It’s not actually less certain now than it was then. It’s just the media has gotten louder. Cuban missilie crisis, civil rights, world wars, nuclear weapons, it has all been happening for a while.
When you look at real wages vs cost of living and the trend line is down and showing no signs of ever going back up, the question will I be able to afford the resources to survive and have a family, will my kids be able to afford a home, that's the growing uncertainty.
There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
Now plot that wage plot against productivity, or corporate profit, or any US stock index, or as you said: housing costs. Real wages are not keeping up with anything. It's not just housing.
The price of food/groceries has doubled over the last few years. The price of new cars is also much higher than it has been. All money I used to allocate to eating out in restuarants now goes to groceries. My next car purchase will be a used car. So there are workarounds for now, but if the trend doesn't stop, soon there will be no more workarounds. Only so many people can get the high-wage jobs.
Household income is not wages. If people work more hours income goes up while wages are flat. That series only includes full-time workers. High earners are doing better, that's the k-shaped economy. The upside of going to college is being carved out by changes in the labor market. A more representative measure would be average wage for non supervisory roles which is flat since the 1970s. Lower earners face higher inflation than the CPI because more of their paycheck goes to necessities. CPI shelter is what I'm interested in.
The data don't support the story you are telling, at least not on a 17 year time scale. Most places including LA and New York actually show the opposite. Real wages are rising faster than cost of living in the long term just about everywhere in the US.
I understand the argument, and housing is a problem, but there just isn't much to support the doom and gloom narrative if you don't use cherry picked data from opeds. I suspect that a lot of people have distorted views about what they should be able to afford.
>The data don't support the story you are telling, at least not on a 17 year time scale. Most places including LA and New York actually show the opposite.
People point to the 1960s as the "golden age" where everyone could afford everything on a single person working an easy entry-level job. However, that is also a meme, not reality. According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024.
For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024.
You're conflating income and wages. People are working more hours so income increases while wages are flat. And people who aren't full-time aren't counted in that income figure.
The source I provided specifically does not look at total income but real wages compared to cost of living. Did you look at the data you are arguing against?
Also, you are wrong about people working more hours. Here's the actual numbers. We are working slightly fewer hours than we have been on average for the past 20 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP.
Has it occurred to you that the data really just doesn't support your perception? People have been giving you sources that refute what you are saying at every level. I get it. I keep reading and seeing people talk about how awful everything is, but I just can't find hard evidence that this is the case on a broad basis. You should look into the concept of the "vibe-cession". People are convincing themselves that things are getting worse based on talk and perception, and, well, one of the limits of humanity is that perception is reality inside your head.
Yes? When I started college 16-ish years ago the '08 financial crisis was still fresh in my mind. Many of my peers were deeply concerned about the kinds of jobs and wages they could expect to find after graduation.
As someone that graduated when you started and was much closer to 08, it turned out to be a non-issue for everyone I know that went to college with me.
It did not, at least not for me. But that wasn't the question: the question was whether or not it was something I thought about as a freshman. It was, though I obviously can't prove one way or another if my concern for the future made a difference in my earnings out of school. I can only provide my own anecdata on the matter.
I agree, don't pre-emptively put too much control over your agents. But they do need guidelines and guardrails. All of the constraints I've added on my agents, I've added because when I let them cook, they went down the wrong path.
Examples:
* Don't do ad-hoc fixes. Don't mutate the production data just to fix an issue. Fix the bug, ingest the bad data in code if necessary, or write a migration/repair script that an ops agent can run.
* Write infrastructure as code, don't rely on remembering complex manual workflows.
* Make sure there's a single model in the app with a single source of truth. Don't let truth get spread out across representations, it will get out of sync and bugs will result. Derived truths can be projected from the single truth, but they must update when the truth updates.
* Write all logic in the application server, and send only a minimal visible payload to the web client. No calculations, except those needed for rendering the view, should happen in the client.
It goes on. These are all driven from the model making mistakes and having to have it go back and refactor to correct them.
A truly committed pessimist would accept this dark omen.
Anyway, this definition of optimism
> or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes
Isn't what one colloquially means by it.
Though it is eye catching that it will make a positive impact even if you don't, actually, control important outcomes, like by not smoking
> These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.
The 100m / 10k analogy is fantastic, but the reality is even worse.
Let’s say you expect a candidate to stay for average five years. That’s about 1200 working days. If you get to interview them for 1 day, then that day is 8.3m to the 10k. You get to watch them run for 8.3m and decide how well they can run the 10k.
You're not even watching them for the skills required on the job either. Most jobs aren't even about running at all.
Basic, boring, line-of-business web application shops are asking candidates to implement Boyer-Moore and k-d trees. When the applicant is going to be hired to mostly update JSX templates and figure out why the customer is frustrated. It's like every business needs Olympic athletes when they're running a hot-dog stand.
It's one thing if your business is writing a RTOS for a custom platform you develop. Asking a candidate to implement a slab allocator might be a fine exercise. It fits the work being done.
Businesses need to get off their high horse and look in the mirror. Most of them are doing mediocre things that need average, good-natured people who are willing to work.
Came here to say this!
So many ways to parse it. But the key issue was not knowing that “pregnancy-test frogs” was the central concept. Without that, the headline is so confusing… at some point I had to consider whether “frogs” was being used as a verb
Too much developers relying on bloatware, not enough “implement it yourself” because in reality every hash map doves a unique problem that a Palin hash map is not necessarily suited for. Embrace NIH
You need at least one or two somewhat disagreeable folks in a team. Because without this, groupthink emerges, teams have too much inertia, they follow the assumed norm instead of challenging it for something better, they don’t debate the options enough. That disagreeable energy, in the right dose, leads to better decisions. If you don’t have it naturally, you can encourage someone to “play devil’s advocate” in decision discussions (or do it yourself) and you’ll find sometimes the devil’s advocate is actually right.
Agree - but The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt) is a rare exception to this. It’s written as a novel but actually contains valuable and counterintuitive lessons about optimizing for efficiency in a complex delivery process. Worth every page
Agree, it's not testing. The problem is here: "In a typical testing workflow, you write some basic tests to check the core functionality. When a bug inevitably shows up—usually after deployment—you go back and add more tests to cover it. This process is reactive, time-consuming, and frankly, a bit tedious."
This is exactly the problem that TDD solves. One of the most compelling reasons for test-first is because "Running the code in your head" does not actually work well in practice, leading to the above-cited issues. This is just another variant of "Running the code in your head" except an LLM is doing it. Strong TDD practices (don't write any code without a test to support it) will close those gaps. It may feel tedious at first but the safety it creates will leave you never wanting to go back.
Where this could be safe and useful: Find gaps in the test-set. Places where the code was never written because there wasn't a test to drive it out. This is one of the hardest parts of TDD, and where LLMs could really help.
