flask_manager
Joined 3 years ago
Joined 3 years ago
Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
This can have lots of issues. Imagine something like a good school zone changing, an event that may not be accounted for by the index. Insurance and taxes are determined by current value, that is partially determined by market rent, but the landlord cant adjust.
This also hurts a specific landlord when it comes time to sell, making a tenanted property potentially less valuable (and reducing the incentive to take on a tenant at all). This does not impact the general property value mind, as the tenant only benefits and creates this problem if the index is below the market.
If you want a fair balance, "its mine as long as I pay market rent" is pretty good. "its mine as long as I pay indexed rent" is not great, as it removes the financial benefit of capital investment from the landlord.
If you dont understand the impact what you are doing has once its out of sight, how can you understand yourself as part of society?
Contracting is simpler in a way, "I made a tool for Steve so that he can better do his job" is an easy to understand story, and doing that 10 times a year makes your connections to the world fairly clear (Not to mention it builds on itself, as more people know you as someone who can make things for them).
Big corporate jobs, especially highly distributed remote ones, can make it nearly impossible to clearly draw a line like that. The narrow context of "I improved a tool that the Widget team uses to support the Tools team who build visualizations for the Documentation team" thirty layers down before you get to a thing customers touch. In person becomes important, because it lets you better understand the context of your work as "Part of the institution that makes fighter jets".
Its a whole lot more sustainable if you can build an identity around "here is my team, we are building {___}", and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
Genuinely clear objectives can also be a great asset here; but I find that clarity doesnt scale. When Ive been a contractor working on projects measured in weeks or months with small teams, full remote is easy. At corporate gigs where the thing you are doing might be several abstraction layers from a customer; its harder to answer "why are we doing this?". In the second case being able to share in person is important; because its not just the work its the context and other people doing it thats grounding.
That motivation brings efficiency; at least for myself.
Its more about the information about the specific problem you are solving having less impact than techniques that target the compute. So in this case, breaking down how to parse a PDF in stages for your domain is involving specific expert knowledge of the domain, but training with attention is about efficient use of compute in general; with no domain expertise.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
That and restaurants from maps.
I use it less for information based searches, but that almost seems to be a win from an advertiser perspective.
Creating highly trustworthy technology is the best we can do, and reliable transportation is a big part of this.
I also suspect targeting and removing the worst interactions people have with strangers (and for many this is the random nature of a human driver, either from a taxi or other drivers) would create a higher trust society overall, as there is less cause to be wary.
I wouldn't call it a crash in this field, but there is definitely a trend away from ambitious attempts. Its not really a field where you can take your savings at make a go for a year or two, capital is required, and capital is more hesitant at the moment.
I am curious about your product, to me SaaS startups aiming to replace an existing always had the problem where the risk to your client was immense compared to the value you offer. For example even if your service is a hundredth the cost of the entrenched it might not be worth it, because its a saving on a small line item against what could be the entire turnover of a business.
I almost expect a higher degree of bullshit to be honest; the cost of a startup will be higher, so the "honest" capitalistic speculation will be reduced, but there will still be plenty of money for DEI and CCP projects.
And fully remote in the states has the additional benefit of actual high speed internet.
There may be people who have nothing to offer others, once technology advances, but I dont think that anyone in current top % role would find themselves there.