Sure, but are you implying that is because of our stricter enforcement of the laws? Or other systemic / environmental causes (eg systemic poor mental health)?
I am unfamiliar with the reasons to which the varying murder rate is ascribed. If I had to guess, I would guess economics is #1.
My CEO sent a company-wide email this week saying "AI use is mandatory for all developers". Until this kind of mandatory bullshit stops I'm happy to see other people fighting the good fight and publicly saying that they want to keep doing a job they actually enjoy.
Many of my coworkers have embraced AI coding and the quality of our product has suffered for it. They deliver bad, hard-to-support software that technically checks some boxes and then rush on to produce more slop. It feels like a regression to the days of measuring LOC as a proxy for productivity.
I'm seeing the top-down AI usage pushed from the same types of leaders and companies who love to outsource and are happy with shit shovelled over the wall then devs firefight production bugs forever. It's just a good reminder they don't care a bit about quality.
It seems that poor tech leadership are fearing that they won't be able to move onto their next job if they don't put "implemented AI efficiencies" on their CV now. It's up to us grunts to work out how to actually make it not suck.
what's your exit strategy? if i got a letter like that i'd either be out switching jobs at the first opportunity, or i'd ignore it until i get fired for refusing to comply, while hoping that disaster strikes before that happens, or maybe just hoping that noone notices.
As other people have pointed out, the trend towards "retro" tech is like vinyl being popular - it's a nostalgia throwback, not a massive wave of consumer preference. There's a small but profitable niche of enthusiasts who want old electonics. Call me when a major consumer electronics company is making it a selling point that their devices are "dumb".
The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? Two giant monopolists creating a new surveillance-tech product which nobody likes. It couldn't be more "monoculture".
> The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? Two giant monopolists creating a new surveillance-tech product which nobody likes. It couldn't be more "monoculture".
Are we really concerned about an Essilor-Luxottica monopoly? Is there lock-in, shady dealings, etc? Can't you just buy sunglasses from other brands (or brandless glasses)?
Regarding Meta, they are playing a role in shifting us from monoculture (or two player markets) to three or more players.
Meta may be ahead of the pack, but they'll be joined by Google and Apple soon. Apple's poor treatment of their partners through the App Store really damaged the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is a good thing.
One does not need to love Meta to see the value in bringing more players into a given market. We deserve more than Apple vs. Google across all of our decisions.
The surveillance is unfortunately inevitable at this point. Cameras are cheap and are everywhere. You're never more than a few feet from a multi-camera cellphone. I don't see any way around this short to national legislation restricting their use.
I might have said the same, but ever since a guy showed me a first-person go-karting video he took on his Ray-Ban Metas, I've been hooked on the idea of being able to record experiences like that... so stupid but so cool.
Capitalism is destroying institutions. Any new technology must be employed in service of "number go up". In this system externalities have to be priced in with taxes, but it's cheaper to buy off legislators than to actually consider the externalities.
This is how we get food that has fewer nutrients but ships better, free next-day delivery of plastic trash from across the world that doesn't work, schools that exist to extract money rather than teach, social media that exists primarily to shove ads in your face and trick you into spending more time on it.
In the next 4 years we will see the end of the American experiment, as shareholder capitalism completely consumes itself and produces an economy that can only extort and exploit but not make anything of value.
I'll focus just on food here: people do have a choice. I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something? Eating this kind of food you can even stack your life chances more in your favor. Huge amounts of information abound as to the how you can do that. Consumers, if they are free to choose, determine value and entrepreneurs will respond. It can be profoundly distorted, that's true but at base, capitalism is doing something that someone else finds of value or not.
Even if we ignore the siblings: but what is being selected for? Pure economic value, right? In other words, imagine two choices: a cheap meal that takes X time and Y money to prepare and eat, vs. a nutritious meal that takes X+n1 time and Y+n2 money to prepare and eat.
If the "fitness function" of the system is "produces more economic value" then it will select for (encourage) the first option because health and enjoyment of the consumer aren't being selected for. They are second-order effects at best, like pollution and other externalities.
I'm reminded of the RFK speech (the dead one, not the death-adjacent Jr.):
"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
> If the "fitness function" of the system is "produces more economic value" then it will select for (encourage) the first option because health and enjoyment of the consumer aren't being selected for.
(Re-reading this, the part I glossed over is that choosing the cheap/quick meal leaves more time for "work")
The basic ingredients are also lower quality and less nutritious. For example, vegetables and fruits these days (at least for the U.S. market) are grown almost entirely for size and appearance, not for the amount of trace nutrients they contain or other quality measures.
Sibling comment is correct, also in the US we have "Food Deserts"[1]: lower income areas that lack typical grocery stores, and might only have convenience stores that only stock prepackaged or processed foods. Any raw ingredients available are expensive and/or low-quality.
>I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something?
Sort of. To add to what the other replies had to say, the US government subsidizes different things. That's why even basic ingredients may have high fructose corn syrup in it. Be it as a primary ingredient, or to try and dillute the actual ingredient you want in that particular piece of food.
and since it's subsidized, these can be cheaper to eat here than to get some good fruits and veggies.
That's not capitalism. That's human nature. We want a better future.
Capitalism assigns a price to this, makes it more efficient. (By allowing people to buy/rent productive things (land, machines) hire people, and buy unproductive setups, improve it, and earn a profit on the effect of the improvement itself.)
If you think "shareholder capitalism" overplayed this, well, maybe, but it seems that manufacturing is getting fucked by tariffs, construction is getting fucked by NIMBYism, and ultimately the world is getting fucked by lack of improvements, by standing still, by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs, and not because people want to make number go up!
Of course there's a ton of problems with power concentration everywhere, but market liberalism correlates with liberty and well-being, and the solution is not USSR-style denial of markets (and in general, behavioral-, and micro- and macroeconomics), it's understanding them, and using taxes to help people to participate in them.
NIMBYism is a very obvious form of "number go up". Boomers were promised endless property value growth, and they've destroyed city planning to make sure it happens. If there was a market correction retirees would be furious.
> by regressing to a past that never was despite the costs
People assume that rejecting capitalism requires us to take a step backwards. Why would that be? If you woke up tomorrow and there was more public housing your iPhone wouldn't disappear.
Theoretically replacing capitalism with something else is not the issue. (As long as there are accurate supply-and-demand signals for efficient allocation of resources).
The issue is that people ideologically want to "set" inconsistent supply-and-demand curves. And since there's no signal things look fine and dandy initially. And then the usual smudging of the numbers start to happen. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty... )
Of course, in a capitalistic system there's a very crude exchange rate for the things we want and the things we have through the profit motive (with all the speculation and technological (im)possibilities and everything added in), but it's usually more "correct" than numbers set by committees of people really really wanting to have something while denying some specific - usually hard to separate - aspect of that. (For example lot of people really don't like it when people 'inherit' easy money for very good reasons and this gets amplified when it comes to real estate, and this is a very big factor why a lot of NIMBY ideas found good traction with young "progressives".)
I think the wrong lesson to draw for this is that it's just a systems problem. Somehow if we do a different song and dance, the outcome will be different. I've been thinking that the end state of capitalism and communism are not that different - what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all? The endpoint is the same, the game becomes about relative power over others, in service of an unending hunger.
Capitalism is the manifestation of the aggregate human psyche. We've agreed that this part of our selves that desires to possess things and the part that feels better when having even more, is essential. This is the root we need to question, but have not yet dared to question. Because if we follow this path of questioning, and continue to shed each of our grasping neuroticisms, the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.
We will have to confront that question eventually because we will always have to face the truth.
>what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all?
Unimaginable wealth means you live as comfortably as you want. no wealth means you are out on the streets and can't even afford the basics needed to get yourself out of the rut society threw you in.
If I'm to take this as a comparison of "wealth ends up in the hands of one", the difference with communism is that the one with the wealth still needs to distribute it, lest they are driven out by a coup or by annihilating all the power they had (the power over their people, who are now dead or fled).
Captistlism makes no such promise of distribution, and who to uprise against is much less clear. toppling a monopoly leader also doesn't necessarily destroy the institution either.
>the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.
If we give up our humanity to someone else, we may as well be. But that's not something I relinquish easily.
It's not capitalism, it's the monetary system that's the problem. It's not a level playing field. Capitalism requires a fair monetary system as a precondition. Though I can agree that communism would be better than whatever perverse system we have now.
I think you're both right. Capitalism is an important part of a liberal society. But when we let private institutions become all-powerful then they can erode our freedom too. The problem isn't government or enterprise, it's the idea that only one of these things should be paramount. We need government to do unprofitable but necessary things and we need enterprise to pursue risky things. And we need government to regulate enterprise and enterprise to hold government accountable.
You can name a lot of symptoms of the problem but at its heart there's a lack of accountability in any of our power structures whether they be corporate or government.
I disagree with the idea that regulations work. Just consider forever chemicals like phthalates... Known endocrine disruptors. They're everywhere disrupting our hormones and health. Carcinogens are everywhere. How is regulation really working?
What works is the threat of punishment and full liability as opposed to limited liability. Regulations just raise entry barriers and stifle competition which makes the system less fair. It's like trying to prevent a crime before it happens; makes no sense. If liability is limited it means that somebody is not being held accountable for some portion of the damage that they're doing. Limited liability just externalizes the surplus liability to society...
I think capitalism can work if operating on a level monetary playing field within simple guardrails but without regulations. We could have wealth tax above a certain high amount to prevent political power imbalance.
It would be all massively worst without regulations. In fact, regulation provably works. When you remove it, situation with pollution and health gets worst. If you add it, it gets better.
> What works is the threat of punishment
That is what regulations provide.
> full liability
Without regulation and just a court system, this is complete failure. This just ensure that you can harm people who cant afford expensive lawsuits. Which is why big companies who want to pollute preferer this over regulations.
And the most harmed companies are small ones. They do not know in advance what is allowed and what is not.
You're mad about loopholes and lack of enforcement. Not the regulations theselves. If you can't enforce it, it's not a good regulation.
And yes, some things do need higher bars to entry than others. That's a feature. You don't want just anyone handling the food you eat or the money you store.
One of biggest obstacles we will have to overcome is for people stop thinking that communism is the only alternative and cling to capitalism.
Capitalism was tried by 120 countries in past 120 years. Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering. Every country employ 50% of workforce on pointless jobs only because capitalism requires artificial scarcity.
>Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering.
By hat metric, capitalism has failed as well. Any successes came from breaking the pure principle and either breaking apart competition (antitrust), regulating competition to comply, or employing non-capistialistic services to support it (social security being one of the big ones).
A key thing I noticed in sincere anecdotes about LLM code is that is always seems to be outside of the author's area of expertise.
I work with an infrastructure team that are old school sysadmins, not really into coding. They are now prodigiously churning out apps that "work" for a given task. It is producing a ton of technical debt and slowing down new feature development, but this team doesn't really get it because they don't know enough software engineering to understand.
Likewise the recent example of an LLM "coding a browser" where the result didn't compile and wasn't useful. If you took it at face value you'd think "wow that's a hard task I couldn't do, and an LLM did it alone". In fact they spent a ton of effort on manually herding the LLM only for it to produce something pretty useless.
When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, what choice do you have? There are civilian aircraft up in the sky. Having a fighter jet run into one and kill a bunch of civilians is a bad PR situation.
How would this happen? Jets are significantly more maneuverable than anything else in the sky. The military could, you know, pilot the plane so it does not hit anything.
It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.
I have been the first (and only) DevOps person at a couple startups. I'm usually pretty guilty of NIH and wanting to develop in-house tooling to improve productivity. But more and more in my career I try to make boring choices.
Cost is usually not a huge problem beyond seed stage. Series A-B the biggest problem is growing the customer base so the fixed infra costs become a rounding error. We've built the product and we're usually focused on customer enablement and technical wins - proving that the product works 100% of the time to large enterprises so we can close deals. We can't afford weird flakiness in the middle of a POC.
Another factor I rarely see discussed is bus factor. I've been in the industry for over a decade, and I like to be able to go on vacation. It's nice to hand off the pager sometimes. Using established technologies makes it possible to delegate responsibility to the rest of the team, instead of me owning a little rats nest fiefdom of my own design.
The fact is that if 5k/month infra cost for a core part of the service sinks your VC backed startup, you've got bigger problems. Investors gave you a big pile of money to go and get customers _now_. An extra month of runway isn't going to save you.
The issue is when all the spending gets you is more complexity, maintenance, and you don't even get a performance benefit.
I once interviewed with a company that did some machine learning stuff, this was a while back when that typically meant "1 layer of weights from a regression we run overnight every night". The company asked how I had solved the complex problem of getting the weights to inference servers. I said we had a 30 line shell script that ssh'd them over and then mv'd them into place. Meanwhile the application reopened the file every so often. Zero problems with it ever. They thought I was a caveman.
I work for a small company with a handful of devs. We don't have a dedicated devops person, so I do it all. Everything is self-hosted. Been that way for years. But, yeah, if I go on vacation and something foes screwy, the business is hosed. However, even if it were hosted on AWS or elsewhere, it would not be any better. If anything, it may be worse. Instead of a person being well versed in standards based tech, they'd have to be an AWS expert. Why would we want that?
I have recently started using terraform/tofu and ansible to automate nearly all of the devops operations. We are at a point where Claude Code can use these tools and our existing configs to make configuration changes, debug issues by reviewing logs etc. It is much faster at debugging an issue than I am and I know our stuff inside and out.
I am beginning to think that AI will soon force people to rethink their cloud hosting strategy.
I identify as a caveman and I fucking love it. I build a 250k sloc C++ project hundreds of times a day with a 50 line bash script. Works every time, on any machine, everywhere.
Those scripts have logs, right? Log a hostname and path when they run. If no one thinks to look at logs, then there's a bigger problem going on than a one-off script.
That becomes a problem if you let the shell script mutate into an "everything" script that's solving tons of business problems. Or if you're reinventing kubernetes with shell scripts. There's still a place for simple solutions to simple problems.
You can literally have a 20 line Python script on cron that verifies if everything ran properly and fires off a PagerDuty if it didn't. And it looks like PagerDuty even supports heartbeat so that means even if your Python script failed, you could get alerted.
Which is why you take the time to put usage docs in the repo README, make sure the script is packaged and deployed via the same methods that the rest of the company uses, and ensure that it logs success/failure conditions. That's been pretty standard at every organization I've been at my entire professional career. Anyone who can't manage that is going to create worse problems when designing/building/maintaining a more complex system.
Yah. A lot of the complexity in data movement or processing is unneeded. But decent standardized orchestration, documentation, and change management isn't optional even for the 20 line shell script. Thankfully, that stuff is a lot easier for the 20 line standard shell script.
Or python. The python3 standard library is pretty capable, and it's ubiquitous. You can do a lot in 50-100 lines (counting documentation) with no dependencies. In turn it's easy to plug into the other stuff.
> We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.
I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
Based on who's definition? Plenty of people use "middle management" to describe anyone under executives, but who doesn't spend time closely aligned with front-line work. In some structures, lowest level management is closely integrated with front-line, but I'd argue PHB has next to zero exposure to the actual work or goings-on.
PHB is Dilbert’s boss, yes? That’s front line manager, first level manager, whatever. By definition a middle manager has managers above and below them.
No. A first level manager cannot be middle management. A small company might not have middle management but the first level manager is bottom management.
reply