Technology

Make sure your retirement is not in the hands of any banks or retirement funds.

They will all go belly up in case the bubble bursts.

Man so envious of that, I'm just a bit younger and I can't retire like that.

I will be sailing my job until they fire me. Don't know what will happen next but maybe I can find something that's more down to earth with my local community and still brings some joy.

good ending, took too long maybe

Congrats on your retirement!, I also just pulled the trigger myself. I think industry managers will need to see AI fail for a few years before they wake the eff up around where to use it and how to control it. Its like we are using horse reins on cars lately. The problem is that AI makes very compelling demos. It lets you fill in the blanks with what looks like an instant, high functioning product. You dont initially see the long tail of mediocrity and imprecision. We are used to just assuming tech products are consistent, endlessly iterable, and user friendly.

It is useful, I'll give it that. But.. we are barely doing code reviews anymore though, which is terrifying. Exec says invest in extra scoping an extra testing, and ignore the software creation part, let AI do its thing and trust it. May work. May not. My replacement will find out, poor bastard. Good luck to them.

I "retired" (fancy way of saying "was laid off") from programming seven years ago and I haven't written a line of code since. I'm happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn't be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.

Fair. I have been a Linux hobbyist for decades. Up until being replaced by AI a year or two ago, I worked tech support and tech billing/contract roles for infrastructure and software giants. I have zero interest in perpetuating purportedly legal but sketchy billing schemes, using or selling AI, or enabling any foreign (or local) genocides or surveillance states with my work. I'd rather make less money and have my ethics a little less shattered.

The main reasons I work are to learn new skills and to get health insurance and money. I can learn skills on my own, I'm doing okay on money because my hobbies are mostly free or pay me a little bit. It's mostly the threat of financial destitution, homelessness, and dying in a gutter because I caught a cold without health insurance that have kept me working full time, even when my freelancing was a big portion of my income. If we can solve the healthcare issue, everything will change for the better. I truly believe that.

man i'm like a couple years behind ya. could you tell me the ballpark of what you're retiring on so i can be envious :D

The consequence is that they waste money and time. Which actually matters for businesses strapped for money or time. But most of the megacorps are swimming in money and in time. They waste those all the time even without the AI because the upper management accepts kickbacks to contract with the worst (but also the bribiest) contractors. And mid management, and everyone else, put their own personal interests ahead of the company's. Now that the AI hype is here, they have a new tool to waste time and money with, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Big business is a lumbering inefficient bureaucracy by its nature.

We all said this was what would happen

They only listen to people who's wage or billable hours are close to the order of magnitude as their own.

You mean malicious compliance works for the mid management too? I believe it.

Ding ding ding. It's fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation... Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.

sounds like they are creating another excuse for another round layoffs.

Wait, we're not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.

So next, you'll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.

I think he's waiting for someone to insert a penis into his mouth

Everyone who was paying attention even a little bit has known this would be the trajectory from the beginning. And we haven't even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.

My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days