- There is real competition. It's less and less the case for many important things, such as food, accommodations, health, etc.
- Companies pay a price for misbehaving that is much higher than what they got from misbehaving. Also less and less the case, thanks to lobbying, huge law firms, corruption, etc.
- The cost of switching is fair. Moving to another places is very expensive. Doing it several times in a row is rarely possible for most people.
- Some practice are not just generalized in the whole industry. In IT tracking is, spying is, and preventing you from managing your device yourself is more and more trendy.
Basically, this view you are presenting is increasingly naive and even dangerous for any citizen practicing it.
Even if it were not a bottleneck, speed allow use cases you wouldn't consider before.
I use Python differently because uv made many things faster, less costly. Stuff I used to do in bash are now in Python. Stuff I wouldn't do at all because 3rd party modules were an incompressible expense, now I do because the cost is low.
Same with AI.
Every week, there was a small tool I actively chose to not develop because I know that it would save less time by automating the thing than it would take coding it.
E.G: I send regularly documents from my hard drive or forward mails to a specific email for accounting. It would be nice to be able to do those in one click. But dev a nautilus script or thunderbird extension to save max a minute a day doesn't make sense.
Except now with claude code, it does. In a week, they paid off. And now I'm racking the minutes.
Now each week, I'm getting a new tool that is not only saving me minutes, but also reducing context switching. Those turn into hours, which turn into days. These compounds.
And of course, getting out a MVP, or a new feature demo out of the door quickly allows you to get feedback faster.
In general, AI lets you get a shorter feedback loop. Trash bad concept sooner. Get crucial info faster.
At first stable coins were to avoid taxes when selling and buying again by skipping the round trip to fiat.
But now, the use case Stripe is talking about is basically the equivalent of creating WoW Gold for companies, and bypassing state money entirely, but IRL.
This is a dangerous idea.
Big corps have become immensly powerful, but they are still kept in check by the state for 3 reasons: the monopoly on law, violence, and minting money.
Lobbying is taking care of the law.
And now they are coming for the money.
Crypto currencies were supposed to taken the power of currency from big actors and back to the people. It's going to take it from the state to companies.
Soon, they will effectively have more power than the state, and citizens will be screwed.
Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.
Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.
However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.
That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.
This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.
All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.
Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.
That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.
Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.
This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.
I know it's all at least semi- tongue-in-cheek, but IRL a piano's discrete, sequential keys are what make it almost inarguably the easiest instrument to learn.
That's exactly his point. Languages aren't easier to learn simply because their specification is short, any more than instruments are easier to play because they have fewer strings.
The analogy is completely invalid. Languages with small specifications are easier to learn.
It's sad that the dev, who has done great work, has to spend time defending the C language from critters living under a bridge when it's a fixed element that isn't going to change.
While that's true, the numbers are still clearly readable and their position alongside a circle still makes a lot of sense. The alarm itself is also listed in digital time.
really? I admit I don't deal with many youngsters, but I never met anyone who can't read clocks with hands, I think they may teach it in primary school here. This is deeply surprising to me.
My kids are teens. We have an analog clock on the wall in the dining room.
It's shocking to me how many of their friends over for dinner (who are all on the "definitely not dumb" part of the distribution) either cannot read it at all or can read it only with obvious/significant difficulty.
Oof … we are going to end up with nut jobs making videos about the alien technology of the circular disks, some with pointers, some with lines going around in circles pointing at an odd sequence of numbers for reasons we may never understand until the aliens come back to explain it to us.
Teach yourself and children how to read clocks, people!!!
But if they were, they would never have become what they are in the first place, including the good things.
States are neither good at innovation nor dynamism.
But they are very good at telling you what you should and should not do.
The latter part has some wonderful consequences for consumer or worker protections, but it has some terrible ones for creating new stuff or improving the old.
If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.
This is not that though. This is just developers being unable to handle constructive criticism, and when they can't win the argument on merits, went for the HR option. It happens.
I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company).
The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the Dev who had committed it saying "hi! There appears to have been a mistake in your latest commit, could you please check it out and fix it? I've reverted it in the meantime since I need to deploy this other feature"
The dev responded by force pushing the code that did not compile to master and contacted HR.
I decided there was greener grass on other pastures. I was right.
When I started breaking the build would end up with the person who did it having to wear the dunce hat for the day. This was before git so there are now fewer excuses for breaking the build today.
Yes, of course. The point of my heavy-handed post was to try to find out what is actually going on here. Does this person have any insider info? Or are they (as many are in the discussion, and as I suspect is the case here too - but I am going only on the balance of probabilities!) just using this as an opportunity to relate this to their own grievances, so they can discuss those?
We've only got one side of this particular story, we don't know what happened from the other person's point of view, we don't know what form this HR complaint took - or any of the other details. We can bet, just as I did in my last paragraph, but in my view the odds are more questionable and the topic more likely end up as unproductive venting. Any good comments will get lost.
Still, it's also true that the link is just there as a starting point for discussion, and the discussion can take any forms that the readership would find interesting.
It’s also super rude to make claims as to what occurred and why in any situation you yourself were not privy to or involved in but I don’t see you rushing in with the same vigour to point that out.
Yes. Seems pretty clear from the post to me that they are making assumptions based on a similar event in their past, not that they were involved first hand in this event.
Having worked in the valley, I've seen what critical feedback meant in many companies there, and it removes all usefulness of the info because there is a ceiling of what is socially acceptable to say; therefore, you can't know how bad or urgent things are.
Everything is ASAP. They are super excited about everything. And nothing you do is wrong, it just could be improved or they like it but don't love it.
You don't know if something is important, basically.
Just like Louis CK said, "if you used 'amazing' on chicken nuggets, what are you going to say when your first child is born?". But in reverse.
Personally, I'd rather work with someone who would tell me my work is terrible if it is.
In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.
Some things are just bad. You should be able to say it is. Not by saying it could be better. Not by using euphemism. It's just something that needs to go to the trash.
In fact, I don't trust people who can't receive this information, even if not packaged with tact (which you should attempt to, but life happens). If you can't handle people not being perfectly polite every time, I can't help but feel I won't be able to count on you when things get hard.
I am with you on this. Worked in our Dublin office was so refreshing to have straight up communication vs whatever the song and dance we do here in US.
> In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.
I don't think it's just about legality. Whether the recommendation letter is included in the application is at the distinction of the applicant. When you want it to reach the next company, you must write is so, that the former employee considers it to be a good recommendation.
First of all, in southern countries we hardly do recommendation letters, if we do they usually ended up being written by ourselves and if the company agrees with the content, it gets signed.
Exactly because of this, you are supposed to give referrals that then talk whatever they feel like about the experience working with you was all about.
Having a whole legal process for recommendation letters, that have created a whole industry of hidden language that looks good on the surface but tells exactly otherwise, was a surprise to me.
Being "reported to HR" doesn't mean "almost got fired". It likely meant a meeting where someone explained "hey, the way you communicated that caused some upset, let's discuss better ways to handle that situation next time." Very often in larger companies, complaints about things like "this bigwig from this other group jumped all over us" are automatically sent through HR because HR has staff whose job just is resolving conflicts between people and keeping things peaceful.
FWIW, it can also mean a meeting where HR says to the complainer: "Are you good, dude? Why are you complaining about this? This is perfectly normal workplace behavior. Stop wasting our time."
From what you know of Carmack, does "can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others" sound like him to you? It does not to me, though granted maybe he's different in his non public persona than what you can see in presentations and talks.
You've concluded this from a single, brief, throwaway line? Any madness you perceive about this situation has been fabricated by you, based on the details we have.
People have been getting mad at being made to feel bad at work for much longer than “safe space culture” has existed. If someone or some team had more power than you at an organization you for sure will get reprimanded for making them feel bad.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got reported for giving a lot of what might kindly be described as unsolicited advice. The guy left Meta ages ago, but he apparently still can't let this one go.
If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.
When a veteran tells you something and is passionate about it, maybe it is worth listening or at least dealing with internally. At the end, he left anyway even if the project didn't fail and Meta remains wealthy but largely mediocre in terms of the products it delivers while relying heavily on startup acquisition and large spending. Pretty sure most people who work there only do so for premium rent-seeking.
None of it surprising if this is a signal of how they operate.
> If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.
I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn't it be nice if someone gave you cover to stop working on it, and then you could figure out something else to do that might not fail? Can't get any impact if your OS will never ship.
The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.
But in any case, almost all interesting projects are likely to fail. Of course it is objectively unlikely that a project to write a new OS will succeed. I expect the people working on it were aware of that.
> The people working on it may not have agreed that it was likely to fail.
They probably didn't agree, but the claim was that it wasn't helpful. being helpful and telling people what they want to hear aren't the same thing. If you're working on a destined to fail project, the most helpful thing to hear would be some way to change its destiny, the next most helpful thing to hear would be a call to stop doing it.
Besides all that, Facebook is probably one of the worst places to develop a new general purpose OS. The review system is built around rewarding impact, which means a long term project with no early deliverables sets up the staff to get poor reviews, which limits staffing. The company also has not built the kind of trust in products, sdks, etc that would make using a new OS seem like a good idea to potential users, or to encourage developers to make applications available for it, or to encourage companies to use it in their products. It would have to be so amazingly better than the marketplace of OSes that it made up for the lack of software for it and become a target of new software.
A special purpose OS is different. The development process is usually not as long, the requirements tend to be pretty narrow, and the target would likely be something in house. It might still not be a good idea, there's lots of off the shelf options to look at and they are likely good enough in many to most cases.
Although I think JC is right in this case, I'm not convinced that he had any kind of insight that wouldn't have already been obvious to the OS experts hired on the team. Writing a new OS is going to be really difficult? No shit!
I guess if he'd been on the Apollo program he'd be the guy telling all the experts that landing humans safely on the moon was going to be quite hard. Thanks John. We'll bear that in mind.
Sometimes you have to let people fail, even though you can see it coming. It sounds like Carmack was sticking his nose in a project that wasn’t under his purview and he dug his heels in a bit too much when he should have just let it fail.
All the FAANG do dumb shit all the time and waste huge sums of money, if you work at a FAANG the best thing you can do is stay in your lane and don’t do dumb shit — eventually it will shake out.
I have been bullied around by L7s (as a L5) sticking their nose in things, and the best thing you can do is clearly articulate what you are doing and why, and that you understand their feedback. Turns out the L7 got canned — partially due to their bullying — and I got promoted for executing and being a supportive teammate, so things worked out in the end.
It got mentioned for a reason. And obviously escalating with HR is a big deal as it comes with career risks for the person you are reporting. Risking someone else's career should be a last resort but seems to be more commonly a knee-jerk reaction with HR becoming weaponised.
The drawback of this is you lose good talent and keep rent-seekers instead.
The only reason you want me to "cool off", is because you feel bad just interacting with somebody expressing a polite, strong opinion. Online. On the other side of the world. With text.
Something tells me that if we heard the other side of the story it might hit different. There's a lot of wiggle room in what "making his team members feel bad" could mean, and I would be surprised if constructively voiced criticism would have gotten someone written up.
With my experience of being written up for constructive criticism the reasoning was that I didn’t give constructive criticism to others and they felt singled out. I only give such criticism in private so of course they were not there to see the others. Apparently that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.
it is madness, you would be surprised how many ppl take things too serious. been there, had talk with HR cause i've said that the solution is mediocre and we have to do something better than that.
This is not a situation where you have zero alternatives. You have ton of cheap hosting out there. Most people using AWS don't need the level of reliability and scaling it provides, they pay the price for nothing.
- There is real competition. It's less and less the case for many important things, such as food, accommodations, health, etc.
- Companies pay a price for misbehaving that is much higher than what they got from misbehaving. Also less and less the case, thanks to lobbying, huge law firms, corruption, etc.
- The cost of switching is fair. Moving to another places is very expensive. Doing it several times in a row is rarely possible for most people.
- Some practice are not just generalized in the whole industry. In IT tracking is, spying is, and preventing you from managing your device yourself is more and more trendy.
Basically, this view you are presenting is increasingly naive and even dangerous for any citizen practicing it.