My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.

In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.

1. The tax deduction change where costs couldn't be classified as an expense.

2. The saturation in people joining coding. At one point in time everyone wanted to be part of a bootcamp to earn that sweet coding salary.

3. Rising interest rates means the era of borrowing at low costs is over.

etc.

AI is last on my list for the reasons that people are being laid off. And its not because AI isn't helping people, rather it isn't helping people enough to justify the current layoffs.

And lets be honest - AI and employment is the hot topic right now. You should expect executives to say that they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and looking at time savings.

Once upon a time everyone wanted to add ML to their product. This is just going with the flow. Otherwise their stock prices will take a massive hit. Others yet want to showcase that they are doing everything to extract better margins. These statements can be slightly deceiving.

What does 30% of the code mean exactly? How much of it is going into the products and making into the market?

For now, AI is a convenient scapegoat. Maybe it becomes a force to reckon with and truly leads to people being laid off. Not today.

The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.

Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.

The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.

"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.

"The day they replaced the previous beam."

Carbon exists so that it's possible to migrate a large C++ code base, like Chrome, from C++ to something saner, incrementally.

The most important attribute of Carbon is not the specifics of the syntax but the fact that it's designed to be used in a mixed C++ / Carbon code base and comes with tooling to convert as much of C++ as possible to Carbon.

That's what makes Carbon different from any other language: D, Zig, Nim, Rust etc.

It's not possible to port a millions line C++ code base, like Chrome, to another language so large C++ projects are stuck with objectively pretty bad language and are forced to continue to use C++ even though a better language might exist.

That's why Carbon is designed for incremental adoption in large C++ projects: you can add Carbon code to existing C++ code and incrementally port C++ over to Carbon until only Carbon code exists.

Still a very large investment but at least possible and not dissimilar to refactoring to adopt newer C++ features like e.g. replacing use of std::string with std::string_view.

That's why it's a rational project for Google. Even though it's a large investment, it might pay off if they can write new software in Carbon instead of C++ and refactor old code into Carbon.

Is that really true? So search engines? News sites? Pseudo-anonymous discussion forums?