"There are no more juniors.
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
@tante Probably the most literate summary of our times I've read. Nice work. Anyone that can wield natural language like this would have been a force with formal language(s) and context-free grammars.
You might enjoy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05280v2I certainly am.
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
This is fantastic and unfortunately
true. I am Sara, tunnelling under Mordor with a USB stick. I have attempted to document the cron job and institutionalize the periodic nudge it needs to run payroll... but then I get yelled at for not videcoding enough new featureslop. There are no juniors for me to explain the cron job too.
Perhaps the AI may one dayabsorb the wiki page about the cron job. Hopefully someone else thinks to ask the AI about why payroll didn't run.
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@tante Why are managers—self-proclaimed “leaders”—the most vulnerable to group think? Or is it that group-thinkers are the most likely to go into management, with the wrong understanding, and the wrong incentives?
Meanwhile, the investors—assholes randomly selected from the same pool—are chasing unicorns, but don’t know what one looks like. So they throw mountains of cash at donkeys wearing dunce caps, until one of them shits out a golden bar of digital heroin.
Incentives are aligned to the production of incentives. If it's easier to fake work than to actually work then folks are further incentivized to do less for more (or do more for more). It's also easier to ignore a problem than to fix it (in the short-term).
I think it's because humanity is already at or past the point of becoming post-scarcity. Part of that is society struggling to let go of the impulses and incentives born from scarcity.
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
@tante classic #LadderPulling will implode shit.
And the then-seniors will be able to charge big time for training their replacements…
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
@tante So right…
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April 26 Fortune magazine quoted an Nvidia VP saying that AI costs far more than human workers.
Ed Zitron reported on the economic realities of the current subscriptions offered by big tech versus the actual cost, found in token usage. The ratio of income to token costs something between five and 12, depending on the subscription charges.
And this figure doesn’t take into account the debt these companies have to service as well.
That’s some kind of productivity increase
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante that is completely correct. But we all know that computational power gets cheaper every year. Question is: will it get profitable soon enough or are AI companies going bankrupt before this happens?
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
@tante oh hey I wrote this! Thanks for sharing!
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante that is completely correct. But we all know that computational power gets cheaper every year. Question is: will it get profitable soon enough or are AI companies going bankrupt before this happens?
@felix_eckhardt @GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante Or if they'll burn up the countryside and destroy the aquifers with the required datacenters.
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@felix_eckhardt @GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante Or if they'll burn up the countryside and destroy the aquifers with the required datacenters.
@StumpyTheMutt @GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante its sad, that it does not sound far fetched.
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
@tante we might not need any human coder, when no senior is available anymore. It was similar with other professions.
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante that is completely correct. But we all know that computational power gets cheaper every year. Question is: will it get profitable soon enough or are AI companies going bankrupt before this happens?
The systems get more and more expensive. They may be more powerful, but they aren’t getting less expensive. They’re getting more expensive.
Given that the lifetime of the computational units is between one and three years before they burn out or become obsolete, the window of time they must recoup their cost and make a profit is tiny. This isn’t like laying fiber optic that has a 30 year lifetime.
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The systems get more and more expensive. They may be more powerful, but they aren’t getting less expensive. They’re getting more expensive.
Given that the lifetime of the computational units is between one and three years before they burn out or become obsolete, the window of time they must recoup their cost and make a profit is tiny. This isn’t like laying fiber optic that has a 30 year lifetime.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante if we look at the last two or three years that might be correct. For the rest of history computational power got cheaper and cheaper. Currently we have a special situation, which will not last forever.
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This is fantastic and unfortunately
true. I am Sara, tunnelling under Mordor with a USB stick. I have attempted to document the cron job and institutionalize the periodic nudge it needs to run payroll... but then I get yelled at for not videcoding enough new featureslop. There are no juniors for me to explain the cron job too.
Perhaps the AI may one dayabsorb the wiki page about the cron job. Hopefully someone else thinks to ask the AI about why payroll didn't run.
There are no more spoons, we sold them all to pay for the AI
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@tante we might not need any human coder, when no senior is available anymore. It was similar with other professions.
@felix_eckhardt @tante this is the same like saying there is no difference between a taylormade suit and 2$ underpants made by slave labor in Bangladesh.
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@GhostOnTheHalfShell @tante if we look at the last two or three years that might be correct. For the rest of history computational power got cheaper and cheaper. Currently we have a special situation, which will not last forever.
Even Moore’s law has flattened out because we’re reaching the physical limit of electronics. The only way compute power has really expanded is by stacking compute cells on top of each other.
The faster speeds dramatically increase. I think the relationship is a low exponentiation so more compute power faster speeds demands more and more power delivery and generates more and more heat. This is not a good combination.
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@felix_eckhardt @tante this is the same like saying there is no difference between a taylormade suit and 2$ underpants made by slave labor in Bangladesh.
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
There will be a place for juniors, I believe. Jevon's Paradox
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@tante we might not need any human coder, when no senior is available anymore. It was similar with other professions.
@felix_eckhardt @tante Yup, no one becomes cooks any more after we got microwave meals in the freezer section. Why bother?
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@felix_eckhardt @tante Yup, no one becomes cooks any more after we got microwave meals in the freezer section. Why bother?
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"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.
(www.stvn.sh)
“Cheaper” only because the industry is currently subsidizing subscriptions to the tune of 5 to 12 times the revenue they gain from the subscriptions themselves.
And we haven’t even started to talk about the debt service these companies have undertaken
