luckylion

At which point do you cross the line? Somebody who murders to take someone else's money is ultimately just too lazy to provide value in return for money, so they're not evil?

What's your estimation for how much more expensive it would be for DTAG to peer at Decix instead of only doing dedicated private peerings that they get paid for?

Because I don't believe it's about any additional cost -- it's only about additional revenue that could be extracted. That's a behavior you don't like to see from a state-owned ex-"Only Offer Allowed" monopolist that is still dominating the market while the government entities tasked with regulating the market are closing both eyes.

The same is true for regular databases though, isn't it?

Network adds latency and while it might be fine to run 500 queries with the database being on the same machine, adding 1-5ms per query makes it feel not okay.

Protecting the employee instead of the company/shareholders is unchecked greed?

Yes, absolutely. I'm not talking about people who are not sociable _and_ can't produce, but people who don't care about your feelings, but are very strong in their work.

In other comments, it felt like they focused very much on the "low in soft skills" part without looking at the other skills being extended. Of course, someone who is unpleasant to work with and only writes buggy software will not help a project progress. But someone you don't want to spend time with but who carries your team through the project with his skill and productivity is a very different story.

Maybe you had those average assholes masquerading as brilliant? I don't know that of course, but "ships broken stuff" doesn't sound particularly brilliant to me.

I'm thinking of the type that builds things that you can stack up against the output of others and comes out miles ahead. I have one of those in my team, and it feels like a force of nature: he independently does in a month what a team of five did in three, and his work is of better quality. Of course I'll cut him a lot more slack.

I generally struggle with the idea of someone actually choosing to be an asshole, I assume there's usually an unseen cause.

E.g. I work with someone who seems very normal, is very professional, and I have no reason to believe that they area neurodiverse in any way. They once were very direct in a ticket towards a different team. Did they choose to be an asshole, or were they losing their last ounce of patience and politeness because they've been carrying a mountain of responsibility and stress? I think it's very difficult to tell that apart, or to judge based on "well, they could have not taken on that responsibility so they're liable for anything that is a consequence of it".

I don't consider it a free pass, but there's a lot more understanding for things that are outside your control. Where we see that line of control probably determines whether we judge someone harshly or not.

To the outside, the difference is hard to tell, isn't it? Between neuro-diversity and genuine unpleasantness -- isn't it mostly that one has a diagnosis (that you know of) and the other does not?

You might change your moral judgement of someone's behavior if you find out they have this or that condition (at least I do), but it doesn't change how their behavior impacts you, does it? If it did, I think the best you could do is to assume that everyone has some sort of condition that makes them act the way they do, and it'll be less of a problem.

I have no experience with the military and very little with working in academia, but a lot with commercial work, and I've seen it work many times. Clearly those people wouldn't be the ones talking to customers or leading teams, but it's worth a lot to have someone that can tackle hard problems.

I'm not at all saying that you can only have one or the other, or that soft skills don't matter at all. It's just my experience that output matters a lot more than people say in these types of conversations.

To me looks a lot more like the cliche Diva in music - are you really going to not work with someone extremely talented just because they're difficult to work with and you wouldn't want to hang out with them?

People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person.

It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over them not contributing but being nice.

I consider "understanding what people want when they well you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that.

I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what impressed me is how well the process works for them. They describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something that's very close to what they want, and they get to their desired result with a few iterations.

It depends on what you want to achieve as a developer, I think. Having some soft skills makes a lot of things easier, but if you don't have the hard skills to back it up, you'll plateau unless you switch to management before you reach your limit.

At the same time, if you're very good at what you do, soft skills are a lot less important. Most of my peers would rather work with brilliant jerk than a friendly average person.

But most people are not brilliant, and then you can't afford to not have soft skills.

Possibly, but those are irrelevant sums compared to their total wealth.

But technically you can also do that with chromium and gecko, but it's a lot of work, so very few do. And those that do don't cut the line, they'll almost all still follow upstream and just apply their changes.

So in the end, they're still dependent on the decisions made in the US. That doesn't need to be a problem, but I don't think "you can get the source code" really changes that.

I think that's more "this sounds great" than "our users are developers". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.)

It reads exactly like what you'd expect from a "I want to be considered a thought leader" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along.

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.

I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

You mean one unelected dictator tried to annex a neighboring country and wanted to remove the elected president of that country.

Please don't spread Russian propaganda by taking over their talking points.

For all its existence it has been 100% state-owned and state-controlled, yet because it's a failure, it's still somehow "not state, but actually privatized", even though not "full actual privatization" (but only imagined privatization).

I understand the desire to have a scapegoat for failure, and to externalize it in some abstract capitalists/neoliberals/conservatives, but abandoning reality to create your own world has no predictive power and is not a long-term strategy.

Germany's public transport is really not privatized though. The Deutsche Bahn AG is structured as company, but is entirely owned by the federal government. There's very, very little public transportation (e.g. private buses between major cities) that is not owned and operated by the government.

What privatization are you talking about?

> Other professions have done what you have stated (i.e. certification) and seen higher wages than otherwise which also proves my point.

I'd generally agree with that if it regards to safety (e.g. industrial control systems), but we manage that by certifying the manufacturer, not the individual developer. But otherwise I think it's harmful to society, even if beneficial to the individuals - but there's a lot of things falling in that bucket, and it's usually not the things we strive for at a societal level.

In my experience, getting better and faster has always translated into being paid more. I don't know that there's a direct relationship to specific tools, but I'm pretty sure that the mainstreaming of software development has caused the huge inflation of total comp that you see in many companies. If it was slow and there's only this handful of people that can do it, but they're not really adding a huge amount of value, you wouldn't be seeing that kind of multiplier vs the average job.

Monopolizing the work doesn't work unless you have the power to suppress anyone else joining the competition, i.e. "certified developers only".

Otherwise people would have realized they can charge 3x as much by being 5x as productive with better tools while you're writing your code in notepad for maximum ROI, and you would have either adjusted or gone out of business.

Increased productivity isn't a choice, it's a result of competition. And that's a good thing overall, even if it sucks for some developers who now have to actually work for the first time in decades. But it's good for society at large, because more things can be done.

> "AI" (and don't get me wrong I use these LLM systems constantly) is off the charts compared to normal data centre use for ads serving.

It wasn't only about serving those ads though, traditional machine-learning (just not LLMs) has always been computationally expensive and was and is used extensively to optimize ads for higher margins, not for some greater good.

Obviously, back then and still today, nobody is being wasteful because they want to. If you go to OpenAI today and offer them a way to cut their compute usage in half, they'll praise you and give you a very large bonus for the same reason it was recognized & incentivized at Google: it also cuts the costs.

> Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.

That's why I'm not a big fan of recommending people to often and quickly change jobs to increase titles and pay. Their skills don't level up the same way, and they end up with a title of senior/lead developer and can't actually build maintainable systems or solve problems that nobody tells them the solution to.

It might just as well have been something that was supposed to sound young and fun ("I don't want to do that") and ends up leaving too much room for interpretation.

If you have the power to do something, saying you might do it but that you don't want to makes people imagine you'd do it. If you have a knife and talk about how you "might stab people, but don't want to", that's a very different message than having a knife and saying "obviously I'm not going to stab people, violence is not an option".

The latter reassures, the former depends heavily on what the recipient of the message thinks of you, and whether they can imagine you stabbing people.

If that quote was accurate, then either he just said something and wanted to wing it, or they should reconsider their communication strategists.

You can easily test this, of course -- the problem isn't that you, the user, cannot find out, it's that you pay for being able to use an endpoint in those countries and can't, because they don't exist.

It's not only small countries either, it affects much of Latin America, including Brazil (PIA's servers were in Miami for BR as well last time I checked). I've occasionally seen it also affect US states where e.g. Massachusetts would be served from Trenton, NJ.

> I am not sure that I really understand what they did.

They checked where the VPN exit nodes are physically located. A lot of them are only setting a country in the whois data for the IP, but do not actually put the exit node in that country.

"shouldn't be profit oriented" is another way to say "costs will quickly grow exponentially", because there's absolutely no incentive not to let them.

Is anyone better off if elderly care becomes too expensive to offer at scale?

"yeah, yeah, that's bad, BUT HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT"

Whataboutism doesn't give absolution, it's only meant to deflect, as ks2048 did.

> But Amazon will fight for its life to stop this

have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.

> Imagine for a second that any time you borrowed money to buy something, like a home or a car, you paid that back not by actually paying the loan plus interest, but by a % garnishment of your lifetime wages. That is what equity capital is like.

Weird analogy. It's more like "what if you borrowed money to buy something, didn't have to return it, but if you made money with that thing, you give the lender a cut, forever".

Because the point is: it's not a loan, you don't have to pay it back, and you're not on the hook for it if things go wrong. That's the big upside and why lots of people do that instead of getting a loan. Because loans are available, but people don't want that risk and are willing to give up some of their ownership to avoid it.