> This sounds like a bad idea if you're trying to convince people from NYC to move to FL, which sounds like a bad idea for the businesses it's presumably trying to serve.
Employees, yes. But the execs at these big firms would love to have more control over their best people so they have less leverage
Employees unfortunately need employers to pay them, so they will take the deal they can get
If your options all move to Florida, guess where you’re moving
The way discourse has been trending lately, I suspect it will be just the opposite. Florida and Texas will probably be first to impose one-child-minimum policies, with heavy penalties for noncompliance.
Yea, I was gonna say! The current administration has this weird fixation on "babies" and encouraging people "having babies" and incentivizing "baby production" with these new savings accounts that are essentially baby bonds, and weirdly trying to denigrate childless people. Why this sudden politicization of childbearing?
Look to history[1][2]. In short, it’s an old tactic for increasing nationalistic sentiment, growing targeted demographics, and putting pressure on women’s rights/bodily autonomy.
Well population decline is a very real threat and with the conservative scapegoating of immigration (the only thing keeping the US growing) they need to get labor somewhere.
Plus it fits right in with their anti-woman and anti-lgbt sentiments. Good god-fearing Christians should be having children after all. But of course child poverty and healthcare is not their concern. Labor should be hungry and desperate.
I remember when the "threat" was out-of-control overpopulation. Most developed countries have finally solved that, and now the "threat" is underpopulation? It sounds like we're just justifying everything as a threat. In any well-run society that isn't a ponzi scheme that relies on ever-increasing labor, population decline is what you want, given the extreme environmental footprint of every single person. The Earth has fixed and limited resources, so the fewer people competing for them, the better.
Population decline is an economic issue not an ecological one. How do we support a larger population of non-working elderly with an ever decreasing population of workers. I don't see how without a restructuring of our economy and society which doesn't seem to be on the table.
South Korea is essentially already doomed. In 25 years over half their population will be over 65. It's workforce will be half what it is now. It simply will not be able to care for the elderly. They will work until they die in poverty.
Ideally as society advances and productivity increases the necessary ratio of workers to non-workers should decrease as well but, the gains of productivity increases have historically not translated to wealth of the populace. And even if productivity does shift to benefit the worker it has to outpace population implosion which seems impossible considering the compounding nature of the decline.
A threat to what? How can it be that AI is poised to eliminate large numbers of skilled jobs but we still don't have enough humans? Both can't be true simultaneously. One of them has to be a lie.
Even if you believe AI will eliminate a significant portion of skilled labor do you honestly believe that the increased productivity will be used to support our aging population?
It can't be worse than too many children, not enough work. We've had that for most of our history.
Have you pictured what a society with mostly unproductive humans (relative to AI) and no income redistribution looks like? Peaceful and tranquil aren't words I'd use to describe it.
Neither did I. My argument is we need a long-term population decrease to maintain a stable society if all the wild AI predictions come true. We simply can't have 25% unemployment for multiple generations without something like UBI. And even with UBI there will be lots of idle hands and unrest.
In that sense we're lucky that the AI boom and a trend toward smaller family sizes is happening roughly at the same time.
A halving of the world population is like the world as it was in 1970. Not some Dark Age devoid of prosperity. Getting to that in 2 or 3 generations, in the absence of a climate change calamity, wouldn't be the worst thing.
I don’t personally see AI as replacing a significant portion of workers any time soon, nor our government implementing UBI if it does. But should both those things come to pass then sure, the devastating effects of population decline on our economy could be mitigated to some degree.
The population doesn’t just halve. Instead the population ages dramatically.
Traditionally higher population means a bigger workforce and army. Things a country can use to become "great." The US reaped a demographic dividend from the Baby Boom and is now feeling the pain of Baby Boomers retiring and transitioning to needing elder care. The Trump Administration is overlooking how US led free trade, security alliances, and R&D funding were also important factors in the US becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country.
Bonus is a very significant component (often the majority) of comp that gets cut when you're under a noncompete in these kinds of jobs. Yes I understand that's a "world's smallest violin" problem at these scales.
Seriously? HN and the tech news sector have exhaustively covered the abuse and exploitation of noncompetes inside and outside of tech for the past decade. They protect employers at the expense of employees, consistently fail to provide reasonable compensation for lengthy agreements, and are regularly exploited by bad actors to harm current and former employees by making them accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Even fifteen minutes of casual reading through old threads here should answer this question for you. The only supporters of non-competes tend to be those who do not view employees as people, but as proprietary property.
If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
> If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
Yes, this is what I think people are missing: non-competes harm the free labor market.
Labor is a resource like any other, and as such there's a market. If the labor is highly valuable that means we should value it as such, in dollars. If we're not doing that then that means something is distorting or otherwise breaking the free market.
I would never expect to buy a car for 5,000 dollars. But, for some reason, with labor, everyone's expectations of how a market works suddenly need not apply. Why is that?
The problem is if we forcibly lower wages via non-competes then that harms the labor market as a whole. Yes, companies get to save a few bucks, but in exchange the expectations are broken. This is actually self-destructive. Why? Because companies, as much as labor, relies on those expectations. Now, you can't hire better workers for more money because we've detached monetary value from the actual value of labor. Oops! You want the best of the best? You can't do that do anymore.
On the surface, non-competes appear to benefit companies, but they don't. It's an illusion, and a seductive one.
The freedom not to sign is not the same as the liberty to pass up an opportunity for survival. Your snippy quip just makes you sound like an ignorant fool who can’t defend their position, let alone coherently argue against others.
If I walk across the desert and find a house on an oasis and the owner offers me water on the condition that I first put a chain on my ankle that is tethered to the property, do I really have the option to say no?
What if all the houses are following the “standard industry practice” of chaining anyone who asks for water? What if refusing to follow this practice means that you can’t obtain funding to build a house?
> This is limited to industry category and employee’s keep their current pay. How is this bad?
I don't know... former communist countries had restrictions precisely like this one, it was an integral part of their regulations.
Former feudal countries too, maybe a bit harsher.
The land of the serfs and category 5 hurricanes - sounds sweet.
> and employee’s keep their current pay
Oh yeah, inflation is just starting - to pay for the big bubblegum bill, in real terms that pay is going down 10%/yr, and the serfs cannot renegotiate.
> Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects
- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL.
- Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate library functions from the types I have defined" and "generate a polished CLI for this API for me"
- Using Tilt (tilt.dev) to automatically rebuild and live-reload software on a running Kubernetes cluster within seconds. Essentially, deploy-on-save.
- Much more expansive and robust integration test suites with output such that an AI agent can automatically run integration tests, read the errors and use them to iterate. And with some guidance it can write more tests based on a small set of examples. It's also been great at adding formatted messages to every test assertion to make failed tests easier to understand
- Using an editor where an AI agent has access to the language server, linter, etc. via diagnostics to automatically understand when it makes severe mistakes and fix them
A lot of this is traditional programming but sped up so that things that took hours a few years ago now take literally minutes.
I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly.
I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.
If you can build, test and run your project entirely from the command line you're never locked in. Every project I've worked on in the past decade has not enforced a choice of editor, and most have been portable to 2-3 OSes.
> I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly.
I found this didn't take me very long. Try things in order of how popular they seem and keep notes on what you do and don't like.
I personally settled on Zed (because I genuinely like the editor even with the AI bits turned off), Copilot (because Microsoft gave me a free subscription as an active OSS dev) and Claude Sonnet (seems to be a good balance). Other people I work with like Claude Code.
When I do projects in this realm, it requires significant discussion with the business to understand how reality is modeled in the database and data, and that info is required before any notion of "clean up" can be defined.
Yeah, you still do all of that domain research and requirements gathering and system design as your meatbag job. But now instead of writing the ETL code yourself by hand you can get 80-90% of the way there in a minute or two with AI assistance.
Claude recommended I use Tilt for setting up a new project at work.
I wasn’t sure if it was worth it…is it pretty easy to set up a debugger? Not only do I have to adopt it, but I have to get a small team to be OK with it.
Our target deploy environment is K8S if that makes a difference. Right now I’m using mise tasks to run everything
Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.
My rule of thumb is that if I get a nit, whitespace, or syntax preferences as a PR comment, that goes into the linter. Especially for systemic issues like e.g. not awaiting functions that return a promise, any kind of alphabetization, import styles, etc.
Yeah I find it pretty funny that so much of us (myself included) threw out strict documentation practices because “the code should be self documenting!”
Now I want as much of it as I can get.
For us it’s been auto-generating tests - we focus efforts on having the LLM write 1 test, manually verifying it. Then use this as context and tell the llm to extend to all space groups and crystal systems.
So we get code coverage without all the effort, it works well for well defined problems that can be verified with test.
the core tech and premise doesnt collect biometric data, but biometric data is collected for training purposes with consent and compensation. There is endless misinformation (willfully and ignorantly) around worldcoin but it is not, at its core, a biometric collection company
the original claim was "it collects biometrics to identify people" and that's just factually wrong. worldcoin in general is not about identification, in fact it's specifically designed to not identify people. its only purpose is to verify "does this private key have an association to any hash that was created after we scanned a unique set of human retinas". it cant even tell you which retinas it's associated with - the data simply doesn't exist
Employees, yes. But the execs at these big firms would love to have more control over their best people so they have less leverage
Employees unfortunately need employers to pay them, so they will take the deal they can get
If your options all move to Florida, guess where you’re moving
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