7 ms·

My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once bo

My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipes out the economic value a system. This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.

paulsutter 1y ago
Why is this a worry? Sounds wonderful
- jspdown 1y ago
  I'm a bit worried about the social impacts. When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity. It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    As others in this thread have pointed out, this is basically what happened in the relatively short period of 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet telecommunications & software platforms. Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were relegated to much smaller niches. Overall it was great.
    - saturn8601 1y ago
      Man 1995, what a world that was. Seemed like a lot less stress.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > They will have to go back to training Why? When we've seen a sector collapse, the new jobs that rush in to fill the void are new, never seen before, and thus don't have training. You just jump in and figure things out along the way like everyone else. The problem, though, is that people usually seek out jobs that they like. When that collapses they are left reeling and aren't apt to want to embrace something new. That mental hurdle is hard to overcome.
    - throwaway35364 1y ago
      What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? You only need so many prompt engineers when each one can replace hundreds of traditional workers.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        > What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? That means either: 1. The capitalists failed to redeploy capital after the collapse. 2. We entered into some kind of post-capitalism future. To explore further, which one are you imagining?
        saturn8601 1y ago
        The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital today. Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for years. They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this since the Nixon years.
        9rx 1y ago
        > They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. Yes, we've had full employment for a long, long time. But the idea here is that AI will free up labor that is currently occupied doing something else. If you are trying to say it will fail to do that, that may be true, but if so this discussion is moot.
  - paulsutter 1y ago
    Good thing that we have AI tools that are tireless teachers
thehappypm 1y ago
Are you sure suggesting google search is in decline? The latest Google earnings call suggests it’s still growing
- hgomersall 1y ago
  We're in the phase of yanking hard on the enshittification handle. Of course that increases profits whilst sufficient users can't or won't move, but it devalues the product for users. It's in decline insomuch as it's got notably worse.
- Zanfa 1y ago
  Google Search is distinct from Google's expansive ad network. Google search is now garbage, but their ads are everywhere are more profitable than ever.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Most Google ads comes from Google search, its a misconception Google derives most of their profits from third party ads that is just a minor part of Googles revenue.
    - philipov 1y ago
      You are talking past each other. They say "Google search sucks now" and you retort with "But people still use it." Both things can be true at the same time.
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      You misunderstand. Making organic search results shittier will drive up ad revenue as people click on sponsored links in the search results page instead. Not a sustainable strategy in the long term though.
  - OtherShrezzing 1y ago
    On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business. >Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0] The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated, and users are returning to their search product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview. Just concise information about the thing you searched for, instantly, with links to sources. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802d40 https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802...
cornholio 1y ago
Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers, delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and hotels. The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster, your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers and programmers first, even if some fear it. The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital. Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues to accelerate. So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed, human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital transition into feudal lords.
- pydry 1y ago
  Given that the world is fast deglobalizing there will be a flood of factory work being reshored in the next 10 years. There's also going to be a shrinkage in the workforce caused by demographics (not enough kids to replace existing workers). At the same time education costs have been artificially skyrocketed. Personally the only scenario I see mass unemployment happening is under a "Russia-in-the-90s" style collapse caused by an industrial rugpull (supply chains being cut off way before we are capable of domestically substituting them) and/or the continuation of policies designed to make wealth inequality even worse.
  - cornholio 1y ago
    The world is not deglobalizing, US is.
    - clarionbell 1y ago
      The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved on.
bambax 1y ago
> This is what happened to Google Search This is completely untrue. Google Search still works, wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.
- weatherlite 1y ago
  Yeah I agree. But this is a strong perception and why Google stock is quite cheap (people are afraid Search is dying). I think Search has its place for years to come (while it will evolve as well with AI) and that Google is going to be pretty much unbeatable unless it is broken up.
- thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
  I can't buy it, unfortunately, because I've used Google long enough to know what it can be, and currently the primary thing it turns up for me is AI-generated SEO spam. I'll agree, though, that many other search systems are inferior.
benterix 1y ago
GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery. Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem already.
- noja 1y ago
  > looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery. I think the plastic surgery users disagree here: it seems like visible plastic surgery has become a look, a status symbol.
oytis 1y ago
What's the alternative here? Apart from well-known, but not so useful useful advice to have a ton of friends who can hire you or be so famous as to not need an introduction.
- thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
  There isn't one. However, every dumb thing in the world is a call to action. Maybe you can show how to do things going forward :)
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous "Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1]. The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth. [1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved-mightiest-spiritual-power-in-tolkien/ https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...
- Garlef 1y ago
  Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly, the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe you're right: First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us. Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM. (There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness. In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this engagement of the mind, is a prompt.
BrtByte 1y ago
Resume-sending is a great example: if everyone's blasting out AI-generated applications and companies are using AI to filter them, the whole "application" process collapses into meaningless busywork
- osigurdson 1y ago
  input -> ai expand -> ai compress -> input' Where input' is a distorted version of input. This is the new reality. We should start to be less impressed volume of text and instead focus on density of information.
- Attrecomet 1y ago
  No, the whole process is revealed to be meaningless busywork. But that step has been taken for a long time, as soon as automated systems and barely qualified hacks were employed to filter applications. I mean, they're trying to solve a hard and real problem, but those solutions are just bad at it.
  - tbrownaw 1y ago
    Doesn't this assume that a resume has no actual relation to reality?
    - Attrecomet 1y ago
      The technical information on the cv/resume is, in my opinion, at most half of the process. And that's assuming that the person is honest, and already has the cv-only knowledge of exactly how much to overstate and brag about their ability and to get through screens. Presenting soft skills is entirely random, anyway, so the only marker you can have on a cv is "the person is able to write whatever we deem well-written [$LANGUAGE] for our profession and knows exactly which meaningless phrases to include that we want to see". So I guess I was a bit strong on the low information content, but you better have a very, very strong resume if you don't know the unspoken rules of phrasing, formatting and bragging that are required to get through to an actual interview. For those of us stuck in the masses, this means we get better results by adding information that we basically only get by already being part of the in-group, not by any technical or even interpersonal expertise. Edit: If I constrain my argument to CVs only, I think my statement holds: They test an ability to send in acceptably written text, and apart from that, literally only in-group markers.
Rebuff5007 1y ago
Im not sure this is a great example... yes the infrastructure of posting and applying to jobs has to go, but the cost of recruitment in this world would actually be much higher... you likely need more people and more resources to recruit a single employee. In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world. Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may no longer exist because anyone and their mother can generate a professional-looking cover letter or personal web page or w/e.
- Attrecomet 1y ago
  I'm not sure that is actually a bad thing. Being a competent employee and writing a professional-looking resume are two almost entirely distinct skill sets held together only by "professional-looking" being a rather costly marker of being in the in-group for your profession.
belter 1y ago
I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse without ad-blockers.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Most people do browse without ad blockers, otherwise the entire DR ads industry would have collapsed years ago. Note also that ad blockers are much less prevalent on mobile.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  People will pay for what works. I consult for a number of ecommerce companies and I assure you they get a return on their spend.
bilsbie 1y ago
Making dumb processes dumber to the point of failure is actually a feature.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate. And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search. If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.
- pixl97 1y ago
  >google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate. Google search is fraught with it's own list of problems and crappy results. Acting like it's infallible is certainly an interesting position. >If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine. The convicted monopolist Google? Yea, that will go very well for them.
- voidspark 1y ago
  LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches with citations. They have been doing that for a year already. Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    And yet they still hallucinate and offer dead links. I've gotten wrong answers to simple historical event and people questions with sources that are entirely fabricated and referencing a dead link to an irrelevant site. Google results don't do that. This is why I use LLM's to help me come up with better searches that I perform and tune myself. That's valuable, the wordsmithing they can do given their solid word and word part statistics.
    - voidspark 1y ago
      Is that using the state of the art reasoning models with Google search enabled? OpenAI o3 Gemini 2.5 Pro Grok 3 Anything below that is obsolete or dumbed down to reduce cost I doubt this feature is actually broken and returning hallucinated links https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding
lysecret 1y ago
Funny you call it value I call it inefficiency.
weatherlite 1y ago
> This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline. Well their Search revenue actually went up last quarter, as all quarters. Overall traffic might be a bit down (they don't release that data so we can't be sure) but not revenue. While I do take tons of queries to LLMs now, the kind of queries Google actually makes a lot of money on (searching flights, restaurants etc) I don't go to an LLM for - either because of habit or because of fear these things are still hallucinating. If Search was starting to die I'd expect to see it in the latest quarter earnings but it isn't happening.
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
In the specific case of résumé-sending, the decline of the entire sector is a good thing. Nothing but make-work.

paulsutter 1y ago

Why is this a worry? Sounds wonderful

jspdown 1y ago
I'm a bit worried about the social impacts. When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity. It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  As others in this thread have pointed out, this is basically what happened in the relatively short period of 1995 to 2015 with the rise of global wireless internet telecommunications & software platforms. Many, many industries and jobs transformed or were relegated to much smaller niches. Overall it was great.
  - saturn8601 1y ago
    Man 1995, what a world that was. Seemed like a lot less stress.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > They will have to go back to training Why? When we've seen a sector collapse, the new jobs that rush in to fill the void are new, never seen before, and thus don't have training. You just jump in and figure things out along the way like everyone else. The problem, though, is that people usually seek out jobs that they like. When that collapses they are left reeling and aren't apt to want to embrace something new. That mental hurdle is hard to overcome.
  - throwaway35364 1y ago
    What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? You only need so many prompt engineers when each one can replace hundreds of traditional workers.
    - 9rx 1y ago
      > What if no jobs, or fewer jobs than before, rush in to fill the void this time? That means either: 1. The capitalists failed to redeploy capital after the collapse. 2. We entered into some kind of post-capitalism future. To explore further, which one are you imagining?
      - saturn8601 1y ago
        The capitalists are failing to redeploy capital today. Thats why they have been dumping it into assets for years. They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. AI will skyrocket their capital reserves. There is a poor mechanism for equalizing this since the Nixon years.
        9rx 1y ago
        > They have too much capital and dwindling things they can do with it. Yes, we've had full employment for a long, long time. But the idea here is that AI will free up labor that is currently occupied doing something else. If you are trying to say it will fail to do that, that may be true, but if so this discussion is moot.
- paulsutter 1y ago
  Good thing that we have AI tools that are tireless teachers

thehappypm 1y ago

Are you sure suggesting google search is in decline? The latest Google earnings call suggests it’s still growing

hgomersall 1y ago
We're in the phase of yanking hard on the enshittification handle. Of course that increases profits whilst sufficient users can't or won't move, but it devalues the product for users. It's in decline insomuch as it's got notably worse.
Zanfa 1y ago
Google Search is distinct from Google's expansive ad network. Google search is now garbage, but their ads are everywhere are more profitable than ever.
- Jensson 1y ago
  Most Google ads comes from Google search, its a misconception Google derives most of their profits from third party ads that is just a minor part of Googles revenue.
  - philipov 1y ago
    You are talking past each other. They say "Google search sucks now" and you retort with "But people still use it." Both things can be true at the same time.
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    You misunderstand. Making organic search results shittier will drive up ad revenue as people click on sponsored links in the search results page instead. Not a sustainable strategy in the long term though.
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business. >Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0] The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated, and users are returning to their search product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview. Just concise information about the thing you searched for, instantly, with links to sources. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802d40 https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802...

cornholio 1y ago

Probably the first significant hit are going to be drivers, delivery men, truckers etc. a demographic of 5 million jobs in US and double that in EU, with ripple effects costing other millions of jobs in industries such as roadside diners and hotels. The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster, your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers and programmers first, even if some fear it. The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital. Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues to accelerate. So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed, human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital transition into feudal lords.

pydry 1y ago
Given that the world is fast deglobalizing there will be a flood of factory work being reshored in the next 10 years. There's also going to be a shrinkage in the workforce caused by demographics (not enough kids to replace existing workers). At the same time education costs have been artificially skyrocketed. Personally the only scenario I see mass unemployment happening is under a "Russia-in-the-90s" style collapse caused by an industrial rugpull (supply chains being cut off way before we are capable of domestically substituting them) and/or the continuation of policies designed to make wealth inequality even worse.
- cornholio 1y ago
  The world is not deglobalizing, US is.
  - clarionbell 1y ago
    The world is deglobalizing. EU has been cutting off from Russia since the war started, and forcing medical industries to reshore since covid. At the same time it has begun drive to remilitarize itself. This means more heavy industry and all of it local. There is brewing conflict across continents. India and Pakistan, Red sea region, South China sea. The list goes on and on. It's time to accept it. The world has moved on.

bambax 1y ago

> This is what happened to Google Search This is completely untrue. Google Search still works, wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.

weatherlite 1y ago
Yeah I agree. But this is a strong perception and why Google stock is quite cheap (people are afraid Search is dying). I think Search has its place for years to come (while it will evolve as well with AI) and that Google is going to be pretty much unbeatable unless it is broken up.
thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
I can't buy it, unfortunately, because I've used Google long enough to know what it can be, and currently the primary thing it turns up for me is AI-generated SEO spam. I'll agree, though, that many other search systems are inferior.

benterix 1y ago

GenAI is like plastic surgery for people who want to look better - looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery. Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem already.

noja 1y ago
> looks good only if you can do it in a way it doesn't show it's plastic surgery. I think the plastic surgery users disagree here: it seems like visible plastic surgery has become a look, a status symbol.

oytis 1y ago

What's the alternative here? Apart from well-known, but not so useful useful advice to have a ton of friends who can hire you or be so famous as to not need an introduction.

thatjoeoverthr 1y ago
There isn't one. However, every dumb thing in the world is a call to action. Maybe you can show how to do things going forward :)

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous "Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1]. The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth. [1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved-mightiest-spiritual-power-in-tolkien/ https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...

Garlef 1y ago
Interesting: At first I was objecting in my mind ("Clearly, the magic - LLMs - can create effect instead of only revealing it.") but upon further reflecting on this, maybe you're right: First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us. Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM. (There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
- mjburgess 1y ago
  My view has been something of a middle ground. It's not exactly that it reveals relevant domains of activity are merely performative, but its a kind of "accelerationism of the almost performative". So it pushes these almost-performative systems into a death spiral of pure uselessness. In this sense, I have rarely seen AI have negative impacts. Insofar as an LLM can generate a dozen lines of code, it forces developers to engage in less "performative copy-paste of stackoverflow/code-docs/examples/etc." and engage the mind in what those lines should be. Even if, this engagement of the mind, is a prompt.

BrtByte 1y ago

Resume-sending is a great example: if everyone's blasting out AI-generated applications and companies are using AI to filter them, the whole "application" process collapses into meaningless busywork

osigurdson 1y ago
input -> ai expand -> ai compress -> input' Where input' is a distorted version of input. This is the new reality. We should start to be less impressed volume of text and instead focus on density of information.
Attrecomet 1y ago
No, the whole process is revealed to be meaningless busywork. But that step has been taken for a long time, as soon as automated systems and barely qualified hacks were employed to filter applications. I mean, they're trying to solve a hard and real problem, but those solutions are just bad at it.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  Doesn't this assume that a resume has no actual relation to reality?
  - Attrecomet 1y ago
    The technical information on the cv/resume is, in my opinion, at most half of the process. And that's assuming that the person is honest, and already has the cv-only knowledge of exactly how much to overstate and brag about their ability and to get through screens. Presenting soft skills is entirely random, anyway, so the only marker you can have on a cv is "the person is able to write whatever we deem well-written [$LANGUAGE] for our profession and knows exactly which meaningless phrases to include that we want to see". So I guess I was a bit strong on the low information content, but you better have a very, very strong resume if you don't know the unspoken rules of phrasing, formatting and bragging that are required to get through to an actual interview. For those of us stuck in the masses, this means we get better results by adding information that we basically only get by already being part of the in-group, not by any technical or even interpersonal expertise. Edit: If I constrain my argument to CVs only, I think my statement holds: They test an ability to send in acceptably written text, and apart from that, literally only in-group markers.

Rebuff5007 1y ago

Im not sure this is a great example... yes the infrastructure of posting and applying to jobs has to go, but the cost of recruitment in this world would actually be much higher... you likely need more people and more resources to recruit a single employee. In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world. Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may no longer exist because anyone and their mother can generate a professional-looking cover letter or personal web page or w/e.

Attrecomet 1y ago
I'm not sure that is actually a bad thing. Being a competent employee and writing a professional-looking resume are two almost entirely distinct skill sets held together only by "professional-looking" being a rather costly marker of being in the in-group for your profession.

belter 1y ago

I had similar thoughts, but then remembered companies still burn billions on Google Ads, sure that humans...and not bots...click them, and thinking that in 2025 most people browse without ad-blockers.

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
Most people do browse without ad blockers, otherwise the entire DR ads industry would have collapsed years ago. Note also that ad blockers are much less prevalent on mobile.
theshackleford 1y ago
People will pay for what works. I consult for a number of ecommerce companies and I assure you they get a return on their spend.

bilsbie 1y ago

Making dumb processes dumber to the point of failure is actually a feature.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Until we solve the hallucination problem google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate. And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search. If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.

pixl97 1y ago
>google search still has a place of power as something that doesn’t hallucinate. Google search is fraught with it's own list of problems and crappy results. Acting like it's infallible is certainly an interesting position. >If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine. The convicted monopolist Google? Yea, that will go very well for them.
voidspark 1y ago
LLMs are already grounding their results in Google searches with citations. They have been doing that for a year already. Optional with all the big models from OpenAI, Google, xAI
- asadotzler 1y ago
  And yet they still hallucinate and offer dead links. I've gotten wrong answers to simple historical event and people questions with sources that are entirely fabricated and referencing a dead link to an irrelevant site. Google results don't do that. This is why I use LLM's to help me come up with better searches that I perform and tune myself. That's valuable, the wordsmithing they can do given their solid word and word part statistics.
  - voidspark 1y ago
    Is that using the state of the art reasoning models with Google search enabled? OpenAI o3 Gemini 2.5 Pro Grok 3 Anything below that is obsolete or dumbed down to reduce cost I doubt this feature is actually broken and returning hallucinated links https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding

lysecret 1y ago

Funny you call it value I call it inefficiency.

weatherlite 1y ago

> This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline. Well their Search revenue actually went up last quarter, as all quarters. Overall traffic might be a bit down (they don't release that data so we can't be sure) but not revenue. While I do take tons of queries to LLMs now, the kind of queries Google actually makes a lot of money on (searching flights, restaurants etc) I don't go to an LLM for - either because of habit or because of fear these things are still hallucinating. If Search was starting to die I'd expect to see it in the latest quarter earnings but it isn't happening.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago

In the specific case of résumé-sending, the decline of the entire sector is a good thing. Nothing but make-work.