But I think the more important point is the increasing number of layoffs linked in the article [1]. These layoffs are mostly ignored here and everywhere else.
Jobs are getting offshored and outsourced in large quantities and the tech community is on the whole ambivalent about it. Unless you were directly impacted.
The path for software developers looks bleak. While people are wringing their hands over AI while something else entirely is destroying job prospects for young grads.
Every time one of Zitron's posts come up I think of bitcoin or algorithmic social media feeds. Like those things, I understand people have strong opinions on whether or not it's good or bad for society.
But what's the endgame? Is it to persuade people not to use these things? Make them illegal? Create some other technology that makes them obsolete or non-functional?
Tech employers are saying it's efficiencies gained in AI that led to layoffs for the past few years. Yet they have increased headcount in engineering offices in other countries at the same time.
This is also happening at small and midsize companies that ship software. It's easy to find this information, particularly for the largest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Like the article states, there are a number of confounding factors. But it's not AI, no matter how much founders and CEOs want it to be true.
That’s because the globally talent works much longer hours at lower salary while in US you have to pay 100k for each h1b. Let’s get rid of the ridiculous administration first and then talk about greedy ceo.
Having foreign workers filling the jobs for American companies working on US soil and sending the money home is no better for Americans than having them working in their own countries.
Say what you will about this administration, God knows they have flaws. However, they're the only one that has taken steps to actually attempt to help American workers in a generation or more. Every other one has been a revolving door of shipping jobs out or importing cheap foreign labor in.
This is rather evidence that this requirement (at least sometimes) does what it should do: it disincentivizes US branches of companies to hire foreigners in the USA by making such hires more expensive.
Thus, instead foreign branches of US companies hire foreigners. Why the complaints: now in the USA less foreigners get hired instead of US citizens, exactly what was requested.
I'd imagine all the borders are fuzzy, but maybe that's the only spot where a broad enough area was that way to note it.
I live pretty much on the border between two regions on the map, and you can definitely see a difference just driving one county north or south. But of course you also see exceptions on both sides, in both individual homes or small towns that seem more suited for the other side of the border.
Yeah, this weirdly splits the Atlanta metro area in half between two regions based on the counties, and while north Atlanta and south Atlanta metro have decidedly differing cultures (along mostly but not entirely racial lines) the split is completely arbitrary on county lines with Fulton County, GA jutting upwards as if the 10 miles across that county don't represent anything on either side of it
Fulton County is a weird shape for historical reasons - it absorbed the counties to its north and south during the Depression - and historically the northern part of Fulton County (everything north of the Chattahoochee River) was Milton County. If Milton County still existed it would probably end up in Woodard's "Greater Appalachia" over "Deep South".
We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)
It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)
Maybe I misinterpreted what this is supposed to show. Is this based on data from like 150 years ago or is it based on how things are today?
This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food
Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)
curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population
The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly.
And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.
>America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]
I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.
Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]
The Population Bomb is a great reference. This was something a family member of mine was seriously worried about in her younger days.
Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.
(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)
Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.
But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.
Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.
And now less than half a century later, there are even people who are worried about falling birth rates in some places, because apparently it's concerning if we don't keep growing the population at the same rate.
It is concerning when all of our major social systems are built on the idea of an growing population and a growing economy (most pressing right now is funding pensions).
Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.
US Citizens have to pay taxes even in orbit or on the ISS, or even on Mars or wherever in the universe they may be. This is fairly unique though, there's like one African dictatorship that does the same and that's about it.
That sounds a lot more like an argument for being concerned about our major social systems than the population trend. I guess I just don't think that introducing millions of extra humans into existence purely to avoid fixing Social Security or other similar issues makes any amount of sense.
Immigration at that scale is completely indistinguishable from invasion.
At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.
I'm not sure there's a single Western country that wanted the kind of immigration it's getting. Many of them like Sweden seem like slow motion wars complete with an average two bombings per day. Other places like the UK have mass rapes, in the US everyone just quietly circles the wagons and stops socializing, in Canada pretty much every public service is suddenly unavailable and there are no jobs etc.
Dubai has managed to not let that happen even at rates far faster than replacement, but they don't give their immigrants voting rights, and usually not permanent residence (unless they are rich).
They definitely have literal slaves there, as well as the highest per capita rate of influx of high-net-worth individuals of anywhere in the world, and then a lot of people in-between.
> Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book
Fortunately, almost twenty years before the Population Bomb book, others such as Alfred Sauvy were already warning against confident overpopulation arguments. They suggested more reasonable arguments such as examining countries on a case-by-case basis [1].
Interesting to see an opinion piece on the register pointing out 3 camps, none of which apply to most people I know who work in software development.
Mainly that ai is a useful tool. Sometimes it is magical but has limits and is often wrong. It can be a great illustrator of sunk cost fallacy when working on very complex problems. But light years faster and more useful than googling for solutions when faced with a difficult debugging challenge. On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not.
I think it is a miss that software development is completely omitted in this article, esp a tech or tech adjacent publication that's been around for forever.
Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.)
Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.
But it has. Aircraft have long stopped getting faster or bigger or having a longer range. They get marginally more efficient, but not better for consumers. Cars are mostly the same. Audio codecs. Everything has a balancing loop somewhere. With AI there are several, eg. the better it is, the more content is made using AI, the worse AI is
Air travel (thanks to efficiencies) costs a fraction of what it used to, look up what % of people have traveled by air and compare that to previous decades.
Cars are safer than ever, per mile driven, for their occupants and substantially more comfortable. They're also more efficient, but we've consciously traded that for heavier cars for crash safety.
Lossless audio codecs are ubiquitous, and there are low-loss low-latency wireless audio codecs deployed to billions of devices.
The efficiencies in air travel don't come from the airplanes. They come from optimizing routes, eliminating competition, and cramming far more people on an airplane.
That saves a lot of money, and despite complaining people seem to accept the tradeoff of cheaper flights for an unpleasant experience. That comes from using basically the same technology as a half-century ago, with more customers.
This is just factually incorrect. Yes, business efficiencies have come from all sorts of tactics, but this being HN: the engine on the 737 MAX uses >30% less fuel at cruise than the JT8D from the 1970s-era 737s.
Not to mention airframe improvements in both aerodynamics and materials.
NFTs were kind of a scam to sell you jpgs on the grounds that insider Bob had sold one to insider Harry for $20k and so you're getting a bargain buying one for $15k. It's a different thing really.
> doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out?
No? When new tech arrives there is always a bunch of low hanging fruit around so there is quick progress immediately afterwards, but then it flatlines relatively quickly and progress is as slow as usual again.
So its a safe bet that progress will slow down to the usual level sooner or later, and it seems to be around now for text models, as this flatlining happens faster the more you invest into it since you exhaust the low hanging fruit faster.
Why is it silly? Cars haven't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years, they have gotten a lot better but not in a game changing way, society still functions the same with cars as 50 years ago.
I see the same thing with text models, you can say they improve but not in a game changing way, and you have the same scenario as cars. It wouldn't be wrong for a person to say "cars are as good as they ever going to get" 50 years ago, in his lifetime he was right, nothing happened with cars that would force him to change his habits during his life.
But up to 50 years ago cars changed quite quickly, so you could say it is weird to say cars wouldn't start flying or such in 50 years, but here we are, nothing dramatically changed.
Tesla self-driving/Waymo/Comma.ai isn't perfect, but they're good at what they do. That's a pretty dramatic change, in the last year or so. You get in the car, and then don't actually have to drive it, the car does it for you. Sure there are some corner cases that still haven't been solved, but most of the time, I get in the car and it just does its thing for me.
Something I've been doing a lot lately is investigating the people on HN that push various beliefs, and in this comment thread there's two voices pushing for how much AI is going to continue to grow, going forwards.
Who are these two voices? Well, we've got fragmede, who, looking through their HN profile, works at NVIDIA as a "senior AI infrastructure engineer", and we've got mh-, who, looking through their HN profile, works at Wunderkind, which is "pioneering a new category of AI agentic marketing".
So, the two people in here pushing messaging about how great and valuable AI is, and how it'll continue to get better, have their jobs/livelihood tied to AI and people continuing to pour money into AI.
It almost always turns out that way. The people protesting the loudest for some idea universally are somehow tied to profiting by convincing people of that idea. Not that that means they're wrong, of course. Just providing context.
My comment wasn’t about AI infra, my job, or broad societal changes. I write code for a living and worry about losing my job to AI like any other developer. I was just describing my experience with self-driving cars doing their thing. The key is whether the argument holds up on its merits. Pointing to someone’s job is background context, not a substitute for engaging with what they actually said.
Yeah, it does seem like progress has plateaued considerably. The leaps from GPT 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 5 shrinks with each one, with 5 being particularly disappointing.
I, with no evidence, feel like GPT-5 was an efficiency release. Save as much power/compute while mitigating the quality loss leaving only the top model (using similar compute as previous models) to show real improvement.
We should remember that Moore’s law was not just about the number of transistors but also the unit cost. GPT-5 works like any modern CPU with both power and efficiency cores.
> On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not.
I agree sort of, but on the other hand we don't know their true cost, whether that's the out-of-pocket expenses, or the pollution and high electricity/water costs that will result.
There are lots of things people do that are much more polluting and less useful or efficient than AI, such as eating meat, driving cars, traveling on airplanes etc, the latter two particularly in terms of business use cases especially when we have video call technology and remote work.
You forget to include the information pollution cost. AI slop is becoming inescapable in Google search results. So this new tool is completely obliterating the usefulness of old tools by flooding them with VC-subsidized crap.
I agree with many of the author's observations. I see a lot of the same thing in my circles.
Where my views differ are when it comes to the leap between layoffs and AI.
Corporate leadership is eager to reduce the biggest source of cost (employees) and happy to use AI as cover. But it's not the reality. AI isn't adding productivity to the company's bottom line in numbers big enough to rationalize the layoffs.
I can point to zero tech roles eliminated where AI performed the same function. Despite the fact me and everyone in my circles use AI on a daily basis and are big proponents of it.
I think the author's biggest incorrect assertion is accepting corporate PR as gospel like this:
>Salesforce says AI bots now do 50% of the company's work. They're pushing what they call a "digital workforce" where AI agents handle customer service, sales, and even coding tasks.
All of these companies have great incentive to say AI is replacing workers. But so far no proof has been offered.
Eventually we will get a recession. For a lot of people that work in tech it feels like we are already in one.
But I do not share the author's concerns with AI taking everyone's jobs in the next few months or years.
But not because of tech, AI, or things like that. It's the rate of pay.
When prosperity is the thing that's receding, money counts more than ever because lack of money threatens more than could be imagined.
And even though it's not as common as it should be, employees can be fairly valued as an asset. In a good way, where you're much happier being valued like that than not.
So even a company that values their people more so than most, will have to make sacrifices on all fronts when the going gets rough, like they don't have to do for years in a row when things are merely non-ideal.
This can cause some of the highest-paid people to get kicked out much earlier, like few have seen before. Even in companies that are not trying to preserve as much head-count until things turn around, they may have no real choice.
A lot of non-tech high-dollar people are also being shed, and it looks like on the increase. Consumers may not have enough accumulated wealth any more to be able to bail out a consumer economy.
But I think the more important point is the increasing number of layoffs linked in the article [1]. These layoffs are mostly ignored here and everywhere else.
Jobs are getting offshored and outsourced in large quantities and the tech community is on the whole ambivalent about it. Unless you were directly impacted.
The path for software developers looks bleak. While people are wringing their hands over AI while something else entirely is destroying job prospects for young grads.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-2025-highest-level-sinc...
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