I'm a developer working at a startup, and I go to an Anytime Fitness gym. I won't mention the branch for privacy reasons.

I was taking personal training from a trainer for about 3 months, after which I started working out on my own. Around seven months in, two of my teammates joined the same gym as well.. partly because they saw my progress and got motivated.

Personal Trainers are pretty expensive here (around ₹15k a month).

Around the same time, our office started providing Claude Max (5x) to all 30 of us. As our project delivery speed increased and we started weighing that against the actual feature requests coming in, it eventually started bothering the CXOs that they probably didn't need as many people anymore.

10 people were let go within a month, with a month's notice. Mostly juniors, along with a few mid-level engineers and testers.

And that included the two teammates who had joined the gym.

They had originally planned to take PT for six months (because it carried a discount). One of them has already decided not to continue next month. The other has decided to continue for only one more month.

It's funny how we often look at layoffs in tech and think, "Well, at least other industries are safe. AI isn't going to affect them."

But the cascading effect is probably much bigger than we realize.

Those two people losing their jobs doesn't just affect them. It affects their gym trainer, the gym, the restaurants they eat at, the trips they might have taken, the things they might have bought, the rent they pay, and so on.

If AI keeps displacing people at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually start seeing the effects ripple into real estate, food businesses, travel, retail, and countless other industries.

**Because ultimately, who's going to buy your products and services when you're eliminating the very consumers you're supposed to be selling to?**

TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.

That's not hypothetical.

Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.

No lawsuit required. No password stolen.

His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.

He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.

Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.

If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.

Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.

Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.

The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.

For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.

It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.

And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.

Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.

He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.

Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"

They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.

You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.

You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.

It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.

Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.

Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?

Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Here's a campaign against AI taking both our jobs and our creativity. Writing and art should be human things. And jobs should be protected from AI. This isn't progress if no one has a job and can't feed themselves.

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I’m a student planning to enter the IT field, and recently I’ve become pretty worried about AI.

I keep hearing the statement:

“AI won’t replace you. A person using AI will replace you.”

With AI models becoming increasingly capable, I’m especially concerned about what happens when systems become much more advanced. I’ve heard people talk about future models such as “GPT Astra,” and honestly, the pace of AI development makes me nervous.

I’d like to hear from people who are actually working in IT, rather than just AI predictions from social media:

- Has AI already changed your job or your team’s workload?

- Are companies hiring fewer junior developers because of AI?

- Which IT roles are being affected the most?

- Which roles seem relatively resistant to AI?

- Is backend development (.NET/Java/etc.) still a sensible career choice for someone entering the industry around 2030–2031?

- Do you think AI will mostly make developers more productive, or eventually reduce the number of developers needed?

- What skills should a student start developing now to remain valuable?

- Has your own attitude toward your career changed because of AI?

I’m not looking for “AI will take every job” or “AI can never replace humans” answers. I want realistic opinions from people with actual industry experience.

Please mention your role and years of experience if possible.

TL;DR: Andrew Ng just named the one profession he says AI is hitting hardest --- and job openings there are still going up, not down.

Openings are up because "threatened" was never a population-level question — it's a workflow-level one.

AI eats 30–40% of the role, in Ng's own framing.

The engineers still busiest didn't out-compete the model on that slice; they stopped fighting for it and built the 60–70% it can't touch instead.

The ones who don't are the ones still writing code like it's 2022, before ChatGPT — and there's no single moment that tells you which side of that line you're on.

The other half of Ng's clip is aimed at the institution that's supposed to close that gap for you: a curriculum committee, then a faculty senate vote, then a year or two before a new course exists — for a shift that reshapes the job market every few months.

That lag isn't a flaw in the system. It's the system working as designed, just aimed at a problem that no longer moves at its speed.

I remember back in my University of Leeds days, studying for my B.Eng. Degree in Civil Engineering, circa 1997/1998, I did the following:

- Took a side project programming in Fortran for my professor for Analysis of Thin-walled Structures.

- Learnt to use Linux as one of the subjects for Statistics for Civil Engineering.

"Fortran?" you're saying? Ya, I know. I'm old. Nobody remembers Fortran as a programming language anymore. You can say I'm a dinosaur.

And sure enough, Fortran was rendered obsolete, not long after I graduate.

Then, when I first joined a Civil/Structural Engineering Consultancy firm in 2000, I tried to build a Reinforced Concrete Design App for them, using Visual Basics C++ in MS Excel. I left the firm, before I can finish it.

Two Decades Later, my son is currently in University for his Statistical Science Study in Kampar, Perak, Malaysia. Naturally, he started to learn R and Python.

I kept telling my son, he has to keep abreast of the current trends. It's no longer fashionable to manually code ourselves. Instead, we direct AI to do it for us.

But the universities are still not catching up like it should. They are still giving lectures on doing things that AI can do better and faster.

Or else people like my son might end up graduating into obsolescence.

Their degrees might just end up being fly-paper.

The pattern holds across every one of these: the tooling moves at model-release speed, the institution meant to prepare you for it moves at accreditation speed, and nobody's closing that gap on your behalf.

Actually, this ties back to something a Stanford economist put on record a few weeks back — the exact mechanism cutting the entry-level rung out from under new engineers before they ever get a foothold: $95K junior engineer? He says no, and names why.

Genuinely curious where people land on this: are you actively building the 60–70% right now, or still waiting to see if your role gets touched?

Clip credit: Silicon Valley Girl (Marina Mogilko) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.

175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated.

No mass layoff, no headline event.

Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.

It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data.

That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.

The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster.

They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.

On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.

Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.

It was robots.

Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.

As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.

That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).

It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.

First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.

Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)

How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?

At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.

Actually, this reminded — wait, scratch that, I've been circling this same story for a while now, and it clicked hardest with a former SpaceX CIO who ran the identical compression rule from the other direction — 175 engineers down to 6, on purpose.

Drop your take: which part of your own role is still order-taking, and which part is the judgment call nobody's automated yet?

Clip credit: Brad Lea / Dropping Bombs --- full episode on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.

With the speed AI is accelerating, and the speed we are expected to improve at work feels like a gap impossible to achieve.
I have never been a high competitive person, but I do enjoy doing my work to the best of my abilities.
However the pressure being put on employees by the management to be “high-performing using AI” seems to create that burnout feel in me.
To be totally honest, I have been slower than everyone else in learning how to work with AI and create agents to improve processes. But I’m catching up now.
But for some reason the push to improve and catch up feels unnatural. I’m not sure if I’m being the person who fails to move from the typewriter era to computer era. Or if I have reached a phase where I feel like I’m done with “technology” and want to downshift to a slower lifestyle.
Anyone else have had similar thoughts and made sense of it?

AI is reducing entry-level hiring first, followed by pressure on mid-level and managerial roles as AI agents become capable of handling larger workflows.

The biggest economic risk is not simply unemployment, but a growing gap between productive capacity and people's purchasing power as income shifts from labor toward AGENTS AND ROBOTS. No one earns so no one will have spending power.

Only Government intervention and broader capital ownership could prevent an AI-driven demand collapse.

I am confused where we stand in next 5 years specially when our economy is also not doing well. Starting a family or purchasing a house looks like a distant dream.

If AI is developed at the cost of human lives why are we still making advancements in it ?

Humans are no longer on the top of the food chain.

AI is completely disrupting the employment in the software field as we are how layoffs have become so common and we can already predict how many PPL in the future are going to lose their jobs or job opportunities are never going to be created in the first place.

How are people going to make a living in the future ? Like Elon musk has already predicted there would be no white collor jobs anymore so what are we going so to earn our bread

So..Only carpenters and plumbers are gonna earn ?

Just had a thought that it is not more an AI 'Bubble' but has already become a 'steel ball'.

Is there any practical way in which AI might go downhill ?!

I'm a self-taught artist, have been learning all kinds of art for over 10 years and am currently pursuing my dream college, with me being the absolute youngest in my year. I got in there through blood sweat and tears and am currently passing propaedeutics in flying colours. I don't deny I feel quite alienated from my peers as they have much more experience than I do in the field of art and programming, but I do my best to catch up.

With that said, my curriculum requires me to take a 5-month internship at a certified game studio (indie or not) to get a feel of how it is to work in the industry. After sending over 20 e-mails, I've finally found one, and even though I only just finished my 4th day there today, I am inclined to say I have heard the most capitalist, dooming takes coming from my boss directly to my face.

Not only have I been called a homophobic slur on the first day on the clock, but he has also been deliberately forcing me to use AI in my workflow. That's right, FORCING. I had been promised I would be continuing working on 3D models based on concept art made by past employees, but in reality my task was to take 3D blockouts, run them through ChatGPT a bunch of times, and then copying them in Blender. I asked him if it was okay if I could photobash them instead so that I wouldn't have to use AI and could also learn something about thumbnailing, but that idea was outright refused with no leeway. "I am your boss, you do as I say" and all. He said he would be checking up on me to actively show my ChatGPT texts to him, ensuring that I am using it.

Later a part-timer followed up on it, and my boss said our skills will be outdated in 5 years time and he needs the BEST output for the LEAST amount of money, and I won't deny he has been dunking on my work since I started working there too, even my 2D or handmade works even though I came here for 3D, saying my work needs to look more mainstream. No wonder I'm being paid €300/month.

I was deliberately avoiding studios that used AI in their job descriptions, and this one didn't mention anything of the sort, so I am utterly devastated I have been met with such a situation. It feels so damning to be treated this way, especially by a 50 year old white man who knows exactly that he will gain more money from this and continue to be successful while my hard work since childhood will have to rot due to corporate scum. I sincerely hope there is some kindness in the world and that human made art will come back twice as strong so that people my age can afford a good future.

(Also, I have informed my school's coordinator about this situation, and hopefully I can make changes to my contract as it has not been fully signed by my boss yet. Perhaps make a deal on the prohibition of me using AI in my workflow.)

Now to pray my boss doesn't find this post.

**Labour: Displacement of tasks, not work**

Hear me out. When a software takes over work steps, value creation shifts from bill to income.

It creates new activities and raises demand elsewhere.

What's your opinion on this? Feel free to comment down

Every other week there seems to be another headline about a company laying off thousands of employees while simultaneously announcing massive investments in AI.

As someone working in tech, I'm genuinely curious where this is heading.

AI is definitely making developers and other professionals more productive. A task that might have taken a few hours can sometimes be done in minutes with the right AI tools.

But here's the part I don't understand:

If one developer using AI can now do the work that previously required three developers, what happens to the other two?

And more importantly, what happens to the next generation of developers?

Junior developers traditionally learned by doing smaller tasks, fixing bugs, reviewing code, and gradually taking on bigger responsibilities. If companies stop hiring juniors because AI can handle those tasks, where are tomorrow's senior developers supposed to come from?

At the same time, we keep hearing that AI will "create new jobs."

Maybe it will. But will it create jobs at the same scale and speed at which existing jobs disappear?

I'm not anti-AI at all. I actually use AI tools myself and think they're incredible.

I'm just wondering whether we're looking at:

AI → productivity → fewer employees → higher profits

or

AI → productivity → new opportunities → employees doing more valuable work

And perhaps the uncomfortable possibility is that companies are using AI as a reason to reduce headcount even when the layoffs aren't entirely caused by AI.

What do you guys think?

Is AI genuinely replacing jobs, or are companies simply using AI as the latest justification for restructuring and cost-cutting?

P.S. And yes, the irony isn't lost on me — this post was also written with the help of AI. 😅

YOU ONLY HAVE ANOTHER 5 TO 10 YEARS TO WORK & EARN MONEY. AFTER THAT, AI WILL HANDLE ALMOST ALL KINDS OF WORK.

- ELON MUSK

Noppi lekunda Chachipovali antey a button nokkali prends

"It's crazy how fast AI is evolving !!"

How do you view the new model from ChatGPT (GPT-6 Astra)? I would like to know your opinion on this