There are 8 billion people on this Earth. It is an extraordinary claim to say that a channel with 1.5 million subscribers is the "world's most powerful" in its niche.
Unless, and much more likely, this is clickbait and by world only USA, or the Western world at best, is considered; of those, only the terminally-online that seek literary criticism on TikTok.
"While WARN requires only 60 days’ advance notice, Amazon is providing at least 90 days’ notice to all affected employees before their separations are scheduled to occur. Affected employees who accept internal transfer opportunities at Amazon prior to their separation date will not be separated as a result of this action."
These people were told they were being laid off in October but remain on payroll. What Amazon is "bracing" for is another one of these announcements, much larger, announcing people who will actually separate from the company 90 days later. They will find out on or around the same day the WARN notice is posted.
Yes, I don't support labelling people as one or the other, but defining and articulating the two kinds of behaviors and expectations relative to each other is incredibly useful for communication and understanding.
>people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things.
True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way.
If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".
It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars.
The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation.
> If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".
This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.
My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own, and that one of the reasons for that is the risk that stems from stepping down being something that you can fail at in the first place, with the consequences of cementing a reputation of "being bad at being a person" regardless of anything that's happened to that point. You don't have the opportunity of accumulating reputation without having that risk at the end, unlike a career, where you have the opportunity of taking a job that pays a regular paycheck regardless of whether you leave at the drop of a hat and burn all your bridges by doing so.
> My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own
OP said "it should be paid" because "it is a job", and so the rejection of that claim is two-fold: 1) Uncertainty in the expected value of payment does not change the fact that it's payment, 2) Payment in units other than dollars is still payment. If I get paid in bitcoins, the bitcoin market could completely collapse before I cash out. It's not different than that.
OP's specific written framing, that because it's a job it needs to be paid, which is only additive commentary if OP believes that it isn't being paid, disagrees with your prediction about what OP really secretly bases their statement on.
We can look further back in OP's comment as well:
> The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user
This is only fractionally true, and it is only true in an unpaid way for a desire to consume free software. It is not true in an unpaid way for the desires to produce or maintain free software. Those are done because the producers and maintainers experience some kind of reward from doing so.
> Payment in units other than dollars is still payment. If I get paid in bitcoins, the bitcoin market could completely collapse before I cash out. It's not different than that.
I can't pay my rent or my server bills in "prestige". Entirely different.
I can't pay my rent or server bills in "bitcoins". I need to leverage my bitcoins in some way to get "dollars" that I can then pay my bills with. Non-monetary payment is still payment. Rare pokémon cards are payment too.
Also, in fact, people get things that otherwise cost money all the time based on prestige.
You absolutely can, because you can sell the bitcoins and turn them directly into money in your savings account. There are exchanges that declare their exact value. You can't do that with prestige. There's no exchange and no market.
Crucially, money, bitcoin, and pokemon cards are all transferrable. You can't transfer prestige to someone else, so it has no value in financial transactions.
Transference doesn't matter, because exchange is not a requirement for gain. People get things merely from having prestige/influence/power all the time. It's sometimes called an award, and sometimes called tribute, and sometimes called currying favor.
> you can sell the bitcoins
Prestige is influence, and you can absolutely sell the use or effects of influence.
> There are exchanges that declare their exact value.
Payment does not need to have exact value, just non-zero expected value, which prestige definitely has. There is no exact value to startup equity either, but it's still rightly considered to be compensation for investment of labor and money.
You're thinking of exposure, not influence. And the payment is what an individual agrees to. If you don't agree to doing work to gain influence, that's up to you, just like I don't agree to doing work for bitcoins or Pokémon cards.
> We know the tells of LLM-generated writing—the awkward lists of three, the parallel sentence structure, the “and then it hit me”, the “uncomfortable,” “brutal,” or “honest” assessments—but even without them we know instantly.
Heh, great writing for those paying attention, on multiple levels.
I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain.
I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.
I really like the sentiment here, and Handmade Network has such a cool vibe, but I can't help but think that he/they would have a bigger impact by focusing more on illustrating to people how this mindset leads to value and less on teaching and learning the skills.
>Building it yourself might sound crazy, but it’s been done successfully many times before—for example, Figma famously built their app from scratch in WASM and WebGL, and it runs shockingly well on very large projects.
Yes, let's hear more about this. "Collapsing Reddit comments could have been like 180ms faster" isn't very convincing to smart, ambitious people deciding what they want to be about. Find more examples like Figma and get people to believe that there's still lots of room for up and comers to make a name for themselves by standing on their performance, and they'll take care of the learning and building themselves.
New York Magazine, not a technical publication by any means, also had an article about Claude Code/Cowork yesterday: [0]. Kinda punches a hole in the argument you sometimes see around here that "ChatGPT is the only brand consumers know, so OpenAI will definitely win."
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