csa

> And if it's so cheap and bespoke, why buying it and not making it in house?

0. Sure, some products will be made in house. That said, being able to spec a product well is a skill that is not as common as some folks seem to think. It also assumes that an org is large enough to have a good internal dev team, which is both rare and relatively expensive.

1. It sloughs responsibility, which many folks want to do.

2. It allows for creation to be done not by committee and/or with less impact from internal politics.

3. It facilitates JIT product/tool development while minimizing costs.

That’s off the top of my head.

The realities of business often point to internal development not being ideal.

> No? I dont see any indication that this would be a good idea. Or even looked for.

Do you spec software for a variety of businesses?

I do.

It’s rare that one SaaS or software package does what the people paying want it to do. Either they have to customize internally (expensive and limited to larger orgs with a tech department) or Frankenstein a solution like Salesforce or WordPress with a lot of add ons. And even then, it’s not hitting all pain points.

Being able to spin up or modify an app cheaply and easily will be a massive boon for businesses.

> And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets?

> Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

Yes. Products will become more tailored/bespoke rather than a lot of the one size fits all approach that is pervasive now.

> nobody understanding what is going on underneath

I think many developers, especially ones who come from EE backgrounds, grossly overestimate the number of people needed who understand what is going on underneath.

“Going on underneath” is a lot of interesting and hard problems, ones that true hackers are attracted to, but I personally don’t think that it’s a good use of talented people to have 10s or 100s of thousands of people working on those problems.

Let the tech geniuses do genius work.

Meanwhile, there is a massive need for many millions of people who can solve business problems with tech abstractions. As an economy (national or global), supply is nowhere close to meeting demand in this category.

> Whats unique or special about these particular tessellations?

1. He talked about them to people who were interested in listening.

2. He was able to apply the knowledge he gained for his specific task in a variety of team tasks at the event.

> I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that

Both.

Smart because you realized that BTC is an incredibly flawed currency, or store of value, or whatever you want to call it.

Idiot because you grossly underestimated the desire of the general public to gamble on the “next big thing”.

> Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

In $big_corp, everyone seems to have penis envy over “head count”, constantly checking whose is bigger.

If you want to see an executive have an existential crisis, ask them how many of those folks are necessary for the org to run.

> Is Microsoft a "dying company"? The stock market certainly thinks otherwise.

This is the entire sentence that I wrote that you seem to be referring to:

“These are examples of how bad management thinks, or at best, how management at dying companies think.”

MS falls under the first part — bad management. Let literacy be your friend.

To elaborate, yes, I think that MS is managed incredibly poorly, and they succeed despite their management norms and culture, not because of it. They should be embarrassed by their management culture, but their success in other areas of the company allows the bad management culture to persist.

> The firm simply assumes that if the top X was sufficient in the past, it is still sufficient now.

> From the perspective of modern management, there's really no reason to keep people if you can automate them away.

These are examples of how bad management thinks, or at best, how management at dying companies think.

Frankly, this take on “modern management” is absurd reductionist thinking.

Just a few points about how managers in successful companies think:

- Good employees are hard to find. You don’t let good people go just because you can. Retraining a good employee from a redundant role into a needed role is often cheaper than trying to hire a new person.

- That said, in any sufficiently large organization, there is usually dead weight that can be cut. AI will be a bright light that exposes the least valuable employees, imho.

- There is a difference between threshold levels of compliance (e.g., docs that have to be filed for legal reasons) and optimal functioning. In accounting, a good team will pay for themselves many times if they have the time to work on the right things (e.g., identifying fraud and waste, streamlining purchasing processes, negotiating payment terms, etc.). Businesses that optimize for making money rather than getting a random VP their next promotion via cost-cutting will embrace the enhanced capability.

Yes, AI will bring about significant changes to how we work.

Yes, there will be some turmoil as the labor market adjusts (which it will).

No, AI will not lead to a labor doomsday scenario.

Scope will increase.

Good accounting teams will have more time and resources to do things like identify fraud, waste, duplicated processes, etc. They will also have time to streamline/optimize existing practices.

Good teams will earn many multiples of their cost in terms of savings or increased earnings.

There may be increased competition for the low-cost “just meet the legal compliance requirements” offerings, but any business that makes money and wants to make more will gladly spend more than the minimum for better service.

> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

In many cases, this is a fallacy.

Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can be done more thoroughly.

Source: Me. I have worked waaaay too much on cleaning up the innards of less-than-perfect accounting processes.

> You quoted "reasonable", but nothing what you said has any effect on reasonableness.

Being notified that you are or have been breaking the law and being told that there will be severe consequences if you don’t stop seems reasonable to me.

It may not be how we do it in the west, but it’s hard to argue that this can’t be perceived as reasonable.

Let me give you an example that opened my eyes. It’s one of many, but it’s one that you may have heard of.

Michal Fay was caned in Singapore in the 1990s. I was so put off by this, that I swore never to go to Singapore. I thought that the punishment far exceeded that which could be justified by the crimes he committed (petty stuff like vandalizing cars).

Then, within a 6 month period, I met two families who lived as expatriates in Singapore at the same time, one in the same community.

They all said that MF was a pariah. They also both said that he and his family had been given gradually escalating warnings over a short period of time, with the next to last one being “MF needs to leave Singapore now”, and the last one being “you (his family) and MF need to leave Singapore now”. Apparently the job was too good, so the family stayed. We know the rest of the story.

A decade later, I met a woman who worked in Singapore at the time, and she expressed similar sentiments.

While I still think the punishment was excessive (even reduced to 4 lashings instead of 6), I lost all pity for MF and his family. They knew what was coming, and they either didn’t understand the culture they were in, or they didn’t believe what they were told.

I’ve see similar types of policing (with warnings and an explanation of potential consequences) happen in Japan, China, and South Korea. IMHO, it works the way they want it to (mostly as an early deterrent, with very little prosecution actually taking place). This is one reason why there is such a high success rates of criminal convictions in places like Japan — if they make the effort to book you, they have overwhelming evidence, usually collected when the criminal has been warned.

We may not like the laws, we may not like the punishments, but we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes.

> If someone warns you that they're going to murder you if you post another 5 comments on HackerNews, and keeps you up-to-date with every comment you make, nothing about those warnings makes the subsequent murder after your 5th comment more reasonable than if they hadn't given those warnings.

Great strawman.

Posting on HN is not against the law (at least where I am).

> reasonable policing

Policing SOPs in East Asia (incl. Singapore) is different than policing SOPs in the west. Typically people are warned, often multiple times, that they are in danger of experiencing the less kind side of local law. Once the switch is flipped, this gentle hand becomes an iron fist.

I will bet dollars to donuts that the person who was held without charge for decades (mentioned above) was completely not surprised that they were severely punished. They may not have liked the punishment, they may not have agreed with the opaque process, but they almost certainly can’t say that they didn’t know it was coming.

> Why don't [they] come in legally?" is just conservative doublespeak for for "they don't belong here." It's begging the question and everyone knows that, even the person saying it.

While this question is definitely used in the way you, I’ve heard it come from the mouths of more legal immigrants than I can count.

It’s not just conservatives who are saying this.

> At best you are buying a dollar with dollar.

There are at least two scenarios in which “just a dollar” is a great outcome for someone purchasing a stable coin (assuming that it’s actually stable):

1. You want the convenience of digital coin transfers/payments without the variance of price swings (e.g., recent Bitcoin). This can be especially useful when you have access to a phone but limited or no direct access to modern banking facilities.

2. It’s easy to get your local currency onto an exchange, but it’s not easy or advisable to have a dollar bank account or keep large amounts of dollars in cash in your locale.

3. (I guess for completeness) You want to engage in activities that are of questionable legality (e.g., drug sales in certain places, online poker in most of the US, etc.).

> And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.

If reading an AI summary of readings is all it takes to make an exercise a facade, then the exercise was bad to begin with.

AI is certainly putting pressure on professors to develop better curricula and evaluations, and they don’t get enough support for this, imho.

That said, good instruction and evaluation techniques are not some dark art — they can be developed, implemented, and maintained with a modest amount of effort.

I didn’t want to belabor the point in my original post, but since you went there…

The next steps at the doctor is that I show them my MyFitnessPal nutrition tracking, my dexascan, and (at some point) take off my shirt. I ask them what exactly it is I should change. 100% of the time the answer has been something like “Oh, sorry. Please continue as you are doing.”

They just aren’t used to seeing muscular 200 pound dudes at my height in my area at my age (btw, I’m in my 50s).

Also, someone can workout in the gym all they want, but I think most people will struggle with lowering their body fat percentage if they don’t focus on their nutrition.

I realize that my lean body mass (both bones and muscle) are decreasing, and that rate of decrease be higher each year. That said, I’m doing what I can to maintain whatever muscle and bone mass I have.

Tesla designer I know said that it’s not something that anyone is currently working on.

As such, my guess is “not any time soon”.

> I'd consider 5'8 and 210lbs morbidly obese. An average male at 5'8 should generally weigh about 150lbs and no more than 164lbs

You would consider incorrectly then.

This person has ~155 pounds of lean body mass. 164 would put him at roughly a body builder level of fat, which basically requires a part time job in cooking and nutrition to maintain.

For reference, I’m in a similar situation to this person. I’m 5’11” (180cm) and about 200 lbs (91kg) with about 170 lbs of lean body mass. My dexa scan says that I’m 15% body fat, but I get the same lectures from doctors about being obese and needing a lifestyle change, all based on BMI and (I assume) my size (I’m barrel chested). It’s completely absurd.

> Having to share a space with a questionably vetted stranger is one of the primary downsides to rideshare apps.

Some people see this as an upside. Not me, not you, but these people exist.

> I'm Japanese and I understand this issue perfectly and you don't.

Um, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. You have a viewpoint that seems more like negatively-biased indirect knowledge of this part of Japanese culture.

Were you born in Japan?

Have you lived there as an adult?

Have you frequented スナック and other types of hostess bars? If so, how did you discover them and with whom?

If you’re older, how has the スナック scene changed over your lifetime?

> I find it unfortunate that this article is glorifying the quite exploitative industry of hostess bars in Japan. From Wikipedia:

> > A "snack bar" (スナックバー, sunakku bā), "snack" for short, refers to a kind of hostess bar. It is an alcohol-serving bar that employs female staff to serve and flirt with male customers.

My friend, quoting Wikipedia on a topic as culture-specific as スナック is just flat out irresponsible.

スナック run the whole gamut from friendly place to hang out, to a place lonely men flirt with hostesses, to thinly-veiled fronts for prostitution (and possibly human trafficking), with most leaning much more in the vanilla direction. While they aren’t always easy to tell apart from each other from the outside looking, スナック and キャバクラ or クラブ (or whatever they are calling them at a given time and in a given place) are very different experiences with different expectations.

The bar-going locals pretty much all know the rules and expectations of each スナック. If they don’t know about a specific place, they can usually find out quickly.

The post-ww2 history of スナック (and other local drinking establishments) is fascinating if you can get people to talk to you about it. It definitely has been a way for various types of less-privileged folks (e.g., widows, low education, low social class, etc.) to earn money, some times multiples of what their customers earn. [side note: this isn’t actually as great as it sounds sometimes, as the bar scene has lower social status than a salaryman job, even if the bar owner makes 3-10x what the salarymen make).

To close, the one specific subset of スナック that you refer to definitely exists, but it doesn’t define the whole dynamic genre.

Source: Me. Lived in Japan a while. Dated a スナック mama-san (no money was involved) after I was taken to her place by a friend of mine who was her alcohol distributor. Learned a lot from her.

> Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale?

The best way to move from the working class to the middle class these days is the military with a federal government job after retirement (even with what the current admin is doing). That said, a person doing this needs to realize that they will need to unlearn and learn a lot of social habits and learn some new ones.

The bonus is that higher ed will be free, and ambitious folks can ladder up into officer roles, which can be even more of a social climb.

> I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold

I think you are very wrong on this point.

A highly-socialized person with the minimum viable amount of competency will go much farther in life than a highly-competent person with limited social skills.

If your kids are in a good school system, there will be a culture of competence in the students and their families.

> but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit

You just need to find the right pocket of people.

I personally recommend good Montessori schools over home schooling for K-8. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works well when it’s a good fit. The community around the school is usually fairly healthy as well.

For 9-12, a high-quality private school, a magnet school, a combo high school / JC, or an independent study high school (often with home school “classes”) are all good options for curious and ambitious students, imho.

> Then they should have points deducted for that. Effective communication of answers is part of any exam.

Agreed. Then let me type my answers out like any reasonable person would do.

For reference…

For my last written blue book exam (in grad school) in the 90s, the professor insisted on blue books and handwriting.

I asked if I could type my answers or hand write my answers in the blue books and later type them out for her (with the blue book being the original source).

I told her point blank that my “clean” handwriting was produced at about a third of the speed that I can type, and that my legible chicken scratch was at about 80% of my typing rate. I hadn’t handwritten anything longer than a short note in over 5 years. She insisted that she could read any handwriting, and she wasn’t tech savvy enough to monitor any potential cheating in real time (which I think was accurate and fair).

I ended up writing my last sentence as the time ran out. I got an A+ on the exam and a comment about one of my answers being one of the best and most original that she had read. She also said that I would be allowed to type out my handwritten blue book tests if I took her other class.

All of this is to say that I would have been egregiously misgraded if “clean handwriting” had been a requirement. There is absolutely no reason to put this burden on people, especially as handwriting has become even less relevant since that exam I took in the 90s.

> Very effective multiple choice tests can be given, that require work to be done before selecting an answer, so it can be machine graded.

As someone who has been part of the production of quite a few high stakes MC tests, I agree with this.

That said, a professor would need to work with a professional test developer to make a MC that is consistently good, valid, and reliable.

Some universities have test dev folks as support, but many/most/all of them are not particularly good at developing high quality MC tests imho.

So, for anyone in a spot to do this, start test dev very early, ideally create an item bank that is constantly growing and being refined, and ideally have some problem types that can be varied from year-to-year with heuristics for keys and distractors that will allow for items to be iterated on over the years while still maintaining their validity. Also, consider removing outliers from the scoring pool, but also make sure to tell students to focus on answering all questions rather than spinning their wheels on one so that naturally persistent examinees are less likely to be punished by poor item writing.

> If you compare them to Finnish or Norse arctic troops and if it ever came to combat, yes, this isn’t the place a US soldier would want to be.

Thanks for coming out.

These are the Arctic Airborne folks (11th division) — above average (which isn’t saying much), but not elite. They are tasked with rapid deployment, and they are good at that, but they aren’t the point of the spear.

There are elite arctic troops who I am confident would sow fear into any opposition troops (arctic or otherwise). If you know any elite Norwegian or Finnish arctic troops, then they have either worked with or know someone who has worked with highly competent US counterparts.

No need to conflate the two.

> Working class as such supported and voted for democrats.

I live in coastal CA, and a healthy majority of my “working class” friends are Trump supporters.

The ones in the trades, who are relatively high earners, are all Trump supporters.

> Eventually, this feedback look can fail, but it isn’t on some predictable four generation pattern.

Actually, it kind of is.

See The Fourth Turning and any other book based on the Strauss-Howe generational theory.

Is this theory air-tight and inviolable? No. Does it more or less support this “silly trope”? Yes. I think it’s safe to say that it is directionally correct.

> Citizens now expect ethical behavior from their leaders as a baseline rather than a bonus.

Amongst the MAGA voters I know, ethical behavior is very much a “hope for” bonus than an expectation.

There is a lot of ends-justify-the-means rhetoric in that voter pool that I talk to.

Useful feedback. Thank you.