> LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes.
This reminds me of the day of Dreamweaver and the like. Everybody loved how quickly they could drag and drop UI components on a canvas, and the tool generated HTML code for them. It was great at the beginning, but when something didn't work correctly, you spent hours looking at spaghetti HTML code generated by the tool.
At least, back then, Dreamweaver used deterministic logic to generate the code. Now, you have AI with the capability to hallucinate...
> I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
Is it really new? We've been replacing real human connections with online connections/friendships for quite a while now. Social media companies have been giving us a world full of simulated relationships and making profits off of it. As quoted in the post, the average American adult has 3 friends. Look how many friends they have on FB.
I can't tell if you mean it literally, or you're adopting the FB nomenclature, but in my mind that FB edge is just labeled friend, and is not the relationshipStatus between the nodes
I have a to of "connections" on LinkedIn, too, but I can assure you I am not "connected" to hardly any of them
I like to call our latest economy the jester economy. No longer is it a service economy, but one of influencers, reality tv, and most lately, TikTok stars. We even have a reality tv star for US President!
> Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown.
How do we slow down or control the flow of information ? Genuine question. I'm just asking to see if there are any studies or proposals that already exist out there.
I've heard people talk about education. But this seems to be part of a long term solution. How can we solve this problem now so that in the next election (next 2 or 4 years) people will not vote against their own best interests ?
Convincing people to quit social medias or stopping listening to TV pundits ? So far that hasn't worked. Facebook/Tiktok just keeps growing.
>> How do we slow down or control the flow of information ?
There's no way that genie goes back into the bottle. And even if you could that's not the issue, people believe whatever they want to believe.
Ultimately education is a good start but if anything US education (which of course is very democratic) is getting worse not better. Book banning and burning spring to mind.
The real root of the issue is individualism over collective good. That's pretty baked into the American psyche (not to mention baked into the constitution) so no amount of education will change that.
For example it's obvious that fewer guns would reduce violence- that's been shown to be true many times over. But the individual's right to bear arms is baked in and not going away.
Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The US acts as a counterbalance to other systems and other ways of life. It fights for women's rights in the middle east and Afghanistan. It traditionally stood up for the little guy against the neighborhood bully (think Kuwait and Iraq).
The pendulum will swing, but just as the USSR exited the world stage, the USA is now doing the same. All empires rise and fall. The gaps left by USaid will be filled by others. China is already buying influence in Africa and Asia.
As it stand today, like as of right now, it's actually possible China is providing Urkaine with more assistance than the USA because they're not going harder on stopping them from buying drones and drone parts.
>> How do we slow down or control the flow of information ?
It’s not a completely new problem. Voltaire wrote about this in Candide in the 1750s. I’m sure there are other (earlier or contemporary) examples that I don’t know, but Candide is the one obvious (partial) commentary on the “flood of information” phenomenon that always comes to my mind. Voltaire’s conclusion was to just ignore it. Worry about your own life. Live on a farm and work a physically exhausting job every day then spend your nights with your family and loved ones that you have no time for all the frivolous noise of news and world events that don’t affect you. When there is an actual signal among the noise, it’ll reach you and you should use your educated/good instinct that you have cultivated from the prior years when you were young and absorbing knowledge and information, and vote accordingly.
Obviously this is my interpretation of the work. Also obviously Voltaire was a very vocal opponent of voting and the will of the masses to enact real political and societal change through education and general shift in social beliefs and attitudes. He was also an advocate for acceptance of others and in Candide he had the wise old man who gives the final philosophical point in the book be a Turkish Muslim man in opposition to everything Christian French people believed in the 1700s. He was also a massive racist against black Africans and didn’t even consider them humans. Soooo your mileage may vary.
The growing concern people have is that you will not be able to vote.
Many people work hard in Russia and spend nights with their families, it didn't stop them from getting shipped off to die in Ukraine or any other god forsaken Russian made hellscape.
In a way, the life Voltaire is describing is kind of, luxurious ?
This is exactly the perfect example of noise. The left in the US worrying about their “right to vote” in 2025 is perfect example of leftist news noise. It’s the exact equivalent of the right news noise of stolen elections. Every. Single. Article. about people losing their right to vote in the US ends up being an absolute strawman non-story that gets pushed to the top of Reddit and leftist facebook groups and twitter accounts and all the other left leaning social media outlets for a week before fading into the noise hole where it belongs. The story got millions of clicks, so it’s worth it.
The guy running basically 'information' for tens of millions of voters is basically curating their information and seems to be able to fire almost anyone at will, and you, for whatever high reason think a fair election is just by default on the cards?
This reminds me of a PBS interview I saw recently [1]. In the interview the guest, Robert Putnam, gave the example of Francis Perkins, who was having tea with friends when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire broke out in 1911. 146 women died in the fire, and Perkins was so shocked by the tragedy that she decided to become a social reformer. She eventually became FDR's Secretary of Labor, the first woman Cabinet member in American history.
> how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances
Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.
“Left” isn’t the right framing at all. The axis of division these days is really democratic vs. authoritarian. Rule of law vs. “might makes right”. I know few educated, intellectual people who find the latter appealing (though they do exist and are loud).
That’s not true of any standard definition of authoritarianism: the whole point of the rule of law is that it applies consistently to everyone rather than following the whims of an autocrat. That’s why the Republicans being able to stop enforcement of the laws Trump broke was so worrisome for many people as it marks the transition away from the rule of law which had existed previously.
I can’t imagine a lot of folks that excel at math and science are leaning hard into the party gutting the NSF and actively trying to undermine the entire scientific community.
I don’t know. I’ve met good scientists who were terrible human beings and would have been willing to defund everything except their field, because obviously everything else is useless. I have no stats, and I think they are far from the majority, but they exist. Scientists are not superhuman and some do actually vote for the face-eating leopard party.
I think that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos fit this profile, but look whom they are supporting now. Simply being part of the scientific community may not be a sufficient criterion. Other factors, such as wealth or power, may have a greater influence on their political affiliations.
The biggest predictor of political affiliation is located in the wallet. It’s not a perfect predictor but it’s pretty good, and it gets better the fatter the wallet is.
What is bizarre now is that the biggest wallets are supporting economic uncertainty.
Top SWEs tend to live in rich cities that have those jobs and lean left; they just blend in with the demographics of where their jobs are located. Like, I’m sure if there were a lot of SWE jobs available in a rich conservative city like…Riyadh…they would be leaning more right.
The top paying fully remote jobs are in AI and Crypto (blockchain). And my experience shows the top are libertarian, which is right wing if you only see the spectrum as left / right (I see it as freedom / authoritarian)
For people who don’t have to work in an office, it’s wide open, but I think even if we consider full remote employees, they are still likely to live in big liberal cities, and it’s the minority roughing it in the country/small towns that are likely to be libertarians. I don’t have access to any numbers though, so your hunch might be better than mine (I’m full remote but live in Seattle, my political ideology follows from that).
The reason why people see right libertarians as, well, right-wing is because the majority ends up aligning more with mainstream right-wing parties and candidates when it comes to voting.
FWIW left libertarianism is also a thing, but you won't find much of that in crypto.
Libertarians used to be left on social issues (they don’t want the right telling them who they can marry or what they can do with their bodies) and right on economic issues (traditional liberal unregulated economics, less socially funded services). It’s hard to see where they land today given Trump distortion (Trump as an obvious authoritarian shouldn’t appeal to libertarians very much, but does, so I wonder if their average ideology has changed).
"Berkshire would not have achieved its results in any locale except America whereas America would have been every bit the success it has been if Berkshire had never existed."
-- https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2024ltr.pdf
Not just a great investor, Buffet is a great man. Not many "self-made" billionaires think like that.
I feel like we, SWEs, have been over-engineering our interview process. Maybe it's time to simplify it, for example, just ask questions based on the candidate's resume instead of coming up with random challenges. I feel like all the new proposals seem overly complicated, and nobody, interviewer or interviewee, is happy with any of them.
Definitely over-engineering. But I also think the industry is just extremely bad at hiring anything above junior or entry-level. Job postings are so generic and interchangeable between companies that they don't actually tell you what the role is or what the company is looking for. Everyone wants to cast the widest possible net so that they catch some wunderkind genius out of thousands. Then, they wonder why they can't find the exact person they're looking for to solve the problem they're filling the role for.
In reality, job postings should be incredibly specific, with specificity rising as the role requires more experience and problem solving. You'll get less applicants (or will be able to clearly screen out the people who don't meet the specific requirements) but you'll get ones that actually match what you are looking for and can actually solve the problem your company is trying to solve with filling the role. Then the conversation/interview is much more important and both sides feel like they have some "stakes in the game".
This risks hiring candidates who can present themselves and their past projects very well but fail to actually write code and ship anything on the job. I've seen it happen.
You would be very amazed at how many people with reasonably strong resumes can't write _any_ code. Google for fizzbuz, it's a dumb problem, but candidates often can't solve similar problems with a _take_home_ interview.
This reminds me of the day of Dreamweaver and the like. Everybody loved how quickly they could drag and drop UI components on a canvas, and the tool generated HTML code for them. It was great at the beginning, but when something didn't work correctly, you spent hours looking at spaghetti HTML code generated by the tool.
At least, back then, Dreamweaver used deterministic logic to generate the code. Now, you have AI with the capability to hallucinate...