AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation"
But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.
I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't recall there being regular, industry-wide layoffs effecting software engineers for basically the entirety of my career up until the last couple of years. I'm sure my memory is bad and there's data to refute that, but this doesn't feel like "normal" at all.
To non-Americans, "global financial crisis" is the standard name we use for it. Inside the US (at least from my experience, when I lived there a few years ago) it was just financial crisis (without "global"), or the housing crash. Draw from that what conclusions you will about how Americans see their place in the world ;)
I worked straight through the dotcom, ‘08 financial crisis, and covid craziness. But recently haven’t worked in over two years, with nothing on the horizon. Definitely not normal over here.
The GFC wasn't good? It wasn't good for the general economy, sure, but given the specific industry we are talking about that was one of the best times ever. Money was being printed hand over fist building software that did nothing more than emit a fart sound. The opportunities for us with the 'picks and shovels' were endless with everyone trying to strike gold at the App Store gold mine.
It is unclear what you mean. It is true that most software jobs were not writing iPhone apps, if that is what you are trying to say, but those were good jobs. Those who didn't have good jobs for a moment were quickly scooped up by investors trying to create the next big app. It was a feeding frenzy out there for tech workers, despite much of the rest of the economy faltering (agriculture also did very well during the GFC, to be fair).
Maybe you are trying to say that there was some grey beard Atari programmer out there who refused to start writing iPhone apps and couldn't find their dream job banging bits on the old 2600? That is likely, but it is equally likely that they never found that job since either.
Correct. This is also the reason why job postings arent as high as they were during and after COVID. During COVID we had “the great resignation” which meant that people were leaving companies to find better pay after 2020 so companies had to “overhire” to account for the poor retention.
This is what a buddy who works at a major consulting firm told me about the hiring trend, we are returning to all the pre-COVID hiring norms.
This is the same with ANY depreciating asset or currency? Can I wait a year to buy it? Will I get 10x the return by waiting a year? Will my competition have a moat if I can move 10x faster next year? can I save money now?
Idk why you're downvoted. Practically everyone i know is unemployed, underemployed, or failing to find a new job to replace one they don't like/isn't paying enough/has bad prospectus.
Lucky engineer types like me in the last group, but many of my college educated friends in that middle group. Shit is rough
> AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning"
What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it?
"EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."
The DoW is engaging in simple crybullying. In my time as an online moderator I see it all the time.
“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”
I would very much like to see us return to something resembling the original copyright terms. Like: Manually file for 22 years of enforcement. Then manually file 20 years later for 22 more.
You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.
And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.
Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture?
We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.
My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.
The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.
What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.
So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.
Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.
> which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.
So how did they measure the difference? They released one title with Denuvo then erased everyone's memories about it and released it again without?
Because if you compare different titles I don't know what you base that percentage on.
I've been saying that for decades at this point. Web apps trade post-release support issues with slightly higher development costs upfront (dealing with browser compatibility), but the real kicker is that the company is now in complete control of who gets to use what and when.
It's a vacuous argument. Even in the complete absence of piracy web apps would still have won out over desktop software due to turning a one time sale into a recurring subscription. That's what drove their adoption.
MMOs show the same thing. There are plenty of multiplayer games with centralized servers that are effectively impossible to pirate. But subscription based MMOs score a clear win in terms of revenue.
(It turns out free to play gacha is even more lucrative than subscription, but I digress.)
> My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.
As an aside, I find this kind of behavior on the part of companies rather irritating. It's like, if you want people to believe that something affects your sales, you need to publicly release the sales data (and do so in a way that people will trust). Otherwise there's no reason for anyone to believe you're not just making stuff up.
They just need law makers to support IP/DRM laws that allow them to continue to operate. (I made games for a while at a small studio; I understand some of the pressures that studios are under and don’t support piracy of games.)
And they can get that support without publicly releasing detailed time-series sales data.
It doesn't add up though. If they were actually dependent on DRM as described then broad public support would be a massive benefit to them. Yet seemingly none of the many studios out there publicize such data. And this comment section is full of hand waving about "well I can't provide actual data but I talked to someone who said ..." it sure looks like BS to me.
Is the content of the comment productive to the conversation? Upvote it.
Is the content of the comment counter-productive? Downvote it.
I could see cases where large walls of text that are generally useless should be downvoted or even removed. AI or not. But, the first example
> faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?
to be frank, is a service to all HN readers. Yes it is possible that a few of us would benefit from sitting down with a nice cup of coffee, putting on some ambient music and taking in 74 pages of... whatever this is. But, faced with far more interesting and useful content than I could possibly consume all day every day, having a summary to inform my time investment is of great value to me. Even If It Is Imperfect
“About half of all food deliveries globally are shorter than 2 and a half miles, which basically means that all of our cities are filled with burrito taxis”
There is a future where a city's burrito taxis are replaced with drones rolling on the sidewalk or flying to the rooftops. And, the large majority of the remaining city drivers are replaced by robotaxis with multi-sensor 360 tracking. Where there are nearly zero parked cars. So, the parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes of bikers and scooters with every robotaxi on the street planning around their motion.
Far less fuel consumption. Far less street crowding. Far fewer accidents.
What do you think the noise is like in your future city? How many cameras and microphones are constantly streaming everything they see and hear into some corporation's private cloud? How many advertisements do we see on our pleasant bike ride? What's it like when a blizzard or flood drives the environment far outside of training norms? Have the debris-collecting drones already been deployed to clean up e-waste when the built-to-be-abandoned delivery drones lose battery or guidance, or is that a V2 thing? Are the police equipped to track down to track down the hacker that overrode my delivery drone?
We used to have books exploring scenarios like this. They were great books, a lot of time, but the most convincing ones didn't paint your future to be a very pretty, peaceful, or equitable one. You might want to read some, at least to understand why some people might be inclined to "hate this idea".
There are thousands of vehicles moving around your house and neighbourhood already. The vast majority of them are large enough to kill you, and emit fumes that poison you and the atmosphere.
Cities will have lots of drone deliveries in them in the future. And it'll be more safe and economical than the current situation.
Recently there's been a lot of anger in San Francisco about a Waymo (which have an excellent safety record with humans) killing an outdoor cat who that walked under the car and sat in front of a tire, when not long after someone was killed by a person backing into a crosswalk and it was a barely a blip on the radar.
The person who killed the bystander has social/legal/financial ramifications. Google had zero.
Anyone ever ask themselves why they have a knee-jerk impulse to support a billion dollar company's attempt at centralizing transportation?I'm sorry but safety and making your life easier isn't Silicon Valley's main concern.
Waymos need to be cheap and convenient to get business (they are a service), and they need to be safer to avoid litigation and social/political problems. Their business interests are aligned with both.
So why can't we prefer robot vehicles on the basis of safety and convenience?
If you want to make it about centralization, needing to pay big money for a personal vehicle (most of which through centralized dealers), register it with the state and an insurance company, requiring a government license, paying for insurance/registration in perpetuity, having to park it in special parking zones -- that's as centralized and locked down as it gets.
Waymo’s cars are, statistically, an order of magnitude safer than human-driven cars.
It sounds like your real MO is that you think SV tech doesn’t care about safety or its customers… which is fine, I guess, but it’s muddying the point you were trying to make as your comment kind of devolved into a strange rant.
For people outside the tech bubble, having strangers constantly market a product for a company they don't even work for as if it's their own spontaneous, original premise is "strange".
if an animal runs into the road and is hit by a vehicle, as long as the driver safely stops after, i don’t think the driver is generally charged after afaik
The comment is responding to a premise made regarding a person being hit by a car--which believe it or not--has legal ramifications. And we don't have to think about it regarding the pet, civil liability is still in play for them too.
In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.
Right, but a counter point is the etherium fork. Only a handful of people stayed on the “classic” chain after that first DAO turned out to have a massive extraction bug in it.
At a logical level, Bitcoin should be decorrelated from stocks. The fundamentals of Bitcoin network adoption and utilization are largely separate and independent.
But, at an emotional level, Bitcoin is considered a high-risk asset. So, whenever fear gets heavy in the fear/greed equation, Bitcoin is one of the first places people pull money out of as they flee to safety. It's also the "High Risk-High Return" spot for folks to plunk their "spare change" when they are feeling safe. So, in practice short term moves in Bitcoin are highly correlated to short term moves in equities.
Meanwhile, if you actually run the numbers, Bitcoin has out performed the SP500 (or even the SP10) by a large multiple over the past decade while having a volatility usually around the median of the SP500-top-10 that everyone is currently betting heavily into. People just have a hard time getting out of linear thinking and so they look at the big dips as short-term linear disasters while on a long-term, logarithmic view they have been rather boring. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...
> At a logical level, Bitcoin should be decorrelated from stocks
I don't see how you get to that logic. BTC is a speculative growth asset held by the same people who speculate on securities, and for the same reason. In fact by virtue of being "pure" speculation, it should be expected to be even "stockier" than stocks! You don't buy bitcoin to influence corporate governance or derive dividend income. The only reason anyone purchases crypto is to sell it later at a higher price.
So if you need to dump an asset to backstop other debts, it's going to be your crypto wallet you reach for first. It'll crash harder, almost by definition.
1. You need it for use as a collateral asset for smart contracts. There are no crypto cops or crypto courts. Only collateral gives contracts teeth. There are many options here. Just like there are many options for collateral assets in traditional finance. But, BTC is the top dog for the role and the first choice of individuals and institutions trying to lay down the foundations of decentralized finance.
2. You are speculating that the growth of BTC's growth in value as a collateral asset will outpace the growth of other assets. This as played out well over the past decade.
So, #2 is exactly what I said, just fancy. I agree, people bet on BTC's growth. That's what speculation is. But your causality is circular: people betting on BTC/USD because it's grown in the past is literally the definition of "pure" speculation.
But #1 simply isn't correct. Yes yes yes, I've read all the kool aid papers too. But the amount of crypto held as a "collateral asset for smart contracts" is effectively zero. BTC, in practice, just gets parked. Most wallets never trade at all.
> would prefer to pay all their employees $0 and have all diners/customers/etc pay 100% of the wages out of guilt.
It is my understanding that this is literally the origin of tipping.
After the abolition of slavery, there were many black people newly looking for work. And, there were employers looking for workers, but unwilling to pay money to black people.
So, someone got the idea to promote that tipping was something fancy European aristocrats did. And, you can be fancy like they were by tipping my workers (that I refuse to pay).
Tipping was previously seen as un-Americanly classist. And, most states tried to ban it when it started to pick up steam. But, it was too late. So many employers were enjoying unpaid labor that the bans were repealed.
Later, when Minimum Wage was established, workers who lived on tips alone were almost all black. So, unsurprisingly, tipped workers were excluded from the wage regulation. And, today they are only acknowledged as fractional minimum laborers.
Perhaps shouting these problematic racist origins from the rooftops is our best shot at getting the support of the Left on board to at least establish that having business models based on obligatory tipping is unethical, if not to ban it.
It would backfire. They’re already losing the culture war. I don’t think the demographic you’re targeting will be very valuable on the scale of real political action.
https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/
But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.
I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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