[borzi]

The 10% reduction in hiring for young workers is entirely because industry (software, manufacturing) at least in the united states (and probably the world) is contracting and in recession, while the services and government sector has been the main sector growing since a long time now - completely due to economic and geopolitical reasons, nothing to do with AI.

[johnfn]

Genuine curiosity: how do you know that software is in a recession? What measures do you use to determine this? And how do you know that the recession is not AI driven? I don't think it is either, but it's more of a feeling; I'm not sure how I would make that argument more grounded.

[borzi]

Well, the best measurement is hiring slowdown and bankruptcies. Bankruptcies in the US are up 13.1%.

Traditionally, you wouldn't look at the release of a productivity tool coinciding with a hiring slowdown and assume that it's automation causing the hiring slowdown, your first instinct would be that the sector is not doing well.

[sameermanek]

Check sum of free cash flow of major tech co.s. you'll soon find out that the cash needle of industry as a whole is not moving that much.

They are just round tripping the cash that was sitting in their accounts through investments that make their way back through advertising channels or compute channels.

Once you see the bigger picture, you'll realise its all just a Fugazi post covid

[baxtr]

Yes. And unfortunately (or luckily for some) the end of the low interest and geopolitical changes aligned with the advent of LLMs.

[borzi]

And what many people don't notice: interest rates are not high.

[elric]

Some anecdata: I have a buddy who runs a smallish consulting firm, and another buddy who's a software recruiter. Both are telling me that they've stopped hiring developers except for senior developers. From this limited sample size, the market seems to be convinced that it no longer needs or wants junior developers because their tasks can be outsourced to LLMs.

Outside of tech, my eulogy writer friend got fired and replaced by ChatGPT. So when gramma dies, someone will now read a page of slop at her funeral instead of something that a person with empathy wrote.

[sokoloff]

I’m sorry for your friend’s job loss, but reading a page of fairly generic eulogy written by someone who knew nothing of grandma beyond what the family said and basic obituary facts doesn’t seem massively different from a page of fairly generic eulogy written by an AI based on the same inputs.

If you can find a workable way to put the family in the improvements loop, the AI eulogy could be far better at expressing the family’s sentiment about grandma. (I’m not going to want to go 3 rounds of edits over 2-3 days with a human to get it just right, but going 8 rounds of tweaking/perfecting with an AI in a 20-30 minute sitting is appealing and would give a better result in a lot of cases.)

Under those conditions, how much more am I willing to pay for a human-written eulogy? $0 at most, and probably a negative amount.