bluefirebrand

As if Uber's policies and incentives have zero influence on their "contractors" behaviour

Get real

> Uber drivers broadly are considered independent contractors

I don't think that should really matter when you're engaging in activities that are "on duty"

The driver was acting as a representative of Uber. They were on a job for Uber.

Good. Companies shouldn't be able to get out of having good public behavior just by not having employees

I'm not a car guy but would it be fair to see that your maximum possible performance is bounded by the engine, but the average performance gains are from tuning the rest of the vehicle?

Kind of like if your RAM has to constantly page, you would see much more improvement from upgrading your RAM than overclocking your CPU?

> Hackers used to say "information yearns to be free" now they're saying "that's my information and I don't want you using it"

If you can't tell the difference between "I want to share all information freely with my fellow mankind" and "I want to share all information freely, even to billion dollar corporations that are making the human-replacer machines that threaten my fellow mankind" I really just don't know what to tell you

> I regret every line of open source code I ever wrote

And every stack overflow post, every reddit post, everything.

I regret participating in the open Internet.

Here I am anyways, I guess. It's just in my genes or something.

There's an analogy I've read before, couldn't tell you where, that goes something like:

Startups are like a roulette wheel at a fancy casino. Most people can't even afford to get in the door. Middle class people can afford to maybe take one or two spins on it, if they go all in. Rich people can spin it as many times as they like

As someone who grew up on the lower end of middle class this rings really true to me. I don't have access to the kind of capital to build a dream business. I could probably take one shot at it, if I put my house up as collateral for a loan to get me started

It's too risky for me. But if I were a multi millionaire I don't think I'd think twice about giving it a shot

> Hello's an established communication protocol that allows the speaker to verify the target is available, listening and ready to initiate a conversation

Which isn't relevant at all in asynchronous communication methods like messaging.

> If you gotta call someone for support, do you say hello and wait for them to say hello back or do you just unload your question

Phone calls and messaging are different.

> True, but this is also a stunning example of survivorship bias

Survivorship bias is literally just how invention happens.

No one strikes gold on the first swing.

Probably most people have moved to the cloud or do other managed services

From what I can tell "sysadmin" has largely been replaced by "cloud ops"

That said it is kind of a lot of pieces of complexity you have there. I don't know if it is unreasonable for a full time sysadmin though. I'm not a sysadmin, but as a webdev I can run about half that stack you listed myself. That might be where some of the disconnect is too, a bunch of this stuff has been taken over by other roles instead of a single sysadmin

This is why a lot of "how to get people to like you" advice is really just "ask them lots of questions"

You ask enough questions about different topics and you'll get a positive reaction probably

> People accidentally hurt themselves with kitchen knives every day. They are also very often used for violent crimes

People are rightfully nervous when they see someone walking down the street swinging a knife i.e openly misusing it or treating it casually

People don't realize how much software is being misused or treated too casually. They might be similarly bothered by lax security on databases and data leaks if they realized that it represented a threat to them

> And why the hell would anyone want a job where a mistake results in personal ruin

We are talking about the sort of job where you are paid ludicrous amounts of money. The sort of jobs that usually come with massive golden parachutes

People earning more money in a year than most people earn their whole lives should be accepting a much higher burden of risk

My experiences has been

3. The business cannot figure out a direction so the developer can either churn on design docs fruitlessly or make prototypes that visually show the business people what our options are in order for them to make up their minds

Proprietary Computer systems shouldn't get the same leeway that humans do. Simple as that.

Another way to look at it is "it talks to me like I don't know anything"

Which is very annoying when you do know things

That's stupid, these courts are stupid

It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.

That shouldn't satisfy anyone.

I don't really buy this.

It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better

Of course they complete.

Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.

Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing

Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?

My Dad was basically a tool salesman for most of my life. He was really, really good at it. and I don't know if he ever measured anything. He just talked to people and tried his best to give people what they say they want

Crazy how successful he has been off of just that simple approach. It's something that drives me nuts about a lot of current product design strategies. Yes, sure. You can occasionally have a Steve Jobs style product visionary who delivers something that people never imagined

But for most of us I think we'd see a lot more success just talking to customers and delivering what they ask for, instead of filtering thier thoughts through a "product owner" who winds up having us build something else

My experience with a lot of current product direction advice is along the lines of "don't just give them what they ask for, because they don't know what they want. You have to figure out what they want and deliver that instead". I think this is a really stupid approach. If you are talking to people who "don't know what they want", then you have to find different people to talk to. In my experience the best ideas come from people who know exactly what they want.

The job of product should be to find those people and ask them, not to talk to the wrong people and guess at what they "really want"

So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?

Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days

If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

> Everyone likes to deride idiot MBAs while also enjoying a stock market that returns on avg 8-10% per year vastly outpacing inflation in a developed, stable, wealthy country of all places

Sounds great until the wheels fall off because MBAs decided to save a few bucks on "unnecessary" bolts to hold them on

I have been toying with the idea of building some kind of "home cloud" that hooks into all of your smart devices (at least all of the open devices that it can), allows photo backups from mobile devices, idk. Stuff like that.

Something you can just scan a QR code with your phone and it hooks it into your backups so your "cloud backup" is sitting in your utility room at home instead of being "someone elses computer"

Obviously this is all achievable by a savvy techie, but I'm thinking along the lines of a black box any idiot can use.

The idea is very appealing to me, I would love to decentralize "the cloud" for your average person.

And if it were possible to get one of these in every house and apartment, then the idea of a "smart home" starts to really click in ways it doesn't right now. Your smart home would have a "home cloud" box that acts as the brain

Idk. I think there's a product idea here somewhere but ultimately it's just something I'm kicking around now and then.

> How is this not a skill issue and why would one conclude that you need to stop learning if this is the case?

It's not the skill I'm interested in learning nor is it the same skill I spent my career building

My problem also is not just to do with "My future learning" it is also about the value and opportunity to use the skilled I already spent decades on. Which are now devalued heavily or will be in the very near future

This feels so insane to me, because I don't think I know anyone who plays phone games

> It's kind of weird. nVidia kind of has the PC market cornered, but AMD has had the last couple of generations of Xbox and Playstation

I have been getting the vibes that Sony is positioning themselves to back out of videogames. I don't think we're going to see a PS6.

> You are not hired for your suffering, your experience, the time you spent learning everything you know OTHER THAN insofar as it helps deliver your employer value.

Yes obviously. But consider:

In the past my employer and I were aligned. We agreed that in order for me to create more value for them I also had to enrich myself by learning new stuff so I could use that learning to better provide value to them

Now that is no longer the case. Now my employer and I are no longer aligned. The equation is now stacked heavily in favor of employers, at the expense of people like me not getting what I want out of the arrangement other than a paycheck

Yeah, fine. Most people only work for a paycheck. I'm not really worse off than anyone else in that regard. I'm still mad that I arranged my life so I did have a better arrangement for myself and now I do not thanks to the greediest assholes on the planet

> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.

> I really don't get the hate

I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"

It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"

I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.

Software is fine as a product, it is when it becomes a service that it sucks

I'm assuming that was when "don't be evil" still mattered to them?