hnthrowaway6543

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"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people" is obviously hyperbole -- if it were true, the onus would be on you to start taking action against those terrible people. but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss, getting paid like every other schmuck, and you're happy to let those irredeemably terrible people deliver your DoorDash, teach your children at public school, and keep your electricity and water running.

> But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.

the current conflict in the middle east shows why this doesn't work in the long run.

despite what a generation that grew up consuming Marvel films was led to believe, not every conflict is a clearly defined superhero-vs-supervillain, good-vs-evil affair. eventually, you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.

it's not really a questionable decision though. in the absence of morals, which is what we have in a capitalist society, the way to maximize the success of a corporation is to remove low performers and replace them with high performers. that's common sense. criticizing a company for doing this because it "destroys people" is misplaced anger, as you should be criticizing the system the company operates in, which again, is a whole other discussion

> Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.

corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers

morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison

bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people

and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?

if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process

the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.

very true. love him or hate him, Trudeau deserves credit for surviving not just sexual assault allegations, but also the infamous blackface/brownface pictures[0], all during the height of #MeToo and leftist focus on identity politics. he wisely identified that the correct response was no response, except for notably stating that the sexual assault accuser simply "experienced their encounter differently"[1]. a lesser politician would have apologized, a tacit admission of guilt, and been forced to resign.

this isn't meant to be snippy or sarcastic, either. he was genuinely excellent at playing the political game and protecting his own career.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-votes-2019-trudeau-b...

[1] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/people-experience-things-differen...

> a desire to not centralize the Internet

> If I didn't already self-host email

this really says all that needs to be said about your perspective. you have an engineer and OSS advocate's mindset. which is fine, but most business leaders (including technical leaders like CTOs) have a business mindset, and their goal is to build a business that makes money, not avoid contributing to the centralization of the internet

i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition.

if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!

430 million people currently work in textiles[0]; how big was the industry before mechanical looms?

[0] https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-indu...

yes, this. the backlog of software that needs to be built is fucking enormous.

you know what i'd do if AI made it so i could replace 10 devs with 8? use the 2 newly-freed up developers to work on some of the other 100000 things i need done

it means it took Frieren 1000 years to fully understand Rust's borrow checker.

> Explaining code, reviewing code, writing code, writing test, writing tech docs.

people using GPT to write tech docs at real software companies get fired, full stop lol. good companies understand the value of concise & precise communication and slinging GPT-generated design docs at people is massively disrespectful to people's time, the same way that GPT-generated HN comments get downvoted to oblivion. if you're at a company where GPT-generated communication is the norm you're working for/with morons

as for everything else, no. GPT can explain a few thousand lines of code, sure, but it can't explain how every component in a 25-year-old legacy system with millions of lines and dozens/scores of services works together. "more context" doesn't help here

> bust most engineers are writing code most of the time.

the physical act of writing code is different than the process of developing software. 80%+ of the time working on a feature is designing, reading existing code, thinking about the best way to implement your feature in the existing codebase, etc. not to mention debugging, resolving oncall issues, and other software-related tasks which are not writing code

GPT is awesome at spitting out unit tests, writing one-off standalone helper functions, and scaffolding brand new projects, but this is realistically 1-2% of a software developer's time

this is the correct answer

i can only assume software developers afraid of LLMs taking their jobs have not been doing this for long. being a software developer is about writing code in the same way that being a CEO is about sending emails. and i haven't seen any CEOs get replaced even thought chatgpt can write better emails than most of them

you're confusing "speaking English" with "knowing the English alphabet." these things are orthogonal. 95%+ of people in those countries know the english alphabet. i just threw down google maps street view at a random spot in Phnom Penh and instantly found english letters visible from the street, on advertisements[0]. then i threw it down in a much smaller Thai city that i had never heard of, Nakhon Sawan, and instantly found English on the street.[1] i've been in China, Japan and Korea enough to know english characters are all over the place. the English alphabet is omnipresent everywhere, i think you fail to realize this. nobody who is using a computer in these places is getting confused by the english alphabet.

> But to assert that such work should not happen is plain wrong.

i assert it should not happen because it's not solving an actual problem, the same way that changing "x" and "y" to "ㅋ" and "ㅌ" in algebra doesn't solve a problem, and trying to "solve" it will yield to a monstrous amount of incompatibilities and confusion. here's a really good comparison: ipv6. IPv6 is solving a problem, maybe in a way people disagree with, but definitely a real problem... and yet we still can't make ipv6 fucking work after God knows how many years, and trying to get IPv6 networking at any sort of scale is a massive fucking headache. now we want to go through the same headaches to support... umlauts in usernames? yeah, no thanks.

there's enough real work left to be done in the world that we shouldn't waste time with stupid makework like this.

or maybe in 30 years i'll be able to call up IT support and say "hey i forgot my password, can you reset it? my username is 神王 سعود. ... need me to spell that for you?"

edit: somewhat ironically, HN swallowed a few of the unicode characters in my theoretical future username...

[0] https://i.imgur.com/0WkG0ze.png

[1] https://i.imgur.com/VhDR5Xh.png

it's certainly hard to localize everything but billions of people use ios/android in India, China, SEA, MENA, etc... i think it's fair to say that at the end user level, computers are in fact usable by non-English speakers.

individual apps may not be as usable, but that's on the developers. good counter-example, a lot of japanese games, even made within the past 5 years, require setting the Windows system locale to Japanese to function properly. and as someone who played a fair number of japanese doujin games in the 00s/10s, it used to be every game with this problem.

> I mean, if the computers had first been built in south east asia, they would have been.

debatable as CJK heavily use Arabic numerals everywhere, but even if they did, so what? you'd learn those symbols and get used to it. the same way that if you're a unix sysadmin you get used to only being able to use a small subset of ASCII characters for usernames.

> A good chunk of the world does not speak english or latin character based languages.

nearly everyone in a first world country knows the English alphabet though. a vast majority of the developing world as well. just look at street view on Google maps in any country, there's going to be a ton of street signs using English characters, even in non-touristy areas.

> They should be able to interact with computers completely in their own languages and alphabet sets, even if those are written right-to-left or top-to-bottom.

if you're a typical android/ios end user you're interacting with a computer in your native language anyway. this discussion only applies to low level power users.

in that case: why? these aren't user-facing features. this is like saying that people should be able to use symbols native to their language rather than greek letters when writing math papers.

it might not be "fair" that English is overrepresented in computing but it also hasn't demonstrably been a barrier to entry. Japan, Korea and China have dominated, particularly in hardware.

if you think it should be fixed why stop at usernames? why represent uids with 1234 instead of 一二三四?

> and the companies trying to turn 5 positions into 2 aren’t paying enough to reliably get and keep two people who are good at it.

it's turning 5 positions into 7: 5 people to do what currently needs to get done, 2 to try to replace those 5 with AI and failing for several years.

oh word? i know a guy at Microsoft who doesn't use Excel, that means nobody at Microsoft ever uses Excel and they're just peddling crap to the dumb masses

the fact that you're engaging w/ a random human on the internet proves that my argument is strong

if you don't like it, go talk to Claude about it

Claude will even use proper punctuation & grammar which i'm not doing. it's LITERALLY an objective improvement over this comment. why the hell are you engaging with this crap?

uh yes? Was this supposed to be some clever "gotcha!" that ended up being really stupid? Might want to run your clever comments by ChatGPT before you post next time chief

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You are choosing to consume human-generated content even though right now you could go to ChatGPT and get infinite AI-generated content, for free!

Why is that?

Yeah but why are you consuming human-generated garbage comments on HN instead of just getting infinite comments from ChatGPT?

Pontificate on this, then return.

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