Layoffs at Block

Where? I want to move there immediately. I bet you’re lying though.

There's basically no consequences for lying when you get to that level, and many incentives to (let's say) embellishing. Jack Dorsey is looking to make billions of dollars because of this announcement. If we find out that the AI reasoning was a bold faced lie (e.g. a leaked email or voicemail or something), I doubt that the stock price will go below what it was priced a week ago as a consequence.

It bothers me. I know some people who were victims of these cuts. These are really smart, hardworking people, and I don't think they're going to be easily be replaced with Claude or Codex, but Jack Dorsey ostensibly does. It has to feel like a slap in the face to think that your employer thinks that you're replaceable with a $20/month subscription.

Though of course, the reasoning doesn't really make any fucking sense to me; if you're 40+% more productive with AI, isn't that a good reason to keep the workforce and have them make more and cooler stuff and/or improve your infrastructure? If it's more productive couldn't you make a lot more stuff and blow your competitors out of the water? Presumably a good chunk of those who just got laid off are going to go work for your competitors, and presumably the competitors will have access to the same OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions that you have.

With the rise of relatively low-risk ETFs and Index Funds, we get into this kind of strange situation where people who might be able to create value by creating businesses and products will instead just invest into the stock market. On an individual level, this is an objectively good decision; most new businesses fail and most of the ones that don't still don't beat the S&P 500 in growth, and even if you manage to match the S&P that required a lot of effort on your end vs. clicking three buttons on E-Trade. Yes, maybe you'll be one of the happy few who manage to actually grow faster than the S&P, and that's great, if someone in that boat is in that position I wish you all the future success in the world [1].

I'm not judging, I'm no better that the people I'm describing. I don't run a business and I just buy ETFs for that reason; it's relatively low-risk, high-return, and basically zero effort on my end. Now it's created this situation where we a) have an over-reliance on BigCos because all of our money is tied with them, b) a shortage of people who are willing to challenge these BigCos because the risk isn't worth it, and as such we have less diversity and competition in the market.

I have thought about starting a business dozens of times. I have a few projects that I think have a non-zero chance of being something cool that instead just languish in private repos because I am too much of a coward to actually try and make a go of it. I don't really know how to find investors, and even if I knew how I would have to prepare for the (very) high potential of them not funding me, and then I have to determine if it's worth self-funding, and at that point I could just take that same capital I would spend, throw it into VOO or QQQ and likely make more money without any effort.

I doubt I'm unique in this reasoning, especially on this forum. This is a relatively well-educated group (by internet standards) and I suspect a lot of people who frequent this forum are in the same boat that I am; I've seen some very interesting stuff in the "what are you working on?" threads here that I think could become businesses but mostly just end up living on Github accruing 100 stars and then languishing into obscurity.

[1] Unless you've made it to "billionaire" status in which case I doubt you did it in a way that I would describe as "ethical", and I very likely do not wish you any success.

I showed ChatGPT(free-tier) the API response and the part of the code reading it, and it fixed it in 5 seconds. Would've been pretty short either way less than 30-40 mins but it's very good for simple tasks like these. The solution is just correct.