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I believe the AI-refusers regrettably have a lot invested in the status quo, which they think, with grievous mistakenness, equates to job security. They all tell themselves that the AI has yet to prove that it’s better than they are at performing X, Y, or Z, and therefore, it’s not ready yet.

But from where I’m sitting, they’re the ones who aren’t ready. I lay this all out in detail, my friends, so you can help yourselves.

Regardless of why the luddites aren’t adopting it, they have lost. Junior devs have the high ground, and the battle is now over. Not only are junior devs on average adopting AI faster, but junior devs are also – surprise! – cheaper. If companies are going to make cuts to pay for their devs to win with tokens, which devs do you think they’re gonna keep?

I’m concerned that the definition is already escaping its original intent. I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible  AI-assisted programming.

Vibe coding is not the same thing as writing code with the help of LLMs!

Using Kagi feels a lot like using Google a decade ago, and I mean that in a good way. You type in a search, and it returns a page full of links. It has image search, video search, maps, news, and even a podcast-specific tab I’ve found very useful. Search for something topical, and you’ll get a few links followed by a side-scrolling carousel of news stories. Search for a person, and Kagi virtually always starts with a short excerpt of their Wikipedia page.

We are not making dumb tools here – we are training synthetic minds. These synthetic minds have economic value which grows in proportion to their intelligence. The ‘reward system’ of the world is flowing resources into the building of smarter synthetic minds. As we make these things smarter, they will more and more display a propensity to think about themselves as distinct from us.

**Really powerful AI could wreck society by making governments too powerful:
**_…The problem with AGI is that it could make governments way better, which destroys freedom…
_Researchers with Texas A&M University and the Foundation for American Innovation have considered how powerful AI systems could alter the balance of power between citizens and government. Their takeaway isn’t very reassuring – powerful AI systems are highly likely to either a) create a “‘despotic Leviathan’ through enhanced state surveillance and control”, or foster an “‘absent Leviathan’ through the erosion of state legitimacy relative to AGI-empowered non-state actors”.

I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.

Software is eating the world, but AI is eating software. The industry has so far witnessed a monotonically increasing demand for software–as abstractive layer after layer enabled more software to be created more easily, it seems not to have lessened the demand for applications or the workers that produce them. But that software over the years was not writing itself… The technological advancement of recent AI feels like a difference in kind, not just degree.

How do things look when AIs themselves run or mostly run companies? The most glaring downside would be the displacement of millions of human workers. Robbed of their livelihoods, where would these folks get the funds to buy the widgets being churned out by robots? The middle class would evaporate, leaving extreme inequality, with the few monstrously rich wielding armies of AIs, and the rest competing for the remaining physical jobs.

Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves. Just as the control of fire came about because of our mindful intentions, so did the cow and corn arise from our minds. Those are inventions as clear as the plow and the knife. And just as domesticated animals were inventions, as we self-domesticated, we self-invented ourselves, too. We are self-invented humans.

While hiring rates remained steady for those who earned less than $55,000 annually, it reached new lows for those who make over $96,000 according to a 2024 report from Vanguard. In 2023, hiring for middle- and top-third earning employees dwindled so much that the latter group reached the lowest level of hiring since 2014.

“While we don’t believe that there will be a massive upswing in demand for mid-level professional talent in the near future, we do believe there will be a steady stream of turnover and new additions driven by prolonged postponements and pent-up growth initiatives slowly being implemented,” adds DiStefano.

In the meantime, he suggests that middle-aged adults in the white-collar workforce stay fresh by networking, always having a contingency plan, and being up-to-date on their skills. The demand in this current market is for experts, not generalists, he adds.

Rust is a fast, reliable, and memory-efficient programming language. It's been voted the most loved programming language six years in a row (survey). Created by Mozilla, it's now used at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for systems infrastructure, encryption, virtualization, and more low-level programming.

Today, our online accounts accumulate small stones, facets of our connected lives. In our lifetimes, we will see an ever-increasing number of online accounts representing the dead, each cairn frozen in time. One day, our own profiles will become a part of that landscape.