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Because of the World Cup with the article fails to mention.

There's generally an uptick at the start of summer and around the end of year holidays. Cannot imagine it's all for football, but also surprising given the news cycle centered on ai/tech layoffs

theres also generally a revision in a few months to the actual number; of course, the longer congress persists in being asleep at the wheel, the less likely these numbers are true.

The belief (for some) is that it will create new jobs like previous revolutions. No one has said what those will look like yet though.

There has been a lot of posturing from both sides, this is probably going to continue for a couple of months more before they reach equilibrium.

I don't think we should consider gross incompetence on the part of the US to be posturing.

I'm only giving a neutral perspective. The moment the world stops relying on oil, Iran will lose its biggest leverage in this situation. Other sources of energy are going to be pushed even more.

There is more that goes through Hormuz than just oil- like fertilizer for example. Just been able to charge a fee for crossing the Hormuz is a strategic goal for Iran. This is an outcome of the war. Previously Iran did not know how weak US is - but now they figured out.

It would be interesting to see if this war will be a net negative for Israel. If Iran emerges with more financial resources out of the war you can bet they will fund Hamas and Hezbollah more than before the war.


Fertilizer exports are a problem but trucks are keeping it moving at a somewhat higher cost.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fertiliser-stuck-i...


I was wondering what the solution to this was.

From a distance, a railroad here would be great. Pay Ukraine to keep the drones away from it. I've been to the region, I understand that a sandy desert is a tough place to keep a rail line open though.


Millions of tons of chemicals, fertilizer, and metals used to pass through the strait, not just oil.

> The moment the world stops relying on oil,

This isn't happening anytime soon.


Yeah, I don't see it. Trump is also pathologically incapable of admitting defeat (see Jan 6) and it will be very difficult for him to claim victory without getting something better than the deal Obama got. There's little to no incentive for Iran to give him any such deal. Israel also doesn't want the war to end and they can easily sabotage any real negotiations that appear to be getting serious.

Trump has no off ramp. I don't see this ending until he is out of office.


There isn't US boots on the ground because that would be absolute suicide, have you followed anything that's been going on? It is an asymmetric war they cannot win.

And yes "decentralised" meaning we have personal echo-chambers or a swarm of Elon sycophant accounts with inflated number of views and bots mass liking each extremist post. LLMs are going to put astroturfing campaigns on steroids.


Unfortunately we are/have been run by sociopaths like Boris Johnson who indeed do think this is a good thing.

"Former British PM Boris Johnson says falling birthrates ‘best news in long time’"

"Mr Johnson said the promised productivity gains from AI should mean less need for population growth"

"They can’t simultaneously complain that machines are making human workers unnecessary while also demanding that we import or create more human beings to do the work.”"

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/babies/former-br...


Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.

Does it need to?

99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't.

Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing...

Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing...

We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.


I remember sitting is a business class in school. The professor gave a story of how computerized spreadsheets changed the nature of accounting. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand on boards/paper. If a mistake was discovered, cascading recalculations needed to be done by hand. It was perfectly normal for large companies to have multiple teams duplicating work, then reconciling differences.

When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.

I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.


But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.

For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).

But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.

Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!


> many died penniless.

99% of people died penniless in those times...


That's...really not true.

Farmers prior to this time, in particular, would have passed their lands on to their children, and that would have been a vital source of livelihood for them.


In every agricultural->industrial transition I’m aware of, the kids are desperate to get out of farming and into the higher paying, less arduous industrial jobs.

Sure?

I'm not sure how that's related, though.


Inheriting that farm from Dad was not “vital” to their livelihoods.

If AI actually succeeds at its promise, it won't be 99% of engineers and accountants, it will be 99% of nearly every profession that doesn't require physical labor. And if the AIs figure out how to cheaply build reliable human-like robots, that's it for the physical labor jobs too.

Our society is not set up to function with 99% unemployment (even 99% unemployment in "only" non-physical-labor jobs), even in an optimistic post-scarcity environment.

Now, my opening "if" is a really huge "if", so...


Whether it "needs to" is its own debate.

I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?


> Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?

But which skill is atrophying? As a programmer I'm really bad at converting human readable code into machine code because we have compilers to do that for us. I can't remember the last time I had to run "ld" by hand. That skill totally atrophied. But at the same time, AI has made me more ambitious. I'm trying projects I wouldn't have before and even completing some of them! I can't talk for "people", broadly, but I believe most people want to be their best and do good and do things.


I can run the same compiler (or assembler) with the same options on the same source code 100 times, and I will get bit-for-bit identical output 100 times (well, aside from the compiler/linker inserting time/date stamps into metadata). Most people will not need to care about judging the output of the compiler. Only rarely will the compiler or assembler do something incorrect, which will require someone with specialized skills to debug and fix.

If I give the same LLM the same prompt 100 times, I will get 100 different programs written. Some of them will not work at all. Some of them will work, but will have major bugs or performance issues. Some of them will work well, but have subtle issues or edge cases that aren't handled properly. A few of them will work perfectly, or at least adequately enough for the task at hand.

Every single time you give the LLM instructions to do something, you need someone qualified and capable of reviewing the output to make sure it works properly. And while I would say you need someone reviewing the source code, even if you're just vibe-coding, you still need someone to test the program and make sure it works, and even that requires some specialized skill.

Maybe LLMs (or their next-gen replacements) will eventually become good enough that you'll get the same output every time for those 100 prompts, or at least close enough and functional enough for it not to matter. But we're not there yet, and I think that's a big huge "maybe". In the meantime, skill atrophy among programmers is a real, reported phenomenon with the current crop of LLMs. That is worrying.


Those with high agency may have even greater agency, but I can also see the inverse effect.

The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".

Also, this entire analysis comes from thinking that software is like manufacturing. Its not, its like music publishing. That's where this entire tower of logic comes crashing down. More software isn't necessarily better, many cases, its worse. What we (most people) want is better quality software, not more.

The world average is 25% work on farms. In 24 countries the percentage is greater than 50%.

It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.


They'll do some other engineering like thing...

Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.


Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment.

>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...


Entry-level jobs are the easiest to get rid of in any layoffs. This doesn't look like anything genuinely new.

Haven't swe layoffs usually targeted more experienced devs?


Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.

Junior employees are not sufficiently competent.

Competency isn't the layoff criterion, cost is

Competency doesn't matter for corporations.

Social experiment: What would happen if you gave the local homeless billions of dollars and adderall?

Funny, it seems Asian countries are more optimistic than Western countries [1]. Maybe this says more about the people running these countries than the technology itself. Technology is just a tool after all.

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/publi... [1]


2024…as fast as AI changes, these studies should be done more frequently.



This is the third or fourth time today I’ve seen someone say “AI is just a tool” and it’s the most brain dead argument, I just simply can’t believe people think like this.

Guns, cars, knives, explosives, dangerous chemicals, etc. are all tools. They’re just inanimate things that have the potential for massive (potentially lethal) consequences. You can argue that malware or nuclear reactors or chainsaws are “just tools” and it doesn’t make them any less dangerous in the wrong hands.

People who say “Well AI is just a tool” are at best being pedantic, and at worst trying to recast valid concerns as fear mongering


>doesn’t make them any less dangerous in the wrong hands.

what do you think my comment said you halfwit.


Definitely not that


It wasn't LSTMs, it was RNNs.


Thanks for correcting the title I misremembered. Fwiw, the article did culminate with LSTMs: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

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EDIT: It looks like you deleted the part of your post I quoted below. So feel free to ignore my question about it, I guess.

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Not sure what you mean by

> Shows how much you know

Do you mean that the fact that I misremembered a word on the title suggests that I know very little about Karpathy's contributions to the field of neural networks?


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