So then the corps find a way to fire you for something other than AI displacement, replace you with AI anyway, and you’re on your own. Basically identical to firing someone in a clever way that avoids having to pay unemployment, which already happens quite frequently.
I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
>I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd.
HN is filled with lots of temporarily depressed millionaires and many actual millionaires too. These are the ones that have bought into zero tax, government is all bad, free market capitalism for me Rand'ian ideas without any systematic thought on how their ideas would work out in practice.
Add to this that a lot of media, and pretty much everything on TV, is owned by billionaires these days that use the news as their platform to propagandize on why they should own more of everything and become richer, so it's not exactly surprising we're at this place.
Goes both ways. You’ve revealed yourself with “little brown strangers”, some weird ass European-style racism. I bet you’ve got a lot of strong opinions about different races of people from neighboring countries who look and sound only marginally different to yourself.
Acidified oceans, poisonous air, and frequent multibillion dollar extreme weather events are a small price to pay for a purely hypothetical $2,400 off my next car, which I am forced to own because the same companies that lobby against climate change regulations are the ones that tore up all the public transit infrastructure that would otherwise allow me not to own a car at all. Americans love getting fucked by our corporate overlords, we can’t get enough of it, it’s our way of life.
The US seems culturally ill-equipped to deal with this reality. We have encouraged several generations of people to channel all of their talents into maximizing their individual income, regardless of externalities or impact to their community. There is low trust and minimal social reward for giving back. We idolize the loudest, most ignorant voices only because they are wealthy and famous. In my own work with the next generation of tech workers, this seems obvious. The younger generations see it as a zero sum game. You only win by making as much money as possible, and the ends justify the means.
I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.
I don't know, you might be underestimating how much damage the orange in charge is really doing to the interests of the US. Change is slow, and the subtle things set in motion are always perceived too late. A simple example would be a small county in germany saving 5+ million a year thanks to moving away from microsoft. Add that to the budget of the many (largely european) opensource projects out there , and you can see things can shift, slowly, but rapidly once noticed.
Europe needs to roll back all of the socialism if it wants to compete with the US and China. European tech is never going to keep pace if the people who build it only work 35 hours a week and take a year of paternity leave every time they have a kid.
With decades of education cuts, top STEM researchers leaving the country, and immigration coming to a halt, I think you overestimate the future competitive position of the US.
No we do not need to roll back on our humanity. The US population however really need to wake up and start unionize and vote for politicians that are not big orange incompetent babies.
How do they compete for actual tech then? Like Airbus.
- 35h a week, doesn’t prevent engineers from working more legally (most do)
- with the age of AI code velocity is no more about time spent, but fresh brain
- And much much more important, it is significantly more efficient to have an employee 10 year in one place than 2 years in 5 places. What could explain higher US turnover than europe, you think?
Here’s the difference between US and Europe: in US tech, productivity gains due to AI will lead to lower employment and higher expectations for the remaining employees. Salaries will remain the same and any increases in profit will of course go straight to the capital owning class. It will continue to be great for a vanishingly small number of people. On the contrary, Europe’s “socialism” makes them well-prepared to deliver the same level of productivity with AI using more people working fewer hours. And their “socialist” attitude toward where that value should go will result in an increased standard of living for everyone. You know, like the AI utopia we’ve all been promised.
Maybe having an endless runway isn’t such a good thing; when you don’t have real constraints at play, you can afford to waste more time on ego and drama.
As time goes on, tech seems to become increasingly detached from the lifestyles of normal people. AI friends, automated gift-giving, sunglasses you can talk to. Nobody wants this — it doesn’t meet people where they’re at and resolve real friction in their lives — but billions will be spent convincing us otherwise.
Maybe this is a side effect of tech workers themselves becoming more detached from the rest of the population. You are statistically unlikely to get a job at Google or Meta if you were not cultivated from day one as a high-achieving box ticking grinder. Anything that does not contribute to TC maximization is unimportant here. Beauty, human experiences, and other such intangibles are irrelevant in that worldview.
SV didn’t used to be this way; there were all different manners of perspective and smarts, which led to genuine innovation. Now we are dominated mostly by a hybrid of hyper-efficient, paperclip maximizing engineering and sociopathic MBA share price optimization.
Interesting that this thread mostly consists of people sharing vibe-coded projects they themselves made, not people sharing other people’s projects that they’ve found useful. The latter would provide higher confidence that the project is actually impressive. It’s the IKEA effect for software.
As for sharing a tool that someone else has made that's useful, I don't think most people are advertising that the tools they've built are vibe-coded, so it would be hard to know what to share.
I think Claude Code itself is mostly vibe coded if you consider that impressive. In general I’m not aware of any vibe coded projects with a substantial amount of iteration put into it rather than being close to one shot, which is why I shared mines. Any project someone can one shot is also something anyone else can vibe code for themselves.
What definition of "vibe coding" are you using here? I seriously doubt Claude Code was made "mostly" (or even "partly") by telling a prompt what they want, and accepting the output when it looks functionally acceptable without regard to how the code looks or works under the hood.
I don't know if or how you've been using AI for coding, but Claude Code is almost certainly being used to develop itself, and I have a hard time imagining their devs not having the best setup possible to make it as easy as possible for Claude Code to iterate on itself with minimal oversight. Once a codebase is well structured and you supply a well thought out meta prompt with something like CLAUDE.md, then there's no reason to check the code output/changes beyond a quick skim.
How uninspired are we that the best we can hope for is to be served popcorn by robots? I look forward to a future where the mentally ill in Los Angeles don’t live in tents by ditches; where blue collar migrant workers aren’t snatched off the streets or racially profiled; where human dignity takes precedence over money for a few people. Sorry but it is not possible to separate any Musk project, however benign, from the reality that he is a force for evil as far as human dignity and flourishing are concerned. Enjoy your rollerskating robots.
I don’t understand why taxation is so off limits to this crowd. We seem to live in a death cult where avoiding a slight inconvenience to 100 people is more important than providing a decent standard of living for the other 345 million people. You can invent whatever clever little solution you want in the meantime but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
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