area51org

There's so much dystopian science fiction about people being completely helpless because only machines know how to do everything. Then the machines break down.

While I do like a lot of what AI brings us, it also scares the hell out of me and makes me fear more for the future of humanity than I ever have.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." —"Dr. Ian Malcolm" (Jeff Goldblum), Jurassic Park

The problem is that trump believes the president is king of America, and that a dictatorship is the best form of government. Even bigger problem: far too many Republicans seem to agree with him and will try to hasten the descent into a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. I have no idea if they will be successful, but it doesn't look like there will be much to stop them.

I wouldn't say it's that drastic. Also, SELinux can give you a false sense of security. It's best to harden the system overall instead of relying on one security feature (however good it might be).

You have to wonder if these people ever stop and think through these decisions.

Start with: why are we even renaming this thing? Everyone already knows the name. The new name is not going to make us any more money. So what are we doing?

Next: is there any chance "Windows App" will be confusing for, I dunno, practically everybody? (I realize everyone else here has pointed this out.)

Maybe the decision to rename was made by AI.

https://genius.com/Abbott-and-costello-whos-on-first-annotat...

It may be free speech, but a lot of companies would not want to advertise next to racist tweets. That's their choice.

I would not. See the Chinese Room thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

In other words, it can't think or reason on its own. It depends on prior human thought and work in order to approximate "intelligence".

> Microkernels still have lower performance than their monolithic counterparts

This is what I've understood, that the idea sounds good but in practice isn't as good as it seems like it would be.

Given that the industry is trying to retire USB-A for good, this doesn't seem likely.

He likes to pretend that the president is King of America. Obviously this isn't true, and no, he could never actually get away with trying to do this. But it feeds his base, which seems to desperately want a return to the 19th century.

We didn't think of it as job-hopping, but yeah, staying at a job for about a year was not uncommon. The thinking was: demand is high, so if you aren't eventually recruited out and you really can't find anything better, maybe there's something wrong with you.

Yeah, that line of thinking can be bogus. I ended up staying at a startup for quite a while, and occasionally had to defend myself for not bailing out even after a couple years. Saying, "Stock options" and winking usually quieted down the critics. There are reasons (even beyond stock options, LOL) for staying at a job for more than just a little while.

BTW a lot of what others have said here (pay raises came from getting new jobs, employers saw long stints at a company as a potential warning sign that you aren't really very good) does ring true.

The thing with C and D players is that while things can appear like they're going just fine, in fact, they tend to slowly and surely inject damage (badly written code, badly designed systems, ad nauseam) that will likely cost the company tons of money.

In other words, penny-wise, pound foolish.

If you don't know who's getting their jobs done and who is not, you don't have an employee problem—you have a management problem.

Ironically, the in-office employees tend to be the dead weight, just people who pretend to look busy, stand around and bullshit, and otherwise just waste time. Meanwhile, the WFH employees, who prize productivity and accomplishment over office pretense, will simply move on to companies that are more interested in making money than power games.

> If there is anything that can actually get a tech worker unionization effort going, it's going to be the back and forth on these RTO policies.

I have nothing to add, but I wanted to say this is a really good point. If nothing else could persuade me to join or help create a union, it would be these brain-damaged RTO initiatives.

This is the Costanza Disposition, the idea that all you really need to do is look annoyed and people will just assume that you're super-busy and overwhelmed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8PzhNuh7w

You're right. Usually the better people leave, and the people who remain are largely dead weight. Really good strategery there.

TIL about the Dead Sea Effect. I've been talking about the effect for years without realizing it had a name. Thanks!

Absolutely. They'll talk about "culture" and how you need to have an office in order to have it, ignoring the fact that most larger companies have multiple offices—so, what, each office has its own culture or something?

More to the point, though: what do they mean by corporate culture, and why do they believe that people need to be in the same room in order to maintain it?

I'll bet anything there is no real definition of "corporate culture". If there is, it has nothing to do with where the employees are at any given moment. Yes, I'm saying that "corporate culture" is just a meaningless buzzword thrown around by people who hope you don't stop to wonder what it is they actually mean.

> Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

It's the Burger King approach to management: all employees are just generic worker bees, and you can just go down to Burger King and order a Whopper, some fries, and maybe six engineers. Problem solved!

Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

This flawed point of view, that you can just think of employees as widgets, fails again and again and again, and yet MBA schools apparently keep teaching it, and/or people keep trying to use it.

And in this case, the failed RTO initiatives: really, I would love for one of these CEOs to explain to me what the point is. You don't think people are productive from home? Based on what, your gut feelings or conjecture? Because the opposite is true. People in offices waste a ton of time—just watch them. They stand around and bullshit. They get up and look for people to talk to (about non-work things). They make disruptive noise. What they don't do a lot of is actually get work done. Meanwhile, you're paying for their office space and electricity and everything else it takes to keep an office running.

So what's the purpose of RTO? If I didn't know better, I would say it's 1- an attempt to justify sunk costs of office leases, and 2- a huge power trip.

Doesn't matter: it will ultimately fail because offices are counterproductive to actually getting work things accomplished.

Meanwhile, it's the knuckle-dragging cro mags who are having all the babies. I wonder how this ends.

> it is hard to take them seriously

Especially when their "opinion" directly contradicts the stated facts of the situation. The feds are not going to bail out the bank—Yellin specifically said, "We're not doing that again." But they are giving the depositors, meaning people and companies, their money. That is huge. That, far as I am aware, will prevent this situation from becoming a deadly falling-domino game.

That's what they're saying, yeah.

This guy is a NYC (self-described) entrepreneur, and if he has a serious background in law or even business, it's certainly not apparent. I take his flurry of tweets with a grain of salt. Obviously he's time-stamped his predictions (today or Monday, right?) but it's likely enough that he's an east coast elite with west coast envy, shouting at the "devil".

The packet filter, for one thing. Yup.

Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.

Only when forced to.

> Perhaps it's a scientific fact that women are superior to men in science

The only valid broad generalization is that there are no valid broad generalizations.

My take? I think we men are used to having things handed to us, and women in our society are used to having to try hard, and with more or less equal opportunity, they're kicking ass.

I very much want you to be correct, but having been around for a good amount of time, it's not always as straightforward as you suggest. In many instances, companies are reluctant to hire people who have been laid off, because they imagine that if company A laid the person off, obviously something's wrong with the person. In some cases, someone can take a couple of years or so to finally find a job, and that's enough time to create financial devastation.

(I am not talking about myself, full disclosure, but I know people.)