find a way to think around a problem.
If you're working with someone else and having to discuss everything as you go, then it's just a different activity. I've collaboratively written better code this way in the past. But it's slower and more exhausting.
Like pair programming, I hope people realise that there's a place for both, and doing exclusively one or the other full time isn't in everyone's best interests.
I've had a similar experience, where I pair-programmed with a coworker for a few days in a row (he understood the language better and I understood the problem better) and we couldn't be in the call for more than an hour at a time. Still, although it was more tiring, I found it quite engaging and enjoyable. I'd much rather bounce ideas back and forth with another person than with an LLM.
> I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding
I do as well, so totally know what you're talking about. There's part of me that thinks it will become less exhausting with time and practice.
In high school and college I worked at this Italian place that did dine in, togo, and delivery orders. I got hired as a delivery driver and loved it. A couple years in there was a spell where they had really high turnover so the owners asked me to be a waiter for a little while. The first couple months I found the small talk and the need to always be "on" absolutely exhausting, but overtime I found my routine and it became less exhausting. I definitely loved being a delivery driver far more, but eventually I did hit a point where I didn't feel completely drained after every shift of waiting tables.
I can't help but think coding with LLMs will follow a similar pattern. I don't think I'll ever like it more than writing the code myself, but I have to believe at some point I'll have done it enough that it doesn't feel completely draining.
I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for, and when there was a bug, you simply sat down and fixed the bug.
With the rise of open source, there started to be more black-box compositing, you grabbed some big libraries like Django or NumPy and honestly just hoped there weren't any bugs, but if there were, you could plausibly step through the debugger and figure out what was going wrong and file a bug report.
Now, the LLMs are generating so many orders of magnitude more code than any human could ever have the chance to debug, you're basically just firing this stuff out like a firehose on a house fire, giving it as much control as you can muster but really just trusting the raw power of the thing to get the job done. And, bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't, so you can't stop using the tool but you can't really ever get comfortable with it either.
> I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for
Not just that, but the fact that with programming languages you can have the utmost precision to describe _how_ the problem needs to be solved _and_ you can have some degree of certainty that your directions (code) will be followed accurately.
It’s maddening to go from that to using natural language which is interpreted by a non-deterministic entity. And then having to endlessly iterate on the results with some variation of “no, do it better” or, even worse, some clever “pattern” of directing multiple agents to check each other’s work, which you’ll have to check as well eventually.
> bafflingly, it works pretty well, except in those cases where it doesn't
so as a human, you would make the judgement that the cases where it works well enough is more than make up for the mistakes. Comfort is a mental state, and can be easily defeated by separating your own identity and ego with the output you create.
I mean, you could make that judgment in some cases, but clearly not all. If you use AI to ship 20 additional features but accidentally delete your production database you definitely have not come out ahead.
I think what will eventually help is something I call AI-discipline. LLMs are a tool, not more, no less. Just like we now recognize unbridled use of mobile phones to be a mental health issue, causing some to strictly limit their use, I think we will eventually recognize that the best use of LLMs is found by being judicious and intentional.
When I first started dabbling in the use of LLMs for coding, I almost went overboard trying to build all kinds of tools to maximize their use: parallel autonomous worktree-based agents, secure sandboxing for agents to do as they like, etc.
I now find it much more effective to use LLMs in a target and minimalist manner. I still architecturally important and tricky code by hand, using LLMs to do several review passes. When I do write code with LLMs, I almost never allow them to do it without me in the loop, approving every single edit. I limit the number of simultaneous sessions I manage to at most 3 or 4. Sometimes, I take a break of a few days from using LLMs (and ofter from writing any code at all), and just think and update the specs of the project(s) I'm working on at a high level, to ensure I not doing busy-work in the wrong direction.
I don't think I'm missing anything by this approach. If anything, I think I am more productive.
Thanks for the story. I also spent time as a delivery driver at an italian restaurant. It was a blast in the sense that i look back at that slice of life with pride and becoming. Never got the chance to be a waiter, but definitely they were characters and worked hard for their money. Also the cooking staff. What a hoot.
I think the upper limit is your ability to decide what to build among infinite possibilities. How should it work, what should it be like to use it, what makes the most sense, etc.
The code part is trivial and a waste of time in some ways compared to time spent making decisions about what to build. And sometimes even a procrastination to avoid thinking about what to build, like how people who polish their game engine (easy) to avoid putting in the work to plan a fun game (hard).
The more clarity you have about what you’re building, then the larger blocks of work you can delegate / outsource.
So I think one overwhelming part of LLMs is that you don’t get the downtime of working on implementation since that’s now trivial; you are stuck doing the hard part of steering and planning. But that’s also a good thing.
I've found writing the code massively helps your understanding of the problem and what you actually need or want. Most times I go into a task with a certain idea of how it should work, and then reevaluate having started. While an LLM will just do what you ask without questing, leaving you with none of the learnings you would have gained having done it. The LLM certainly didn't learn or remember anything from it.
In some cases, yes. But I’ve been doing this awhile now and there is a lot of code that has to be written that I will not learn anything from. And now, I have a choice to not write it.
The whole time I'm doing it, I'm trying to think of better ways. I'm thinking of libraries, utilities or even frameworks I could create to reduce the tedium.
This is actually one of the things I dislike the most about LLM coding: they have no problem with tedium and will happily generate tens of thousands of lines where a much better approach could exist.
I think it's an innovation killer. Would any of the ORMs or frameworks we have today exist if we'd had LLMs this whole time?
I doubt if we're talking about the same sort of things at all. I'm talking about stuff like generic web crud. Too custom to be generated deterministically but recent models crush it and make fewer errors than I do. But that is not even all they can do. But yes, once you get into a large complicated code base its not always worth it, but even there one benefit is it to develop more test cases - and more complicated ones - than I would realistically bother with.
It depends on how you use them. In my workflow, I work with the LLM to get the desired result, and I'm familiar with the system architecture without writing any of the code.
I've written it up here, including the transcript of an actual real session:
I just woke up recently myself and found out these tools were actually becoming really, really good. I use a similar prompt system, but not as much focus on review - I've found the review bots to be really good already but it is more efficient to work locally.
One question I have since you mention using lots of different models - is do you ever have to tweak prompts for a specific model, or are these things pretty universal?
I don't tweak prompts, no. I find that there's not much need to, the models understand my instructions well enough. I think we're way past the prompt engineering days, all models are very good at following instructions nowadays.
Right when you're coding with LLM it's not you asking the LLM questions, it's LLM asking you questions, about what to build, how should it work exactly, should it do this or that under what conditions. Because the LLM does the coding, it's you have to do more thinking. :-)
And when you make the decisions it is you who is responsible for them. Whereas if you just do the coding the decisions about the code are left largely to you nobody much sees them, only how they affect the outcome. Whereas now the LLM is in that role, responsible only for what the code does not how it does it.
Hehe, speak for yourself- as a 1x coder on a good day, having a nonjudgmental partner who can explain stuff to me is one of the best parts of writing with an llm :)
I like that aspect of it too. LLM never seems to get offended even when I tell it its wrong. Just trying to understand why some people say it can feel exhausting. Instead of focusing on narrowly defined coding tasks, the work has changed and you are responsible for a much larger area of work, and expectations are similarly higher. You're supposed to produce 10x code now.
Not sure if it's what you're talking about but I had a coworker trying to break into eSports and he talked a lot about the micro vs macro skills a game requires. Sounds like we all have an aimbot for programming so the competition has shifted hard towards the macro. That could definitely be tiring.
This hits home for me. Lawyer, not developer here. Implementation was never a hard part for me, it was an impossible part. Now that the time/cost needed to experiment with prototypes has dropped to near zero I've been been spending a lot of time doing exactly what you describe (steering, brainstorming). I find it fun but I do it mainly as a bunch of personal side projects. Can understand how it might feel different for users when the stakes are much higher (like when it's part of the day-to-day in a real job).
This is such a weird statement. Game engines are among the most complicated pieces of software in existence. Furthermore, a game that doesn't run smoothly increases the chances that your player base doesn't stick around to see what you've built.
If you care at code quality of course it is exhausting. It's supposed to be. Now there is more code for you to assure quality in the same length of time.
If you care about code quality you should be steering your LLM towards generating high quality code rather than writing just 'more code' though. What's exhausting is believing you care about high quality code, then assuming the only way to get high quality code from an LLM is to get it to write lots of low quality code that you have to fix yourself.
LLMs will do pretty much exactly what you tell them, and if you don't tell them something they'll make up something based on what they've been trained to do. If you have rules for what good code looks like, and those are a higher bar than 'just what's in the training data' then you need to build a clear context and write an unambiguous prompt that gets you what you want. That's a lot of work once to build a good agent or skill, but then the output will be much better.
Classic coding was the process of incrementally saying "Ah, I'm getting it!" -- as your compile your code and it works better each time, you get a little dopamine hit from "solving" the puzzle. This creates states where time can pass with great alacrity as we enter these little dopamine induced trances we call "flow", which we all experience.
AI is not that, it's a casino. Every time you put words into the prompt you're left with a cortisol spike as you hope the LLM lottery gives you a good answer. You get a little dopamine spike when it does, but it's not the same as when you do it yourself because it's punctuated by anxiety, which is addictive but draining. And I personally have never gotten into a state of LLM-induced "flow", but maybe others have and can explain that experience. But to me there's too much anxiety around the LLM from the randomness of what it produces.
You used to be a Formula 1 driver. Now you are an instructor for a Formula 1 autopilot. You have to watch it at all times with full attention for it's a fast and reckless driver.
That may not be a bad comparison. A F1 car is really fast, really specialized car, that is also extremely fragile. A Lada may not be too fast but its incredibly versatile and robust even after decades of use. And has more luggage space
Working with LLMs for coding tasks feels more like juggling I think. You're fixating on the positions of all of the jobs you're handling simultaneously and while muscle memory (in this metaphor, the LLMs) are keeping each individual item in the air, you're actively managing, considering your next trick/move, getting things back on track when one object drifts from what you'd anticipated, etc. It simultaneously feels markedly more productive and requiring carefully divided (and mentally taxing) focus. It's an adjustment, though I do worry if there's a real tangible trade-off at play and I'm loosing my edge for instances where I need to do something carefully, meticulously and manually.
I suspect it's because you need to keep more things in your head yourself; after a while of coding by hand, it becomes more labor and doesn't cost as much brain power anymore. But when offloading the majority of that coding to an LLM, you're left with the higher level tasks of software engineering, you don't get the "breaks" while writing code anymore.
How often, in your life, did you write code without stopping, in the middle of writing, to go back and review assumptions that turned out to be wrong?
I'm not talking about "oh, this function is deprecated, have to use this other one, but more "this approach is wrong, maybe delete it all and try a different approach"?
Because IME an AI never discards an approach, they just continue adding band aids and conditional to make the wrong approach work.
I meant to write “tactile”, not “tactical”, but missed it before the edit window expired.
Anecdotally, ask people who knit whether their brain is stimulated. Physically engaging with the thing you are making is part of the process that makes it actually good.
It feels no different than inhheriting someone's code base when you start at a company. I hate this feeling. AI removes the developer's attachment and first hand understanding of the code.
I imagine code reviewing is a very different sort of skill than coding.
When you vibe code (assuming you're reading teh code that is written for you) you become a coder reviewer... I suspect you're learning a new skill.
The way I've tried to deal with it is by forcing the LLM to write code that is clear, well-factored and easy to review i.e. continually forcing it to do the opposite of what it wants to do. I've had good outcomes but they're hard-won.
The result is that I could say that it was code that I myself approved of. I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't read all of it, when you just let them go the results are so awful. If you're letting them go and reviewing at the end, like a post-programming review phase, I don't even know if that's a skill that can be mastered while the LLMs are still this bad. Can you really master Where's Waldo? Everything's a mess, but you're just looking for the part of the mess that has the bug?
I'm not reviewing after I ask it to write some entire thing. I'm getting it to accomplish a minimal function, then layering features on top. If I don't understand where something is happening, or I see it's happening in too many places, I have to read the code in order to tell it how to refactor the code. I might have to write stubs in order to show it what I want to happen. The reading happens as the programming is happening.
Any programmer needs to be able to approach a foreign code base and navigate through it to identify ab issue. Reading code and understanding what is going on is an essential skill.
They make a big difference. For example if you use the Jira cli, most LLMs aren’t trained on it. A simple MCP wrapper makes a huge difference in usability unless you’re okay having the LLM poke and prod a bunch of different commands
Fwiw I'm having a good experience with a skill using Jira CLI directly. My first attempt using a Jira MCP failed. I didn't invest much time debugging the MCP issues, I just switched to the skill and it just worked.
Yes occasionally Claude uses the wrong flag and it has to retry the command (I didn't even bother to fork the skill and add some memory about the bad flag) but in practice it just works
Do you mean wrap the CLI with an MCP? I don't get that approach. I wrapped the Jira cli with a skill. It's taken a few iterations to dial it in but it works pretty damn well now.
I'm good, yet my coworkers keep having problems using the Atlassian MCP.
I was going to say, how on earth does it take 3 months to build 12 ramps. Seems like there’s a much deeper dysfunction. Ramps should genuinely be able to be stamped out at scale. This is the type of thing China would do in a few hours
Codex is very steerable to a fault, and will gladly "monkey paw" your requests to a fault.
Claude Opus will ignore your instructions and do what it thinks is "right" and just barrel forward.
Both are bad and papering over the actual issue which is these models don't really have the ability to actually selectively choose their behavior per issue (ie ask for followup where needed, ignore users where needed, follow instructions where needed). Behavior is largely global
I my experience Claude gradually stops being opinionated as task at hand becomes more arcane. I frequently add "treat the above as a suggestion, and don't hesitate to push back" to change requests, and it seems to help quite a bit.
At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.
Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly
- high electricity prices
- crazy computer part prices
- phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs
and the benefits are mostly
- slop and chatgpt
Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.
> they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost
They should be, and the answer is obviously no—at least to them. No political or business leader has outlined a concrete, plausible path to the sort of vague UBI utopia that's been promised for "regular folks" in the bullish scenario (AGI, ASI, etc.), nor have they convincingly argued that this isn't an insane bubble that's going to cripple our economy when AGI doesn't happen—a scenario that's looking more and more likely every day.
There is no upside and only downside; whether we're heading for sci-fi apocalypse or economic catastrophe, the malignant lunatics pushing this technology expect to be insulated from consequences whether they end up owning the future light-cone of humanity or simply enjoying the cushion of their vast wealth while the majority suffers the consequences of an economic crash a few rich men caused by betting it all, even what wasn't theirs to bet.
Everybody should be fighting this tooth and nail. Even if these technologies are useful (I believe they are), and even if they can be made into profitable products and sustainable businesses, what's happening now isn't related to any of that.
I hope they do. We live in a time of incredibly centralized wealth & power and AI and particularly "the machine god" has the potential to make things 100x worse and return us to a feudal system if the ownership and profits all go to a few capital owners.
IMHO this is exactly what is happening. Everyone should be on the phone with there senators putting pressure to enforce anti-trust and deal with citizens united
For good measure, a bunch of this is funded through money taken directly from the electorates taxes and given to a few select companies, whose leaders then graciously donate to the latest Ballroom grift. Micron, so greedy they thought nothing of shutting down their consumer brand even when it costs them nothing at all, got $6B in Chips Act money in 2024.
> At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad prediction for 2028, but I'm old enough to remember when the 2020 election was going to be a referendum on billionaires and big tech monopolies.
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.
But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...
I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though
I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.
RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
I've heard that, but anecdotally, neither of my two teenagers care at all. Maybe it used to matter in the past, but these days all the kids seem to be on Discord and any phone will do.
> I think this update is finally ending that for some people.
For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
Yeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.
It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
Sure, but neither my Pixel nor Samsung handset defaults to gesture navigation. I consider myself pretty tech savvy but just never use Apple's multitasking provisions on iOS and iPadOS.
I’ve been using iOS since 2013 or so, and even spent five or so years off-and-on developing for the platform.
I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but I regularly use Android via single-use tablets and dev test devices and I think I dislike Material 3 Expressive even more. M3E feels weirdly awkward and unrefined and it's a struggle to come up with a color scheme that looks right. It would be a constant irritation if Android were my daily driver.
The latest top of the line Chinese phones (Xiaomi 17, Vivo x300 pro, Oppo X9 Pro) are at least equal if not better than top of the line iPhones or Samsung phones. Better battery life, larger batteries, better screens, faster charging. Much better cameras. They now do collaboration with lens makers like Zeiss and Hasselblad and it really shows in the photo quality, last year was the first time I've felt like a phone could replace an entry level DSLR.
People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
Especially with the state of the App Store. We used to have really nice, well designed apps to go along with the amazing hardware, now it’s even worse than Android with an endless list of SEO-optimized, copycat and IAP scam apps.
Yeah I switched to Android in large part because of Liquid Glass. Not the look, pictures of it are quite nice, but because of how it works or rather, doesn't. It's buggy, slow (on a 1 generation old pro phone), and way too UI-forward, prioritising UI over content in the same way that skeuomorphism did. Overall it just felt dated in the same way that skeuomorphism did when it died.
It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided to nearly universally stop enforcing rules on a large basis as an alternative to legislative reform.
We’ve basically decided that actually reforming the bureaucratic machine is much too hard, so instead of reform let’s just not enforce anything.
One of Zohrans ads is such an on the nose example of this. He has an ad where he says he’s gonna help out small business by cutting down the fines that they face. Which on the surface sort of sounds nice, but now we basically just get shitty businesses selling shitty things and facing small slaps on the wrist instead of actually going through and removing the onerous laws and enforcing the important ones.
Same thing going on with immigration. The system is so fucked up, that instead of reform we simply won’t enforce immigration laws.
You see the same thing with housing that abundance basically called out. The system has gotten really good at writing more and more complicated laws at the cost of things basically falling apart in the real world
These copper thefts affect millions of people. It regularly happens to the MTA and shuts down the subway. A functional society would make an example of people committing these thefts so that the rest of us can continue to contribute and live their lives without being screwed by antisocial people
Seems to me there’s been a weird inversion on the left towards prioritizing individual rights over rights of society.
The right to use drugs in public, to camp in a park, to steal copper, to do sexually inappropriate stuff, to break laws, all seem to be more important than societal safety, comfort, and peace now.
It’s very hard for me to make a case for urban living, and more apartments, and less cars when the average experience in cities in America is rampant drug use, and tons of unenforced quality of life issues.
I live in a very very good area of Brooklyn and still regularly run into needles, human shit, and open fentanyl use.
LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.
DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.
SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles
I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.
I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.
In what "very very good area of Brooklyn" are you regularly encountering needles?!
I've lived in the NYC metro area for nearly two decades and have yet to see a single one. Definitely saw them when I lived in Baltimore, and have seen them in Philly, but even then not "regularly" in either case.
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.
To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin. Chesa also had pedigree like Zohran does (in his case, both parents in prison for terrorism charges, raised by lefties).
Inevitably, people saw through the virtue signalling and ended up recalling him. I voted for him initially because he sounded good on paper ("a DA with a heart") but when it actually came to running the office, he was a disaster.
Case in point: SF is overrun with Honduran drug dealers. But Chesa was convinced that they are all victims of human trafficking and refused to enforce the laws against them! His office would either not file charges against them, or just let them walk with a slap on the wrist. Naturally, in the Hondo drug dealer circles it was a well known fact that if you ever get picked up in SF, claim that you were trafficked there and/or that you are underage.
After a couple of years people had had enough of this circue, and decided to recall him. I voted to recall him at the first chance I got.
> Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin
As a former New Yorker who grew up in the Bay Area, I disagree.
Chesa had zero public experience prior to his run, and he never moderated his position, not even after being ousted from office. In the end, he was elected by fewer than 90,000 people [1]. (Smaller than the population of Manhattan’s Chinatown [2].)
Mamdani has some experience as a city legislator. And he moderated between his primary and the general, the latter which he won with more than a million votes [3].
The police respond to upstream actions of the prosecutors and judiciary. If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them. If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place. This is broken windows theory in action.
> If the people they are arresting aren't being punished they won't bother arresting them.
That’s a weird excuse to be soft on crime.
> If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place.
Well right there is the reason they should still be doing their job. Because you’re right, if the police stop arresting people, why would anybody report crime to the police?
> It feels like we (and I specifically mean the left) has decided ...
I'm going to invoke Murc's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law ) here and call out that this is an example of ascribing all agency in government to the left (and considering the right to be a force of nature that can't do anything but what they're going to do).
> Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined. The term originated in the left-wing blogosphere and has since gained traction in commentary about press bias and political framing.
These sorts of things are not a "the left has stopped enforcing laws" (the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws), but rather there has been a concerted effort to remove the ability for government to operate and regulate people organizations.
That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Yes, reform is hard. It is made more difficult when there aren't resources to do the reforms. It is furthermore difficult to do reforms when the suggested alternatives are "privatize it, move it to the states (or to cities), let the market figure it out."
> the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws
Left DAs absolutely have the ability to enforce or not enforce laws.
> That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Who was saying "defund the police"? And yes, some of them were actually trying to do that, to do exactly what they said.
The ridiculousness of the US two party system is key. Eg Zohan allowing shitty business practices is him using a traditionally right wing policy (to deregulate, and be "business friendly") coming from a Democrat.
Where does ICE fit into your view that immigration policy is too soft?
I just don't see how you can view America's plight as being due to soft, left wing policy. It has a right wing populist government and a partisan judiciary.
I think immigration currently is fucked up and there needs to be clean, legal avenues for immigrating. I don’t think immigration policy is too soft. It’s much too hard if anything.
But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement
It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.
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