JSavageOne

This is just factually incorrect as I've already explained, such as via the ability to provide bounties on technical debt reduction. Also an incentive doesn't mean that one has to chase that incentive, or that all work must revolve around those incentives.

In any case, it's already the situation at most companies that they tend to prioritize shipping new features and bug fixes above code refactoring. As a developer myself, I'm simply suggesting a way in which employers can further motivate employees and promote intrapraneurship by more directly compensation employees for their contributions. If you're happy with the status quo, all the power to you.

For tasks that aren't straightforward to measure impact on bottom line, perhaps their impact can be approximated via product owners setting bounties on them.

In any case as important as things like code quality are, they are ancillary to the bottom line of a business. Employers hire employees to increase the profitability of their business, and code quality is not the top priority.

Allows you to load a local folder directly in your browser, and works completely offline. No login or installation required.

It is still a work in progress though so has some bugs / rough edges.

I explicitly mentioned profit sharing because that is different from simply owning stock in your company. Owning stock / options, although better than nothing, is not a meaningful incentive for most as the value of it is generally so far removed from your individual labor unless your company is just a handful of people (at which point your equity is useless unless there's a liquidation event in the future, which your employers can rob you of anytime by firing you before they vest or diluting it through further fundraising).

By profit sharing, I mean literally giving workers a cut of their direct contributions. This is how sales people get paid, and most sales people won't quit after making a few million if they can continue to make more millions in the same fashion by being directly compensated for the money they bring in. This is not analogous to a Tesla engineer in a massive corporation with thousand of employees finally getting exit liquidity on their stock options.

Of course it's harder to measure direct contribution of an engineer compared to a sales person, but I don't think that difficulty means that it's not worth trying. Of course for this to actually happen, employers would have to start trying this out and proving its success - which may be a tall order in a job market where employers already wield such enormous power.

If a company wants to increase productivity, then they should provide greater ownership and autonomy to workers, as well as better incentives such as profit sharing. If an engineer knows that they'll get a cut of the cost savings or profits of some project idea they have, then you can bet that many employees will take advantage of that to get valuable work done.

If I were running a company, I'd hire remotely from the global talent pool, and more importantly ensure that my employees are actually incentivized to get things done via ownership and profit sharing.

It's a shame that executives at big tech companies are opting for the authoritarian approach, and I firmly believe that that will be their downfall. There certainly is value to in-person collaboration, but forcing it via threats is absolutely not the right approach. A better way to incentivize workers returning to office would be via positive incentives (eg. more money, subsidized housing, free transportation) as opposed to negative threats (eg. firing people for not obeying the lord's commands)

If I'm forced to commute to and work in an office 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, then I will be more miserable, lament my job, and thus be less productive towards my day job. I will feel more like a wage slave worker bee who has little autonomy over their work, having to regress to the humiliating dynamic of having to ask my boss for "permission" to work from home. As a night owl, I'll be forced to conform my sleep schedule to the CEO's, and still show up bright and early on days where I didn't get enough sleep, and look busy until 5:30pm+ - maybe stretching out work that could've been done in a few hours to an entire work day because when you're stuck in an office there's little incentive to work faster since you're trapped their all day regardless. When I'm finally sick of it all I'll accept the offer for that remote-friendly company that doesn't care what time I wake up, what hours I work, or where I work, just that the work I produce is high quality.

If I have the flexibility to WFH, not waste hours/day commuting, and live wherever makes me happiest (as opposed to the city my company happens to have an office in, which is probably a city like NYC or SF which may not be my preference), then I will be happier with my employment arrangement, more productive, and more loyal. Also I personally find it easier to accomplish deep work when working under my own conditions, as opposed to some open office with no privacy, constant chatter, and the drudgery of wage slaves who clearly don't want to be there but have no choice.

There are far too many variables at play to be able to make that kind of blanket statement with such confidence.

I still like the concept. But it feels tough to compete with Google Maps in the geo-information / review space. If Google Maps just added a more robust reviewing feature (eg. wifi speed) and metadata (outlets), then there wouldn't be a need for our projects.

Also individually there is inherently no incentive to share some gem of a coffee shop you found with limited seating capacity to strangers on the internet. I had some ideas to work around that, but it's something that really needs to be addressed. It's amazing anyone even bothers to write reviews for any sites (except as a favor to a nice person, or out of revenge for terrible service) given that none of the platforms really incentivize it, which is a shame. As much flack as social media sites get, I do believe there is space for it in this domain - which I guess Google Maps is sort of starting to adopt but Google is just horrendously terrible at trying to do anything in the social media space or UI/UX-related (eg. like a bunch of CS nerds trying to create a women's fashion blog).

The same will happen to modern wage labor due to AI. Automation will not be a sudden an obvious moment (eg. Google deciding to lay off every software engineer), rather it will be a slow hemorrhaging of the working class where vast swaths of workers will be laid off, and unable to find work of similar pay and stability ever again. The job market will continue to get exponentially more and more competitive, and the illusion of stability will collapse. This same trend has already been playing out over the last few decades, but the pace at which it's playing out is now accelerating exponentially.

Because jobs will still exist, the status quo "just re-train them" optimists will remain ignorant and in denial, clinging to old models of the past. They'll say ridiculous things like "we can re-train the bus drivers by teaching them how to code", or "just teach illustrators how to prompt".

Of course advancing technology should be a good thing, and with the modern technology we have now we already could afford a society of leisure and abundance. But our current capitalist system drains most people of the time/energy for big picture thinking (unrelated to making a buck), and our representative democracy (compared to direct or delegative democracy) further discourages political participation from regular people who aren't wealthy enough to have the abundance of leisure and financial security required to think about anything other than money.

The result is that governments only serve the interests of the wealthy, while providing only an illusion of representing the masses. The rigidity and inflexibility of government systems means that nothing will change short of a revolution.

The easiest and simplest policy change that can be made to alleviate job loss + destitution from AI and to reframe AI automation from a game with winners + losers to a game where everyone wins is to implement a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Think we can't afford a UBI? Fine. Start small, and peg it to the revenues of something specific like a Land Value Tax (Henry George's "citizen's dividend"). Watch society not collapse and everyone be happier (eg. like when COVID forced employers to allow more remote work) as society collectively moves up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The increasing abundance of leisure will start the flywheel towards increasing political participation and representation of the people, systemic political reform towards delegative democracy (liquid democracy), and the next evolution of the human species in the "AI Age".

Until then, the only way to safeguard yourself from the AI automation wave is to achieve financial independence and to fully embrace AI, since workers who know how to leverage the latest AI tools will displace those who don't.

Like HN, with tags. Not many people yet though.

The U.S can't have many nice things because it has an epidemic of homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, but can't get treatment.

Hell even India seemed to have piblic bathrooms within reach when I visited

Really what these companies should be doing if they want to lure the minions back into the cages is to entice them with things like benefits and compensation increases. Making ultimatums like this is just terrible for morale, and I imagine many talented employees will leave. I don't use AWS, and hearing this kind of thing makes me less likely to want to use AWS in the future, for the same reasons I prefer not buying clothes made in sweatshops

A couple points:

- Amazon has had a terrible reputation as a place to work for a long time, it seems they don't care at all in trying to change that

- Workers prefer the flexibility of remote work and do not want to be forced to go back into offices, commuting, and being confined to living in just NYC, SF, and a handful of other expensive cities with rampant crime and homelessness epidemics

I don't think there's much workers can do other than refusing to work for companies that aren't fully remote, but given the imbalance between employer/employee power (due to lack of universal basic income) and the terrible job market, workers just do not have much leverage because there are enough desperate people who will.

One thing workers who are passionate about worker freedom should do is consider not purchasing services from companies that are anti-remote work on ethical grounds, similar to avoiding purchasing cheap fast fashion products made in sweatshops. This would mean avoiding using AWS, Google Cloud, and buying Apple products.

If there's any bright side to this though, it's that at least the new equilibrium for these companies is a hybrid model of 3 days in office per week, which is still a hell of a lot better than 5 days per week. Regardless it is definitely hard to return to an office after experiencing the freedom of remote work. I definitely hope that fully remote companies will be rewarded, and going forward I think the trend will still inevitably continue towards remote work in an increasingly digital world.

I understand sometimes you need auth, but the app could just show the live app and then pop up a signup modal when the user tries to do something that requires auth (that's what I do on my apps)

- Instantly supports all operating systems and mobile devices

- No need to download/install some .exe files (or your OS equivalent) with all the associated security risks

- A web app will likely get updated more frequently since it's easier to develop and update

I think VS Code proves that web apps can deliver

> "we can embrace AI and leverage it to free people to spend their time at their own leisure, moving society collectively up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs"

What is the point of working in the first place if not to increase our own quality of life, of which freedom and autonomy over one's time is a core component?

- Humans will not be writing code by hand in a few years.

- Workers will be expected to move "up the stack" of abstraction. Software engineers will be expected to be more high level product manager hybrids, serving more as technical business managers who delegate low level tasks to AI agents + cheap offshore workers

- Rise in generalists. Expensive specialists are most at risk since AI democratizes knowledge + power

- Gutting of the middle class, since most peoples' jobs are now very easy to automate

- Rise in AI agents. Most of what you read online including on internet forums and in DMs, you won't be able to tell if it was written by a human or AI (already the case with recruiting). There is currently an arms race in AI agent development, the results of which we'll start seeing on society within the next 12 months.

- The glory days of working in tech are over. Just like very other industry, it's only going to get more and more competitive. Salaries will at best remain stagnant. This is not specific to tech and will be the case for every industry. The industries most resilient will be those that require a human (eg. physical therapy)

The winners will be those who harness AI to their advantage, the losers will be everyone else.

I think most people are drastically underestimating the enormous impact that AI will have on society within even just the next 12 months. People are treating AI like a temporary fad or bubble, as if things will just return to the way they were before. But AI is not only here to stay, it's just getting started, and it's an arms race because everyone knows that AI will eat everything. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential growth, and most cannot comprehend how fast things are about to change.

Not trying to make this political - but I don't see any easier method of alleviating the hemorrhaging of the middle class than governments implementing a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Humans just cannot compete with a superintelligent autonomous AI that has parsed every book and document on the internet. We can continue to be in denial of this while our citizens suffer and overdose suicide to cope with the depression and bleak opportunities, or we can embrace AI and leverage it to free people to spend their time at their own leisure, moving society collectively up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. But given how blind and reactionary most people are to this kind of stuff, I don't predict anything changes until we reach a serious boiling point, so unfortunately billions will needlessly suffer in the meantime until the masses wake up to the cosmic societal shifts that are taking place as we speak.

They interview MIT professor Tom Kochan who says that in the 1930s U.S unions like the AFL actually pushed against federally guaranteed worker benefits like paid vacation because then there'd be less need for unions. Other benefits Americans never got were federally guaranteed health insurance and pensions.

To quote the podcast transcript [1]

"The big three - pensions, health insurance, time off through vacations - were left off the table. Instead, we got collective bargaining rights, which basically say we can bargain and negotiate with our individual employers for pension, health care and vacation. Now, we should say that the U.S. is also known for not passing these work benefits because of racism. A bunch of people in the U.S. back then didn't want Black people, for example, to get these benefits, so no one got them.

But in Europe, everyone gets the big three - vacation, pension, health care - as a right. Vacation started spreading in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, and health care came in waves in the 1940s, '70s and '80s. And maybe this is why European countries started cutting their hours after 1979, but not the U.S. Like, maybe Europeans were, like, OK, we're getting all these benefits, plus we're just generally getting richer. Maybe work is not so important anymore. But when you do have to pay for these things, like we do in the U.S. - maybe that's why work is so important here."

[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1194467863

Obsidian is not able to open a local folder on my machine stored in Windows Subsystem for Linux, which for me makes it a non-starter (my personal knowledge base is stored there).

I personally prefer the Notion UI but hate being locked into their cloud, so I created an offline-first Notion alternative [1]. Offline mode is totally free (no user registration required), and aiming to add cloud syncing tomorrow or so. Still in active dev so needs a lot of work, but wondering whether others might find this useful. Goal is to make it be able to seamlessly sync across multiple data sources, and also easily to publish files/folders (eg. can currently turn folders into APIs when synced to cloud).

[1] https://mindgarden.app

tRPC seems cool, but seems riskier to go with an alternative to REST or GraphQL, especially if you intend to make your API public and/or have multiple consumers of your API.

Love it, and wish I had this drive at your age.