721–730 of 759 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives. When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible. The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happe…
(I don't really respond to these kind of threads, but I'll respond to you because I respect you and am a Zerotier customer and have been for years. Thanks for your work!) > My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like t…
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives. When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible. The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happe…
> If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one. How true is this? Certainly trust busters like Teddy had a lot of political power. Though I wouldn't call them a new capital class. > Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives. You're advocating for po…
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives. When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible. The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happe…
>Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class. The typical pop Marxist…
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
I know it's a joke but... Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy. If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
> Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy. No. Oh my god no. This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed. Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!
I worked at a 10,000 person company ~15y ago. I was a lowly employee at the time; just a run of the mill Research Analyst writing code in SAS. I got on the elevator w/the CEO, said hello, and he knew exactly who I was and what I did. Two important grounding items for me when I went into management and my career accelerated: 1. Take the worst boss I ever had (coincidentally at the same company) and make sure that I do…
I had a physics prof ~20 years ago who made a point of memorizing the names of every one of his intro physics students by the second week.
Neither CEO nor dev here but must say hn comments on CEOs are always wild. It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn’t need to be perfect - it just needs to be as effective as a human CEO… luckily, many human CEOs suck at their job
Is the average CEO worse at their job than the average software engineer is at theirs? I highly doubt it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI. I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.
> Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI. Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point. The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> qIf you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.” I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, wh…
Decided to check this book out because of this and it is actually extremely interesting. Thank you for mentioning it. Have you ever read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz? It’s about turning NASA into a fully functioning organisation, and your book reminded me of it.