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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

601–610 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#601

It's the bullshit era. The truth doesn't even matter. It's not factored in. Even liars care about the truth enough to deceive you. Bullshit is worse than lying. We disagree? Ok. You believe your facts, I'll believe mine. We can scream into the void with our respective audiences. It's hard to maintain the energy to seek the truth because there is so much bullshit. The peddlers of it are filling every single form of me…

Bullshit asymmetry principle: it takes less energy to produce bullshit than it does to refute it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I think about that a lot while trying to read PRs that Copilot Agent has created

Re: The Who Cares Era

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out.

Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman' feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.

I dare say at Amazon managers are encouraged to promote that sort of thing. Every project is understaffed and too short of a timeline and you bet half your team will get pulled to work on an escalation and the timelines won't change. Capacity planning assumes regretted attrition, mostly though burnout.

I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person.

But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered.

Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again

Re: The Who Cares Era

#603
I agree this is a real phenomenon, but I also have been finding a lot of truly interesting and great (long-form, deep dive) stuff on the web lately, from podcasts to Youtube videos to Substack blogs and so on, by people who do care. You can scratch the intellectual itch in this age if you curate what you consume. The signal to noise ratio is terrible now, but if you know how to look, you'll find great things.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#604
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans. If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers tr…

>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation. If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness an…

To clarify, are you suggesting capitalism doesn't select for cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness? If so I find that remarkable.

If I were to guess at what true universal human values were, I'd take a look at history, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness. Humans seem to universally deride greed, selfishness, cowardice, causing harm to other humans, injustice, unfairness, and boastfulness.

I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism, and capitalism at its worst punishes those that live the desired values.

It sounds like you disagree, so, some examples:

In my characterization of the worker / employer relationship, the employer that best is able to exploit their workers (without going so far as to have measurably negative consequences on output or turnover), will have the highest profit margins compared to their competitors, all other things being equal. When they've all found all the other inefficiencies in the market, the last that remains is how terribly they can treat the workforce and still turn a profit. The investment market will see this organization having the highest margins and reward it with the largest stock price. The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it, being executives and having equity. They might even build career reputations on being able to come into a company and find the maximum possible level of exploitation (it won't be called that, it's called cost cutting or similar).

Thus capitalism rewarded treating humans poorly and short term thinking. Conversely the employer that treats its workers well won't have as high profit margins or growth, money to spend on stock buybacks etc, and so will have a lower stock price, lower valuations, etc, and will be punished according to the KPIs of capitalism. "How happy are your workers" isn't a KPI of capitalism.

Next, the cigarette industry. People like smoking tobacco. People would have bought paper tubes with tobacco in it. But they wouldn't smoke it as much as paper tubes with tobacco and a shitload of known-toxic additives. So, the companies that added a bunch of toxic additives (that increase addictiveness, etc), were rewarded immensely under capitalism. When non capitalist mechanisms kicked in to limit their profits, the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying. Thus greed and harming humans was rewarded under capitalism. Marlboro is worth far more than your given indie tobacco purveyor that doesn't add additives.

Just look at the overall state of our society and the fact that capitalism rewards our most derided values and often punishes our most treasured values is fairly obvious: teachers make less than investment bankers. Landlord success is correlated with tenant misery. Public transit in the USA died to feed the automative industry. I mean, America turned its healthcare into a for-profit industry, and just look at the results. But, the health insurance industry is worth 1.59 trillion, so, by capitalism's values, it's awesome!

Re: The Who Cares Era

#605
post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.

I agree with this. It's a slight shift in perspective from the article: it's not just "Who cares" but "Nothing matters". It's not so much about people not caring as about people feeling that caring is pointless because everything that happens is outside their control. Even quite local dimensions of life that used to be more controllable are becoming corrupted by giant corporations, rampaging politicians, etc.

In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.

I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or very well paid.

Yup, and even that is way harder nowadays. I feel like the VC backed startup thing is dead and there are no big moonshots anymore from underdogs having a big idea. Everything capitalism, especially of the American variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can argue against that.

It's precisely because of the VC backup startup thing that capitalism isn't delivering. VC startups only exist if there's a bunch of people with a lot of money who don't care about anything except making more money. What we need is lots of businesses succeeding on a small scale rather than failing on a small scale while burning VC cash in the hope that they can become big enough to succeed.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#608
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people would probably like to contribute something good to the world, and make it a better place in some way or another. A lot of folks are forced to produce things they hate because otherwise they have no health care and may not eat. All so somebody else can take most of the profit and leave them with a pittance.

People would like to do their best to make their impact on the world as positive as possible, but they also care about showing they have the critical ability to notice everything wrong about the system they exist in, and we don't give them permission to do both. Wouldn't it be nice if we did?

I think there are many people who don't care about that at all. Plenty of people are happy to exist in a system and not criticize it. But it's getting hard even for those people because the system is making it so hard to extract the things they do want (e.g., enough money to live a satisfying life).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#609

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN. So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer. Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did no…

Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that. What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work. So wo…

I think this is a good attitude, but it does point up that doing this requires a conscious choice and involves a certain amount of sacrifice in that you have to sort of accept that you're "wasting" effort. In other words, this is the healthiest response to an unhealthy situation in our society.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#610
post #478

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.

> at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much.

I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.

That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.

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