6 ms·

I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegate

by ehnto 7mo ago

I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated. Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps. Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it. Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.

jstanley 7mo ago
If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think. The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
- dv_dt 7mo ago
  The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
- komali2 7mo ago
  > The richest person I know talks to robots all the time. I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves. If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams. I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
  - argee 7mo ago
    I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052
    - swiftcoder 7mo ago
      I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather have had a real job, even if it was to build something he didn't fully agree with)
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone. It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool. It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
  - nandomrumber 7mo ago
    Correct. The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff. Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right? So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff. That’s less time teaching and innovating. Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.
      - danny_codes 7mo ago
        My company won’t backfill product management in timely fashion. Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
- type0 7mo ago
  So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.
- jt2190 7mo ago
  By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.
- ehnto 7mo ago
  Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that up. Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.
SecretDreams 7mo ago
"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading. Otherwise, totally agree.
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.
  - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource. When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition. Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
    - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      > Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource. This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table. I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above. >Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil. I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.
threatofrain 7mo ago
Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
- d-us-vb 7mo ago
  Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.
- joe_mamba 7mo ago
  >but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that? Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - carlosjobim 7mo ago
    With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
    - joe_mamba 7mo ago
      Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)
      - 7mo ago

by ehnto 7mo ago

jstanley 7mo ago

If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think. The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.

dv_dt 7mo ago
The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
komali2 7mo ago
> The richest person I know talks to robots all the time. I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves. If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams. I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
- argee 7mo ago
  I don’t think John Carmack likes to tell people what to do, regardless of wealth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170052
  - swiftcoder 7mo ago
    I'm not sure that he doesn't like to, so much as that the position he ended up in as a result of the Oculus acquisition had no actual authority attached to it. He was functionally a glorifier adviser, to trot out at trade shows (and reading between the lines, this was a pretty frustrating position to end up in - he'd rather have had a real job, even if it was to build something he didn't fully agree with)
TeMPOraL 7mo ago
Nah, they're right. In fact, "self-service" is one of the biggest value transfers from people to capital owners, a society-wide "fast one" the computing industry pulled over everyone. It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool. It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
- nandomrumber 7mo ago
  Correct. The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff. Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right? So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff. That’s less time teaching and innovating. Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    Same is true in all white-collar work, too. I mean, not to look too far, it's very obvious in our own industry if you look for it. Highly-paid engineers hired for high-skill engineering work, but spending most of their time doing their own task management, calendar management, memo writing, presentations, trip planning, trip expensing, filing HR documents, and such? Heck, even the proliferation of ideas like "devops" or "devsecops" or whatever-ops, lauded as breaking down siloses, is just using buzzwords as cover for another iteration of headcount reduction.
    - danny_codes 7mo ago
      My company won’t backfill product management in timely fashion. Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
type0 7mo ago
So what, the richest person I know talks to DMT jesters, it doesn't make it good.
jt2190 7mo ago
By choice. Your friend is presumably wealthy enough that they could talk to a human instead, or completely delegate whatever they’re talking to AI about and never talk of it further.
ehnto 7mo ago
Oh I am not speaking from experience here, I'll clear that up. Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.

SecretDreams 7mo ago

"Time-poor" rather than "time poor" would make this a lot more readable. I struggled a bit on the first go of reading. Otherwise, totally agree.

lotsofpulp 7mo ago
Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago
  Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource. When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition. Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
  - lotsofpulp 7mo ago
    > Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource. This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table. I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above. >Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil. I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.

threatofrain 7mo ago

Why can’t people just ask for simpler, less custom, prebuilt websites? If you want a custom app then you can always create spaghetti logic, but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?

d-us-vb 7mo ago
Instructions unclear: my website is now advertising the logic of spaghetti for an Italian restaurant.
joe_mamba 7mo ago
>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that? Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
  - joe_mamba 7mo ago
    Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)
    - 7mo ago