I am a tech worker. This November 2026, I am going on strike. I want you to join me. This is a 100% human written wall of text. No AI tokens were spent writing/researching this. I will be on strike for the entire second third week of November. I invite you to choose your own days that you wish to strike and coordinate with your colleagues.
What am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).
What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?
It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.
The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.
We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.
And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.
Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.
Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.
And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.
The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.
I've had enough.
Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.
I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in...
Nope, he is free to do whatever. I am just telling the truth and looking at where the money (potentially the salaries of tens of thousands of workers) is going. [0]
Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending [0]
Google, Meta and Microsoft boost AI spending forecasts [1]
Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce [2]
I am telling you that these companies don't care about human (tech) workers striking, since they are too busy spending that money on data centers for AI agents.
So you honestly think one of the largest and most powerful AI-enabled corporations on planet earth is being stopped from firing these people because of a technicality or two on the books? Why hasn't it happened already?
> What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
I'm not one to deny that current AI models can take you quite far along. But you know they can't replace all of us with LLMs yet. Strikes work if enough of us do it, that's why I made this post. And if you believe LLMs will eventually be able to indeed replace millions of engineers, then it's better that we strike now rather than in the future.
But honestly, I have no beef with AI technology specifically or people using it. This is all about being ethical, distributing the fruits of work equally.
> And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
No I don't want to. The fact you wrote this yourself doesn't matter. No one works Nov to Jan anyway so the impact is nothing. Ranting about us vs them is completely unpersuasive simplifying drivel.
Your list of demands means nothing to me. Social media addiction is fake. RTO is good. My manager doesn't even talk to me let alone micro manage me. Slop is 2024 criticism you need to update your insults.
There is no we. I don't share your goals or outlook and you make no effort to persuade.
Although I generally agree with this, we software developers are rapidly losing our power to make such demands, thanks to AI. But I wish you all the best.
>>And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. ... So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever. ... Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. ... then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
And organizing a strike may help. But even assuming the best case, your idea spreads like wildfire and 80% of all tech workers touch no keyboards starting mid-November, the likely result is management makes a few changes and lies they are far larger and more permanent than they are in reality, and back to extraction-mining the rest of humanity for private profit.
Perhaps the very best thing would be for tech workers to self-organize to create an EFFECTIVE alternative to the extractive social media currently plaguing society. A new way for people to stay in touch that is easier to use and migrate to than Xitter/BlueSky/Farcebook/etc. (and no, Mastadon ain't it; wish it were, but...). When I try to get people off those sites, they object to not having an as-easy way to stay in touch with people they connect with. Hitting them at the root of their interests —profits— is what will hurt them, and free us.
I understand the frustration. I've been in this industry for over a quarter century myself. The proliferation of advanced computing in the palm of your hand with a fancy touchscreen slapped onto it in 2007 seemed like Star Trek magic at the time, but it quickly turned into dystopian tracking before anyone knew it. Now that compute was out of the realm of the enthusiast with the general public okay with locked down devices; with have access to your own hardware now called "jailbreaking," things quickly spiraled to a technocratic state we're moving towards.
LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.
I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.
I'll be straight up. I have been responsible for performance conversations and hiring decisions, and I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
Been hearing that for 3+ years now. All the people going "once everything goes to shit they're going to hire me to clean up the AI mess" are still waiting. Meanwhile models get better with every new release.
You've put words in my mouth. In no part of my post have I claimed that we all need to be no-AI coders, or even that I am one.
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
If your measure of a 10x engineer was in (thousands of) cranked-LOCs/day, then for sure, AI has taken their "performance" to the moon.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
I don't think this line of reasoning is very reasonable anymore. LLMs are getting good not only at producing high quality output but even preemptively dealing with architecture and other 'big picture' type designs. And this has been true for quite some time, certainly at least since the Fable gen of LLMs.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
The quantity over quality argument has substantially broken down in the last 6 months especially. SOTA models outperform the vast majority of engineers at engineering tasks, let alone everything else they're also exceptional at, including system design, incident recovery, DevOps, etc.
This is because these models act as a productivity enhancer for engineers. A 1x engineer becomes 5x. A 10x becomes 50x. And so on.
Slop is a risk that can be mitigated through team policy, skills and other mechanisms. Nothing we produce is slop, in fact incidents are down dramatically. It's more stable than ever.
Nobody is measuring LOCs. They're up, but that's barely relevant to me. I'd rather measure defect rate, rollback rate, sprint velocity, roadmap adherence etc. Those measure actual progress.
I don't use LOCs as a reason to manage people out. But if they're vehemently refusing to even try AI, other metrics will make it obvious that they're falling behind.
> I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
Reddit is not crazy because of moderators. It’s crazy because it attracted the wrong crowd and gave them all the exposure they can dream of. Have you checked r/popular? It is filled with memes, celeb gossips, aitah posts, random web links about trump, twitter screenshots about Reddit posts.
R/popular used to be an interesting place to discover new forums. But now it’s just a handful of subReddits showing up again and again - Reddit is just a pigpen, with the same mud slinging by the same pigs.
The recent login-required (to use old-reddit) is stupid [0].
For now, just use this tip: `www.reddit.com/r/RedditYouWant+RandomCharactersHere`
and then your UI will be similar when browsing. Be sure to replace "RandomCharactersHere" with something obscure, or else /r/RedditYouWant will overflow with undesired content.
Have fun with that. But … I’m not in a position to have such a luxury. I got a family to feed and bills to pay. Idealism died when I got a mortgage and got married.
With no context on who you are, where you live, what this strike is - what the fuck am I suppose to do with this tell HN post? Do you ignorant bastards just assume everyone is from the same 4th world shithole place from where you are?
If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world.
The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.
I respect your frustrations and can relate to most. But strikes only mean something when they are organised. The best way to organise is through worker unions. If enough employees in a given company join forces, they can achieve a lot.
But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
It was the only industry where a person with a high school education could self-educate based on passion alone and relatively reliably be pulling down a six figure salary in just a few years.
Unfortunately, we're finding out that that phenomenon was a fluke and, well, "easy come, easy go". The market is going to continue to tighten up over the next few years and I think the gravy train is pulling into the station.
When I was younger I too eschewed the idea of unionization. Why would I want to slow down my own career progression for the protection of the elder engineers? Of course now I'm the elder engineer and at the same time AI is taking the fun part of my job. I would surely support unionization now, but again it would be entirely self-serving.
I suspect instead I'll just keep my nose to the grindstone for another year or two until waking up everyday and trying to sweet-talk an LLM into doing what I want becomes unbearable and I decide to move to the Appalachians and open up a campground.
> But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
As a software engineer myself, I agree it's painful. So many supposedly-smart people have been so unthoughtful about their own positions and so easily deceived by propaganda (e.g. libertarianism). Now we're all in a much weaker position due to our collective lack of preparation.
And it's not like this was rocket science. You could see it coming from a mile away. Industrial offshoring that lead huge economic disruptions for manufacturing workers (made painfully obvious by Trump's election). Similar offshoring increasingly affecting the technology industry. Then generative AI popped in 2022, and you still have all kinds of software engineers parroting their bosses' talking points.
I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business.
What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting.
You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization.
The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
even with unionization I am feeling this will not stop things, as it did not for all the unionized workers on the letterpress side of things displaced by DTP programs way back when.
If there is a legal way to lower employment costs (via outsourcing, AI usage, ...) eventually it will happen, as the market will reward companies that will take the option. I know this is not the current meta, but without regulation, things will keep moving in the same direction; unionizing might help in the short term for better buyouts etc. (of course) but if a transformative technology comes out that significantly changes the amount of labor you need to achieve the same result (and it does feel AI is one of those), eventually that technology will permeate the market.
Technology, including LLMs is a tool, without agency of its own, as such it's netheir intrinsically good or bad. What defines that is the entity with agency, despite what labs would have you think this is still employees, corpos and governments.
Imagine for a moment star trek like society where one needs not toil for corpos to have their basic needs met. In such a scenario is better LLM good or bad? Would you fight to go back to cubicle then?
I posit we should not scrutinize technological progress itself or try to resist it's adoption, but rather look at people who shape the policies around it and how our society is structured, which is politicians and to larger extent us who live in democracies around election time.
In fact, I believe we should accelerate AI adoption in order to emphasise the impacts of the disruption and shortcomings of current societal structures and norms thus shortening the Unstable Era ushering a new AI driven heaven on earth...
... or we all just get marched into the recycling vats, it's a coin toss at this point I guess...
59 comments
[ 525 ms ] story [ 568 ms ] threadWhat am I going on strike for? I've just had enough of a lot of different factors which have, over the last decade or so, completely eroded all humanity and "good" from tech. This is not just about AI. AI is a symptom, not a cause. The cause goes way back. It started with being hostile to the users of software, then to non-users by alienating them from society, and now to those who build software (regardless of whether you write code or not).
What was the point of software? What was the point of building industry, companies, and jobs around software?
It was to empower people. And it HAS empowered people. Software is likely one of the most accessible and cheapest form of relatively advanced technology made available to such a large number of people. What you can do with software today, specially connected to the internet, is pure magic made cheaply accessible to a majority of the world's population. Search, navigation, live communication, live streaming, e-commerce, fintech, health advice are all magic.
The resources you need to build this magic and to use this magic is not very dissimilar. The machine used to develop software is basically the same machine used to utilize that software. This is an engineer's dream.
We envisioned a utopia which would lead to everyone having equal access to information, communication, market access, and general prosperity. I want to emphasize that this is not specific to those who write code. Anyone who could understand the concept of what software can do and had good intentions at heart was part of this.
And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. Build insane profits on that near-zero initial cost.
Then they realized you need to maintain software, specially if you didn't do it well the first time to rush to market (out of greed, to crush any competition). The costs started to rise up. There was still plenty of profit, just not enough to satisfy their greed. So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever.
Advertising essentially took over software. Nearly all software now was being built in the service of getting attention to advertisements in one way or another.
Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. And they did, successfully. And made even more insane amounts of money in the process.
And then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
During all this, the general public has lost control of their lives. They need a locked down always online machine tracking their location, health etc. to access their own money, messages, pictures, etc.
The workers building this are forced to rent expensive small apartments near their office, and/or commute regularly, to then video call with other workers, diminishing the utility of the very software they have built, to then further diminish the utility of other software. In a game of pure madness designed to steal everything from the poor and give it to the powerful.
I've had enough.
Fuck their greed. Fuck their pathological necessity to control us.
I'm going on strike. My specific demands from strike may be different from yours depending on your location, your habits, your company, your specific role, etc. But our goals are the same. We want humanity back in software. We want goodness back in...
These companies don't care and are too busy building homes (data centers) for agents.
What they are telling you is that you have no leverage against them since they will just replace you with 1 person with 100+ agents.
> So please, join me in my strike for one week of your choice in November 2026.
You are free to leave your job and play GTA 6.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending [0]
Google, Meta and Microsoft boost AI spending forecasts [1]
Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce [2]
I am telling you that these companies don't care about human (tech) workers striking, since they are too busy spending that money on data centers for AI agents.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-giants-double-down-on-their...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/b934037d-7fc6-4f93-acdf-a3ec75f45...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524
I'm not one to deny that current AI models can take you quite far along. But you know they can't replace all of us with LLMs yet. Strikes work if enough of us do it, that's why I made this post. And if you believe LLMs will eventually be able to indeed replace millions of engineers, then it's better that we strike now rather than in the future.
But honestly, I have no beef with AI technology specifically or people using it. This is all about being ethical, distributing the fruits of work equally.
It looks like you are talking about enshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/. There are strong NGOs fighting for the user rights like https://eff.org and https://edri.org.
My man that is called PTO.
Your list of demands means nothing to me. Social media addiction is fake. RTO is good. My manager doesn't even talk to me let alone micro manage me. Slop is 2024 criticism you need to update your insults.
There is no we. I don't share your goals or outlook and you make no effort to persuade.
I'm curious how you think general prosperity can be achieved by the things you mention. Like, lay it out.
>>And then came the greedy grifters. They invested money not just to get returns (they could've gotten returns on any other established field of business), but to gamble for a chance of crazy high returns. They thought software has near-zero marginal cost. They started building walled gardens, to extract rent from users. ... So the advertisement business grew, and with it came the largest assault on the privacy of the general public ever. ... Then they realized they could use this game politics itself. ... then they realized they don't want to pay the workers anymore who support the software. So they turned against the workers.
And organizing a strike may help. But even assuming the best case, your idea spreads like wildfire and 80% of all tech workers touch no keyboards starting mid-November, the likely result is management makes a few changes and lies they are far larger and more permanent than they are in reality, and back to extraction-mining the rest of humanity for private profit.
Perhaps the very best thing would be for tech workers to self-organize to create an EFFECTIVE alternative to the extractive social media currently plaguing society. A new way for people to stay in touch that is easier to use and migrate to than Xitter/BlueSky/Farcebook/etc. (and no, Mastadon ain't it; wish it were, but...). When I try to get people off those sites, they object to not having an as-easy way to stay in touch with people they connect with. Hitting them at the root of their interests —profits— is what will hurt them, and free us.
LLMs should actually be the level to oppose such things allowing for rapid reverse engineering of closed systems and custom bespoke software, but it's all dependent on "cloud" architecture, and OpenAI/Anthropic could ban you at any time for any reason. Independent models like Kimi 3 and GLM-5 should hedge that situation, but compute hardware required to run such models (e.g. 4x DGX units) use to sell for <$20k, but have now been pushed to nearly $40k. Enthusiasts can no long affordably buy the hardware that was so prevalent that made the modern compute era possible.
I feel your frustration with your "strike" which is an unplanned vacation. It's won't amount to much and hopefully you won't lose your job. Organizing anything at scale will be impossible, because every large at-scale protest you see is organized by the state or massive private interests. They're all psychological operations, yes even the famous 9 minute clip. When you really dig into all of it, the vast majority of people in this world are in the global control net of the new technocratic religion, and they believe everything they see from a major news site on social media, Google or the TV screen.
The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
This is because these models act as a productivity enhancer for engineers. A 1x engineer becomes 5x. A 10x becomes 50x. And so on.
Slop is a risk that can be mitigated through team policy, skills and other mechanisms. Nothing we produce is slop, in fact incidents are down dramatically. It's more stable than ever.
Nobody is measuring LOCs. They're up, but that's barely relevant to me. I'd rather measure defect rate, rollback rate, sprint velocity, roadmap adherence etc. Those measure actual progress.
I don't use LOCs as a reason to manage people out. But if they're vehemently refusing to even try AI, other metrics will make it obvious that they're falling behind.
Kindly enumerate the metrics.
"All metrics is up" is a message The Communist Party approves wholeheartedly. 5 year plan delivered in 1 year, give this comrade a medal! anyone?
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
Tech scene can’t even muster enough collective consensus to slow a „this is potentially dangerous“ scenario let alone a vague eroding of humanity.
Still I’m all for people’s right to strike for whatever reason they like
Where is everyone going next?
The interface is also worse. I preferred old.reddit.com. Hackernews has this weird "you post too much" limitation, which is so annoying.
Reddit meanwhile killed old.reddit.com anyway; logging in defeats the point of using reddit. Things always get worse - and never seem to get better.
R/popular used to be an interesting place to discover new forums. But now it’s just a handful of subReddits showing up again and again - Reddit is just a pigpen, with the same mud slinging by the same pigs.
The recent login-required (to use old-reddit) is stupid [0].
For now, just use this tip: `www.reddit.com/r/RedditYouWant+RandomCharactersHere`
and then your UI will be similar when browsing. Be sure to replace "RandomCharactersHere" with something obscure, or else /r/RedditYouWant will overflow with undesired content.
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+fuckUspez123>
e.g: <http://www.reddit.com/r/PCMasterrace+PCBuild> (does not require login, yet)
[0] I go back to the SA>Digg>Reddit transitions, with my oldest (abandoned) /r/account [1] dating to 2007. #Return2RSS
[1] Hey /r/Admin(s): yeah, it's me, Rita... howdy you fatcat bayarea phucks
If you can add some inkling of details, I might empathise with what you are doing, heck even support you. But if you want to be a twat about it, then I wish you all the suffering in the world.
The other commenter is right, this place is infested with Reddit retards.
But here, I’m not optimistic - I’ve never seen another industry where workers have so little class consciousness. Tech workers think they’re very special and they’re so self important, it’s painful. It would be a huge job to get them together to fight for their common interests.
It was the only industry where a person with a high school education could self-educate based on passion alone and relatively reliably be pulling down a six figure salary in just a few years.
Unfortunately, we're finding out that that phenomenon was a fluke and, well, "easy come, easy go". The market is going to continue to tighten up over the next few years and I think the gravy train is pulling into the station.
When I was younger I too eschewed the idea of unionization. Why would I want to slow down my own career progression for the protection of the elder engineers? Of course now I'm the elder engineer and at the same time AI is taking the fun part of my job. I would surely support unionization now, but again it would be entirely self-serving.
I suspect instead I'll just keep my nose to the grindstone for another year or two until waking up everyday and trying to sweet-talk an LLM into doing what I want becomes unbearable and I decide to move to the Appalachians and open up a campground.
As a software engineer myself, I agree it's painful. So many supposedly-smart people have been so unthoughtful about their own positions and so easily deceived by propaganda (e.g. libertarianism). Now we're all in a much weaker position due to our collective lack of preparation.
And it's not like this was rocket science. You could see it coming from a mile away. Industrial offshoring that lead huge economic disruptions for manufacturing workers (made painfully obvious by Trump's election). Similar offshoring increasingly affecting the technology industry. Then generative AI popped in 2022, and you still have all kinds of software engineers parroting their bosses' talking points.
I understand your frustrations, but you can't strike without a union. The power of a strike is all (or most) of the workers stop working at once in a coordinated manner, causing severe impact on the business.
What you're planning and asking people to do (small number of random people here and there temporarily stopping work) is just ineffectual venting.
You need to put your efforts into unionization. You're not going to accomplish anything by yourself without organization.
The best time to start a union is 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
src: former IBEW 520
If there is a legal way to lower employment costs (via outsourcing, AI usage, ...) eventually it will happen, as the market will reward companies that will take the option. I know this is not the current meta, but without regulation, things will keep moving in the same direction; unionizing might help in the short term for better buyouts etc. (of course) but if a transformative technology comes out that significantly changes the amount of labor you need to achieve the same result (and it does feel AI is one of those), eventually that technology will permeate the market.
Share with your friends.
> start alternative better businesses or work for them
> encourage work reforms in society like remote work / 4 day work weeks
> write in
I’ve been saying we need a general strike for a long time and I’m hoping it will happen
https://generalstrikeus.com/
Imagine for a moment star trek like society where one needs not toil for corpos to have their basic needs met. In such a scenario is better LLM good or bad? Would you fight to go back to cubicle then?
I posit we should not scrutinize technological progress itself or try to resist it's adoption, but rather look at people who shape the policies around it and how our society is structured, which is politicians and to larger extent us who live in democracies around election time.
In fact, I believe we should accelerate AI adoption in order to emphasise the impacts of the disruption and shortcomings of current societal structures and norms thus shortening the Unstable Era ushering a new AI driven heaven on earth...
... or we all just get marched into the recycling vats, it's a coin toss at this point I guess...