Comment by Aurornis
9 hours ago
> A new Amish-like lifestyle may be developing before our eyes in real-time and that's very interesting to follow and observe (from a distance).
I’m just old enough to remember some older adults in my life who refused to use email. They would only talk to coworkers in person or on the phone.
It did not work out very well, unless they could afford to retire at that point. When your career evolves, the only way to keep participating is to evolve with it.
I knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
Some in that era could not type, at all.
And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already cursive writing in some parts of the world).
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Yes, and because typists and secretaries were predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers based on their perception of gender roles.
I like to call it “keyboard cooties.”
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Isn't this still what Donald Trump does?
Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common for people from that generation. He was already in his mid-50s when computers started to become common in the workplace.
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It hasn't exactly worked out well for email, either...
There's no better written communication tool than email. It's one of the most successful inventions of the 20th century.
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Why?
i have 4 email accounts, and I check them maybe once a week. nobody sends me emails any more, everybody uses "messaging"
(actually, i forgot i have 2 or 3 others, I check them even less, perhaps a few times a year, really only when i need to reset a password associated with them)
Out of roughly 400 billion emails sent daily worldwide, estimates pin actual human written messages at around 10%. In personal inboxes, human correspondence is essentially extinct. Checking my own personal email inbox right now, the entire first page is 2FA, Amazon, some shit from my climbing gym, my car, my employer health insurance, my bank... My spam filters are aggressive and there are literally thousands of unread emails in there waiting for me to click select all -> delete. Even at work the overwhelming majority is automated Jira noise, CI/CD noise, calendar shit, compliance blasts... I have received maybe 2 or 3 actual human typed messages in the last 2-3 weeks.
It's a fucking log dump for machines.
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Refusing to use technology isn't the Amish way, they communally decide how and when to use technology.
According to the AI boosters, my career (and pretty much everyone else's) is already over anyway.
I am an AI booster, and this is incorrect. Your career will change, and if you change with it, it'll thrive.
What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.
I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.
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I don't care if my career thrives. I care if I thrive.
Currently, I don't see any reason at all to suspect that AI will make my life better or even just not make it worse.
And you are basing this on what, exactly?
AI boosting seems to be very close to pulling shit out of ass.
My change will be killing the computer. I will then thrive.
Sometimes career tracks cease to exist…typists, secretaries, and in real time right now translators.
The job is to automate the enterprise, keep things safe and reliable, and make money for the company.
It was never about software. That was just the means.
Even in the software era, fads developed and tech stacks changed frequently. Now it's just moving a hundred times faster.
You need smart systems thinkers to do this. That's the role. Be smart in managing processes and complexity.
I'm not going to give coding interviews anymore, but I am going to give architecture, systems design, and SRE interviews. People still need to know how not to fuck up a database and how to design scalable and resilient systems.
Very much agree with most of this.
The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.
That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.
The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.
Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.
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hospitals still use faxes not email due to the latter's inherent insecurity
As if phone lines are not inherently insecure. The only reason they use fax is because it's been grandfathered in.
Are you sure? I work across a few hospitals in the UK and can't recall seeing a fax in the last decade.
in the US, yes. I experience it personally. Can't speak for other countries.
I don't like that comparison. Email was an improvement to snail mail, and the people who you claim refused to use it just didn't understand it and didn't want to understand it.
Lots of people, myself included, understand llms and can and do use them at work because we have to, but we might choose to not use them outside of work because they rot our brains, are unethical, funnel even more money into the hands of a few billionaires (selling a service trained on stolen property) and haven't actually been proven to make the world better. Unlike email!
I’d love to read the paper on how email was objectively “proven to make the world better” and how LLMs fail this same test.
Email stopped me having to walk to the post box or spend a lunch hour in the post office. Before WhatsApp etc it let me communicate instantly with relatives in other countries for free. Email made my website accounts harder to crack. So many things.
What the fuck have LLMs done yet? Nothing! We would be no worse off without them so far and no one has anything to show to prove otherwise, except some vibe coded websites that all look the same (edgy dark theme and hacker vibes)
Come on Gary, prove me wrong smartass
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