If you look at the actual ranges on his graphs, the conclusion is a little bit exaggerated, but the basic point is valid.
Education systems need to have very strong curriculum about AI use and the necessity of just not using it to some degree to be able to obtain any level of actual literacy or other competency.
Actually education should be redesigned to properly incorporate personalized AI tutoring and as part of that effort provide a supportive environment where students don't feel the need to go around it to cheat.
If the goal is to communicate and solve problems, the technologies will probably be a huge improvement if we can manage them properly.
I definitely do not have the depth of vocabulary that some 18th century readers had, but I am a good problem solver. Probably a more effective problem solver with AI. But kids do need to be trained that they will lose it if they don't use it.
If you look at the extreme amount of video content these days and combine that with the increasing abilities of AI video generation, there may be a trend towards more visual (and often more literal) communication.
I often find that screenshots or screencasts are important for technical communication.
But of course we don't have any visual replacement for the abilities of natural language so I hope we can keep that.
We need a deliberate and effective effort in education.
But we are rapidly approaching the era where your access to AI and robotics determines your labor productivity. So it increases the existing inequalities.
It comes down to the topology of the social networks and how the built environment and belief systems shape that. But the belief systems mostly serve the social groups rather than the other way around. So maybe what happens is determined by group dynamics.
> we are rapidly approaching the era where your access to AI and robotics determines your labor productivity
Some of the wealthiest, most powerful and yes, most productive people of the last decades had no clue how to use a computer or phone, interacting with it through staff.
Remember the folks who were teaching their kids to code ten years ago? How relevant is that today (beyond as a cognitive exercise)? Access to AI and robotics are secondary to other factors. Not the determinative ones, certainly not at the individual level.
> Please parse that sentence more carefully. I said "labor productivity"
Yes. Unless we’re redefining labour to fit a square peg into a round hole, this remains true.
Access to the latest technology is never a sole determinant of productivity in any technological revolution. If anything, it having any relation to productivity is a modern phenomenon.
(Most kids who had a computer in the 80s or internet in the 90s didn’t become wildly more productive for it. They just found new ways to entertain themselves.)
> Actually education should be redesigned to properly incorporate personalized AI tutoring and as part of that effort provide a supportive environment where students don't feel the need to go around it to cheat.
I have no idea what is this magical AI capable of tutoring that you're talking about. It is certainly not any of the AI models we see in the market, which hallucinate systematically and are only able to output remotely valid content if they are subjected to tight feedback loops.
This is another magical thinking we have in our age. AI will do nothing good for education, because to be educated you need to do the hard work of understanding things. This is just the opposite of getting a machine to provide you with quick facts, summaries, and conclusions. In fact I would say that if you introduce AI to classrooms it would be better to take a good number of $100 bills and incinerate, because the end result will be less expensive.
The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness. Many people have some sort of family or other community that they could lean on, even in America where family ties are weaker than any other place I know.
I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
"Homeless" is not the same as "living on the street". People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
> People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless.
You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out weekly, and almost zero money in the bank. And all this in a country with some of the weakest social security in the developed world. I'm sure the half-trillion dollars spent on advertising every year has something to do with this.
> You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
No, but this is also not ideal for many reasons
I have a friend going through this right now, actually. The biggest challenge is that her parents don't live anywhere near a strong job market. So the decision for her is "be homeless in a place where jobs are available" or "have a home but no access to employers"
I have been applying since March 2020 out of New Orleans and I have come up with nothing (5-6 first round interviews) so I think that this is a much bigger problem than people think.
Probably. The iPhone users I know mostly replace their phones once every 3 to 5 years, and they don't all buy brand new replacements even then (although some do.)
I'd be surprised if you had no one around you that didn't have an old android laying around collecting dust. I'm still on an old A52s and it works fine.
You might need to get out more, I've lived it, I've been around people who live it every day. I met someone for the first time in like 15 years (old school semi-acquaintance), something like the second thing we started talking about was how rough it was just finding and paying for an apartment in the remote super "LCOL" place we found ourselves.
Think about it, I'm guessing the guy welding the beams in your kid's school isn't making a quarter of what you make a year. Yet he has to be reminded every day that he's an economic failure vs what do you do, javascript? Early stage startup ideas? I bet it was pretty good in 2006-8.
Getting out more won’t help in this case because I will be walking around SOMA. The fact of the matter is that the stat is made up by a payday loan company and has no bearing on reality.
People like to share it because they are LLM like and just repeat things without looking at the data. “Hallucinations” are the common way that humans experience the world. World models born of pure fiction.
Also wtf I know journeyman ironworkers. They own homes in Oakland. People act like this is some poverty mode existence. Their lives are fine.
Thanks for sharing the slowboring blog post. I didn't know that stat came from payday loan companies, which definitely makes it suspect. Encouraging to hear that 55% of Americans have enough cash on hand for 3 months of expenses, and most of them have less liquid resources they could draw on if they needed more.
However, saying that the median American household has ~$200k net worth doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing great. A lot of the burden of funding retirement falls on the individual in the US, meaning if you're 60 and only have $200k of net worth in a M/HCOL city you're still potentially kind of fucked.
whats making the confidence that you are correct, and other people are bots, vs you being the bot?
up until recently, you didnt know the definition of homelessness that is used in the data. how are you making claims about the data? which data? what does it say?
since you know journeymen, you might want to ask them to meet their apprentices. That way, you could visit the apprentices homes that theyve bought, and can definitely pay the mortgage on by themselves.
or, if they dont have any, you could try to meet some CNAs at the local hospital? or the person at the grocery til?
I made no claims about homelessness. Only about the paycheck to paycheck thing. Did you use Llama 3.2 1B to make this comment? Next time use a bigger model. Gemma 3n 4B is sort of the limit before it starts talking nonsense about “claims about the [homelessness] data”. Complete non sequitur.
I also remember seeing something a few years ago that this stat has always floated around 20-30%. It was in the context of reporting that living paycheck to paycheck "has reached 30%", but that the reporting never included historical averages, to make the news much more sensational than it actually was.
The median American has $8000 in transaction accounts and a net worth of $192k. 50-60% of Americans self-report that they’re living paycheck to paycheck, but not everyone understands that to mean “I literally can’t pay the bills if my paycheck doesn’t come on time”.
(Is it deeply uncomfortable to get laid off with $8000 in your account? Without a doubt, especially in an increasingly weak labor market, even if you have home equity or retirement savings you could theoretically dip into to cover what unemployment benefits can’t.)
> Plenty of Americans are much closer than this than you might think working in tech. 50-60% of Americans currently live 'paycheck-to-paycheck' which means the second work stops they're on a timer for missing bills to start coming in.
How is that actually defined by whoever measured it?
No, the people I'm thinking of are childless. They recognize that their level of stability and functioning is not currently high enough to support a family.
I didn't say that they're thriving and living their dream, just that they're still a couple rungs above homeless.
> I think "most people in the real world" have at least a few rungs between their current situation and true homelessness.
This is one of the most out-of-touch HN comments I've seen in a while. Most people are not nearly as privileged as the community on these forums. Not even all the people posting here are fully removed from the risk of being out on their ass. Some have moved from other parts of their home country (think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market). Some have moved from other parts of the world to where they are and have no one upon whom they can impose. Plenty have huge student loans and are so fresh out of school that they're at the edge of the many rounds of layoffs affecting the tech industry in the last few years and lack enough experience on their resumés to land a new position before their finances run out.
I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back. And I've only been talking about people on these forums, the "fortunate" types.
> think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market
If they've failed to find a job for long enough that they're about to be homeless, does it really make sense to remain in the most expensive housing market in the country?
I think it's equally out of touch to imply that if you select a random person from across America (the richest country in the world) you will land on someone who is an inch from homelessness, with no close family or community, massive debt, and living in terror of the next layoff. Certainly there are people in that situation, but to imply that it's somehow the median American experience is to caricature the country.
All I said is that "most people" have rungs to fall back on, not "everyone".
> I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back.
There are rungs which are available to the population at large, so all of us have those privileges. For example the armed forces are recruiting. They will put a roof over your head and food in your belly, as well as give you medical coverage.
The median household net worth in the US is $193,000. The rate of home ownership is 65%. I don’t think the median American is at risk of becoming homeless during normal unemployment. Maybe you mean that the article isn’t as relevant for a global audience which is fine, but I would think that the median American lives in “the real world”.
It doesn't say liquid assets though, it mentions multiple options which vary in how easily you can/should use one to pay an unexpected bill or period of unemployment.
For example, if one is using their life-insurance payouts to pay their rent... well, something has gone very wrong somewhere.
Specifically, this part:
> financial asset—which includes transaction accounts, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, other bonds, stocks, pooled investment funds, retirement accounts, cash value life insurance, and other managed assets
For the highly-liquid "transaction accounts" (checking, savings, money-market) the conditional [0] median is just $8k.
[0] AFAICT "conditional" here means "we don't include $0 data points in the median." That explains why the subcategory of "stocks" has a higher conditional median value than the more-general category of financial assets.
Sure, I couldn’t find a better data source than that. If you find a better source that includes liquid assets specifically that would be helpful. I am skeptical that of the 39k in assets listed there, there isn’t a substantial amount that can be used to pay the bills (i.e. who has $39k in their 401k but $0 anywhere else?).
It seems some "Survey Data" files are publicly available [0], but without investing a bit more effort in parsing them (which is definitely not happening on my phone) I'm not sure if they have the kind of household-by-household data that could be used.
Again I don’t think that means what you think it means. It says “value of all financial assets” which includes banking accounts, cds, stocks, bonds etc. that is not liquid.
The next exact line it calls out those bank accounts and the mean at $8,000. That is not a lot of liquid emergency savings for a household let’s say of 3.
Again that number is inclusive of retirement accounts, hard to say much without knowing the breakdown but we do know $8k is the closet cash number. I would suspect the majority of the rest are in retirement accounts. Sure bonds and stocks are liquid but not like cash is. Using Fred is not that useful for these type of exercises as I don’t think those datapoints do a great job on topics like this.
So I don’t see what you are trying to point out. Most surveys I have seen put something like a quarter of Americans without any emergency savings.
Good luck accessing any of your home equity if you don’t have a job. I guess you could just sell your house of many years and move your family into an apartment.
Until you factor in maintenance, utilities, taxes, etc…
Depending on where you live, renting is often cheaper than owning, but real estate agents who make money off selling houses will never tell you the full cost of owning a home.
This is going to upset some, but the tech industry is full of delusional people that are completely out of touch with reality and the needs and struggles of everyday Americans.
I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.
It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.
OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.
Blog posts are aimed at an audience, HN is an audience, and in both cases the audience in question is a technical one with an above-average number of well-paid professionals. The whole framing that the blog post "reeks of privilege" to "most people" is a bit strange. If I were to read a Yachting Monthly article about The Five Most Attention-Grabbing Mega Yachts For The Conspicuous Consumer Billionaire it would probably reek of privilege to me, too, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem: nobody is making me read a specific article from a yacht magazine.
I think people would be shocked at HN demographics. I'm quite confident it's more representative of the average population in terms of things like income than some people seem to realize.
Sure, but none of us have to read all the way through every article that hits the front page, or take it to heart when the article is about a rich person.
One of my friends has given up on finding a software job and become a handyman to make ends meet. I get that not everyone in tech is loaded. I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you deliberately read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
> I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
Interesting way to characterize GP's response when all they did was use a word in a very common way.
I suppose if you are including European and Indian salaries and American students? But upper middle class students are literally temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
>The median annual wage for software developers was $133,080 in May 2024. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $79,850, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $211,450.
I don't think one has to live in a country to be able to look up and read statistics, or talk to people who work there, or read job postings from there, or have worked for companies in that country, or...
Anyway I'm not really sure why you're so insistent on this focus of America. HN (and the Internet in general) is a pretty diverse crowd... which was sort of my point
Burnout is real, and it’s worth talking about, but it’s a luxury to be able to even think about rest when your bank account is at zero and you're juggling survival
Absolutely. Cryptocurrency should make payment middlemen obsolete. PayPal should get laughed out of the building here. It's incredible that this has any legs at all. This thread should be full of the names of Ethereum wallets.
You might still want an mediator, sure I can pay you directly on chain but what if you don't even ship my goods? I'm not going to court over an 5$ item but I don't mind engaging PayPal support.
Maybe they have combined an LLM or something with the speech detection convolution layers or whatever they were doing. Like with JSON schemas constraining the set of available tokens that are used for structured outputs. Except the set of tokens comes from the top 3-5 words that their first analysis/network decided are the most likely. So with that smarter system they can get by with fewer electrodes in a smaller area at the base of the skull where cranial nerves for the face and tongue emerge from the brainstem.
