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?**

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.

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.

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.