281–290 of 939 posts
> a computer scientist class traitor
Loved this. In addition to this class traitors, we also had (much earlier) counter-revolutionaries that sold us a Tech Utopia in 90s and then promptly setup camp in FANGS to give us the Surveillance Tech Dystopia.
[my tongue is somewhat lodged in my cheek here but only a bit]
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I just recently switched to Kagi. It's worth paying a few bucks to get decent results.
I find myself seeing nothing useful on Kagi, going to Google, seeing nothing useful, then asking ChatGPT and sometimes seeing something useful and othertimes being led on a wild goose chase. The general state of information retrieval seems bleak. Reddit is usually the solution for me, even on technical matters now.
I am generally sceptical of GPT results, but also of other results, and GPT search is easier to fine tune and drill down into. For example if it gives me an obviously wrong answer, you can call BS. And it even apologises! Much more difficult to do for search engines.
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What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.
You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…
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...which is why society needs safeguards to guard against people like you. Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most harmful forces in our society. And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're arguing for isn't a free market, i…
> If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent. Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they are completely incompetent, they'll run the company into the ground and…
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You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a str…
> You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it. It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomp…
Hard to place the blame on a single person, though I do think a "management consultant wearing an engineer costume" captures Google's engineering leadership these days
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> and gives us a name to actually blame. Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations. As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior. It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unila…
> shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the malfeseance we're observing. It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and disrupt.
I had the unfortunate experience of running a startup with a couple of guys from a name brand fintech. They absolutely demolished the company before we got our first sale.
I couldn’t quite work out if these guys learned their mendacious trade from $bigcorp or if $bigcorps simply attract these kind of people.
My sense is that it’s a bit from both columns - I think that huge, profit driven megacorps, in general, are bad for society, in part because corporate culture itself is rapacious, and in part because they deliver enormous power into the hands of incredibly selfish people.
Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”. That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.