They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.

Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initially

Your new point is excellent btw. I should have considered that.

I also hope it doesn't sound like I don't care for these developers who are being taken advantage of. They should be compensated fairly for their work.

EDIT I should add why I think it is a great point especially since I make recruiting software. The greatest increases in salary for most people is done by switching companies or jobs. If you don't want to leave the company because you really like what you do it would skew it so that salaries are lower.

sounds very much like open source maintainers too

You're not wrong, but it's also so sad.

FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.

Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.

It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.

So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.

It's just a natural progression. When the company is a startup working on a new exciting tech it's chasing the dream and changing the world. When it's a behemoth employing 200k people, it's impossible for all of them to be chasing the dream. Probably like 90% of them would be doing extremely boring "keeping the lights on" tasks and ensuring this gargantuan machine does not go to pieces under it's own weight. It still can pay incredibly well, but it won't be exciting frontier work anymore. It just can't be, 200k people company can't move with the agility of 200 people company.

Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers

Its not like the CEOs unilaterally said "we want to suck now". It's the cumulative effect of many people optimizing for the promotion process within the company and then coaching their mentees to do the same.

I was going to post a more extended rant but really yeah, this says it all

> The overlapping AGI definition I use here is "Most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans".

That's a poor definition. Nowhere have I seen cheapness as being a requirement to count as AGI. If we have something that can do everything people can do and more, but it costs a lot means it's not AGI?

Author here, I drew on this from AI 2027. Yes, a very-expensive AGI, e.g. $1 million / day to simulate a smart human, would be a huge deal. But it would have meaningfully different effects than a cheap one.

Here's one definition AI 2027 used [1]: "Superhuman coder (SC): An AI system for which the company could run with 5% of their compute budget 30x as many agents as they have human research engineers..."

[1] https://ai-2027.com/research/timelines-forecast

I've got no problem with your concept, and even think it's useful. I just don't think that concept and AGI are the same thing. Economically useful has no relation to what has been called AGI before.

I take it as a sign of how close it is (or how close people think it is). When AGI was SFnal magic, merely having it at all is a fascinating concept. Now that (people think) it's on the horizon, there are more practical concerns, like the fact that running these things might cost a substantial amount of money.

If it's merely human equivalent but somehow costs a lot more than actual humans, then it's actually pretty marginal until the cost comes down. There are a lot of humans.

So you could technically have AGI without entering a true AGI era. "95% as good as an average Harvard graduate across the board, but it costs $5 million/year to run" is impressive and scientifically interesting, but not economically transformative.

But if it costs $50,000/year to run, then everything changes really fast. And not necessarily in a good way.

Plenty of C-level executives have salaries around that number. Replacing them with AGI would be cost-effective. Cost is contingent, shouldn't be part of the AGI definition.

You could replace them with a potato and get similar economic outcomes for their companies.

They get this much money not because their work is worth this much. It's just how the system is set up.

AGI couldn't be CEO BECASUE it can't receive millions of dollars in compensation the same way potato can't. Getting this much money is what the CEO does. Apart from that they do very little when summed up.

Well, let's look at someone like Einstein. Just for argument's sake let's say he has a flat salary demand of $5 million dollars. It's not cost effective to hire Einstein to write your CRUD apps in this situation. That doesn't mean there isn't somewhere that he would have a value of $5 million.

No insult to the Harvard grads I know. But the median grad isn't Einstein, and they won't magically earn back $5 million/year. They're not that special, on average.

Now, if you have an AGI that can reliably and repeatedly do Einstein-level science, then I'd argue that we're starting to talk about ASI, aka, "superintelligence." Which would be providing something that humans can't consistently produce at any cost. So cost becomes much less relevant.

But if the best you can do is replace an ordinary smart human for $5 million/year, you have to compete with ordinary smart humans. Who are abundant and who very rarely cost more than $500,000/year, if you're willing to shop around and gamble a bit.

It's also a very lame definition. Intelligence - and humans - are more than just labor.

(You'll forgive me for conflating humanity and intelligence - we are homo spaiens, after all. Thinking man.)

I'm not _confused_ why these "AI" "Labs" are using that definition though. It's extremely clear they're trying to eliminate the need for the non-owner class. They're not selling LLMs (some companies are, but not these companies). These companies are selling the idea of labor without laborers to people who hate and fear laborers - and their utter dependence on them - more than anything else in their lives.

Really looking forward to the scam collapsing. Crypto wasn't very satisfying to me because too many of the victims were just idiots. This time, it's class warfare.

If it's not cheaper, it won't be automated. So saying that it's gonna get massively automated already includes assumption that it's gonna be cheaper. No harm in mentioning it again.

They are better and keep getting better and cheaper. Iteratively rather than one giant leap, but undeniable.

Eh, at the beginning of 1995 the Nasdaq PE ratio was about 17.5. The current Nasdaq PE bounces around 33. During the dotcom bubble that would be the early 1998 timeframe.

All of the authors age at a rate of 1 year per year

That's mostly due to homogenization, a process that spreads the fat evenly through the milk and keeps it from resettling.

It's also my understanding that whole milk isn't necessarily just "pasteurize and pass along"; it really means "3.25% fat".

All the milk has its fat separated out and re-added at specific percents, and the 3.25% for whole milk is just what whoever standardized this thought about typical for whole milk. An individual cow might have a mix that's a little more or less.

If you look around you can occasionally find higher fat milks; I've seen as high as 5% (without getting into half-and-half or heavy cream). You could probably just splash a little heavy cream in yourself if you aren't satisfied with the thickness of whole milk.

99.9% vs about 20%. Pretty weak argument.

I'm in one of the many states where my vote doesn't matter. Deep red. Doesn't make me a supporter

Good how?

The difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.