If there was an exponential cost, I would expect to see some sort of pricing based on that. I would also expect to see it taking exponentially longer to process a prompt. I don't believe LLMs work like that. The "scary quadratic" referenced in what you linked seems to be pointing out that cache reads increase as your conversation continues?
If I'm running a database keeping track of a conversation, and each time it writes the entire history of the conversation instead of appending a message, are we calling that O(N^2) now?
Yes, that is indeed O(N^2). Which, by the way, is not exponential.
Also by the way, caching does not make LLM inference linear. It's still quadratic, but the constant in front of the quadratic term becomes a lot smaller.
> Also by the way, caching does not make LLM inference linear. It's still quadratic, but the constant in front of the quadratic term becomes a lot smaller.
Touché. Still, to a reasonable approximation, caching makes the dominant term linear, or equiv, linearly scales the expensive bits.
> I would also expect to see it taking exponentially longer to process a prompt. I don't believe LLMs work like that.
Try this out using a local LLM. You'll see that as the conversation grows, your prompts take longer to execute. It's not exponential but it's significant. This is in fact how all autoregressive LLMs work.
What we would call O(n^2) in your rewriting message history would be the case where you have an empty database and you need to populate it with a certain message history. The individual operations would take 1, 2, 3, .. n steps, so (1/2)*n^2 in total, so O(n^2).
This is the operation that is basically done for each message in an LLM chat in the logical level: the complete context/history is sent in to be processed. If you wish to process only the additions, you must preserve the processed state on server-side (in KV cache). KV caches can be very large, e.g. tens of gigabytes.
My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home?
Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the military. What are we even building? For what?
> It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home?
Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford.
> Pay's less.
Less than the narrow window of post-COVID mania pay maybe, but inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term.
When it comes to happiness, the numbers don't actually matter though. Perceptions do. Your and your mom's worldview that everything "isn't working any more", that young people can't possibly be buying homes, that real wages are down, and that working hours are up are actually very common ideas, especially if you zoom in on demographics who read a lot of certain types of social media (Reddit especially!) where classic doomerism prevails.
Home "ownership" is misleading. You don't own a home until you've paid it off.
Younger people are getting into more debt, for much longer in order to be able to survive.
When we start comparing the numbers (i.e, house paid off, even reflected as a percentage paid off, relative to age) the numbers reveal the real crisis.
Anecdotally, I know tons of 20-30 year olds getting into the property market (with insane levels of debt with almost impossible loan lengths) simply because if they don't do it now, there is a high chance homeless is the next option.
That's not quite true. If you want to think that way, then you'd never own it because you'll always pay property taxes so the paying never stops.
But as soon as you buy a home it is your asset. Yes, you have a debt against it. But you are the owner. Go look up the owner in the county records and it is you.
To be pedantic what most people consider ownership is a revocable land lease from the state government which you forfeit if you fail to pay protection money to the gov.
Why? The military power owns things by enforcing their ownership. This is, in fact, the true ownership.
You have to pay taxes to own land so the power which is on your side can prevent another power to re-own it.
If you don't pay taxes to the power which is on your side, why would it allow you to own stuff and provide free protection? Out of good will?
That's how the world works, ownership without the power behind it is non-existent, as well as power without the money behind it is non-existent. When there are enough powers balancing each other, stable systems emerge, and we all can enjoy some few decades of peace and prosperity.
That chart is comparing point in present time, not point in generation-relative time. IE zoomers at ~25 mills at ~40. If you were to approximately age sync the red and yellow lines on that chart, by moving their start dates to the same point, the red line is higher.
There's several charts, the second is: Gen Zers, Millennials Less Likely to Own Homes Than Their Parents at the Same Age which does a direct "at same age" comparison and showed that Gen Z started off slightly stronger than millennials but fell behind.
I do wonder about how they're calculating some of this. It looks like in the chart is saying 16% of the cohort born between 1981 and 1996 (aka millennials) owned a home in 2000. I wouldn't even expect 16% of that group to be over 18.
Thanks for sharing! Seems to show that both are doing poorly relative to earlier generations, and it doesn’t seem Gen Z is greatly (or much at all) outpacing millennials.
Which is crazy cause GenX is management as everything falls apart. GenX is 50-65 year olds running everything and everything sucks now.
GenX is the big tech leaders, the insurance CEO that got got, the EpiPen CEO jacking up prices, senior teachers and admins as student grades slide into the toilet, the uncreative repetitive Hollywood decision makers. Hollywood actors slapping each other live on camera and hacking their faces up to pretend they are still 25. They manage the construction companies that refuse to build more homes.
As an older Millennial it's not a shock they ended up such poor leaders. Working with GenX has always sucked.
I think you need to be a little careful of taking the whole generational group thing too far. It's a very lazy way to think, and it can cause real hatred on overly simplified, group identified lines.
Like: if you were a few years older, now you're the focus of your own hatred? Doesn't make much sense, does it?
As a millennial, I apologize for the blame and hate the boomer generation gets. But I think it's important to understand why the hate exists.
Many boomers grew up in an era where even if you dropped out of high school and waited tables full time for a few years, you'd be able to afford to buy a house and start a family by age 25. Sure, interest rates were 20%, but the price of a house was often just 2-3x someone's annual salary (single earner). Now the price of a house is often 4-5x a households annual salary.
Boomers also had access to stuff like pensions.
I think boomers wouldn't get hate if it weren't a trope for them to say that the millennial generation is lazy, entitled, etc. When milennials have to be extraordinary in order to live what used to be an ordinary life (3 bedroom house, 2 kids).
"for them to say that the millennial generation is lazy, entitled, etc" - they said it about Gen X too, but there's too few of us, so they focused on the Millenials instead.
I too dislike the Millenial whoop, but I like smashed avocado toast, so it's a wash for me.
> inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term
Inflation is a tool for monetary policy. It doesn't track cost of living. For example, if luxury items become more affordable, but housing prices rise, inflation-adjusted pay doesn't capture this kind of negative effect on the working class.
It doesn't track cost of living? The way it's calculated is all about cost of living!
In the US, the official inflation numbers are based on a "basket of goods" meant to be representative of a typical person's spending. Housing currently makes up about a third of the basket, while luxury items are a fairly small percentage. Here's a pretty well-written summary, albeit with numbers from 2022:
Changes in housing prices have a large effect on the BLS's inflation figures. Downward changes in the price of luxury goods have a small (and bounded) effect. Even if all luxury goods became free, the reduction in inflation wouldn't be all that much.
CPI is an aggregate measure which munges a bunch of things together under a single statistic.
In fact, the cost of necessities has overall risen faster than the cost of discretionary goods. This has been generally true since the mid-1990s; prior to that, inflation differences were much smaller across income groups despite lower income groups spending more of their income on necessities. In some periods like the post-COVID housing and energy price shocks, the differential effect of real inflation on basic necessities has been even greater.
Even "small" effects compound over time. For example, when someone in a low bracket loses 10% purchasing power after many years, the net economic stress they experience is much greater than for someone at a high bracket. Differential inflation of necessities vs discretionary goods magnifies this.
Housing is actually ~44% in 2024, but the subcategory of 'Shelter' is ~35% for CPI-U. 'Shelter' is further broken down into rent and owner's equivalent of rent. 'Owners' equivalent rent of residences' is ~26% for CPI-U and ~21% for CPI-W, 'Rent of primary residence' is around 7% and 10% respectively.
Depending on how one live their lifestyle, the 'inflation' calculation can greatly vary in relevance.
Nope. CPI is an excellent differential indicator -- "how much did a typical person's cost of living rise this year" -- but it's a terrible integral indicator if you compound it because it's blind to the difference between forced and voluntary substitution. If essentials inflate faster than wages, money_in=money_out drives a reduction in nonessentials -- forced substitution -- and the CPI basket adjustments launder the forced substitution into voluntary substitution.
Well, "launder" is a strong word that the hardworking bureaucrats at BLS do not deserve, but the people who use CPI as a deflater so that they can wave around graphs "proving" that things have never been better absolutely deserve it, so I'll keep it in.
Bonus meme: the American Dream was not to Owner Imputed Rent a house.
Yes, it also takes into account rising quality. For an example, in 2010 I rented a rat hole apartment for $x from a fisherman who had inherited the building. He never did maintenance (he was out to sea most of the year) and he never raised rent.
A large company bought the building after I moved out. Ten years later, the same apartment with a fresh coat of paint and new countertops was back on the market for a rent of about three times $x.
The CPI can say that apartment, since it was refurbished, increased in quality and so it wasn't really a price increase of the same good from $x to $3x. This offers a "degree of freedom" to adjust the CPI itself (since quality is inherently subjective), and may be a big part of why CPI does not reflect the lived experience.
I didn't care one bit about paint or countertops when I rented that apartment and I assume broke young adults today don't either. At the time I wanted the cheapest place to live in the area and this was it. It still is one of the cheapest places, but you need three times as much money to rent it.
Yeah, a house is always affordable to someone, and it's not like all the single-family homes are owned by huge landlords renting out. Some areas have become more sought-after, so young adults there are finding that they can't afford to buy a house where they grew up.
It’s actually not true that a house is affordable to the person living in it.
First, plenty of people own houses, paid-off even, but have little else in the way of income or assets, and, other than not wanting to move, they might be much better off if the home magically turned into cash.
Second, taxes. In the US, in HCOL markets, selling your house may involve large amounts of capital gains tax, and in California, you risk losing your low Property 13 basis.
I suspect that, in markets like Palo Alto, a lot of houses are owned by people who could not credibly afford those houses if they were to sell and then decide to buy an equivalent house next door.
Sure, someone can afford your house, but that’s a nearly vacuous statement.
My in-laws bought a house in the East Bay area in 2000 for about $400k. Worth about $1.5m (according to zillow and similar homes in the neighborhood that have recently sold). Fully paid off now, and they're retired.
If they were to sell it, they'd have to pay taxes on 1.1m of "profit." sure they can write off renovations and deduct $500k but that's still a lot of taxes to pay!
So yeah, they wouldn't be able to sell and rebuy even their own house because uncle sam just took about $100k on the sale of their house.
$1.1m is a lot of money to pay taxes on for middle class retirees!
My point is that they wouldn't be able to rebuy their house, since they'd pay taxes on the "profit," and then need to get another mortgage at 6%.
When I was shopping for a house one of the sellers had a special exclusion where they'd roll the proceeds into a special account that they'd use to buy another house so they won't pay taxes on the profit. I think it's quite strange that RE investors get that exclusion but if it's your primary residence you don't. I feel like it should be the other way around.
> Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford.
It's more the case that Gen Z is giving up on having the homes that Millennials want in the places they want them. They're buying fixer uppers, moving into 3rd/4th tier cities, etc. They also have some benefits millennials didn't have: inheritances and way less student loan debt.
You can look at this in a number of ways, but it's clear we didn't solve the problem of "so you want to live in NYC/LA/Chicago/SF/Seattle".
> Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic.
Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper?
edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent history, but I think it's pretty inarguable that the housing market is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
From what I understand, yes. My 24 year old coworker makes $65k/year and has a $2200/mo mortgage. It's an old starter home in the Midwest, nothing fancy. It stresses him out to the point of not going to a happy hour once in a while unless there's a buy one get one deal or something or I offer to buy (which I do happily). No vacations, no eating out, no fun. It's super sad to see. He talks about being in his prime but being unable to enjoy it at all.
For what it's worth, when I was 24 I was only really focused on my career and didn't really have much of a social life. It wasn't until my late 20s and 30s that I started being able to comfortably afford drinks with coworkers after work, travel, etc.
A $2200/mo mortgage on a $65k salary does indeed sound like a stretch. But even having a mortgage at all at 24 is pretty impressive, and he's probably still a ways off from his peak earning potential. Then he might have a bit more income for discretional spending.
In short - yeah it's a grind, but it sounds like he's making responsible decisions and hopefully they will start to pay dividends in another 5-10 years. And your 20s is when you are most able to grind it out - before kids (if that's something you want) start demanding a huge chunk of your time and energy, and before work starts to feel like a slog after you've been at it for 20 years.
> But even having a mortgage at all at 24 is pretty impressive...
Impressive in what way?
> ...and he's probably still a ways off from his peak earning potential.
That's an assumption, but even if it's probably true, to what end? The issue most working Americans face is that the cost of living rises faster than their wages.
> Then he might have a bit more income for discretional spending.
So...earn more so that you can spend more. This, in a nutshell, is the insanity of America's consumer culture.
> In short - yeah it's a grind, but it sounds like he's making responsible decisions and hopefully they will start to pay dividends in another 5-10 years.
Young people who are fortunate enough to be in a position to make "responsible decisions" should obviously do so (within reason) but this "grind for the future" mindset is also part of the insanity of American culture.
There are places in this world where people in their 20s can enjoy their youth without having to worry that doing so could doom them to financial distress for the rest of their lives.
I don't think that working hard or investing for the future are insanity.
I also didn't mean to imply that I didn't enjoy my early 20s. My job was difficult but also interesting and fulfilling. For recreation I was into fitness and the outdoors, which can be done on the cheap. I was in a serious relationship with my now spouse, so I wasn't lonely. It was a very fulfilling time - we just lived very frugally.
Not saying that everyone needs to follow the same path. Or that we can't do better. Or that times haven't changed since then. Just that the parent's example doesn't sound too far off from my own experience in my early twenties, so I don't necessarily see them as doomed to a life of misery. You can certainly do worse.
The question is really what "working hard" and "investing for the future" entail. I think it's clear that many young Americans don't have the opportunity to "work hard" and "invest for the future", and even among those who do, a growing number struggle and lack confidence that their efforts will produce the intended results.
Times are changing. HNers tend to be among the more fortunate in American society but even today, a STEM degree doesn't guarantee anyone a cushy, high-paying tech job.
Indeed these are scary times. I think people are right to be on edge, and I'm sympathetic for anyone who is out of work (I may soon count myself among them). But so were the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and Covid-19. "Outsourcing" was the big scare word when I started my career. With AI, things may truly be different this time. But it's early days, and we won't really know for sure how things shake out until we're looking back on the other side.
I think you can make the argument that AI is a more fundamental change to the structure of the economy than any of the previous "black swans", which were more about financial conditions (in the case of the .com crash and 2008 financial crisis) and a recession caused by a global pandemic. In other words it's more like the industrial revolution than a temporary economic event.
AI might have a financial component (malinvestment that needs to be corrected) but from my own first-hand observations, I can't deny that AI is reducing the value of many jobs that people would like to believe are "high skill" and therefore "high value". I've personally seen dev teams shrink by 50% while productivity remains the same because all of the devs are using AI to knock out tasks. A lot of software engineering isn't as complex and immune to AI as software engineers would like to believe.
American companies are already incentivized by the market to maximize profit by cutting labor wherever possible and I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that managers aren't aware of the fact that many employees are already using AI to do their work.
> That's an assumption, but even if it's probably true, to what end? The issue most working Americans face is that the cost of living rises faster than their wages.
Mortgage never rises (in the US), can only fall (if you refinance when rates dip). So that locks down the housing cost. In that sense, inflation helps you in the long run.
What do you mean "mortgage never rises" in the US?
It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage. But that's not all. Lots of people leverage their equity for cash (HELOCs, etc.) to remodel, take a vacation, buy more junk, etc. So your house can easily become a financial boondoggle.
And your mortgage isn't the only cost. There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.
Tons of people are living in homes that have increased substantially in value, making them "rich", but they're still under financial pressure if not outright struggling because the prices of everything else they want and need in life have increased faster than their wages.
And then what happens when the company you work for reports record profits and...lays you off into a market where tens of thousands of people who do what you do have also been laid off?
The problem with the modern American economy is that the path to "success" for the average worker gets narrower and narrower. You can "win" in one or two areas and still lose in the end. Very easily. Happens to tons of people.
> What do you mean "mortgage never rises" in the US?
> It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage.
Yes, that is true. Also, ARMs are rare and always a bad idea. The norm is a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Which means the mortgage can never go up. But you can refinance it down, if opportunity arises.
> There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.
Sure, if we change the goalposts then we're talking about something else.
Dining out may get more expensive (I fail to see how that is relevant to the mortgage), but the fixed rate mortgage never goes up.
Yeah, I agree, but it makes me think of my 20s when I was paying $275 for rent with one roommate, working part time and easily making it work. I worked nights chucking boxes in a warehouse and was able to take a vacation to Jamaica. This guy is a sysadmin, helping to keep a billion dollar company online and can't afford to go to Florida for a few days. It's a raw deal and I hate it for this generation.
> it makes me think of my 20s when I was paying $275 for rent with one roommate
I was in the SF Bay Area and spending $1600/mo to rent a studio apartment in my 20s, and even that looked like a bargain compared to the people that graduated a few years after me. And my starting salary was probably higher than your friend's when adjusted for inflation, but not by much.
Not saying it's right - the US needs to do better when it comes to affordable housing. Just that expensive housing is not exactly a recent phenomenon, and your friend's situation is not hopeless.
What I'm trying to say is that I did things the "wrong way". Worked part time, invested nothing, played in a band, ate drugs, got laid. And it was really fucking easy. I was happy as hell. This was a long time ago, but I was able to blow my 20s away and still land just fine when I started my "career" in my 30s. These days, you can do everything right and still not be happy. We all make our choices of course, but I feel like if you don't hit the grind immediately these days, you're fucked.
I would say your particular case is the exception, not the rule. If I look at my graduating class, there's a pretty clear trend where people who screwed around and did drugs in their 20s are still generally screwing around and doing drugs - and quite often pretty unhappy (and sadly a few close friends have passed away from overdose). And people who hustled after graduation are much more likely to be married, own a home, have kids, etc. To be clear - I'm NOT saying that having a home, a family, or money are either necessary or sufficient to be happy, but in general I view it as a pretty decent heuristic. This tends to hold true both for people who pursued white collar careers, or who learned a trade.
You could easily get away with a "gap year" between school and starting a career, but multiple years of screwing around seems pretty hard to come back from. There are exceptions of course, but I can't think of many. One relatively recent example was the rise of coding "boot camps" - where I know of several people who were able to change careers and land high-paying gigs. Or the more traditional path would be serving in the military, getting a free college education, and then going on to a successful career from there.
Has it actually gotten harder to do that recently? It would be tough for me to say without some data. Certainly any time the job market is tight, and there is strong competition for jobs, it's going to put non-traditional candidates at a disadvantage and make it harder to change careers.
> One relatively recent example was the rise of coding "boot camps"
As a boot camp graduate, you really have to either be extraordinary or know the right people. College doesn't just give you education, it also gives you references and a network, something that many boot camps lack.
> serving in the military
Nothing against our hardworking soldiers who put their lives on the line, but I would not fault anyone who does not want to serve in this particular military at this particular time. I don't expect it to be like this forever, but it does put today's young people in a predicament.
> free college education, and then going on to a successful career from there.
People with advanced degrees (paid or not) are having trouble finding work, even with masters in STEM fields. Entry level jobs are diminishing. Yes it's hard to change careers, but seems even harder to start one these days.
fast-forward 15-20 years. He has most probably paid out his mortgage (salary growth/inflation, etc. so most people i know paid their mortgages in about 15 years, and some by that time got second or even 3rd property - the observations are over the last 30 years here, included are only salaried employees and excluded are the ones who made "exits" which is completely different game level). Even if he is still paying his mortgage, his non-homeowner coworkers would be by that time paying $4K+ in rent while he is still paying 2200 (out of at least 100K+ salary by that time). He can have cats/dogs while it is a big issue for renters. Add the land/home appreciation - about double. And if he gets tired of such comfortable life, he can always HELOC and venture into say a startup, all while still may be not even 40 (and with great health as no drinking&eating out :).
Our industries are routinely telling people who just spent 4-6 years in training that tough shit, you picked the wrong career.
You are looking at this with a lens of stability that no longer exists, which I personally believe is a major component about why everyone is so unhappy.
You cant just reach a level of life that you are comfortable with and stay there anymore. Its a constant cycle of learning new skills that are then useless then learning more skills that are then useless, ad on infinitum.
Birth rates have collapsed completely, so this gravy train is ending very soon. There won't be another sucker to buy the real estate, because new buyers aren't being born.
>Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age.
Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread):
"Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home in 2025, compared to 42.5% of Gen Xers when they were 28 and 44.4% of baby boomers when they were 28." (There is an accompanying chart in the linked report.)
nice debunk, thats just a wall of words that besides likely being wrong, has no evidence and goes against what i hear people saying all the time.
edit: besides, happiness is not about money. freedom of expression and free/impartial institutions are at all time lows across the western world. which as we speak is in an arms race to be the biggest and best surveillance system it can be.
I can’t grasp the math. How are young people buying homes? Is the average income now over $100k?
Or are they taking out mortgages they can never pay off, meaning they are almost renting not on a path to actually buying or owning and most of their payments are interest.
If that’s the case they are renting a leveraged financial position.
Previous generations could own homes. As in pay them off.
The interest is fixed in a typical mortgage, so just as long as you reliably pay the mortgage payments, you will own the home eventually when the term is complete.
Owners only really get screwed if their home value goes down and they need to sell for some reason.
Prices are usually going up (at least on a long enough time frame), so most owners make out pretty well when selling even with little home equity.
Sure, I know that, but even a small down payment on crazy home prices is insane let alone the monthly payment.
I suspect these stats are nationwide. There are places you can still actually buy a home without an exit event. Maybe genZ has wised up and is avoiding high cost of living traps and that’s how.
one thing to also consider is that maybe the younger kids who are capable of buying houses may be getting their down payment from the bank of mom and dad. not good for people thinking things are fair
This reminds me that people only care about what you tell them to care about. Grocery store prices was the first thing out of any "undecided muh both sides" voters mouth in 2024.
But on Jan 20, 2025 it was magically fixed instantly despite grocery store prices increasing because voters decided to elect in blanket import taxes. No one cares about these issues. They just care about the aesthetic.
Cut the bullshit please. I bought house in 1998 for $200K, guess what's the price is now. And salaries did not all that much since then. Definitely not 5 times.
I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you.
Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.
YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.
I and my wife have been fully remote for over a decade, absolutely love it and I can't understand the whole going to office thing or people pushing for it.
Some of us just need a different space to work, I can't wfh - my living space is too small to have a dedicated area and I can't discipline myself without said dedicated area.
The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.
Anecdotally, my manager is a rabid RTO advocate, he's a gen X man and messages our team sometimes at 1am, is working on the weekends, schedules early morning and late meetings that extend well past 5pm. He has kids that he never mentions. We don't work on anything mission critical whatsoever.
Small sample size, but of the people in my office that really prefer in-office to WFH, the two archetypes I have noticed are those people are either single and have no family, or they wish they were single and had no family.
> largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would.
This is a big YMMV, but you accidentally hit on something I've observed over my years of working remote: A lot of the successful remote coworkers I've had have been people with families at home.
There is a lot of demand for remote jobs from young, single people who think it's going to be the best thing ever, but then many decline into a funk that they don't really understand. The social isolation starts to wear on most people like that.
There are very obviously ways to theoretically avoid this, like having an active social life during the work week. I know many people who fit this description and love it. However a lot of people think they're going to do that and then just don't really keep up with it. They go from bed to remote job to Netflix on the couch to sleep and repeat, then wonder why they're feeling so blah.
I agree, for many it's wonderful. If you've got family at home I can see that being a real attraction. When my kids were little I'd have liked that as well. I also had wonderful office-mates that are now life-long friends, but I mostly worked non-corporate nearly mom-and-pops so we were a close knit group. I realize I am an outlier. I just wonder if not being in an office is 3% (or whatever %) of the unhappiness problem.
If your company culture fully supports it it's great. Unfortunately because of all the half-assed RTO the employees still remote often feel both resentment from employees that had to RTO and anxiety about being first in line to get cut.
Yeah, but those people were previously burdened by helping their coworkers be less crazy. Now they remain blissfully isolated as their coworkers spiral into unchecked weirdness.
> Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity
This is a major difference between US and Euro workplaces that I have noticed. In the USA, there is plenty of time for chat with colleagues, and everyone stays at work longer. In Euro workplaces it tends to be more focused on work and then everyone goes home at 5.
The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.
I've worked with German colleagues who were ex-large-consultancies and they all said the same thing about working in the USA; that Americans spend a lot of their day chatting and stay in the office much longer. It drove the Germans crazy, "they would be so much more efficient if they just stopped talking and did the work!".
I'm not holding Europe up as an example to emulate; I don't think Europeans are that much happier at the moment, particularly the UK, but I wanted to push back on this idea as work == social space.
> The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.
I want to call out that while generally, Irish working hours are pretty capped, most people at most companies definitely don't go to the pub at 5pm. I am Irish, and work in Ireland (but mostly for multinationals) so 5pm pub time (unfortunately) doesn't work when you need to talk to California.
Additionally, I normally agitate for the whole 8 and only 8 hours of work, as lots of professional people in Ireland are quite driven (or people pleasing) and tend to work longer hours.
That being said, there are some employers where this definitely is a thing (particularly on Thursday or Friday), but it's 100% not the standard.
I've only worked at this one place in Ireland, so there was definitely a tendency to say "the Irish" when I actually only knew "this one workplace in Ireland". Thanks for the clarification :) From now I'll preface it with "it's not the norm, but I worked at this one place in Ireland where...".
> I've only worked at this one place in Ireland, so there was definitely a tendency to say "the Irish" when I actually only knew "this one workplace in Ireland".
To be fair, this does happen a lot if there are visitors to the office. I can certainly believe everyone going out in that case. Alternatively, if the team is pretty young and single this would definitely happen. When I worked at FB there was a big drinking culture (not just in Ireland), so again I'd believe it of there.
I would much rather talk to my family at random times over the working day than listen to the guy at the next desk who is always on the phone blabber on (and it always happens when there is a pressing deadline, and your boss is checking every 15 minutes: any progress on this?).
The fully remote teams that I have been a part of all started a tradition of leaving a persistent ${VIDEOCONFERENCE} running that we can just hang out in. It isn't perfect, but is enough to retain the sense of community and support from an office.
I'd love to see a dedicated tool that does "virtual office hangouts" well, where you can spin up rooms, share screens/files/text, easily drop in and out, and see where people are. There are a few out there that come close, but I haven't seen any that let you browse to see various groups/individuals to match walking the halls.
If you have asd or adhd (not uncommon in programmers) it can be a definitive minus for well-being. But even if you don't, between office politics and idiotic corporate mandates, it can be draining.
Especially as for the average office worker, originally you had an office of your own or at worse with one or two other people, then starting from the 80s you had a cubicle, then we got the hellish open plans. You're asked to focus on a screen and a codebase in an environment full of distractions, and full of activity around you.
And that's before we added any commute, and preparing for the commute, which can easily eat an additional 1-2 hours of your day, every day.
This is me. I'm not anti-social by any means, and I like people, but constant chatter around me drives me nuts. So I put my headphones on and now I'm unapproachable. It's tough.
This. And on top of that, headphones at office suck, at least for me.
They don't drown out enough even with large, well insulated cups. So you add noise cancelling. Which drowns out more but not everything. In fact it keeps some very annoying stuff around that is suddenly actually audible VS being drowned out without the headphones. And having noise cancelling on for 8 hours straight for days in a row actually creates some significant pain in my ears. The next idea is music to drown out what's left but that just distracts me too.
Remote is the only good way.
In fact, being remote means I have "social interaction budget" for the family again VS it all having been used up during work hours (being an introvert)
Wearing over the ear headphones all day can contribute to cranial pressure, tiring out your jaw muscles and strain your temporomandibular joint.
It can also encourage ear infections and clogging of the eustachian tubes, because covering or plugging your ears slows down the self cleaning process.
At first you won't notice, but after a decade, these problems will slowly creep up on you and fixing them is very expensive, because you're basically slowly deforming your bones.
I personally wouldn't let kids/teenagers use headphones that apply any amount of noticeable pressure.
> The next idea is music to drown out what's left but that just distracts me too.
You could try using white noise, either an app or if you have a Mac or iPhone they have native white noise generation (Accessibility -> Hearing -> Background Sounds iirc)
Maybe I'll have to try something new at some point. Fair. It's been a while.
I just googled this and what I found was this for example:
The Sony WH-1000XM3 is much better at canceling noise above 100Hz than the Bose is. However, because the Bose QC35 II can block out more sub-100Hz noise, it does a better job at killing unwanted car engines and low rumbles.
So sounds like it's just gonna be a different kind of noise that will still come through. So instead of still hearing voices, but much clearer I might hear more of the AC humm. Sounds like a wash unfortunately. And one the company won't pay for ;)
One thing that immediately turned me off when finding the Sonys on Amazon: It says "Alexa". Sorry, immediate and 150% no thank you, see you, bye.
No, just try a pair from Amazon and return if you need to. I can mow the lawn with these on and it's nearly silent. There's a feature to recalibrate for air temp and ambient noise (use this every time you put them on). They are really good.
Yep, ADHD and God know's what else here. Oddly enough, I am too gregarious, and it often gets me in a lot of trouble. So, by being WFH, I am not surrounded by distractions, and I am much more productive.
> Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.
Remote work is an interesting topic in this debate because any change in any direction (more remote work or less remote work) provokes claims that it's the reason for declining happiness.
I've managed remote teams for years, and I lean more toward your interpretation: Over the years I've seen a lot of people turn over in remote roles because they thought remote work was going to be the best thing ever, then they slowly slid into unhappiness in the isolation. (Before you downvote, I'm not claiming this is true for everyone. Remember I work remote too!)
It is Taoist/Buddhist translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) who once said something along the line of; if the Taoists and traditional Buddhists where in charge, we wouldnt have built the world like we have today. It would be angled towards happiness and satisfaction rather than growth of the machine.
Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring.
I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch.
But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater.
There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.
In this case, we might not have an advanced civilization with modern medicine and technology. Herbs for healing, candles for lighting, letters for communication. (Perhaps I wouldn't be alive without modern medicine. I suppose it's not easy to be dead and happy.)
Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.
While they have the right idea about not leaning in to hard on the progress narrative, if it basically became a movement of apathy and non-science, it is basically regressing back to the stone age.
There is a possible middle ground but how we get there is anything but clear.
Buddhism was never intended to be the way you organized societies. It was a monastic tradition where you practiced outside of society with the support of people who had to live in the real world and do the dirty work of progress and civilization.
The goal of Buddhism is not happiness anyway it is the total cessation of suffering. If Buddhists are scoring high on happiness surveys they are doing it wrong.
While I want to agree with you, my critical mind finds flaws in this. The idea of a taoist in charge is an oxymoron: "would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones honored, or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail through the mud".
And the idea of a buddhist doing anything to change the world is also impossible to me, isn't it all about accepting reality as it is?
There is now practically a cliche saying in Zen. When hungry eat, when tired sleep. But in that exact same sense there should be, when something needs to be acted on, do it.
It isn't about total passivity, but trying to not to excessive force a position. If you fall in a river, to be passive is to float with it. But the smart move is to swim to the side. Don't try to swim against the flow but with it.
I am not an expert, but I think 'accepting reality' is not the correct term. It is 'seeing clearly the way things are'. That does not imply passivism, but it will enable more 'skilful action', not clouded by greed, hatred etc..
Looking at long term Buddhist societies I don't really see a difference from the disappointment of long term Christian societies when it comes to expecting the over all outcome to reflect and be overridden by the priorities in the base belief of the original thinker. I think people confuse those who go through the motions to move within a system with the original thinker who is probably incompatible with the system and would be unable to be a leader in it.
It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money.
As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.
Terminological nitpick: equality is a relation, not an operation. What you refer to as a "commutative operation" is more accurately described as a "symmetric relation".
It's not about believing. It's about a lack of alternatives.
There is no real meaningful competition between money systems. Every nation has one national money system and it's a government mandated monopoly.
Your options are basically complete autarky or using the national money system with nothing inbetween. Even if you were to use a cryptocurrency, you'd still need to pay taxes in USD.
Then there is the fact that cryptocurrencies don't really meaningfully change the rules either. You're supposed to accumulate them forever and profit off of latecomers joining in it at inflated prices. Meaning the supposed competition just amplifies the worst part of money that people would rather get away from.
Anyone who earns an income from work is by definition going to be a "latecomer" by the end of their career. Basically, you're defining yourself by the first few years of your career, e.g. buying thousands of dollars worth of BTC in 2013. By 2026, there is not much point buying more BTC.
Money is given an inherent bias towards the past being more important than the present or the future, which thereby inevitably causes the collapse of the future, which then becomes the collapsed present through the simple passage of time.
This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.
I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p
> because they think it will be beneficial
The Capital-class have, on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.
When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic.
It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job.
Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
> You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
They know that, they just don’t want their kids to go to school with the kids in the bottom 4 quintiles. Also, I probably would have foregone kids if it meant I was not going to be financially independent by age 50. Incomes are too volatile, and healthcare too expensive to be in that age 50 to age 65 period where a healthcare issue or loss of employment can derail you forever.
At almost 50, I feel like there has been a cultural shift since I was a kid.
It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority.
If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy.
The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.
I think this was what was the meaning behind the "avocado toast" phenomena. My typical example is that back in the day, you could be the coolest in town +/- 5 grades by jumping off the Big Rock into the river- and that person's 2-3 best friends all shared in the glory. Now, you have to compete with the craziest people in all the world for the same level of admiration.
I think for me the big difference is in airline travel, it's become ubiquitous for vacationing. At the same time everything in N. America has become a cookie cutter suburb or exurb and drab. Houses have also become bigger, as well as cars. It's a big shift in culture that happened.
I want to be clear that I'm not judging anyone, just observing the zeitgeist.
Does just being able to live mean getting a new phone occasionally? Getting a coffee/treat once a week? A job that doesn't leave you in physical pain, sometimes permanently?
Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. Our expectations are very high without sounding unreasonable.
This is the shift I'm talking about– maybe we don't conciously yearn for glamor and wealth, but what we see as normal is a luxury lifestyle compared to previous generations.
> If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy.
Most people in this conversation on HN seem to just be talking about a regular house and a lifestyle that would’ve been normal for a manual laborer 60-70 years ago.
60-70 years ago would have been the 1950s-1960s, the American post-WW2 economic boom. The rest of the world was rebuilding their cities and mourning their dead.
Sure, you can have another post-war economic boom if you're willing to go through another world war to get to it and a drone doesn't get you. You're in luck, seems like we'll be having one soon.
I think it was boomers who demanded McMansions with 3 car garages and new cars every 4 years and drove lifestyle inflation to a point it's no longer sustainable/affordable for the next generation. Millenials are struggling to afford the bare minimum. Housing used to be 3-5x your salary. Now it's 10-15x in some areas. Meanwhile our taxes are sent to Israel to subsidize genocide and we can't even pave roads in the most expensive zip codes (La Jolla). There's something fundamentally broken with our society at the moment.
> Great, have they increased by as much as inflation?
Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful.
It was nice, but that's quickly changing now that the consumer market is being ignored by chip makers who'd rather sell to companies building data centers
Necessary stuff (houses, healthcare, education) have outpaced CPI, and generally it is becoming more expensive.
Unnecessary stuff (electronics, appliances, other tech) did not, and generally it is becoming cheaper (Planned obsolescence is another topic though...)
Unfortunately this is using BLS data that captures largely urban areas and fails to account for a large and quickly growing segment of the workforce that also tend to be lower earners - self-employment (eg uber drivers, doordash, gig working, contractors). This is definitely an over-estimate of real wages, a best case scenario of sorts.
With the backdrop of it coming from the organization that is supposedly supposed to be managing inflation... :P
Wow wages barely rising after 60 years of wage suppression, the wealth is truly trickling down now! Just ignore that the top 1% stole $50 trillion from the bottom 90%:
This is mostly true, but things were almost universally worse in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was a similar feeling of anomie, stagflation, and a sense that the country was on the wrong track. But people still reported themselves as happier than now.
This is something I have observed too. I think one of the ways things have gotten worse is generally people are less social, we're interacting with each other via screens, not in person.
While one could meme about being introverts, I just feel like the writing in older media, movies and other records of the time makes me feel people back then were just more comfortable with each other, more practiced in natural social interaction, and this lack of understanding has not only made modern media less compelling, the fact that we don't understand in general what people are really like has been a detriment to the fabric of society.
It's not what we, or even your mom's generation built (taking some liberties here, assuming your age). Whatever ideals the US stood for have been long gone.
Benjamin Franklin, when asked "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" responded "A republic, if you can keep it”. The answer is clear today.
People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry.
For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.
The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.
I agree with your mom’s sentiment. It’s exactly that. I also feel that generally hope is gone - nobody actually sits there imagining the US becoming what it felt like in the 90s and that’s probably the root of the problem. We all kinda internalize this is the decline.
I agree there’s a lot in the comments here that are right. Yes people are chasing ideals that probably aren’t worth it to chase. Yea money for the sake of money is a bad idea. But the reality also is a lot of what had been built has been actively dismantled. Much of what made the lifestyle of the boomers possible has been being actively taken apart piece by piece since the 80s. We’re now seeing what happens when a society stops trying to improve and instead just rent seeks off of itself for 40 years.
And yet people risk their lives to get to the USA. They vote with their feet. It isn't perfect but declaring "it isn't working", my response "compared to what".
I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.
there is a new general aversion to em dashes, as well as sentences like "and maybe that feeling is worth taking seriously on its own terms, separate from whether the numbers back it up." which sound llm generated.
No issue in using LLMs for polishing writing but when the tone is impacted in this way, I can understand peoples aversion to it. Especially on hackernews, where i guess people speak with LLMs a lot more than other people, and are able to even subconsciosly pick up on these cues.
ohhh i gotchu, that's actually fair feedback, thanks! i didn't realize the em dash thing had become a tell. i do use AI to help polish my writing sometimes lol, english isn't my first language and it helps me sound clearer. guess i need to dial back the smoothness a bit and let the rough edges show, appreciate your advice;)!
The US is not particularly rich. The GPD is way out there, but that doesn't mean anything. It is highly concentrated in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.
And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations.
Dunno, from the WSJ scoop: "CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either."
I don't get it, now I can't use Tidewave or Zed or Agent Shell in Emacs with my Claude Code plan? Why would they do this? It makes my subscription so much less worthwhile.
More than an extension, imagine us having good enough, fast enough, vision models that you never even see a real website. Maybe the whole OS in Microsoft's case if they keep putting more ads in. It will be a level of inefficiency inconceivable but really something.
I'm a big fan of it for building micro websites with LLMs, since it can keep pretty much the entire thing in context (even including the docs) it seems to perform pretty well.
I'd say you identified a difference with modern names. This split has certainly grown wider in the "code is cheap" AI era and changed meaning.
I'm firmly in the camp of actually enjoying programming. To me it was interesting to hear that some people actually don't like it all, and it's much nicer to have something "just do it".
Over my career I've leant much more heavily into programming as the art.
I wouldn't even say "how do you balance" is too much of a problem, as we all can vary between needs, you know?
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