I think it's important to realize how divided the U.S. is right now. Half the country is in favor of what ICE is doing in some form or another. Some people on the right are denouncing the _way_ ICE is accomplishing this. But they are far from outraged.
The other half of the country is as dumbfounded/shocked as the rest of the world.
This isn't like the French revolution where a majority of the country was suffering and rose up against the few.
This is very nearly 50% of the country wants to make the other 50% squirm.
It cannot be understated the role that Fox News has played to get us to this level of division.
The channel "The Necessary Conversation" has some good examples of just how radicalized some American's have gotten. It's 2 kids interviewing their MAGA parents. I think it's not uncommon for American's to know people like the parents in this video.
I know what you mean about the country being split politically, but I think using the 50% number is a misleading illusion. Only 31.8% of the voting-age population voted for Trump, so 68% did not vote for these policies.
I get that we often assume that the non-voting population is as evenly split in their support as those who voted during the election. But I think that is going to be wildly off the mark as well. Why? current presidential approval ratings are net -15%, and 2025 elections showed avg 15% swing in district that he won in 2024. His biggest support %s are from old people, and lowest among young voters.
My prediction is that we will see political ads playing non-stop showing ICE brutalizing main street America, and showing how tariff driven inflation is destroying paychecks. The mid-terms will be a dramatic correction which is why you are seeing the ground work to call everything illegitimate or rigged, and attack our established means of voting.
As someone who was waving a "fuck ice" flag on a street corner in rural Colorado yesterday as part of our weekly protest of their facility, anecdotally I'd say about 60% of the 100 or so cars I watched looked away, with about 30% showing some active support and the other 10% or so showing active opposition.
I don't think that folks are braodly supportive of ICE here, though I think that a) the folks who do support it are loud and b) most of the folks who don't support it have fairly reformist politics and are opposed, for instance, to us protesting while open-carrying.
For the record, I am highly worried that open-carrying by the counter-ICE folks at these events will be the next escalation- I carry a stop-the-bleed kit (and did some formal training). We are more worried about getting shot by counter protestors at this point.
> It cannot be understated the role that Fox News has played to get us to this level of division.
Yeah, it's been a sharp shift, as someone who've watched/read Fox News (and other news of course) for decades out of the US. Fox News always been a bit strange with it's vitriol, but at one point, I can't remember if it was around the middle of Obama's second term, or later, but it took a really sharp turn further into emotional reporting and partisanship. Again, Fox always been a bit special, and other news channels also did similar turns further into their sides, but I can remember seeing the change as it was happening.
There is another documentary I quite liked in similar vein but on an individual level, called "Dear Kelly", that follows a far-right conspiracy theorist and tries to give some understanding into Kelly's struggles and radicalization. Released independently and can be found here: https://www.dearkellyfilm.com/
The fact that ragebait is the most effective way to drive engagement (and therefore to make money off of a captive audience) feels like the first falling domino that sunk us into our current predicament. Certainly the Murdoch empire made its fortune that way.
Why does it even matter if it is a stochastic parrot? And whose to say that humans aren't also?
Imagine the empire state building was just completed, and you had a man yelling at the construction workers: "PFFT that's just a bunch of steel and bricks"
About a year ago, another commenter said this in response to the question "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?":
> "I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time."
Even a year ago that seemed like a ridiculous thing to say. LLM's have made one thing very clear to me: A massive percentage of developers derive their sense of self worth from how smart coding makes them feel.
Yes. If one thing is universal among people is that they can’t fully accept reality at face value if that reality is violating their identity.
What has to happen first is that people need to rebuild their identity before they can accept what is happening and that rebuilding process will take longer then the rate at which AI is outrunning all of us.
What is my role in tech if for the past 20 years I was a code ninja but now AI can do better than me? I can become a delegator or manager to AI, a prompt wizard or some leadership role… but even this is a target for replacement by AI.
AI doesn't need or care about "high quality" code in the same ways we define it. It needs to understand the system so that it can evolve it to meet evolving requirements. It's not bound by tech debt in the same way humans are.
That being said, what will be critical is understanding business needs and being able to articulate them in a manner that computers (not humans) can translate into software.
There aare probably 2 ways to see te future of LLMs / AI: they are either going to have the capabilities to replace all white collar work, or they are not.
If you think they are going to replace us, then yo ucan either surrender or fight back, and personally I read all these anti-AI posts as fighting back, to help people realize we might be digging our own grave.
If, OTOH, you see AI as a force-multiplier tool that's never going to completely replace a human developer then yes, probably the smartest thing to do is to learn how to master this new tool, but at the same time keep in mind the side effects it might bring, like atrophy.
My personal goal has been to dig that grave ever since I could hold a shovel.
We've always been in the business of replacing humans in the 3-D's space (dirty, dangerous, dull... And to be clear. data manipulation for its own sake is dull). If we make AI that replaces 90% of what I do at my desk every day... We did it. We realized the dream from the old Tom Swift novels where he comes up with an idea for an invention and hands the idea off to his computer to extrapolate it, or the ship's computer in Star Trek acting like a perfect engineering and analytical assistant to take fuzzy asks from humans and turn them into useful output.
The problem is that this time, we're creating a competing intelligence that in theory could replace all work, AND, that competing intelligence is ultimately owned/controlled by a few dozen very rich guys.
Respectfully, I think you should do more research.
The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.
The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.
In an interview earlier this week [1], with one of the new Editors-in-Chief states that before retracting he tried contacting Gary Williams and send him 3 emails to which Gary never replied.
[2] Ik heb Gary Williams, de enige van de drie auteurs die nog leeft, drie e-mails gestuurd. Daar heeft hij nooit op gereageerd. Op een gegeven moment houdt het op, hè?
It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown.
ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way) until sometime in 2024.
Basically:
- the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.
- but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024.
As for this point:
> According to very recent research from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less
The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.
I think the interest rate and shareholder pressure were the most immediate causes. In 2021 you could get head count to do trivial projects at many tech companies and by the end of 2022 you had layoffs and hiring freezes.
Tend to agree here. The slowdown here has more to do with the financial ecosystem. IE less capital available for some companies, higher salaries and a changed approach to work.
Doesn't it seem ingenuine how everything good is socialism and everything bad is communism? Also if socialism can't compete with capitalism then it's doomed. Socialism must make capitalism illegal in order to succeed and I don't want to be in a place where capitalism is illegal. And "market socialism" is not socialism either.
I think it's important to realize how divided the U.S. is right now. Half the country is in favor of what ICE is doing in some form or another. Some people on the right are denouncing the _way_ ICE is accomplishing this. But they are far from outraged.
The other half of the country is as dumbfounded/shocked as the rest of the world.
This isn't like the French revolution where a majority of the country was suffering and rose up against the few.
This is very nearly 50% of the country wants to make the other 50% squirm.
It cannot be understated the role that Fox News has played to get us to this level of division.
The channel "The Necessary Conversation" has some good examples of just how radicalized some American's have gotten. It's 2 kids interviewing their MAGA parents. I think it's not uncommon for American's to know people like the parents in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hSysuwHw4KU
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