“Hell-ya brother”
100% agree even with half your experience.
Readit Newspclowes commented on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion · Posted by u/shannoncc
I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.
Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.
Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.
Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
You can just do things.
Not everything needs a study, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone!
Try things, if you like them, do them!
Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!
This is a farce. Handwringing about a cat while SF drivers kill hundreds per year, and SF policy kills thousands.
pclowes commented on Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line kensegall.com/2025/11/07/... · Posted by u/zdw
Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.
I dunno, for a while it was the most valuable company on the planet. While you might not like his judgment it seems plenty of people did.
Honestly, stuff like this makes me want to leave my smart phone in the garage when I get home and have a single desktop linux box that is in a “computer room” hardwired and the house has no wifi or smart anything and every other screen goes into the trash.
I fear the move to LLM based search is a short term boost with a potential long term cost.
Yes they are very helpful. But what is the incentive to create more blogs for them LLM companies to scrape for novel tech? They are great for answering questions about things that are very well documented and understood but the incentive structure that aligns technical bloggers with search is being undermined.
In tech, knowledge scales non-linearly. No amount of trivial search can amount to finding excellent technical writing. Most of the stuff LLMs are great at answering are things that an individual can typically figure out already just much more slowly by RTFM (eg: react component, MVC code etc.) However, the LLMs fail at deeply technical or highly novel subjects.
I worry LLM usage overtime will create a gap between research papers and engineering as nobody is incentivizeded to write about their implementations/explorations.
I am hearing more and more tech-people jumping to Kagi regardless of role (SWE,SRE, PD,DS) which is encouraging.
pclowes commented on Palantir: The Most Evil Company politicaleconomist.substa... · Posted by u/mgh2
Part of the question here is how much power one company should have and who is responsible for it. A government is ultimately beholden to its citizens; a company is only beholden to shareholders.
I agree, and personally think we need to be very careful about surrendering data privacy in order to stop the bad guys or creating a surveillance state to police immigration.
pclowes commented on Palantir: The Most Evil Company politicaleconomist.substa... · Posted by u/mgh2
I posted this a few days ago on a separate Palantir-related thread, but it probably is more relevant here. The world could use fewer Alex Karps.
--
This quote from the CEO of Palantir (Alex Karp) haunts me. ---
> “I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Is he wrong?
This has historically been very true. The nuclear deterrent has significantly decreased the probability of civilian or armed forces dying as a result of conflict globally.
Something is broken. Lets go back to paper and pencil.