Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?"
Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"
For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.
And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.
I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.
So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.
You’re trying to create nuance where there is none. Creating jobs exactly means “I want to pay someone less than the value they bring in to my company” and this has been true since forever.
Nobody cares that you want money and you want something to do that you enjoy. Nobody ever will.
If you actually dig into all the social programs that exist at least in the US, they’re just a massive payday for a small group of people under the guise of bettering humanity.
College/education is a fantastic example. Education as it has been established today is a joke. The humanities were originally established for rich bored wives to have something to do. They were never meant to create value. Colleges hang anvils around the necks of naive children via loans telling them “yes if you major in history you’ll have a job!” This is a joke, and a bad one.
Huxley was on to something. If everyone is educated, nobody collects trash, or chops lumber, mines minerals and metals, etc. it’s a big fucking not-talked-about open secret.
Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
“AI” will at best lead to anarchy at this point, if all the grand visions of the billionaires comes to fruition. People have already tried to kill sama and burn his house down. Wait until armed humvees are driving around data centers. It’s coming.
Fair, I never said there wasn't risk involved with ownership. I even made sure to qualify when I said that people who own don't do labor, because often there is labor involved in ownership.
So I don't think it's a free lunch, it's more risk-for-lunch than labor-for-lunch. Maybe you could argue laborers are still risking their body or something, but I think the point might stand.
> Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”
You paint the economic model as a false dichotomy, and the main point of my posting was that it is not a false dichotomy. It is not either have a job (and be exploited by someone else) or be helpless and rely on government handouts.
For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
The whole conversation seemed to be about the economic model, so I'm not sure how it is a distraction, a boogeyman, or inconsequential.
> For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?
You have described less than 0.1% of the US population, not to mention the rest of the world.
I get it, you have an idea in your head and you're struggling to see past it. Read Brave New World.
It seems that you may not want to actually have a discussion, rather just reinforce the idea that we're either screwed by employers or screwed by helplessness.
Fair, my one example on layoffs may not land with you.
But do you want us to just sink into the helplessness of us all being screwed or do you want to try to find solutions that might allow us to feel some sense of agency and hope?
The actual significance of this article is that, finally, the establishment is beginning to accept that the US may be in big trouble because of this war.
Yeah exactly, if the US actually took its rule of law seriously, we won't be having this Trump problems because he'd be in prison for the rest of his life.
Yep, his administration took the worst possible approach by waiting so long only to bring these slow milquetoast prosecutions against trump. They should have gone after him and his accomplices immediately, but failing that doing nothing would have been better.
These weak prosecutions did nothing to stop trump and only caused republicans to rally around him.
Well, i feel a bit reluctant about sharing this, because it is so sad, but the following was recorded not long ago ... wouldn't be surprised if they took it down
Sure, but all the same, given what you've said, isn't it a bit weird that Kramnik himself has rushed to raise drug taking suspicions? Is he trying to divert attention? Regardless of whether he has anything to do with this, it would have been classy of him to stay quiet for a while about this
I think that Cursor is doing the same. A couple of weeks ago they removed the 500 prime model requests limit per month in the $20 plan, it seemed like this was going to be good for users, in fact it's worse, my impression is that now the limit is effectively much lower, and you can't check anymore in your account's dashboard how many of these requests you've made over the last month.
Actually yes! I saw this post some months ago, and thought to myself: "Wow this is really close to what we've been building". Kiro uses three files though: requirements, design, and then tasks. The requirements doc is a bunch of statements that define all the edge cases you might not have originally thought of. Design looks at what is currently in the code, how the code implementation differs from the requirements, and what technical changes need to happen to resolve the difference. Then tasks breaks the very large end to end development flow up into smaller pieces that an LLM can realistically tackle. The agent then keeps track of it's work in the tasks file.
Realistically, I don't think that Harper's statement of "I get to play cookie clicker" is achievable, at least not for nontrivial tasks. Current LLM's still need a skilled human SDE in the loop. But Kiro does help that loop run a lot smoother and on much larger tasks than a traditional AI agent can tackle.
Thank you, I will certainly check this out because this is something I've been sort of doing, manually, but I am still struggling to get the right workflow.
This recent OpenAI presentation might resonate too then:
Prompt Engineering is dead (everything is a spec)
In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower.
Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code.
Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example.
Have you considered a fourth file for Implemented such that Spec = Implemented + Design?
It would serve both as a check that nothing is missing from Design, and can also be an index for where to find things in the code, what architecture / patterns exist that should be reused where possible.
And what about coding standards / style guide? Where does that go?
That is interesting. So far we are just using the task list to keep track of the list of implemented tasks. In the long run I expect there will be an even more rigorous mapping between the actual requirements and the specific lines of code that implement the requirements. So there might be a fourth file one day!
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