DefinitelyNotAPhone

It's an understandable position to hold for someone who hasn't gotten over the hump of understanding that these issues are structural to capitalism. If you feel that reform is a possibility then UBI makes a lot of sense, because from the ideals that liberal democracies tout it seems like a win-win: workers get money to live off of as automation and outsourcing put them out of work, and capitalists get a more consistent flow of money through the economy to stimulate growth that offsets the cost of UBI itself.

The issue is that capitalists aren't interested in the long-term vision required to build factories that take 30+ years to pay for themselves, they want maximum returns right now and don't care if that tanks the economy in the long term because they'll already be fantastically wealthy and insulated from the effects. They also will not, under any circumstances except having no other option, ever give concessions to the working class, because if people start remembering that's an option they're liable to remember they outnumber the people in charge 1000:1 and might push for more.

That's why the US will not reindustrialize and why UBI will not happen; they'd rather pump-and-dump another AI/real estate/micro financing loans bubble than build anything of real value. When all that matters is the accumulation of wealth society fundamentally breaks.

Because the money for UBI fundamentally has to come from the upper echelon of capitalists, and they don't want it because it both reduces their hoards of capital as well as relieves the structural stress on the working class that keeps them desperate enough to work for dogshit wages in order to continue surviving, and we do not live in a democracy that cares that 95% of the population would be better off for it because those same capitalists own all major forms of information dissemination, lobbying, and campaign funding.

Which just circles back to the core problem of UBI: if you somehow managed to unite enough people willing to buck the current system to get it instituted against the wishes of the ruling class, then you've also reached the threshold to end capitalism outright and bypass the half-step of making the ultra wealthy give back a tiny percentage of their ill-gotten gains in the form of UBI in favor of just building a society where the collective wealth generated by the workers is spread among the workers.

I know they're propagandists and tailoring their complaints to make sure the intended message gets across, but I find it disgusting that these ghouls look at a grocery store and have their first thoughts be "Gee, I sure hope their sales figures look strong and they're extra pliant for some nightmare customer whining that their chicken went bad after sitting on the counter for two days after purchase!" instead of just hoping they feed people in the most efficient way possible.

Extremely critical support to CEOs having AIs give their quarterly earnings only to have it hallucinate its way into becoming a third-world Maoist and calling for the shareholders' executions.

Socialists get one big dumb infrastructure project, as a treat.

‘If you’re wealthy, you did something wrong. You cannot be a billionaire without being a criminal. The system is stacked against the rest of us.’

Yes, congratulations. You understood it- oh, you're saying that in an exasperated way. You don't understand why people feel that way, just that they feel that way, and your response is confusion rather than a moment of self-reflection.

Well, hold that thought while putting on this blindfold please. Yes yes, stand against the wall, just like that.

HR gets the wall.

As someone with experience working in tech, the biggest hurdle to getting a job isn't proving that I know how to do my job to other engineers interviewing me but getting to the point where I can talk to them because the initial filter is HR drones who know exactly nothing about the job or work who are picking resumes completely off of a combination of A) what college they have a degree from, with a heavy emphasis on Ivy Leagues (most of which don't even have particularly noteworthy CS departments anyway), and B) how many arbitrary buzzwords-of-the-week that resume has plastered on it. All of this is usually getting initially filtered by "AI", ie shitty algorithms that have even more arbitrary buzzwords as their main criteria.

Every time I've ever gone job searching I've had to shotgun my resume out to dozens if not hundreds of postings. Again, I have plenty of experience in the industry, in a quasi-niche field that every company in the industry needs, and it doesn't matter because these dipshits can't learn to distinguish decent candidates, can't write postings that match the actual job expectations, and/or post literally fake job postings because their manager told them the company wants to look more successful than it actually is. I've dealt with them as a candidate, I've dealt with them as an interviewer on the inside, and I don't exaggerate when I say that I could step into their role and do it better than them with minimal effort.

Quick edit: Also, every job I've ever gotten had higher (sometimes significantly higher) YOE requirements than I could offer, and never once was that an issue, because YOE translates to someone in HR asking the hiring manager how many years someone should have experience working in this field, getting an answer, and then doubling it "to find the best candidates."

I'm making the assumption this is in response to stuff seen on social media: don't put any stock into social media trends, they're not real. The constant need to go viral and be relevant pushes people to come up with total bullshit and pretend like it's the hottest new thing despite all of ten people in existence being aware of it, and social media makes it easy to fall into echo chambers that reverberate that until it seems like a cultural hegemony.

Rubicon is just an inherently GOATed word in general. It punches you in the mouth on its way out, and you thank it for it.

In my experience, LLMs can often pump out perfectly fine starting code for very basic problems. If you're coding up some tiny blog it'll probably be good enough that someone with some coding experience can unfuck the places where it screwed up.

That's not what professional software engineering is about though. You want a codebase built in a coherent, consistent, repeatable way that can be independently worked on by dozens of people often at the same time, and LLMs cannot do that in any real capacity. It might serve as a decent tool for spinning up quick proof-of-concepts (I've poked it to figure out a new framework before, mostly due to terrible documentation making it difficult to figure out how to use specific features) but none of it was production-worthy and never would be.

Furthermore, if you're using it to figure out entire languages/frameworks for you, you're quickly finding yourself in a position where you don't see where it's fucking up, which is going to hit you down the line when you're playing whack-a-mole with a bug or severe performance issue in a giant codebase.

My favorite part is that thanks to China's rail network it's entirely reasonable and even expected for someone to take on a job working away from home, because they can just supercommute via bullet train and come home on the weekends to see their families.

I wrote a full blurb about this on another post a while back that I'm too lazy to go find right now, but it bears repeating that one of the major brainworms in western chauvinists is this idea that authoritarianism is real and that somehow one or a few people can impose their will on everyone else in a society with no buy-in from anyone lower on the ladder. This magical thinking that if we just got rid of Kim Jong Un or Putin then everything in those countries would simply revert to the vacuum state of liberal democracy is built into their worldview and has to be beaten out of it to make them realize that individual persons don't control the flow of history, systems do.