Thanks, Tim. I do feel for the folks working for the more egregiously
worker-hostile companies. The kind of speed-up that they talk about is
what we've seen in industries since the industrial revolution, but this
is happening to supposedly "white collar" workers.
They don't mention age nor time on the job (well, I read through it
quickly, so if I missed that ...) and I would love to see those figures.
And, the statement that "Founders are the happiest people in tech" is,
to me, the usual question of power.
kc
On 7/23/26 2:43 PM, Tim Spalding wrote:
> On the topic of this thread list members may be interested in a recent
> study, surveying some six thousand tech workers—developers, product
> managers, marketing, etc.—on how they're feeling about the industry. As you
> might expect, AI was the central topic of the survey. The survey follows on
> a similar one from last year, and was put together by tech researcher Noam
> Segal and Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny's Podcast.
>
> How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two
> https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026
>
> As the title indicates, the results show extreme bifurcation. About half of
> tech workers are excited and energized by AI, the other half range from
> conflicted to disoriented to resentful. There are a lot of other
> interesting findings. They don't survey outside of tech. A similar study
> focused on library tech workers alone, or on library workers generally,
> would be interesting.
>
> Segal and Rachitsky discuss the results in depth in a recent "Lenny's
> Podcast," available here:
>
> How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment
> survey (Noam Segal)
> https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-actually-feel-about
>
> Best,
> Tim Spalding
> LibraryThing
>
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 7:45 AM Rich Kulawiec <rsk_at_gsp.org> wrote:
>
>> Before I get started: I'm maintaining a page of links relevant to
>> the AI/LLM field. It's in loose (very loose) chronological order
>> and it's usually updated every couple of days. I've tried to avoid
>> paywalls, but: no guarantees. It's a mix of articles, reports, papers,
>> opinions, and occasional rants. Here's the page:
>>
>> Topic-AI
>> https://www.firemountain.net/~rsk/topic-ai.html
>>
>> There are currently about 2350 links there. One recent entry of particular
>> relevance is this:
>>
>> Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
>> https://www.trueobserver.com/news/6a566b1afb4011d7ecfcb1d1
>>
>> Now for a comment or three:
>>
>> I've studied AI/expert systems/statistical pattern recognition/etc.
>> and I'm very dubious about what the big tech companies are doing.
>> It's a combination of massive hype and sloppy, careless, haphazard
>> development that requires exponentially-increasing amounts of power,
>> water, CPU, memory, disk, and money...and imposes severe costs on the
>> electric grid, the environment, and anyone unfortunate enough to live
>> in the vicinity of massive data centers -- as well as on anyone who's
>> trying to run a web-facing resource, thanks to the abusive behavior of
>> the web crawlers being used by these companies.
>>
>> On that last point: I've been thinking about something Grady Booch wrote:
>>
>> "These deals have absolutely nothing to do with increasing the
>> accuracy of any large language model.
>>
>> Such architectures are inherently just next word predictors
>> and any correlation their output has with truth is only due to
>> statistical coincidence.
>>
>> What these deals do have to do with is locking up exclusive
>> access to sources of information, thereby concentrating power
>> in the hands of just a few organizations who can afford to do so."
>>
>> And about something that Sam Altman (OpenAI) said:
>>
>> "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity
>> or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
>>
>> I think these explain why AI/LLM web crawlers are so very badly behaved:
>> it's deliberate. Consider: there are all kinds of open source crawlers
>> readily available. There's Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/).
>> There's a wealth of knowledge/experience in this area that makes it
>> possible for anyone to efficiently and responsibly get their paws on
>> pretty much anything on the open web; it's just not that hard to do
>> things the right way, even if you've never done it before.
>>
>> Yet the AI/LLM web crawlers are ignoring robots.txt, evading firewalls,
>> hijacking IOT devices, and conducting D/DOS attacks against millions
>> of web sites. They've forced web site operators to take all kinds
>> of countermeasures: there are entire software projects (e.g., Anubis)
>> devoted to stopping them. There are two IETF working groups. There are
>> all kinds of bot tests that have been deployed (and some of them are
>> rather badly broken). What was the open web is now a hot mess.
>>
>> For a while, I thought these were mistakes, that the AI/LLM programmers
>> were just being sloppy -- but I don't think that any more. I think
>> it's deliberate strategy. I'm going to refer to those quotes above
>> and make this assertion: it's the intention of these companies to drink
>> the wells dry -- and then salt them.
>>
>> After all, they can't make themselves the exclusive sources of knowledge
>> (for profit) if there are other people giving it away (for free).
>> Thus every web site, every library, every archive, every repository must
>> not only be crawled with no respect for copyright/terms-of-use/etc.,
>> it must also be rendered unusable so that primary sources are unavailable
>> and everyone is forced to rely on AI slop.
>>
>> ---rsk
>>
>
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
Received on Thu Jul 23 2026 - 20:33:07 EDT