subradios

And yet, MacArthur has been proven historically prescient.

A lot of the Netflix one or two season shows got cancelled when they were finally finding their legs too.

Doubt, those companies are in an even worse position - all the money that rushed in to fund them just got turned off.

The ones that will do well for the coming economic cycle are the ones that are the IBM/Oracle/Cisco tier.

Microsoft and Amazon have never had operating losses, not ever.

Google and Facebook did. But they are the product of a very blue ocean for their respective markets. The first people who did it will were going to absolutely clean up, and both of their current strategies are focused on finding the next market that works that way and get there first.

That business model isn't plausible in a high rate environment.

To add to your point, even "professional" software engineers are a lot of times in a role where they are in 9 ecosystems in an average workweek.

I've used poetry, even loved it - but without being able to control the project the only thing I can rely on is pip.

The industrial revolution moved 90% of workers out of farming, yes 90% of employment in 1870 was agricultural, literally producing calories.

We sometimes mourn for this in the form of back to the land pastoralism, but quality of life empirics suggest the industrial revolution was a benefit anyway.

Instead of luddism, we should try to find ways that the coming apocalypse of white collar knowledge work can benefit humanity as a whole, and learn from our mistakes in the rust belt.

Google does not have evidence that their outrageous salaries couldn't be cut some and still maintain the line outside of the door.

The gyms and perks are not purely a cynical ploy to make people stay later.

Google wouldn't make their employees lives miserable to increase revenue by 0.1%, because they care - the people at the top aren't literal lizardpeople.

This is where I bring in "bounded", because if that same choice would increase revenue by 100%, Google execs do it every time.

The exact lines change depending on local customs and competition (Google is a dominant market monopoly, so can afford gyms and adult playgrounds and all the really cringe Google perks) but it's also why low margin businesses have shittier working environments - there's more competition and less room for executives to care.

You have to show they actually benefit the members as a whole. Union laws in the US are extremely strong, and anti union sentiment is largely a hangover from the 70s, where features of unions limited our manufacturing sectors ability to compete internationally with catastrophic consequences for the Rust Belt.

Unfortunately when unions are weak, they are negative value - and when they are strong they are the UAW. Workers are not a firm, and structuring labor as it's own firm is known as contracting and or a guild.

I think we can give Google executives a little more credit.

They care a bounded amount.

A rough approximation of how much they care would be the rational incentives to not produce a culture of fear in the regular workforce + the amount of being nice to employees that Google can afford due to their dominant market position.

Similarly, when I shop for employers there are fringe benefits, cultural differences, etc that matter - but they aren't going to matter in the face of another $100,000 in salary.

Definitely wouldn't go somewhere else for a few hundred bucks tho.

It's not a recent myth, saying that the purpose of an organization or class of organization "is" something depends on legal and social context.

Friedman popularized the idea of fiduciary duty in the field of economics, and even popular left economists like Keynes didn't foundationally dispute that premise.

You can think it shouldn't be popular among economists for moral, aesthetic, or even empirical reasons - but to suggest somehow that the 1880s model of companies is "more correct" and assert it as truth is just as much a "myth" if you are framing these ideas about institutional purpose as "truth".

The robber barons you speak of have created the single largest reduction in poverty in human history. Most of the west, and even poor Americans are living truly historically blessed lives - and by letting the robber barons loose, the CCP was able to lift nearly 1b people to a standard of living unimaginable to Chinese people in 1970.

Capitalist thought and action is not immune to criticism, but the empirics are on capitalist ideas. Most of the common areas where Americans complain about "capitalist" processes are not capitalist under the hood at all.

I am not on coinbase's side, because the advent of cryptocurrency, should it work - will make it trivially easy to avoid nasty letter regulation as it exists today.

They are taking steps to comply with a regulatory policy that is not voted on, nor written by legislature, and failing to make their case to the people that they should own their own money.

I understand why, but it bothers me that the CEO is pro crypto, has tons of money, and yet consistently fails to fight for the user.

They absolutely have, just gotta dig.

Remember the wave of people being in hot water over tweets sent in 2008?

Taking Gebru's word seriously here is reason to discount the entire argument.

Gebru is a part of a clique that is devoted to an entirely different set of ideas around AI Safety.

The two basic movements here are: 1. Be very scared of AI development, then do capabilities research but feel bad about it. 2. Demand AI research comes with locks in them that make sure the AI can't write a tweet that would make a San Franciscan Activist uncomfortable. Achieve very little in terms of manipulating AI, but get lots of book deals.

Neither of these groups should really be trusted for hard data about the other, and more importantly - missing that piece indicates that the author is not even attempting to convince the unconvinced.

Admin tools, particularly federating admin actions in a distributed team - will never not happen. Their shape may change, but devoting time to building the first version will give you the harness you need.

Source: I am writing three services at this point that are mostly Middleware to deal with the lack of native federation for certain services we use.

HN posters are not my example of a typical customer.

The typical customer does not understand what an OS update is, or what it entails.

They know "man, my computer freezes" and "man, I keep hearing about this vuln/oh no I got my hard drive ransom'd"

Those are the people Windows primarily has to appease, otherwise they have the problems that Linux does.