DietaryNonsense

Can I please just take a moment to talk about the Fall foliage? Autumn crimsons and browns, and golds, and buttery golds, and buttery browns.

Put another way: irrational numbers are functions, not values. You can run the function as long as you want and get more digits but the function won't halt.

Crisis Era.

A better Customer Service bot would be one that's trained on data other than what's publicly available. A support bot that has read and "understands" the code itself may be able to offer suggestions, or confidently determine there is in fact a bug, and either report it or fix it. Imagine a customer speaks to HelperBot and says the sorting is broken, and as a matter of fact it is. The sorting broke when the last change to SomeApp was shipped. Don't fear, HelperBot has rollback authority. "One second, I'll see if we can get that working for you..."

Working at SaaS companies I've seen countless "somewhat fluid" exchanges of information between customer -> support -> product -> developer -> support -> customer -> support -> dev, etc. The different modes of communication and long round trip times make things slow, bug reports take minimum of hours, up to weeks to absorb and resolve.

This is just one case but there are boxes drawn everywhere. Every level of intelligent organization within the society, including it's artifacts, has assumptions baked in. Now that the unit economics of applying `intelligence()` is being shifted by orders of magnitude, there's all sorts of stuff that's ripe for recrafting.

Disclaimer: Don't give HelperBot launch authority to offensive weapons etc. You know, make decisions consistent with a world line where the continuation of the civilization is pretty darn likely. Unless of course your project is to replace the current civilization, ... I don't know. Just don't do what Donny Don't does.

You like saying Gore-TEX, don't you?

What about ones perception of being able to improve their life? What of opportunity? hope? These are human beings after-all, they perceive such concepts as integral to their reality.

In the post-war period prior to the 70s, it was (more) common and reasonable for a high school educated factory worker (in the US) to have optimism in their ability to work in that role and improve their state of affairs. Afford to buy a home, pay off the mortgage, buy a car, provide for a couple of kids, send one of them to college, drive to a national park for an annual vacation.

Nowadays, one can be both lucky in terms of their upbringing and be highly educated (post secondary or even advanced degrees), and yet very easily find themselves in a position where the above "life staples" (house, car, family without poverty) are meaningfully out of reach. And in many cases, not even conceivably within reach.

It's not merely that housing in major cities is objectively less affordable, it's that the stage upon which life is lived has changed in it's nature. It's a perpetual sunset rather than sunrise, optimism is either for suckers or for those who mischaracterize a certain degree of background luck as merit.

I'm in the lucky category. But I think when we boil down the collective subjective experience of hundreds of millions (billions?) to broad metrics and indicators, our models lose the fidelity they need for the subjects to feel they are being taken seriously. I understand why we have these models and tools for better navigating the civilizational state-space, but they're obviously imperfect, and they're of little comfort when serious concerns go unacknowledged (let alone unaddressed) for decades.

Now it's possible that CEO pay is orthogonal to all of this. Perhaps as a measure it's one of the metrics that loses too much descriptive power in it's generalization... but it certainly does reek of something.

The reduction of the communication overhead is definitely non-trivial. Though many businesses don't seem to measure the internal performance of their systems when the programs are running on and between humans. So if it works to some vague, hand wavey degree, "fine".

By relying on the idea that back/front is "just" a way of splitting a system, one could say that SRE/Front is a way of splitting a system, or Sales/Support, or Finance/HR, and so on. We're of course talking about ways of splitting the system(s) involved.

I think the spirit of the original idea is that roles are defined by boundaries. The boundaries are definitely "made up" but they aren't arbitrary. The degree of expertise and volume of knowledge needed to operate effectively (or expertly) within a role, and the ease or difficulty of obtaining those requirements, should be acknowledged when a company describes a role they are hiring for. If the bulk of your roadmap is back-end work but you want to hire full-stack devs because its nice to have everything, this seems like sloppy practice (though totally accepted).

On the other hand there are plenty of full-stack jobs that really just mean "back-end but not going to throw a contract in our face when you have to drop into the browser debugger to solve a problem". This is the kind of full stack I am. I wouldn't be okay with being asked to work on our frontend for the next year but I'm perfectly comfortable with debugging, making recommendations, doing some front-end work if it means filling a gap when resources are constrained.

Thanks!