Everything sounds like "Equilibrium" because there's not a millisecond of originality in that movie.

Yep this is the problem. People who are saying "but COOFANDY is a real brand" are missing the point. They were not brands before Amazon provided the tools and targeting to allow them to flourish at extreme discounts. China can manufacture pretty much anything you want: hats, cat shoes, missiles, underwear, cars, you name it. The problem is connecting the manufacturers to the global market. Normally domestic name-brands do all the design and have the prototyping and manufacturing done in China, Vietnam or anywhere it's cheap. Not France, not California, not Italy. The Asian companies who have all these prototyping and manufacturing capabilities want to sell their own shit, not just make shit for the name brands we're familiar with. Why? Because they're probably making MORE money per unit than they are working with name-brands. The designers are in-house, no need to take a design from Nike, prototype it, send it back, have them complain, tweak it, redo, redo again until the customer is satisfied. I had an ex-girlfriend who worked for a company in Vietnam. They made name brand shoes. Her job was to go to the brand's office, talk over the design, work out some details, fly back with the design, have the prototypes made, fly BACK to the office with the prototype, back and forth a few times before the prototype gets approved, then start the manufacturing process and coordinate logistics. The manufacturer adds these costs into the manufacturing, but they can probably make a lot more money selling direct through Amazon.
This is not good for the global economy, but it's great for China and Vietnam. Business strategy based on capital's need for growth has driven the economy into this configuration.

Lol'd I did.

Socializing without activity is pretty damn boring. I go sailing and rock climbing all weekend. Some of that time is spent talking to other sailers, climbers, and people who hang out around those places. I often see people enjoying nature by taking a walk and talking to family or friends on the phone. I saw a guy kayaking on a beautiful, perfect day on his ear phone chatting away to someone. I do not understand this at all, but I'm reluctant to talk to anyone on the phone or to even text with most people beyond a short message. I really do not like socializing. Have I said that yet? I don't really enjoy it.

"4.8 hours a day on apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat"
That's on average, and that's frigging bonkers. I'm guessing that's not all at one time, but consistently throughout the day. They must know it's only being used for evil by the people who own the platforms.

The workplace use of AI is better understood as more companies adopt it from the top down. They had to stop letting us see who's using the most tokens because it wasn't the programmers they were hoping to replace. The product managers and executives are using WAY more tokens than any of the developers. Devs have been optimizing usage by creating scripts and skills, memory and graph systems to reduce the amount of code grepping and re-grepping on every prompt. The rest of the non-dev users are having conversations with Claude, having it craft lengthy communications, build slides/decks whatever they call them, creating product review documents that will get shark-tanked in 3-hour product review meetings. They're discussing strategy with Claude, creating POCs and demos that will be thrown out or need real development to make deployable to customers. We could see more token usage as we move into AI software factory mode, but devs will optimize that because we don't like things to be slow and inefficient.

The biohacking business is all over the place now. If you're not at the top of a peptide-pushing MLM scheme that sells biohacking kits to high school kids, what are you even doing bro? Just get a 16-year old with a Claude account to vibe code white label sites for sellers to customize and start buying in bulk from Chinese suppliers! Selling vape pens online is so 2024. The new hotness is injecting experimental peptides directly into your quads to see if you get Ronnie Coleman results or get some weird new disease nobody has ever heard of.

arboriculture would also be not terrible.

That's not a bad one really. I'm too old for saturation diving or orbital work.

"Now, potentially any clinician in the world can chat with Claude and design an antibiotic that may work"

MAY work, or MAY cause immediate bowel explosion and death.

"When given a simple natural language prompt, the platform designed peptides, predicted their efficacy, and provided a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments in minutes"

Heck, it's FDA approved then. Ship it!

They should return as highly-paid consultants, and when they're done training the model, they get to license that model to Ford. Or Ford can buy it from them, for an amount that means they never have to work again, because it looks like they're not going to be able to. Not as automotive hardware engineers anyway.
We have to stop giving our knowledge away to corporations for wages. That's just stupid.

"IBM is explicit that "0.7 nm" and "7 angstrom" should be read as generational node names, not literal gate lengths or pitches, in line with the broader industry trend of decoupling node labels from specific physical dimensions. Internally, the company said it benchmarked NanoStack's critical dimensions—such as gate pitches and contacted gate pitch—against a projected 1 nmclass node, then pushed scaling by going vertical."

Someone needs to come up with a new nomenclature. What if ASML develops a 0.7 nm process? What the hell are they going to call it??
Surely this isn't the first chip to be stacked in layers? IBM also says it's going to make these chips, and not in just reference quantities. Obviously IBM makes money on IP and licensing more than it does manufacturing these days. OR does it i dont know..

"isn't just to build retraining programs but also to reconsider decades-old policies such as unemployment insurance and act as a working lab for testing the most effective ways to transition workers to new fields"
Also known as "Let's find a way to make this the worker's responsibility, so that capital can continue to grow its already massive wealth."
- Increase unemployment insurance contributions because you know that fund is going to dry up quick when it gets tapped.
- Transition workers to new fields like ... WHAT EXACTLY? This is to ensure the worker caste system remains intact.
- training programs: so I gotta go back to college or trade school again? FER WHAT??

"an AI-powered career navigation platform."
Also known as "feeding the hand that bites you" - Let's take public funding and feed it to the AI companies that are setting trillions of dollars on fire. Fixed!
AI can solve the problems that AI created. You just have to feed it more money. Your money, not ours.

"Microsoft, one of the companies backing the organization, said it had already found a promising model: cross-training its entry-level lawyers in different parts of the organization and equipping them with A.I. skills in order for them to be repositioned as technology evolves."

When capital tries to solve a problem, it's for the benefit of capital.
When labor solves a problem, it's for the benefit of all workers.

That is why capital's solutions always sound so dystopian: retraining/reeducation centers or programs, unemployment insurance, human testing labs...

The solution to this problem is to give real equity to the people who's knowledge they stole. Those of us who's data they've been stealing all along should be paid in real shares of equity, the same way they pay themselves. Voting shares. And then we demand they show us how this economy works in the long term.

Just wait, it gets better!
The near future, probably in a month or two if your company is following everyone else's trajectory:
You are mandated to use Claude and a set of skills called the SDLC that agentify (not a word) the work you used to do. You use Claude to generate a mult-repo, mult-agent spec/plan .md file based on the PRD file created by product (also using Claude). You polish this plan and start Claude executing it. Unfortunately Claude Code needs to be running on your laptop in order to orchestrate the 15 agents doing the actual work across 5 repos (services, infrastructure, apps etc), but they can run as long as you're logged in and they don't hit any authentication snags or MCP servers that crapped out. Github has daily outages on PR and actions due to over-active agents. Your company authentication system doesn't like Claude Code/Anthropic, so it keeps logging you out mid-session. They're not scaling well. That said, you burn about $5k in tokens a week and rarely look at the code. Each step of the process has a Claude skill, and you run about anywhere from 3-5 projects concurrently through these skill steps all day, except for meetings where your boss wants everyone to pay attention and stop doing actual work because they need to be updated on what's going on, and how long it will take, and try to understand any of what's going on, which they don't anymore. But you have to spend time explaining repeatedly how stuff works so they can feel a little bit more part of the process.
You generate a lot of documentation, great sequence diagrams, spend a lot of time reviewing code, but you're pretty detached from the actual thinking part. Maybe at a very high level, like the sequence diagram level.
Nobody but you really owns the code, and you generated all of it. When someone asks you a question about it, you're not really sure of the answer. I think it works like this. Looking at the code tells you otherwise. You can't answer questions about how things work anymore, because you don't have the internal model of how things REALLY work, you have the spec you generated with Claude.
When Claude makes mistakes, they're your mistakes. So you spend a lot of time testing and verifying that Claude didn't make mistakes.

You are no longer a programmer/engineer. Your role feels more like a QA engineer, but to the company you are an "accountability sink."

"humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting."
Can relate. Must read. Forgot how though. I'll have my computer phone read it to me.

My company does this sort of theatre: partnering with non-profits that provide the look and feel of being a progressive and caring company, but ultimately they are beholden to capital and not to the employees in any way.
Is your company employee-owned, or do you believe the investors and management are actually good people who are motivated by more than increasing shareholder value?
"support community service by their employees" - that's called good will for free. You have to work against goals/deadlines/OKRs/KPIs/whatever measure they use, so you just work more in order to volunteer. It's the same with vacation/PTO. You can have unlimited PTO, but the work has to get done.

Helping the rich get richer comes with the false promise of you becoming rich as a result. This is the old MLM scheme that employers use on employees. If you look at your 4000 shares compared to the CTO's 10 million shares, things start to make more sense. Also, your shares are the restricted kind, so they hold no voting power.

The only long-term answer to the problems we have in the US is employee owned companies and all employees/workers being organized. We have to stop competing against each other for the crumbs the billionaires lend to us in exchange for our time. Time is all we have, how we spend it should not be determined by our bosses and their bosses.