> The recurring dream of replacing developers
> In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
It's basically this:
"I'm hungry. I want to eat."
"Ok. What do you want?"
"I don't know. Read my mind and give me the food I will love."
> an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task
I don't think that's true at all. The tool linked here is exactly the kind of utility that does one single task and that people are happy to download. Most people use software to solve a problem, not to play around with it and figure out if they have a use for it.
Agree with this wholeheartedly. Stay there for now while looking for a new job. If things work out ok at the current place, end your search and enjoy your current job. If they don't work out, hopefully you'll have some options to move into. Best of luck to you.
What is the point of being great at persuading if one is persuading peers, reports, and leaders to do the wrong thing? Persuasion is necessary but it should be second to the suggestion actually being a step in the desired direction.
I think it's interesting to also think about it from the other perspective. If this is someone who is supporting themselves through this work, then what they have to at least charge you is going to depend on how much they need to survive, i.e., buy housing, food, tools, etc. If they get only a few jobs per week, then they kinda have to try to pay their bills off of those jobs. They may also have a spouse, kids, and various others who depend on this income for survival.
Exactly. The car in front might be reacting to some road hazard that just appeared that is not visible from behind it or it may have some mechanical failure. It doesn't matter why it comes to a stop, it is always and all times the responsibility of the trailing car to maintain enough distance to be able to come to a complete stop given the speed and road conditions.
If a human driver had been driving, they also could have fled the scene, like the other human driver who caused the whole problem in the first place, and left the woman laying on the road in the dark, you know, just waiting for the next human driver to drive over her. Lets not forget that the woman was crossing the intersection on red, violating the laws that are meant to keep her safe, which again is something that the robots tend not to do. Basically, what we have here is two humans fucking up and yet we blame the robot for doing the best it could given the circumstances.
Same thing. The idea is go without a lot of the comforts we are accustomed to in order to experience life as those less fortunate do so that we may be more empathetic towards our fellow humans.
> People keep talking about how 'this is a solvency crisis because if SVB had to sell everything today, they wouldn't cover liabilities' when that is the definition of a liquidity crisis.
I don't think that's right. It would be a liquidity crisis if the market value of everything they own is higher than their liabilities but they can't find a buyer at this time. You are saying that a liquidity crisis is when they can find a buyer but everything they have is worth less than their liabilities. That's not the case.
And by not at least naming one of the problems, the author is being cowardly and/or lazy. It's like describing a reviewed item as "good". It conveys no information other than "I like it". The word "problematic" does the same thing here. It signals that the author doesn't like something but doesn't tell us anything about why. In other words, it's fucking useless.
It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world. Sure, there are other ways of organizing economic systems, but to suggest that we are simply or easily going to switch to one is unrealistic. Imagining and wanting a different status quo will not lead to a different status quo, especially if all we are doing is making demands on others to change their behavior and use their property in ways that we want. In other words, if we want a different status quo, we won't get it by bitching about GitHub but by building a competitor company that does things the way we want it.
You are right about the benefits GitHub provides to the FOSS community but I don't think that was ever the stated goal of this company. Their goal is to make profit, not foster FOSS, so we shouldn't be surprised when they make decisions that benefit their bottom line.
I agree with your point wholeheartedly. This makes me think of "knowledge transfers" in software companies where a meeting is set up between the outgoing engineer/team and the new engineer/team where all knowledge about some project is transferred in the duration of that meeting. For the participating engineers, it's usually clear that this doesn't work but management still expects the new team to be able to basically pick up where the old team left off. If we were able to transfer knowledge gained over months or years of work within a few hours, we would revolutionize scientific advancement and the education industry. Maybe one day that will be possible but for now it is ridiculous to think that reading any kind of complex information once is sufficient to not only memorize it but to truly understand it.
> But is it more or less anti-social than running a huge software platform that advertises the ways to exploit itself?
Security through obscurity is no security at all. Google is not doing its user a favor by hiding the criteria it uses to determine whether an extension is malicious or not. Also, just because Google won't publish the criteria, it does not mean that it can't be discovered by someone with enough determination. I think that a malicious actor is more likely to spend the necessary time and effort to do so than a developer who is more interested in creating an extension that will serve its users well. If anything, these types of policies drive away developers who act in good faith and leave the marketplace with more developers who are looking to exploit the users.
Defining "more important" this way seems limited to one actor. In your original post, you talk about multiple actors, namely hospitals and individual people. Different actors are going to have different budgets and preferences. Suppose you consider toilet paper to be an absolute necessity but at $20/roll, it is not affordable to you. I, on the other hand, don't value toilet paper as much but my budget is much bigger than yours so I can afford and am willing to pay $20/roll. When looking across both actors, could we still say that the "more important" need was met?
I wasn't suggesting you should do it just for this article. My library has a really good selection of newspapers and magazines that they make available online and I use it frequently. I figured some people may not know about that but would find it useful if they knew about it.
> high prices direct resources to more important uses
I don't think that that is always true. High prices will redirect scarce resources to those who have the means and desire to pay for them. That doesn't necessarily mean that those uses are more important, regardless of how one defines what it means for the resource usage to be important.
One doesn't need to be an aerospace engineer to know that Boeing planes crashed because the company leadership decided to forgo quality for the sake of profits. Before the crashes, I agree, there was no reason for customers to expect Boeing planes to be unsafe. However, now that this information has become public, any customer can decide to not fly on their planes.
I wasn't suggesting that the customers could have known beforehand that the Boeing planes had issues that would cause crashes. However, we do know NOW that Boeing planes have quality issues. If customers still willingly get on those planes, then where is the incentive for Boeing to do anything differently? That's really the point I was trying to make. We don't need perfect information to now decide to not fly on Boeing planes. That would send a very strong message to the entire industry that putting profits above customers' lives will be met with very negative consequences such as reduced or loss of profits and possibly the company going out of business.
In my opinion, we all have the choice of not flying on Boeing planes any longer. If a company shows that they are willing to put profits above their customers' lives, then customers should not do business with that company any longer. The customer has to provide an incentive to the company to not do this. Going out of business is a very powerful incentive, I believe. If a company can kill a couple of hundred of its customers and still continue to make money, then why should it do anything differently, especially if the decision that caused the deaths also caused higher profits?
Absolutely, I 100% agree with this. I wasn't arguing that the current system is anything even close to ideal. I was trying to point out that now that we, the public, have paid this horrendous price, we are still not using the information gained. A company that shows that they will put profit above their customers' lives should be abandoned very quickly by its customers. That isn't happening and the fault for that lies with the customers, IMO.
I think you're right that highly competitive markets can push down quality but that happens because the customer accepts the lower quality. If air lines or the customers actually flying on these planes decided that they were not going to buy/fly on Boeing planes, the quality issue within the market would be resolved fairly quickly. Either Boeing would produce higher quality planes or they would go out of business and their market share would be taken over by a competitor with higher quality. Of course, I'm assuming that such a competitor exists. In case they don't, my argument becomes invalid.