The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.
My prediction is that you won't see it reverse too soon, but that AI has nothing to do with it. It's just (for now, until the AI bubble itself bursts) a convenient scapegoat for people who haven't come to grips with the broad economic malaise outside of, but not caused by, AI.
I looked but AliExpress makes it impossible to locate even specific sellers, like BohrOptics, who I found to have consistently good quality (bought a beam splitter and fused silica ball lenses from them).
I'm sure he didn't explain it because almost nobody knows what it is (or even how to interpret the interferograms he showed) and learning to figure optics takes years and entire books are written on the subject.
You can, but then the names get needlessly long and one of the things we generally like (especially for command-line programs) is names that are short and easy to type. If we're going to make this argument then why not call the unix tools `concatenate`, `difference`, `stream-editor`, etc. Those are way better names in terms of telling you what they do, but from a usability standpoint they stink to type out.
Libraries and programs also have a habit of gradually changing what exactly they're about and used for. Changing their name at that point doesn't usually make sense, so you'll still end up with long names that don't actually match exactly what it does. Imagine if we were typing out `tape-archive` to make tarballs, it's a historically accurate name but gives you no hint about how people actually use it today. The name remains only because `tar` is pretty generic and there's too much inertia to change it. Honestly I'd say `cat` is the same, It's pretty rare that I see someone actually use it to concatenate multiple files rather than dump a single file to stdout.
The author is missing the fact that stuff like `libsodium` is no differently named from all the other stuff he mentioned. If he used libsodium often then he may just as well have mentioned it as well-named due to it's relation to salt and would instead be complaining about some other library name that he doesn't know much about or doesn't use often. I _understand_ why he's annoyed, but my point is that it's simply nothing new and he's just noticing it now.
Short names are a figment of the age of teletypes when you had to repeatedly type things out. This hasn't been the case for at least 3 decades. Most good shell+terminal combinations will support autocomplete, even the verbose Powershell becomes fairly easy to use with shell history and autocomplete, which, incidentally, it does very well.
If you are repeatedly typing library names, something is wrong with your workflow.
Niklaus Wirth showed us a way out of the teletype world with the Oberon text/command interface, later aped clumsily by Plan 9, but we seem to be stuck firmly in the teletype world, mainly because of Un*x.
Without looking it up, is it sodium for "salt"? That's about as tethered to the actual use (salt + hash being a common crypto thing) as any of the names in the root comment
It's not just that AI is being pushed on to employees by the tech giants - this is true - but that the hype of AI as a life changing tech is not holding up and people within the industry can easily see this. The only life-changing thing it's doing is due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of eliminating jobs in the tech industry and outside by CEOs who have bet too much on AI. Everyone currently agrees that there is no return on all the money spent on AI. Some players may survive and do well in the future but for a majority there is only the prospect of pain, and this is what all the negativity is about.
More than this man. AI is making me re-appreciate part of the Marxist criticism of capitalism. The concept of worker alienation could be easily extended in new forms to the labor situation in an AI-based economy.
FWIW, humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.
Getting everyone to even agree that this is a problem is impossible. I'm open to the universe of solutions, as long as it isn't "Anthropic and OpenAI get another $100 billion dollars while we starve". We can probably start there.
Whether it's capitalism or communism or whatever China has currently - it's all people doing everything to give their own children every unfair advantage and lie about it.
Why did people flee to America from Europe? Because Europe was nepo baby land.
Now America is nepo baby land and very soon China will be nepo baby land.
It's all rather simple. Western 'culture' is convincing everyone the nepo babies running things are actually uber experts because they attended university. Lol.
Yeah, unfortunately Marx was right about people not realizing the problem, too. The proletariat drowns in false consciousness :(
In reality, the US is finally waking up to the fact that the "golden age" of capitalism in the US was built upon the lite socialism of the New Deal, and that all the bs economic opinions the average american has subscribed to over the past few decades was completely just propaganda and anyone with half a brain cell could see from miles away that since reagonomics we've had nothing but a system that leads to gross accumulation to the top and to the top alone and this is a sure fire way (variable maximization) in any complex system to produce instability and eventual collapse.
> humans derive a lot of their self-evaluation as people from labor.
We're conditioned to do so, in large part because this kind of work ethic makes exploitation easier. Doesn't mean that's our natural state, or a desirable one for that matter.
"AI-based economy" is too broad a brush to be painting with. From the Marxist perspective, the question you should be asking is: who owns the robots? and who owns the wealth that they generate?
> I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.
Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
This point was also briefly mentioned in the article, but I think is other half of the equation: even if Ti is made cheap to manufacture, it's use will still remain problematic as it's brutal to machine and form, which increases manufacturing costs drastically.
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