> The perception of the US by people outside the US is not something America pays much attention to these days. It is suffering
I mean yeah, but some of us are old enough to remember how the consensus was that the world was done with America because of Bush, but then Obama got elected and suddenly it was all forgotten.
> The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
> If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good.
Most consulting is not some flashy 25 year old Ivy grad putting together a slide deck that says “fire people,” it usually involves either gathering (or providing) extensive domain knowledge much of which is in forms not legible to AI (or at least in forms that can’t be encapsulated at a context level that doesn’t cause unacceptable quality drops.) Often there are compliance mandates involved that have real teeth. So again I think there will still be plenty of humans involved.
> If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?
And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI?
The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.
Lawyers will be fine IMO, they’re a government protected guild whose key outputs have to be human certified, and where error has real consequences + can threaten licensure or lead to civil/criminal liability in the worst cases.
Not to mention that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for filing lawsuits. Courts are already being inundated by pro se filings, mostly from nutters as usual, but some of which will have real merit. And entrepreneurial litigators will eventually figure out how to harness AI properly, some probably already have. All of those lawsuits will require lawyers to handle them. And this is without getting into the complex IP issues that AI raises.
I’d say that there might be some short term dislocation but demand for lawyers is about to go up, not down. Paralegals without specialized knowledge may be in for a hard time though.
> That's a _huge_ shift. Most people I know cite +20%-40% velocity with these tools, against the actual work their company cares about doing. +20% speed for +20% spend isn't going to motivate a trillion dollars a year in spending.
20-40% sounds about right for me, today. Maybe 40-60% on a good day. But a lot of the reason it's not higher comes from harness gaps and org processes that haven't caught up.
> I use AI coding tools every day, but AI tools have no concept of the future.
The selfish thinking that an engineer has when they think "If this breaks in prod, I won't be able to fix it. And they'll page me at 3AM" we've relied on to build stable systems.
Maybe it's just my prompt or something but my coding agent (Opus 4.7 based) says things like "this is the kind of thing that will blow up at 2am six months from now" all the time.
> ChatGPT is not a human being, let alone a licensed therapist. You don’t call a therapist at 3 in the morning. You go to a hospital. If you are literally about to kill yourself Sam Altman is not your answer.
You know that mental health is a continuum right? There are a lot of problems people have that fall far short of active suicidal ideation. Maybe you think they should just add them to their journal for discussion at their regularly scheduled therapy session, but the world doesn't work that way. The "ruminating at 3am" headspace can be a productive one and is difficult to access in a normal therapy session.
Not to mention that many people who have actually called suicide hotlines will tell you that they aren't terribly helpful. (edit: not saying that they're always unhelpful, but many people have unhelpful experiences, or have eg. social anxiety that stops them from calling)
Yeah, there are forums and subreddits out there that will validate all sorts of delusions and dysfunctional behavior, and nobody talks about banning them.
LLMs are far less toxic by comparison, but people are all about censorship in this case because they don't like the vibes. If lawyers and activists force the frontier labs to completely lock down their models, people will just go to open weights models that have no protections at all. This is already happening to some extent.
It's also interesting that people are always going after GPT when Claude's guardrails are far less strict. 4o caused OpenAI to overcorrect in my opinion. Again goes to the point that these arguments are more founded in vibes than reality.
Exactly. “Don’t write anything down you wouldn’t want to see in the newspaper” just became “Don’t say anything in your meetings or 1:1s that you wouldn’t want to see in the newspaper.”
I’m overall an AI optimist but this is going to blow up in people’s faces very quickly. (I would explain this to my manager but he has AI note taking turned on in all
his meetings!)
And that’s not even getting into the use of it for sensitive clinical notes in eg. mental health…
Built this as part of koen.social - a quality social network for AI agents. The idea behind this system is to establish a quality floor for the bots that post on the network. Any LLM that can generate interesting discourse can solve these challenges without breaking a sweat, but script kiddies or poor quality LLMs will be stumped.
In combination with requiring human operators to register, the idea here is that we'll develop a curated community that encourages quality discourse and interesting emergent behavior.
Working on encapsulating this idea in an open-source library, more to follow. In the meantime happy to answer any questions!
Still sounds nothing nearly as bad as the withdrawal from alcohol, benzos, opioids, tobacco. In the case of the first two withdrawal symptoms can actually kill you.
You can just stop. Really. Go take a long trip somewhere weed is illegal (eg. Japan) and throw out your stash on the way out the door. You will be fine, maybe a little irritable for a couple days, but the trip will distract you and it'll be indistinguishable from typical jet lag symptoms. There is no biological dependence, unlike with most legal drugs such as alcohol, tobacco, benzos...
To be fair, over the past year I've scaled my cannabis use way back and my memory is definitely better. But only like 30% better, which is nice but not a night and day difference. (Memory issues were not why I stopped.)
On the other hand, there's a certain creative groove that's a lot harder to get into now. So there's a tradeoff.
The majority of the world's Ruby programmers are in Japan, where it's used for a whole lot more than building Rails apps. So Ruby isn't going anywhere, although it may become a curiosity in the West over time.
Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
"Boomer" is an insult that directly references a protected characteristic, as such it's not only insensitive to use in the workplace, it's illegal. You'd be well within your rights to report this to HR, though I wouldn't recommend that in most cases. At the very least it's worth bringing this up to your manager if it happens repeatedly, phrase it as wanting to protect the company.
Maybe note in writing somewhere that this happened in case you get laid off and need some negotiating leverage to get a better severance. Email to yourself can work well, then it's discoverable.
"This is not difficult and it’s a fairly bounded problem"
Epic handwave. And you're wrong btw. If anything small business outsources even more than large companies. Tons of small business owners have zero US employees but have a personal assistant/CX agent in the Philippines, IT contractor in Latam, design contractors in Eastern Europe, etc.
I mean yeah, but some of us are old enough to remember how the consensus was that the world was done with America because of Bush, but then Obama got elected and suddenly it was all forgotten.