Comment by rich_sasha

> So if you'd claim it's terrible, there's some explaining to do

Here's the explaining:

  - Unemployment has increased.
  - Long-Term unemployment has increased.
  - Number of gig workers is at an all time high.
  - Layoffs have continued.
  - Personal household dept is at an all time high.
  - Polls show most people have financial anxiety and feel squeezed.
  - Inflation is not under control.
  - Buy now pay later usage is up as much as consumer spending is.
  - Income and wealth inequality are near records high.
  - GDP and consumer spending were also seen peaking before the last 5 recessions as well...

I'm going to set aside GDP for a moment, which is hardly the full story but instead I want to zoom in on inflation.

The Federal Reserve of St. Louis is using the CPI numbers, as most government agencies do. I would contend those numbers in and of themselves lie. The ALICE index, which is based on more comprehensive data[0][1] and closer to what CPI used to represent before the major adjustments in the 1990s, tells a different story[2]

Inflation against the ALICE index is much higher than the 3% reported in by the Federal Reserve, running at a stark 5.9% YoY change. This honestly lines up much closer to the reality I see in my day to day life than the CPI numbers reported by the Federal Reserve do.

[0]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/methodology

[1]: I recommend downloading the PDF here: https://www.unitedforalice.org/Attachments/Methodology/ALICE...

[1]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

It always takes 6 to 12 months for the graphs to match the reality on the ground. Because that's how long it takes most people to run out of money and credit.

U.S. tariffs created inflationary pressure that has so far been mostly absorbed by producers and retailers, but they can’t do that forever. In fact the Amazon CEO said a week ago that they will have to raise prices this year due to tariffs.

Once the dust settled, sure.

We're still on our way to hit the bottom for this round, and by all accounts it's likely to be much bigger when we finally do.

2008 didn't really impact tech sector much though. Companies continued to hire through it, and in fact those that didn't often had a headcount deficit afterwards.

And also the worst of 2008 was confined to the US.

What we have now is more like 2001.

Also most of these big companies were completely dysfunctional on their hiring through 21/22, just going completely apeshit. Now they're making everyone suffer for it.

Well. Maybe not quite as hot as 2022. But by any standard from a year before 2020, yeah.

Which is why governments and firms in the capitalist core are trying to cool it down?

Everyone was trying to pretend the bottom of the market back in 2007 right up until they couldn't keep up the farce and everything collapsed.

I believe that's what we have today. The economic indicators are all worse than they were in 2008. Our economy is Wile E Coyote running at full speed in midair until he realizes the truth then falls.

as a response to "Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance.". I've edited the comment to make it clear, thanks

What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?

It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.

In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)

> I still use them but find that more of the time is spent arguing with it and correcting problems with it than actually getting any useful product.

I feel the same. They're better at some things yes, but also worse at other things. And for me, they're worse at my really important use cases. I could spend a month typing prompts into Codex or AntiGravity and still be left holding the bag. Just yesterday I had a fresh prompt and Geminin bombed super hard on some basic work. Insisting the problem was X when it wasn't. I don't know. I was super bullish but now I'm feeling far from sold on it.

Tomorrow's Calc app will have 30mil lines of code and 1000 npm dependencies!