Surely you can concede that your statement as written was wrong, that there's no possible charitable understanding where it wasn't, and that at the time of writing the comment you indeed didn't posess the knowledge that it was only for enterprise accounts; otherwise you would have specified it, because then it becomes a completely different claim with different consequences. Unless you misinterpreted it intentionally, in order to derive the implication you wanted, but I'll go with the first interpretation.
My annoyance was about you not acknowledging your wrongness and instead trying to hold on to your statement by shifting the goalpost, and furthermore replying to the commenter that corrected you by correcting *them*.
Furthermore, there seems to be some emotion/bias from your side between the lines of your original comment.
If you think I'm being too harsh, then sorry, but I really dislike this manner of discussing.
Is it still necessary to ask Claude to spin up sub-agents? If Opus 5.5 decides how carefully it needs to think after each question, surely it can also decide whether it needs to spin up sub-agents? GPT 6 series models at least seem to do this agent management automatically.
I don't think there is really any convergence going on. The agentic ecosystem is continuing to multiply on a daily basis and everyone and their grandma has written a new agent framework--people are stepping over each other to get these new projects out the door.
That said, I think Google's ADK ecosystem and this new AX platform is promising--I would expect Google to maintain this and other tooling around this for years to come.
To the Googlers out there: is Google using this at any capacity for internal projects?
And you aren't even being snarky. This is a legit concern whenever I see some new Google initiative that feels like a wart. A nice friendly useful loving wart but its days can be numbered
Google already dumped their original agent framework on the Linux foundation after they realized noone really liked it and the overzealous managers who immediately bought into the hype would go apeshit if they dropped support so fast. Agentic tools have a lifetime measured in months.
Hey, Dialogflow still appears to be alive and kicking after over a decade. Given how much money they have spent marketing their agent plaform I could see this lasting a while.
I was @ Google I/O at live keynote when they announced/demoed it. Ironically, at the exact same time, me and the guy next to me said (in different words), "Why do we need this?" That was a collaborative Google Wave moment IRL.
Gmail for Your Domain/Google Apps for Your Domain/Google Apps/Google Apps Premier Edition/Google Apps for Business/Google Apps for Work/G Suite/Google Workspace
Google tries a lot of stuff. It doesn't always work out for them, and sometimes they give up on it. I don't think that's a complete loss for the rest of us. We get to see what didn't work in the real world, and if it's really valuable, someone else can pick up the idea and build on that knowledge. I say this as someone who misses Google Reader.
I think the negative impact lots of humans regularly experience from Google's approach to business is far more than the benefit of the very, very specific learning that "this idea doesn't make enough money for Google the way Google did it".
I don't think this is entirely true: let's just say the jobs boom is unevenly distributed. There are definitely more openings than there were a year ago, but it is also now much more of a challenge to effectively market yourself as a person in tech.
On the one hand there is the problem that every job posting is flooded with hundreds of bogus AI resumes which, if they are not outright fabrications, stretch the truth enough to make it hard to tell who is qualified and who is not.
Anecdotally, it seems to me like directly applying to jobs is a waste. You either have to find some way to attract recruiter outreach, or network with people who can get you a foot in the door.
They certainly aren't politically progressive, but Boise is probably one of the cleanest, safest, nicest cities in the US. It is really quite pleasant, at least it was when I visited.
What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site.
As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writing aids? Using AI does not mean no human effort was involved.
Subheading and dot point spam, low density writing (the opposite of standard technical english), including useless detail (like enumerating stats on Shopify's scale), using contrastive parallelism, and other llm-isms. Even if it's not AI it's bad writing done by someone who has picked up AI's worst ticks.
For example this subheading:
> "The real bottleneck: connections, not CPU"
That's two AI smells. AI likes to say vacuous punchy statements like "the final takeaway" or "here's the rub". Then contrastive parallelism "connections, not CPU". Contrastive parallelism should scarcely exist in technical writing, regardless of whether it's AI generated.
I really wish that slop writing was disincentivized in whatever RLHF they do. I don’t want to read the weird LinkedIn pop-sci tone for the rest of my life in such amounts.
I wonder if the average reader is also getting annoyed like this or whether they just don’t care - especially seeing what seems to get upvoted on your run of the mill social media sites. They probably collectively shape things more than I do.
I don’t know how you stop the slop writing. What the LLM writes has the voice of whatever has been RLHF’d into the weights. There will be a voice. It will have ticks.
They can change it but it will be there.
I do like that I have a term for that “this, not that” phrasing that’s nails on the chalkboard for me after several years of reading slop.
The LinkedIn “techbro” writings are the worst. They talk like a cryptobro “APPLE JUST PUBLISHED A CODE REPOSITORY ON THEIR HAND CRAFTED LLM ANYONE CAN USE THIS TO COMPETE WITH OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC” and its some random simple LLM on github that handles very little compared to OpenAI and Anthropic.
That's two AI smells. AI likes to say vacuous punchy statements like "the final takeaway" or "here's the rub". Then contrastive parallelism "connections, not CPU". Contrastive parallelism should scarcely exist in technical writing, regardless of whether it's AI generated.
Aren't the LLMs trained on a massive corpus of human written texts? If that stands, then they are doing what they were asked, kind of? I am also not a fan of the fluff words that Claude pollutes the context with, it's a bit much, I could live 30% less but it doesn't want to read its instructions in the .md
If the author wanted, they could ask their "AI" to write the article as a caveman, no? I, simply for fun, slop coded up a skill so that I can ask Claude to reply as Samual L. Jackson, or Kramer, etc.
I also wonder if there is an "AI language barrier", likely not in this particular article, but let's say there was a published article by a researcher whose native language isn't English. What happens with the translation? I realize I am asking naive things :)
There are distinctive patterns of language use that can be powerful when used sparingly. LLMs trained on a massive copus of human communication, picked effective patterns, and overuses those patterns to the point that it feels both artificial and underwhelming.
>Aren't the LLMs trained on a massive corpus of human written texts? If that stands, then they are doing what they were asked, kind of?
I think you might be interested in reading in training data generation, training, and post training papers/articles. I think you might be surprised at how much intervention there is on some of these levels.
Just? With all the Claudisms it is hard to distill what really happened. My guess:
- Our oversell protection was a gross hack that broke ACID.
- MySQL has a new feature that allows us to remove parts of the gross hack.
- Question: To what extent does the hack still exist?
Instead you get garbage like "The answer is often in the plumbing, not the engine." and "Crucially, this wasn't about making reservations fast. It was about making them safe neighbors."
But this crap is what Lütke wants, so they deliver.
Taken verbatim "But the hardest lesson wasn't about database design. It was discovering that the real bottleneck wasn’t what we were observing and measuring. "
Because the post is just rambling without a clear intent or direction. Why do you need "oversell protection" if you have "transactions". Isn't the whole point of a "transaction" that it handles concurrency and disk failures?
I work with Shopify often and the whole oversell protection thing is like a huge joke.
Oversell happens because Shopify doesn't decrement inventory until payment is confirmed. And they apparently would rather die than change that invariant.
It's funny the organizational rules that get written into a company's DNA.
I could see a historical moment where Shopify, sans that invariant, massively fucked up inventory counts from uncompleted transactions... then had to unwind all that when a bunch failed to clear payment.
Would a retail business want the inventory to decrement just because users put items into carts that get abandoned? Seems like that would really mess things up more in the long run.
In every AI-written post, we have the script: some top post complaining it's AI-written, someone cluelessly saying they don't see it, and another person pointing out the claudisms. Sometimes someone posts a link to pangram.
I think we need the moderation team to set up some policy. In which direction idk.
Well, one thing to remember: AI learned from us (See what I did, there?).
The training these LLMs got, was from endless human-slop, on sites like LinkedIn, and marketing copy, everywhere. In fact, don't be surprised, if we start learning from AI; reversing the process.
But I think that it's only a matter of time, before almost everything will be at least touched by AI.
I posted this, yesterday[0]. It wasn't a particularly popular comment, but I stand by it.
I read your linked comment and I'm bummed out because I agree.
The thing is that I LIKE writing code. It's fun.
I don't LIKE coding with an LLM. It isn't fun.
We can't go back to a place where the professional code is all hand written. But at the same time I'm sad and tired. The joy has been utterly sapped and I don't think I'll be able to do this as a career for much longer.
Well, I am sorry to hear that, but it hasn’t been my experience.
That may have something to do with the way that I use an LLM.
I use it as a “pair partner,” not as an agent.
Most of the code in my apps is mine, but I do ask the LLM to take care of some of the “overhead” tasks, such as minor utility functions.
In fact, I just got done, ripping out a bunch of code the LLM wrote, in my current app, and replacing it with my own work. It seems that I can’t really ask the LLM to do much beyond function level, without it going sideways.
I simply can’t understand people shipping entire, vibe-coded apps. If I let the LLM write my whole app, it would be hot garbage.
Yeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not. There's this weird romanticism of the time pre-LLMs where people imply all writing/code was perfect, and only now it's slop.
It's likely because no one could be bothered to respond. There's plenty there, but it's not their job to fetch it for you.
People on the Internet (especially here), seem to think that it's OK to make rude demands of complete strangers, and expect them to spend considerable time, meeting them.
I'd rather some rando think they "won the Internet," than spend a bunch of my time, working for free, just to satisfy them. I have better things to do with my time, and I don't really have a lot of investment in what complete strangers think of me.
One of the things that I learned, about the time I lost my baby teeth, is that making rude demands of people, instead of working with them, is likely to result in exactly the opposite.
Chances are good, that you learned this, as well, which might explain the rude demands. They are unlikely to be met, so the matter stays open.
I apologize for my inferior communication skills. It appears as if I am unable to make the point clear. It has nothing at all to do with the matter at hand, and everything to do with communication style.
Your clearly doing it wrong, on the internet your supposed to make a positive claim such as; No blog exists from the pre-llm days that include the llm-isms. And then you wait for the internet trolls to come out of the woodwork and prove you wrong.
You dont ask people on the internet to provide you with some kinda proof because nobody can be bothered, you dont even ask them to prove you wrong because they cant be bothered. You have to confidently and boldly assert your false claim and that will enrage some poor autists somewhere into doing what you want.
> But enjoy your intellectual wheelchair, which for some reason you feel the need to advertise after 40 years of programming. I'm sure it is just in the best interest of future generations ...
There are some claudeisms here (it's not x, it's y) but it does read like they did at least one human pass on it. Or maybe this is opus 5 writing which is a bit less distinct idk. It doesn't feel as obviously generated slop as some of the stuff posted here with every other sentence a fragment and load bearing and all that nonsense
Using AI is a pretty good indicator that the reader will need to exert more effort than the writer did. Unless the reader also decides to use AI to summarize it, but then what's the point?
Anyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional. Anyone who works for "the mission" is an idiot - no company or billionaire running a company cares about you. They will let you go in a heart beat.
I’m aware of this (consciously) but I would really do my job if it was unpaid, in fact: many do (and did) in the form of side projects and volunteering and FOSS.
I was always weirded out by the “only in IT for the money” crowd, which is a lot more than the people in it for passion these days it seems, and I might be an extreme case, but consider that while I run an IRC community- I do not write open source software.
I disagree, while money is a really important factor, that's not the final. Personally, I've changed to lower paid job to work on something i am more interested in.
> Anyone who thinks people work for anything other than money is delusional.
I work primarily so that I am given food, shelter, entertainment, etc. at some point in the future. Money is just the IOU that records the promise that I will receive those things later. I'm sure there is someone out there who is driven by the desire to collect IOUs and nothing more, but everyone (else but me)?
This sounds a little dystopian. How confident are they that this system is reliable? Any downtime could literally result in deaths. I would be highly skeptical of such a system being put in place in my city, not to mention the private company being paid to provide these services
I can’t even get through the banks automated live agent in a non-emergency. This is just going to be a disaster. I still have memories of McDonalds trying this and the insanity the order became was hilarious.
The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
I can accept the premise that condiitions have improved, but not that it was consistent. It seems to me that it was anything but; more like extremely spiky. great depression, postwar economic miracle. Massive labor movements rose and fell, general strikes... Plus most countries have had several wars + revolutions in the last 200 years, including two world wars. Not all of those are to do with technology, but I also dont think technology wasnt indirectly responsible for the conditions that created some of them
The problem with these discussions is that it’s hard to control for the horrendously lower living standards of pre-industrial life where things like antibiotics and flushing toilets weren’t around.
Certainly, many people still lack access to those things. But also, the median person essentially lives better than the monarchs did 400 years ago when it comes to some of the more important things in life.
Sometimes, whether or not your power distance from your employer is high is less relevant than all the other important stuff in your life.
not only inconsistent over time, but also inconsistently distributed over people. rich people got richer (at least lately) and the less rich didn't get much richer (if at all)
Such a good comment, I would also add how much our perception of technology lifting conditions is conflated with the increased ability of governments to steer the economy to smooth things over.
All of those problems had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economic mismanagement. And the commies were the worst at it. The US never had famines even at the worst of the great depression.
Economic mismanagement assumes there is economic management, and this is a very recent development. I would wager that we still do not know how to manage economies well in the long run - case in point US deficit and wealth inequality.
The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse.
Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.
This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government.
> the hourly wage
This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc.
> The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse.
This is a flat out lie. Comp/GDP is a side note that does not negate the fact that inflation adjusted wages are up.
The part of compensation includes healthcare, because we have no choice, it's a lock in - there's no marketplace to choose your healthcare, unless you go ACA which is a bad idea in many states - and as a lock-in the out of pocket costs have skyrocketed. To borrow your wording, google 'out of pocket healthcare costs annual trends.'
I think you're conflating productivity growth with distribution. Technology increased wealth, but whether workers shared in those gains depended heavily on bargaining power and institutions.
The Robber Barons were able to r>g their empires just fine in gold-backed currency.
The Cantillon Pump is only one of several major "rich get richer" mechanisms in the economy. It is not the most important, and it does not consistently run in the same direction (wages can inflate faster than assets).
It can be caused by deficit spending. It can also be caused by supply shocks. For example, if you restrict building new housing, the price of housing will increase, both rents and house prices. If you tariff imports, a basket including those goods will rise in price to the degree those imports are not substituable. If you start a war in the Middle East, oil prices will rise, and increased energy costs can feed into lots of different things, raising prices.
Sigh. It is always the result of deficit spending.
Bob earns $20 every day. He buys 5 eggs $2/ea and 5 apples $2/ea every day. Now, due to supply shocks, egg prices double. He still has only $20, and so he now buys fewer eggs and fewer apples.
What happens when he buys fewer apples? The price of apples goes down, due to the Law of Supply and Demand. There is no inflation.
What happens when this economy is flooded with dollars? The Law of Supply and Demand again, meaning the value of each dollar drops. That means the dollar price of eggs and apples rise, as well as his wages.
Oil prices rising means people have less money to spend meaning prices of other things drop.
Another way to look at it is the US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914. From 1914 to today a dollar is worth 3 cents of a 1914 dollar. That isn't due to supply shocks, and there certainly were plenty of supply shocks before 1914.
1914 is when the Fed was created and empowered to print money with no backing.
People had to put up with deflationary shocks and yet robber barons built their empires all the same. Hard money doesn't stop r>g, it doesn't stop expected returns from growing increasingly burdensome, and it doesn't stop assets from appreciating relative to wages. It doesn't actually deliver the things we care about.
It delivers plenty of things we don't care for, though. History provides the most lurid examples, but we have modern ones too. In the US, Clinton balanced the budget and the macroeconomic consequences broke something very important (audience participation: what was it? Hint: we call them "dual deficits" for a reason). We quickly took our finger off the stove, though, so it was only a lesson for the observant. Germany on the other hand kept its debt brake in place, which mechanically suppressed investment (macro 101 quiz time again: why?) with staggering consequences, leading to one of the most underinvested economies in Europe and almost completely shutting them out of the digital revolution, in which I privately suspect they'd have otherwise participated fabulously. In any case, had Clinton installed a debt brake, that would have been us. HackerNews, YCombinator, and all the ZIRP babies around these parts would have been among the most affected. The Magnificent 7 would not have all been in the US.
So no, deficits aren't the root of all evil and the appropriate deficit is considerably north of 0. That said, it's south of where we have it. Interest rates are the gauge. Is money being pushed in (low rates) or pulled in (high rates)? We are transitioning from the former regime to the latter regime, partly due to imperial retreat, partly due to crisis-level spending in a time of no crisis which is wildly irresponsible. The US is clearly headed for a debt crisis. But the answer is belt-tightening and either gentle-repression-over-time like we did after WWII (fat chance) or an inflation spike followed by a rate hike (probably several) until the bond market is happy again. It's going to be bumpy, but not as bumpy as the hard money counterfactual.
Louis Brandeis would like a word. In particular: no, the fact that tech advances and economies of scale dropped oil prices at the same time Rockefeller was building his monopoly does not make that monopoly harmless or good or justify it into perpetuity.
More importantly, after Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork brought us back to robber-baron era antitrust policy, we've seen robber-baron level corporate consolidation and corporate profits. We've exceeded them in most regards, in fact. It has been terrible for consumers and excellent for shareholders.
Printing money without backing is not deficit spending!
We're all well aware of the money supply, M1 / M2 / M3, velocity of money, etc. It's important for money to not get tight when the economy slows down, and it's important to tighten up the amount of money when the velocity increases again. But this is neither deficit spending nor printing money without backing!
Inflation is can come from a social psychological phenomenon around expectations. If the cost of living goes up in a surprising way, you feel the pinch. You want more money. Maybe your employer gives you a raise, and raises prices to compensate, reasoning that other things are also going up in price. The risk is this creates a self-propagating loop (which in turn does to a degree depend on accommodating institutions that don't restrict monetary supply).
You can trigger inflation through loose monetary policy, sure, and you can dampen the cycle by restricting the supply of money, and that's been the main function of independent central banks for most of the latter 20th and 21st century.
But inflation is literally just increase in the cost of living. It's a symptom, not a disease. It admits multiple explanations.
Although that's true, is 200 years ago really the baseline we want to use for judging working conditions?
Two hundred years ago meant widespread child labor, harsh factory conditions, little worker protection, and slavery or serfdom. Add to it the onset of Industrial Revolution.
Modern studies indicate people in the dark ages worked 6 hours a day: Ironically a better baseline!
I don't believe that "6 hours a day" is an answer any historian would give when asked how much workers in any period in history worked.
There have been indications that there were approximately 150 days per year which were most active for medieval farmers, but if I had a time machine I wouldn't stay there very long if my desire was to experience good working conditions.
You're missing the trees for the forest. The Industrial Revolution was terrible for the people who were working during it. Their jobs got eliminated and they only sorta sometimes were able to retrain for the new jobs, and the working conditions in those new jobs were atrocious, exactly because they were new enough that we didn't yet have safety regulations for them.
It was only their children who eventually saw any improvement in working/living conditions, and it was only because of all the absolutely awful things that happened to their parents. Safety regulations are written in blood. It only looks like consistent improvement if you zoom out to a level that obscures intra-generation experiences. At the level of the actual human beings subjected to the turbulence, it was awful.
I’ve seen a similar thing with globalization. Macro scale, it’s great. Much number go up.
Zoom in, though, and it also impoverished my hometown and many others like it. A whole generation saw their job prospects gutted, and had no realistic options for a career shift because it’s really hard to get an entry level position when you’re middle aged; doubly so when there’s a glut of middle aged people looking for jobs.
And waving away the pain those people experience with an appeal to large scale, intergenerational, historical trends is simply heartless.
Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
Really depends on the group of people you are including. In the US the middle class has been eviscerated to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
>to the point where raising a family on a single income is not a realistic goal for most people.
Was this ever true? During the 1950s, (the perceived heyday of American middle class wealth) the female labor force participation rate was 35%[1], which was close half of the male labor force participation rate.
1) Based on your numbers, 65% of women were not working at that time.
2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women.
3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example.
4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.
5) In short, Americans are working much harder today.
>4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.
Sources for these numbers? Also, housing is only a fraction of your costs.
A housing development nearby my home was built in the early 1960s (I think). If you look closely at the homes, they are all of two designs, made into four by mirror images.
But it's pretty clear that over time the homes were remodeled, gut remodeled, extended, garages added, and so on, so they are significantly improved over the original. I've been in a couple, and the hallways are pretty narrow and everything is very cheaply built.
If you want to see what they were like originally, see the old Bob Hope movie "Bachelor in Paradise", filmed at a just-built suburban community.
"Narrow and cheaply built" isn't enough to make houses affordable in an age where crack dens with busted utilities go for over a million dollars. The ability of material to become cheap is capped far below the ability of location to become expensive.
google sez: "The median home sale price in Seattle is approximately $853,000 to $879,000, depending on the specific neighborhood mix and recent monthly data. Listing prices sit slightly lower around $750,000 to $775,000, placing Seattle among the highest-priced major metropolitan housing markets in the United States."
I assume a crack den with busted utilities would go for less.
I've lived in this area my adult life. Pretty much all the open spaces and lots have been infilled with houses over time. Prices go down the further away from the business core. Being within commuting distance to Microsoft comes with a big boost in price.
True, YIMBY can only do so much. The market serves wealth-weighted people not people-weighted people, so when inequality cooks to the point that the whims of the wealthy outweigh the needs of the poor, the latter gets the boot when the two are in conflict.
The reason the 'middle class' is smaller is because more families have become "upper middle class". All the data shows this.
You can argue that housing is too much or that inflation hasn't benefited the right things, but to say that the middle class is shrining just doesn't match reality.
The only way one can claim that the middle class isn’t shrinking is to have a floating definition of the middle class.
If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.
The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house?
I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.
> working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years
They've improved, but not consistently on human timescales.
Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous. Things have, so far, trended better over time but they can be bad for whole generations and also past results do not guarantee future results.
> The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity.
I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors". And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
> Being a worker in the pre-labor-movement industrial revolution was by all accounts horrendous.
Average height and life expectancy improved steadily in the US throughout the 19th century.
The pre-Revolutionary Americans tended to live short and backbreaking lives.
Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys.
> Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys.
I don't think that's a correct interpretation, see the explanation here [0]. Not quite the same situation, but likely a similar case. Are you sure the "adult" clothes weren't made for young boys or teens, or women?
I don't think your statement about short lives in colonial America is correct either, they had a low life expectancy like everyone else, but mostly due to a lot of childbirth deaths and young infant deaths. Surviving childhood gave you a good shot at making it to your 70s, which has been true for a long time pretty much everywhere.
> Are you sure the "adult" clothes weren't made for young boys or teens, or women?
Yes. I read the informative cards at the display. Some were for officers. George Washington was a giant in his day. Look at the short beds and low ceilings. Watch your head walking through a doorway!
Tour a navy ship of the time.
If you like, look up historical US statistics on height.
BTW, I saw Henry VIII's armor in London. Looked like a boy's armor.
As for the short colonial lives, I read an account by bone archaeologists who examined the bones of colonials and noted that they suffered much damage from overloading the bones and their age at death was usually under 40.
Just think about the hard work in making your cabin with a saw and an axe. Then a barn. Then fences. Then about the endless amount of firewood you have to chop every day. Then using a horse-drawn plow. And dig a well by hand. And so on.
> I don't think we can sweep the worst parts of it under the rug because the bad impacts are only happening to "the poors".
We can and we will.
If you read HN for any period of time, you'll probably read at least 5 apologia for the harms caused by prior technological change for every one critique or expression of sympathy. After all, we're well-indoctrinated software engineers, and most of the rest are temporarily embarrassed billionaires. We know what we're supposed to think.
> And anyway when it comes to the current tech revolution, it is likely that almost all of us are going to be "the poors".
Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
> Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.
We will see in 5 years ! I think you highly overestimate llms
Funnily enough, the parent made the point that people probably overestimate their position in the future pecking order, and did so sarcastically, which you seemed to have completely missed (probably due to being ESL), something even a current LLM would easily "understand", thus proving his point.
Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.
Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement. Some of the cities were proud of the soot, since it showed that they were participating in Progress.
You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
> Early in the Industrial Revolution people voluntarily moved from the countryside to the cities despite all that, so apparently a lot of them thought it was an improvement
The industrial revolution took many of the countryside jobs to the city. You cannot stay in a place that no longer has jobs
Before 200 years ago we lived as hunter gatherers, and we did it sustainably for millions of years, longer than we've been human.
200 years is nothing. It's nothing, unless that is, we try to think about what the mess we're currently making will look like 200 years from now. Then 200 years from now is a terrifying prospect. It has to be sustainable. If it isn't sustainable it's a joke.
It's a pretty clever way to sell more tokens, I have to admit
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