I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degree), and may also have a family and a mortgage. They have relatively high salaries, plus health insurance, and they can't work when they're sleeping, sick or on vacation.
I once worked for a software consultancy where the owner said, "The worst thing about owning this kind of company is that all my capital walks out the door at six p.m."
AI won't do that. It'll work round the clock if you pay for it.
We do still need a human in the loop with AI. In part, that's to check and verify its work. In part, it's so the corporate overlords have someone to fire when things go wrong. From the looks of things right now, AI will never be "responsible" for its own work.
I think AI will substantially thin out the ranks of programmers over the next five years or so. I've been very impressed with Claude 4.5 and have been using it daily at work. It tends to produce very good, clean, well-documented code and tests.
It does still need an experienced human to review its work, and I do regularly find issues with its output that only a mid-level or senior developer would notice. For example, I saw it write several Python methods this week that, when called simultaneously, would lead to deadlock in an external SQL database. I happen to know these methods WILL be called simultaneously, so I was able to fix the issue.
In existing large code bases that talk to many external systems and have poorly documented, esoteric business rules, I think Claude and other AIs will need supervision from an experienced developer for at least the next few years. Part of the reason for that is that many organizations simply don't capture all requirements in a way that AI can understand. Some business rules are locked up in long email threads or water cooler conversations that AI can't access.
But, yeah, Claude is already acting like a team of junior/mid-level developers for me. Because developers are highly paid, offloading their work to a machine can be hugely profitable for employers. Perhaps, over the next few years, developers will become like sys admins, for whom the machines do most of the meaningful work and the sys admin's job is to provision, troubleshoot and babysit them.
I'm getting near the end of my career, so I'm not too concerned about losing work in the years to come. What does concern me is the loss of knowledge that will come with the move to AI-driven coding. Maybe in ten years we will still need humans to babysit AI's most complicated programming work, but how many humans will there be ten years from now with the kind of deep, extensive experience that senior devs have today? How many developers will have manually provisioned and configured a server, set up and tuned a SQL database, debugged sneaky race conditions, worked out the kinks that arise between the dozens of systems that a single application must interact with?
We already see that posts to Stack Overflow have plummeted since programmers can simply ask ChatGPT or Claude how to solve a complex SQL problem or write a tricky regular expression. The AIs used to feed on Stack Overflow for answers. What will they feed on in the future? What human will have worked out the tricky problems that AI hasn't been asked to solve?
I read a few years ago that the US Navy convinced Congress to fund the construction of an aircraft carrier that the Navy didn't even need. The Navy's argument was that it took our country about eighty years to learn how to build world-class carriers. If we went an entire generation without building a new carrier, much or all of that knowledge would be lost.
The Navy was far-sighted in that decision. Tech companies are not nearly so forward thinking. AI will save them money on development in the short run, but in the long run, what will they do when new, hard-to-solve problems arise? A huge part of software engineering lies in defining the problem to be solved. What happens when we have no one left capable of defining the problems, or of hammering out solutions that have not been tried before?
It's interesting you mention the loss of knowledge. I've heard that China has adopted AI in their classrooms to teach students at a much faster pace than western countries. Right now I'm using it to teach me how to write a reverb plug-in because I don't know anything about DSP and it's doing a pretty good job at that.
So maybe there has to be some form of understanding. I need to understand how reverb works, how DSP works in order to be able to make decisions on it, not necessarily implementation. And some things are hard enough to just understand and maybe that's where the differentiation comes in
There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they're distributing three times as many meals per month as they served before the pandemic. And this is an area of relatively high employment.
People working service jobs simply can't afford the basics, and that's a problem. Part of capitalism's implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
It's really getting out of hand. I see it here with my coworkers in our small company. There are only 6 employees here total. 3 of my coworkers commute for 1hr+ away each way because they can't afford to live in our town. And then they don't eat. With their work schedule and their commute they're gone from home for 12hrs or more per day so they can't meal prep. And they can't afford to dine out. So they simply don't eat breakfast or lunch.
I told my CEO that my past success and my wife are effectively subsidizing his company. Because I could not afford to work here it I had not been so successful earlier and if my wife didn't have a great job with great benefits. In fact, I'm seriously considering leaving my role when the summer starts because childcare for my 5 year old son is going to cost ~55% of my net pay each month.
But my CEO and his family of 4 have been to Disney World twice since October 2023. And they're going to Europe for 2 weeks this summer.
A 2 week vacation and 2 long weekends to Disney World don't seem out of reach for any middle class family, let alone a company owner. My sister is an adjunct professor and I think has been to disneyland 3 times this year already.
The rest of it certainly sucks though. There would have to be a VERY good motivation for me to travel that far for work. Most of us on here are involved in software and I'd be shocked to see if less than half of us were remote or partly remote.
> A 2 week vacation and 2 long weekends to Disney World don't seem out of reach for any middle class family, let alone a company owner.
The fact that this person is going on all these vacations while his workers forgo meals is just kind of fucked up. The fact that people don't seem to see a problem with this is the problem.
Yes but it shouldn't take 5 people working 50+ hours per week to support just one family. The CEO's family is the only one taking vacations. They're the only family that has healthcare.
I know you're kidding, but one of my neighbors gets super excited because his boss allows him to job his sports car to lunch sometimes. My neighbor can't afford his own sports car but at least he gets to drive one to McDonald's a few times per month.
This sounds vaguely like the observation that retail checkout employees get stupider when the economy is good, because everyone with 2 brain cells to rub together moves to more gainful employment, and walmart has to really start scraping the bottom of the barrel
OK, maybe it isn't capitalism but US society that implies that promise. Many (insensitive) people respond to tales of economic woe by saying, "Get a job!" As if that's going to solve even your basic money woes. As others in this discussion have noted, many people employed full time still struggle to provide the basics. That part of the social contract just isn't holding up for a lot of people. And that's a recipe for social unrest.
I also don’t understand people on a tech forum not being more sympathetic about the economy’s troubles. Is tech not in a recession? That’s ludicrous. Tech is in a bad way.
> The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID.
what does this really mean? Like food is so cheap we are obese. So does this mean more people want freebies? Tasty brand name foods? My neighbor thought we were poor and gave us food they got from a foodbank, it was really nice (but odd) stuff.
In 2024 I can't really understand using food as a measurement. There is too much.
Well, if you can't understand, why such strong opinions?
Read up about basics of nutrition, about how poverty and obesity are correlated, what "food deserts" are, the differences between processed and healthy foods, etc.
Poor people are fat because they don't cook well, not because food is expensive. Good cooking is expensive, and bad cooking is available. Healthy basic cooking is cheap. Food is so cheap that you can eat when you can't afford to anything else! In other words, obesity is cheap entertainment, not a good cost issue.
Food Deserts are defined in a way that is unhelpful, I live in a food desert in one of the richest counties. I have 0 grocery stores within 1 mile. But I have 6 grocery stores within 3 miles.
Go ahead with the conventional sayings: Tell me the fallacious remark about McDoubles being the healthiest cheapest food ever. Go ahead and say something incorrect like processed foods are cheaper than fresh foods. In a few years you are going to change from thinking Fat is the devil to carbs are the devil. Then you will take up fasting, then keto, then gluten free.
People in the US have too much money to care about food. These are people getting dopamine from food pleasure. No one wants to admit it.
I largely agree, but lately eggs, butter, cheese, meat have sure surged ahead in price. They cant really shrinkflate around these items. Even the kids selling eggs as a side hustle in my rural community are jacking their prices.
No one will push against the claim there's far too many calories available, on average, in Western countries. That consumption is the automatic answer to anything that ails, it could be argued as well.
It reeks of ignorance and obstinate privilege to claim people are too rich to care about food [1] [2], that having to travel 3 miles to get food is not a barrier to access [3] [4]. Saying that processed foods are more expensive than fresh is an outright lie [5][6][7].
The HN discussion forums are one of the last remaining places where we can expect civil and informed online discourse. Please try and keep with that spirit.
My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."
After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large code bases and because the visual debugger is so easy to use.
I still use emacs in the terminal for scripting and for smaller coding projects, for anything over SSH, and for blogging and fiction writing. It's a distraction-free editor that has very powerful features when you need them, but doesn't shove them in your face. It's also nice to be able to do everything with the keyboard and not have to keep reaching for the mouse.
Same here, I came into massive project from embeded and driver dev where Vim with plugins was better for development. Instant start on everything that can run linux. Minimal hustle.
However when you debug race conditions in app with 100s of threads in containerized environment, the limitations of cli starts to show.
As with everything there is no silver bullets and its a good skill to be able to pick right tool for the right task
I use VSCode sometimes to click through a new codebase, but its memory consumption can be hard to swallow particularly when various LSP servers are running (looking at you terraform-ls).
I think web tools will replace this in time they are just so convenient, I have setup custom reference tools for code bases. These are simple to setup on a server or on you own desktop, but even with a seemingly perfect Nix install dependcies might fail.
A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and South America. All three felt betrayed by the US government. They said, essentially, "We put our lives on the line many times to try to stop the flow of drugs. Then the government turned around and basically gave the pharmaceuticals license to sell this stuff professionally, through people's personal physicians."
These retired agents didn't see the drug war as a war on "bad guys," but as an effort to stop the destruction drugs wrought in people's lives. After all their work, their own government undermined their efforts.
My own doctor was taken in by Big Pharma's sales pitch and wound up going to prison for over-prescribing their pills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hurwitz. Though to hear Big Pharma tell it, there was no such thing as over-prescribing.
If you want to get an idea of how out-of-hand the prescription frenzy got, take a look at John Temple's book American Pain, which describes the pill mills in South Florida. Towns in Appalachia used to send charter buses to these pharmacies. After a 12-20 hour bus ride, each passenger would pick up hundreds or thousands of pills, then ride home to sell them in their small country towns.
Some of the pill mills, which were fully licensed by the state of Florida, were cash-only and would haul garbage bags full of money to the bank each day at closing. For a summary of Temple's book, see https://adiamond.me/2020/01/american-pain-by-john-temple/
My mom worked as an ER physician in Pennington Gap, VA during the early years of opioid abuse there (late nineties through through the early oughts) [1]. She would constantly complain about drug seekers there and refused to give out pain meds. According to her, she was the only doctor who would refuse to give out pain meds.
Fast forward to 2022, she needed heart surgery and was in the ICU for three weeks afterward. She never asked for pain meds and regularly refused them when asked. I think she had became so accustomed to denying people pain meds, that she even denied herself, though it was clear she was in pain.
One can learn how to handle pain yourself. Some people went very far with this.
While younger, I was a bit advanced in those technics - basically it is about accepting the pain and working with it.
In my theory, pain was like a alarm sound - and a painkiller just deactivating the alarm, but therefore maybe stopping a adequate body response.
Nowdays I got a bit softer as currently I am on weak painkillers, but a very low dose compared to the recommendations. And for my (disease related) empty stomach, this is probably way better. Also less extra stress on the liver and kidneys.
But even so, I experienced the feeling, that can put people into the path of addiction. Just one more pill and everything feels fine again. No more struggle, being calm again. But this is dangerous.
I'm not sure where I would have learned it in my life, but this is very similar to my experience with pain so far. I'll definitely feel it but I do experience it more like an alarm, and once I recognize what happened the pain signal seems to go away after about 30 seconds.
To this day I'm still surprised by it, and appreciative for whatever it is that allows my body to apparently recognize and then silence the pain signals.
If she never explained what was happening there, public ERs cannot refuse service to anybody for any reason. So drug addicts will use ERs as an attempt to score drugs by pretending to have some illness or another. If they fail, they'll just go to another one. And then repeat the circle. Even when the people at the ER know they're faking and they're there solely to try to get drugs, they have to continue trying to treat them in good faith. It's a major source of burn-out for ER workers, because it's just never-ending and a complete waste of resources.
That's not quite accurate. Under EMTALA, ERs are only required to stabilize patients. Once an indigent patient is stabilized and no longer at immediate risk, the hospital is free to discharge them even if they have serious medical conditions.
There's a much more informative article available here. [1] Stabilization does not have the colloquial meaning. It's defined as, "To provide such medical treatment of the condition as may be necessary to assure, within reasonable medical probability, that no material deterioration of the condition is likely to result from or occur during the transfer of the individual from a facility, or, with respect to an emergency medical condition..."
So somebody with a serious medial condition could be discharged, but only once that condition was treated and unlikely to further deteriorate. And then there's also a bunch of other rules hospitals that accept medicare have to follow for all patients, which are similar in spirit to EMTALA. And then there are going to state rules on top of all of this. Violations are severe with penalties able to be imposed on both the hospital and the doctors/staff involved - up to and including loss of license, and they are not covered by malpractice insurance. And the courts have invariably ruled on the side of patients, so I don't think there's any doctor that's going to be looking to try to short-serve the requirements of the law. Part of the reason you can find a million negative articles about it!
I'd say it's fairly accurate. It's difficult to confidently establish "stable" in a patient with possibly feigned or exaggerated symptoms based on history and exam alone. It is generally agreed that pain management is part of managing an emergency, and so if an emergency has not been confidently excluded, it is usually part of care until a workup is concluded.
If one could know from the initial evaluation that an emergency could not possibly be present, one could certainly discharge without additional care, but that can be impossible to know immediately (even with highly trained and calibrated eyeballs).
I remember going to the dentist a number of times a few years back and they always prescribed me something crazy like percs, vicodin, oxy, etc. I never actually got any of the scripts filled because by then I had read too may stories about the opioid crisis and was determined to never venture down that road. I did notice once the opioid crisis really hit the mainstream press, my dentist stopped prescribing those strong painkillers and prescribed prescription grade tylenol or ibuprofen instead. Never filled those prescriptions either because the prescription grade stuff was the same as taking more of the regular OTC medicine.
Back in 2007 an oral surgeon gave me an opioid painkiller prescription after a routine tooth extraction. I never filled it but in retrospect it seems crazy how they were handing out those scripts like nothing.
It hit this area hard. I’m from neighboring Scott County and I left in 2015 to pursue a job in a larger market. When I brought my family back in 2021 we shocked to see just how much the opioid crisis had hollowed out the community. Whatever big pharma has paid it’s not enough to repair the generations of damage it’s done to the area. I am on the local Board of Supervisors and I’m trying my best (along with the rest of the board) to get everything running back in the right direction.
Last I heard, culprits are arguing at SCOTUS that they should get immunity for a fraction of their gains. Also, some payouts will come from selling more of the same, which is nuts. It’s pretty hopeless…
Just a point - the same people who thought they were “saving” people with a drug war were destroying lives themselves over drugs that not so many years later are legal and accepted to possess. Somehow they’re not harmful anymore. It’s all BS.
Excellent point, and it's not just a thing of the past, it's still happening right now. Cannabis might be at various stages of legalization throughout the US, but there are countless other substances that are criminalized without any justification, like psychedelics.
The damage that the US-led war on drugs has done throughout the world is staggering. It's probably going to take decades until all the brainwashing and propaganda washes away and we get some form of legalization in Europe, not to mention other parts of the world that take it even more seriously.
The war on drugs is also just a much more active participant in harming people vs the drugs themselves.
The drugs aren’t making a conscious choice of destroying someone’s life. Those agents are. They’re by definition worse than the drugs (premeditated vs not).
Drug policy is complicated. Amphetamines and opioids certainly have very valid medical uses - but also giving the public unrestricted access to them is a complete disaster.
Psychedelics likely have various mental health treatment uses but they are for some bizarre historical reasons considered dangerous.
Mental health medication like benzos are also tricky. They are amazingly affective but also amazingly addictive and withdrawals can be fatal
Having been a cannabis smoker myself for years, I can understand the danger of self-medicating with psychedelics. They aren’t entirely harmless.
Any drug with a high is a dopamine button. It’s easy to hit that button instead of doing something else to feel good. It’s easy to stop doing other things in favor of just hitting that button all day. But the effects of that button diminish over time, so you hit it more often, and the more you hit it the less other things you want to do.
Psychedelics powerfully activate and deactivate different parts of the brain, changing the way you think and process information. Controlled and intentional, this has huge potential for positive mental health outcomes. With chronic recreational use, cannabis leads toward negative mental health outcomes like depression, disordered thinking, anxiety, and low agency.
Quitting is an interesting grey area for cannabis; culturally and functionally people misusing the drug are able to do so indefinitely, usually not reaching the “rock bottom” emergency state that other drugs (hopefully) convince the user to seek treatment. So it feels like “just weed” isn’t serious enough to warrant a 30 day treatment center, but the behavior patterns can be so ingrained it can be hard to see breaking them without.
I haven’t quit but have pulled back and am using it far more occasionally rather than most of the time.
The sense of increased focus after smoking is a big plus for me, but the decrease in focus after that coupled with the overall disorganized thinking is a big minus. Disorganized thinking can be great if you are trying to generate a variety of ideas, but bad if you are trying to communicate them. Learning more about what is actually happening in my brain with focus, memory, agency, etc has been one of the biggest motivators in pulling back from chronic use. I don’t enjoy it much knowing that I’m avoiding other things or going to be grumpy and depressed later because of it.
Agree about the grey area for quitting. There isn’t a rock bottom, but with chronic use there is a kind of dull limbo where everything feels harder to do, but you’re demotivated to make a change. It is literally a drag - it slows and lessens you overall.
For me after daily use for 6 months or so I just had a realization that it’s a net negative. I was always tired, cranky, forgetful, and the highs weren’t that high - more like maintaining some rather low level of life satisfaction. If you use it a lot there is probably some root cause why you think you need to get fucked up all the time.
What helped me quit was really seeing it for what it is - it was making a few hedonistic experiences “richer” but kind of draining the color out of all the experiences outside of that. I never had any negative effects while high - like anxiety so it seemed harmless. For practical tips think of something to do for the first few days at least when you’d normally toke up if youre just bored at home. Out with friends, walking, playing a new game, hobbies, etc
In the early 2000s I was a pharmacist intern and then early in my career working retail pharmacy as a PharmD. I knew the pill mills around me, I would provide DEA agents with clear examples and little to nothing was done about it. What I did get were credible legal threats from patients and physicians for not carte blanche filling what was written by their doc and then I started getting pressure from my district manager (after all I was denying big fat cash payers!). At the same time I saw pharmacist going to jail for "inappropriate dispensing" while the doctors who were running the pill mills were getting in no trouble at all. I left outpatient pharmacy as fast as I could. It was clear no on wanted to do anything to actually solve the issues at hand.
I also get so frustrated with all the border bullshit. Doing anything at the border is trying to solve the problem two thousand miles from the root cause. And pretending that migrants (people trying to come to the US permanently) have anything to do with drug runners is about as stupid as it gets.
The idea of someone going to a bank with a garbage bag full of cash and depositing it into a pharmacy's business account is insane. That's the kind of thing that can only happen when the system is fundamentally corrupt.
A friend of mine was a mechanic in the air Force and took a wrench to the knee. The VA basically prescribed him a giant bottle of benzos and told him to take them as needed.
Young man laid up at home with nothing to do but sit on the couch playing video games and drink beer. Add in a big bottle of pain pills to take "as needed" and you've got an addict.
Because people form their impressions of what the world is like by continually reading anecdotes like this, I'd like to at least throw my own experience out there. I (not my friend) got out of the Army needing three spine surgeries in the span of 16 months, after years of increasingly worthless non-invasive treatments. This involved daily percocet for a very long time along with periods of time in which I couldn't do much beyond mindlessly watch television while falling in and out of sleep.
I did recover, though. Today, I run 40-50 miles a week, lift 6 days a week, work in software making five times what the Army ever paid me, haven't touched a painkiller in 7 years, and don't even drink.
Make of it what you will, but people are individuals and medical policy should reflect this. Pill mills are a problem but physicians deserve the judgment and discretion you should expect of someone we spend up to a decade training and licensing.
Yes, a lot of the problems with drugs is probably cultural. We decided to convince people that they are absolutely powerless against addiction, that this is a disease they were born with it and there's no much they can do themselves, that they can't have absolutely no agency.
Benzos are not pain meds. Might make you an addict, but if that’s what was prescribed, it wasn’t for pain. Dunk on the VA all you like, but they’re not that bad.
You're right, I got my wires crossed for some reason. Pretty sure it was either for Percocet or the generic equivalent.
When he recounted this to be, he was frustrated that they didn't give him a small prescription to start with, but more or less gave him a large quantity up front and let him dose himself.
He managed to beat the addiction, and when I'd met him it was in a software development gig so it's not like it ruined his life or anything. He certainly wasn't happy with how casually he'd been treated was the jist of the story.
Edit: just realized I had a different friend at the same company who had been on benzos and dealt with the withdrawal... The three of us chatted quite a bit and I imagine that was the context for the conversation but it's been a decade or so.
That makes more sense. As for why, just look at the responses to my other comment saying that opioids aren’t generally warranted for weeks after a dental extraction.
sounds like the only difference between the Columbian Drug Cartels (cocaine producers and street pushers distribution network) and the American Drug Cartels (Big Pharma and pill mill distribution network) is the latter paid taxes
And funny enough, here I was just thinking about how these jerks are making it so that, after the midwit backlash against all the criminal behavior encouraged by the Biden admin, I'll get to just live in pain the next time I have an injury!
… Eh? Purdue Pharma’s downfall was long and protracted, but it started in 2007 and ended in 2019; presumably Biden was encouraging it using his time machine? Like, the US opioid crisis isn’t exactly _new_.
Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different book genres on Amazon then chose a genre where he thought he could squeeze onto the top ten bestseller list. He's been cranking out books for years and selling pretty well. If you check his author page, you'll see he has quite a few titles out.
I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degree), and may also have a family and a mortgage. They have relatively high salaries, plus health insurance, and they can't work when they're sleeping, sick or on vacation.
I once worked for a software consultancy where the owner said, "The worst thing about owning this kind of company is that all my capital walks out the door at six p.m."
AI won't do that. It'll work round the clock if you pay for it.
We do still need a human in the loop with AI. In part, that's to check and verify its work. In part, it's so the corporate overlords have someone to fire when things go wrong. From the looks of things right now, AI will never be "responsible" for its own work.
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