kaashif

As a leader, I can just tell people literally that: if you can't go away and work independently on a problem, it puts a ceiling on how well you're going to do. Then I ask people what they've tried before asking me.

Just being upfront with people can break low performance patterns of behavior.

It appears that you are saying that because someone is an Afrikaner, they must be a member of the apartheid regime or a proponent thereof.

If you are not saying this, then it's unclear how this is related to your previous comment.

You could write a comment that makes sense by saying "Afrikaners usually believed in weird corporal punishments because that was normal in their culture" or something and that would be perfectly acceptable.

Or perhaps, you have some specific knowledge that this guy was actually a proponent of apartheid, which you should share.

Something interesting: for me, that comment was the 6th Google result for "medior". Interesting term.

It's not, but token peddlers will say it is. It's good to interact with everything through buying tokens.

The primary way to increase reliability is to automate. Instead of humans producing some output manually, humans producing machines which produce that output.

I've seen a disturbing trend where a process that could've been a script or a requirement that could've been enforced deterministically is in fact "automated" through a set of instructions for an LLM.

If you are saying that what we had previously was actually as easy as literally writing "make me a web app for arranging seats at a wedding and put it on Vercel" then you are very divorced from reality.

I know how to do all of these things and even find them easy, but it's just much faster now. These are personal one task toy apps, but they are useful.

One would be completely wrong.

AI is a tool that may make copyright violations more likely, but whether the output violates copyright is a property of the output, not how it was produced.

If you copy and paste leaked closed source code or if your AI produces it verbatim, you're in trouble either way. Change it up a bit and you're fine in practice in both cases.

Workers are necessary but not sufficient for most businesses. You also need capital. This can be provided by the workers and is for many worker owners businesses, but when the business is very capital intensive that's just not feasible.

Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.

You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.

This can be the mindset now with a lot of things.

If you want a certain app with a feature and the app isn't open source, then you may as well just clone the app and add the feature.

Claude Code and Codex (and other tools) have computer use and are perfectly capable of navigating, experimenting, cloning functionality, writing tests...

If the app is open source it's probably easier to just fork and add your features though. And cheaper.

Maybe they mean you can be not employed and build products yourself? Technically true, but that's like running your own surgeries or something, you're still doing surgery.

Somehow despite travelling a lot for work, I've never had this happen.

I just do personal stuff on my phone.

Yeah, memorization is very underrated.

Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.

Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.

I write because I just find it hard to form long, coherent thoughts without writing.

When trying to think on the fly, I often say something jumbled and nonsensical, then make another attempt after thinking for a second.

I need that editing step to even get my paragraphs or long sentences just right.

But why am I writing this comment? I don't know.

I'm not American or in America, but I wouldn't use a work laptop for anything personal.

I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?

Lucely absolutely does not catch the hard c. Surely there is no word in the English language where "ce" has a hard c, only loanwords like celt.

Massive selection bias - only the good quality ones remain standing, the low quality ones are not.

You have to get a representative sample, that's the tricky part.

So there's that!

I'm interested in how one would prove that one way or another.

It seems to me that in the past there probably was lots of shoddy workmanship and just no-one paid attention to it.

But I have no proof of that.

As long as it doesn't cost me anything, I'd like to see it play out in court and know for sure.

But that is very unlikely even if everyone adopted it, which they won't.

Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.

I think the classic one is pedophiles and protecting children.

If someone uses ChatGPT to create child porn or worse, to get help tracking down and meeting children, there is NO way in hell the public will accept "don't punish the toolmaker" as a principle.

No. But you can easily make and post content that is not easily detectable as generated.

You only notice plastic surgery when it's bad, but that doesn't mean all plastic surgery looks bad...

If the cartels attack American civilian infrastructure with drones, the American public will support a full on land invasion and annexation of Mexico if they're told that will make it stop.

Rent seeking refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

That seems non-financial.

Plenty of things are made fast, at high quality, and cheaply.

Some things just aren't very hard to make.

I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.

Any other system of incentives would be insane.

Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.

A burger flipper cannot flip 20x the burgers. There isn't really any way to produce more output flipping burgers. Even if you could, if there isn't a queue of people waiting to collect their orders, there isn't any point in producing more blindly.

The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.

> In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?

If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?

Yes, I just described the difference.

It is clearly different because in one case you are not guilty of fraud.

Being guilty of a crime plus fraud is obviously worse than just being guilty of the crime.

Breaking the law by stealing a loaf of bread is obviously different to killing one million people but "both boil down to breaking the law" - I'm not sure that comment contains that much information.

The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.

These people have a real advantage.

It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.

Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.

If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.