You can believe whatever conspiracy theories you want, of course, but the most straightforward explanation is that when you lay off X,000 or XX,000 people, some number of them will be on leave.
And my CTO insists that PR count isn't a performance metric. But guess what number gets used the minute people are forced to stack rank (of course they don't call it that, but... that's basically what it is)?
Do you have any source for this at all? I’ve seen so many different exonerations for Meta’s layoff criteria including claims that engineers using the most AI were laid off because Meta had them build AI tools to replace themselves.
Everyone is oddly confident despite all of the conflicting explanations.
Without any evidence, I would be shocked if performance rating wasn't a factor in the layoffs. But performance rating is not the same thing as AI tool use.
This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?
Taking a distance uni class now to maybe swap away from dev work and my submitted works that are to be reviewed and commented on by other students all come back with AI generated feedback and it's making me go insane. If I needed AI feedback I'd go ask an AI but for any communication now it's a cointoss if you're getting a human reply.
Yeah, but I guess harder for the professor to check up on too. It's a course on a specific kind of creative writing so human feedback would be QUITE helpful instead of AI responses about how good parts are.
I'm starting to see pushback for this. I know a Product Manager that was fired for padding his documentation with AI to the point there were mistakes and wasted work due to AI hallucinations.
I see it even on my GitHub project, issues and pull request comments get longer, responses get longer, all generated by ai and read by ai. This text is no longer for human consumption, but to provide context to ai.
Seems like we risk the atrophy of western software while surpassed by software developed in places and cultures where they don't "move fast and break things".
We have never needed to "move slow and fix things" more than right now.
I'm not opposed to "move fast and break things" but our problem is that's the only lever we pull. For every "... and break things" there needs to be a phase of "clean up, everybody do your share". It seems the modern development framework is allergic to cleaning up. There's so many excuses given but if you don't clean up you can't move fast.
In physical reverse engineering there's a common pattern people use: buy 3. One to break, one to modify, one to reference. You need the one to break because you're going in blind. The problem has a lot of unknown unknowns. It's often difficult to take things apart (especially these days) without breaking them. But the second time it is much easier to do nondestructively.
But I'm also a big fan of taking time to think and understand. To gain deep understanding of things. I've always found this to be helpful and allowed me to move faster in the long run but I often face resistance to this because everyone wants me to "move fast".
The problem is I think people have the illusion that you can run a marathon by doing consecutive 100m dashes. It sounds nice in theory but I think there's no surprise that burnout is at an all time high and things are getting sloppy.
It's weird, we've systematically created a work structure that has the same principles as scams: frame everything as an emergency so the mark doesn't have time to think. Why the fuck are we scamming ourselves?
What I find particularly irritating is that you can actually prompt the fcking AI to be short.
> Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible.
It takes more effort to be brief, even for humans. Good documentation writers were always brief.
Simply saying "be concise" isn't enough. I often have Claude write first drafts for me (which, for the record, I review completely and rewrite as needed before publishing) and even when told to be concise, there are times when what comes out is unusably long and wordy.
I've seen some of this as well. It's OK to send me an agentic screed if it's just going to be consumed by my agent, but I want a nicely written summary up top that was made by you... I'm starting to value poor grammar, typos, and other signs of legitimacy
It would take one or two not especially complicated law taxing wealth and loans against equity. Congress could do this tomorrow but guess who controls congress. And cap political spending like every other sane democracy.
To anyone with half a brain not poisoned by conservative ideology this always was, and is, obvious. Crypto has always been pitched as a get rich quick scheme which only appeals to the financially illiterate.
Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.
When this is all over and Trump has been consigned to history's dustbin, at the very least the public deserves to know the names of the individual federal agents and entire chain of command responsible for these atrocities. The people responsible for this wanton cruelty need to be charged and tried criminally for their actions. Nobody is going to forget this and I think a lot of Americans will demand justice and accountability once all is said and done.
At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?
Ah yes, the hyperloop is what killed California high speed rail. If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Or maybe there's another reason these high speed rail projects consistently fail. An insane regulatory and litigious environment where no technology progress can be made. Meanwhile, in Asia, rail is being laid at insane pace.
What do you think it'll take to match their progress? Do you honestly think Elon is the reason this is all failing?
> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.
Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.
Didn't a number of companies led by Facebook already attempt to do this with Libra (Diem) and basically got nuked from orbit by US regulators? I have to assume this is primarily happening now because there is a more favorable (nonexistent) regulatory environment.
the reality is that most new projects started by Meta are going to be nuked from orbit when democrats are in control (even if started during republican control). Stripe has less reputational risk so is less likely to experience the same.
From what I have heard it wasn't just the US but other governments as well which came down on them quite hard. States broadly do not like it when a bunch of huge corporations get together to issue their own currency.
I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. This has nothing to do with socialism. Corporations profiting from externalities and pushing costs onto regular workers is just capitalism. If you have a problem with it, maybe you have a problem with the inevitable concentrations of wealth and power which result from capitalism.
Well, what if the corporations would pay the bills - then they would increase the price of the product so the people would pay for it again. Now you can say that you do not use Metas or Googles products, but their business models is ads - and you DO pay the products advertised for.
In scenario 1, a corporation externalizes some of its costs. Those costs are then paid by people who may or may not actually use the corporation's product — people who never chose to be part of any transaction. This is coercive because the people paying for the corporation's externalities are forced to: they may not use the product, or do so to different degrees not proportional to the price they pay for the externality.
In scenario 2, the corporation does not externalize costs and raises their prices, offsetting costs by passing them on to their customers. The people paying the additional cost are those who know the price of what they are buying and willingly engage in the transaction for the good or service.
Do you understand why scenario 2 is bad and scenario 1 is less bad?
That is just a very simplified and incomplete model. I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets? Well I consume products build by other people that use cars to go to work. Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break? Direct vs. Indirect is not a good measure of value, PRICE is.
> I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets?
Streets are generally paid for by taxes, which are categorically different than corporate profits. In theory taxes are under democratic control. If you don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law. You have no control over the governance of a private corporation, but it can still pass its costs on to you via externalities (in the absence of regulations preventing it from doing so).
> Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break?
What are you even talking about? What is the externality here? The wages you presumably pay your cleaning lady are hers to do with as she wishes.
> don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law
Just as you can build your own power plant (solar, wind) if you don't like the electricity prices of your provider... That works in theory, in practice you will have to pay...
That's a strange definition of capitalism you're using.
Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
In this case, the government has written laws in a way that indirectly transfers wealth from consumers to large corporations.
Saying that such laws are "inevitable" in any conceivable capitalist system is unfalsifiable and adds little to the discussion.
I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
This is not a real definition. Saying "most people" use the term to mean what you want it to mean in this argument is ridiculous.
Capitalism is a system of private ownership of capital. We live under that system. Anything you see that happens now is the result of that system because it's the one that exists.
There is no such thing as "crony capitalism". What came before crony capitalism? Was it regular capitalism? Did regular capitalism turn into crony capitalism? Or — more likely — is it all one continuous process and system of accumulation?
> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.
“Capitalism” is a term coined for the dominant system of the industrialized West in the mid-19th Century and is defined by the specific orientation of property rights in that system around the private and marketable ownership of the non-financial means of production (the “capital” in “capitalism”), and the way in which the system was fundamentally structured around—and institutions within it, including government, invariably served the interests of—the owners of that capital, who formed its ruling class, displacing the landed hereditary aristocracy of the preceding systems.
While the dominant politico-economic systems of the developed world have evolved somewhat since then, with modern mixed economies having structures in place mitigate some of the adverse impacts the original system for which thr label “capitalism” was created for has on the vast majority of the population that is not major capital owners, it retains the basic property structure and resulting class heirarchy of the original “capitalism”, and neither it nor the original tended tof eatite annabsence of regulation of commerce.
> I think calling it "crony capitalism" to make it clear that it's the undue influence of capital on government specifically causing the problem here lends more clarity to the discussion.
The commanding and undue influence of capital on all of society, government and otherwise, is literally the feature for which critics of the then-dominant system coined the term “capitalism” to refer to that system. It doesn’t need an extra qualifier for that.
It's always pretty suspect when you first hear about the opposition to something in its rebuttal. I've heard lots of critiques of the abundance movement and this is my first time hearing anything about housing cartels. Maybe someone had this critique but it isn't the dominant strain of criticism of the abundance people. It feels like Thompson picked the weakest argument to debunk rather than one of the many stronger ones.
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