Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
When only the self-selecting intelligent/diligent/driven went to college, selecting college graduates was a huge win.
So then everyone decided everyone should go to college - to me that's manifestly not the case, but that's where we are; plumbers doing quite successfully for themselves with a degree in something or other that doesn't matter at all.
> Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
I think the management answer to this is that you can just hire 9 offshore not-seniors for less money, and that somehow equals the experience of a single onshore senior. In that sense it's a kind of the experience equivalent of the 9 women/1month == baby analogy, and obviously wrong. Unless you're in management.
More or less correct. It's not that management believes in "9 offshore juniors", it's just that they don't know (nor care to confirm) who's actually working for them at the outsourcing firm.
The combined incentive of cost cutting at the outsourcing firm and foolish MBAs in the west opting for the cheapest outsourcing means that the offshore does actually employ juniors, who do build up the experience to become seniors.
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
“In the training data” isn’t really relevant for a modern LLM. The better question would be are they solvable using known techniques that have been fine-tuned in.
A simple example, as a non-mathematician: I’d expect a well trained LLM to be able to solve any integral that can be solved with integration by parts. I would be much more interested to see it solve one with no know solution using some novel technique.
Obviously this doesn’t really lend itself to making a benchmark, but if something is solveable by a known technique, and the LLM has has some kind of RL training re using that technique, seeing a solution isn’t too surprising.
I’m curious, do writers and authors still really care about AI? I think by now most people are completely put off by AI slop, the value of AI writing or image generation is basically zero
So I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too, initial demos get extrapolated and people get worried but in the end slop is slop and serious people aren’t getting replaced or even threatened.
This is quite a way to admit that you don't have any writers or artists in your social group. It has absolutely gutted jobs in these industries, and will continue to do so.
If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble because: most people cannot even tell that the slop is slop, and are happy to engorge themselves on it.
> If you think 'most people are completely put off by AI slop', you're living in a blessed bubble
I think most knowledge workers don’t like AI because most of them are aware that AI was created to replace them.
Just about every CEO that has given a speech about AI at universities have gotten booed by the students which isn’t surprising as those CEOs are effectively promoting technology that will take their future from them.
Ehh, I've had the opposite experience, with lots of writers and artists in my circle.
The markets that have replaced writers and artists with slop never valued them in the first place, and the markets that do will never replace them with AI, and I say this as an AI engineer.
Writing movies, writing theater, creating clearly original illustrations for various purposes, these are all tasks AI will never threaten, because there is just no point. And also, the market sizes for this kind of thing are a rounding error compared to say coding or back office automation which is incidentally the bulk of the token spend right now, confirming all this.
But this is missing the fact that the vast majority of starting jobs for artists/writers would be in the former category. Similar to how AI coding or automation hurts junior hiring more than it does senior.
I found myself thinking about this issue when I was experimenting with an MCP server to handle tuning some precision parameters for scientific simulations. Claude did a much better job than I used to do when I was a fresh PhD student, yet being given tasks like that was how I learned, so it almost felt like pulling the ladder up after myself.
In the sciences, I think this is less of a problem because the PhD to scientist pipeline is pretty normalized, labs are used to the idea of having to let younger people take longer on problems that experienced people could solve much faster. But this doesn't seem to be as normalized elsewhere.
There have been numerous studies by now showing that most people cannot reliably distinguish "slop" from the real thing, and that many genuinely prefer the slop even.
> do writers and authors still really care about AI
it is demographics.. there is no single answer, you are talking about millions of people with varying amounts of this JOB description
> most people are completely put off by AI slop
this is almost pathological.. most people consume media not produce it. Those in the business of media have been eliminating people for thirty years, and this AI tooling has multiplied that effect
> the value of XXXX writing or image generation generation is basically zero
yes - bingo.. the average capable person now can expect to be paid ZERO for their ability to personally produce writing or image generation.. and, if you don't start somewhere, you will never get to ascend the ladder of success in those fields, by definition
> I suspect that the cloud will pass on math too
consistent with the other statements here, this is 180 degrees false.. substantiation? the content of the letter signed by world class mathematicians, who are visibly quite concerned
Not replying to the above comment specifically as I obviously don’t know individual circumstances. But I find it ironic that people working in basically surveillance tech, who would gladly get paid to strip mine users’ privacy in order to market to them - you might say having open contempt for their users, suddenly get put off when the same is applied to them.
It’s unlikely this is true. LLMs are way more mad-libs / templates than we like to admit, that’s (ironically) not a judgement about their capability, it’s primarily just an observation. But it’s also what plain old SFT, which I believe is the primary culprit, ends up imparting.
The best remote jobs I’ve had included many hours a week of no-agenda calls with colleagues, just catching up and talking about what we’re up to. This is very hard to make happen. Most people don’t want to, don’t see it as work, or more likely just don’t know anyone well enough to call and shoot the shit. But imo this is the only real way. Just doing transactional interactions, it’s very tough to stay well connected.
Doing that kind of thing over Zoom just always felt fake and not fun to me.
Maybe some people are wired differently where that works, and I'm stuck having to meet people in person to connect with them for real. Which could be a disadvantage for me.
Captchas are primarily to punish users for not allowing tracking, or using the “right” services, they may prevent some bots as a side effect (or a pretence from the provider) but it’s mostly for google and cloudflare to abuse their monopolies.
Google I would say yes, but what does Cloudflare gain? They don't run an ad network. Generally I'd say Cloudflare is pretty good to have as a guardian of the web compared to other options.
They protect free speech and allow Tor users. Ever tried completing a reCaptcha on Tor?
Nowadays, somebody can just ask claude to build them a scraper/bot that hooks into a proxy network and all of a sudden they can easily send 20k+ reqs/min from hundreds or thousands of IPs cycling them as they get rate limited or banned. In my work, the scrapers have gotten way more aggressive in the last 2 years or so. Frankly, I'm happy there is a solution.
There may be things to criticize Cloudflare for, but the problem of bots and scrapers destroying the open web was getting worse no matter what.
I can relate to the cynicism, but it's also a general tool in the effort to combat bot abuse on public facing post forms that are trying to do something for real people. Many everyday devs reach for tools like this because of the deluge of garbage they get in its absence.
My take is that it's a very hard problem, so hard that even captchas by the biggest internet company can't get it right. I strongly hesitate to roll my own bot friction strategy when other tools are available. But I recognize I may have a lack of imagination here, would absolutely love to hear alternate ideas especially for small projects that may not need the heft of corporate captchas.
We use captchas to cut down on bots and crawlers. They don't work as well as they used to but they at least alter the economics somewhat, or so I tell myself.
Our reason for this is to try to make HN as good as possible for its real users.
I’ve never encountered a captcha on HN, do you guys use less aggressive settings?
The reason captchas bother me so much is they always seem to happen in the course of legitimate activities. Like I had one when trying to make a charity donation, or ordering something - I have no idea why it would be hard to distinguish such traffic as legitimate, I’m convinced it’s because I’m using a nonstandard browser, not allowing cookies, etc.
If I was trying an automation or to bulk download something or whatever, I’d take the captcha as an interesting professional challenge. When I’m trying to use someone’s services or pay them money, it’s just ridiculous friction and I generally abandon any transaction that makes me do a captcha.
Incidentally I have scraped HN and never encountered any problems, since you have an api for it
I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.
We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
> You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little
And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
that was driven by seemingly endless amounts of cheap money being thrown at whatever and whoever, which is not at all what "caring for humans and providing a good work environment" means.
labor-led automation produces improvements in quality, while capital-driven automation increases throughput
I don’t know if this is true, but I do think that LLMs mainly get used where their proponents don’t care (whether intentionally or through ignorance) about the quality of the output, and want to minimize work / maximize throughout. Basically whoever is pushing them is playing the hypothetical role of capitalist in his assertion.
This explains the management push (ignorance) but also the user push (automating BS tasks). The common thread is that the user doesn’t have to take any responsibility for the output. This is why people don’t like having LLMs pushed on them, because for cases where they are responsible for or have to consume the output, they don’t work very well, but when it’s just something that needs to look ok at a glance and be handed off, everyone is rushing to use them.
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