matrix87

for some reason, stripe owns this magazine

Zerohedge is probably more reliable at this point

I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.

The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.

I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.

At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.

Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.

Yeah, he cut headcount, zuck saw an opening, now threads took a bunch of market share (and probably has a better monetization system in place).

Once a company gets bloated, it's pretty much impossible for upper management to actually know (or have time to know) where the bloat is

Nick Land already predicted this

> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes

Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.

In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.

As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.

Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't

This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.

It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.

They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now

> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working

they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest

I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.

I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda

I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.

Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.

This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable

I think the point is to push people out primarily.

This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.

I feel the exact same way, it helps speed up development a lot (and eliminates a lot of really annoying grunt work). But I see people I work with doing shit with it that doesn't make any sense, e.g. writing 50k lines of code for a "compiler" when it's really just an interpreter under the hood. Like they never take the time to understand the domain more deeply, they just use claude to sling some shit that barely works

> i'm not sure what gap people are trying to close building themselves some proverbial great library here, but i would encourage people to just sit back and trust that their brain is still one of the greatest technologies at their disposal.

Culturally I think this is going to fuck things up significantly. If I take the time to read all of the latest papers in the LLM space, I'm damn well not going to summarize it or document what I've learned for anyone. (Maybe this is why there are not many high quality books aggregating all of this information in all the latest papers, all of the advancements, etc. All the people doing this work would rather (smartly) milk the cash cow and maintain the information asymmetry.)

Or think about open source, this will kill it for people trying to make money off a product and keep it open source. Because someone could spin up a competitor overnight.

AI is going to make the information easier to acquire for cheap. But it's going to absolutely destroy the incentive structure and trust required to have an open exchange of information. It was already bad enough because the industry is not incentivized to produce quality literature for educational purposes like academia is. But after this, it'll be a complete shit show

you can use AI to get a faster explanation for what's happening in a big codebase, it makes the timelines on developing features much lower from my experience

am I losing out on something by not having to spend hours clicking through redundant parts of a large codebase to get a concrete answer on something? doesn't feel like it

> when ambiguous, assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral.

If you're in a toxic environment, this is what it's like. It's a culture problem, not an individual problem.

Here are some examples, going to get anecdotal here:

- People stealing credit for my work

- Needing to kick them off of projects I'm on to protect myself

- Getting into political standoffs with people trying to pressure and threaten me into arrangements that fuck me over

- Had people I work with turn on me all of a sudden and try to throw me under the bus

- A manager forcing someone to work with shitty consultants (who were, of course, a personal connection), then using it to throw them under the bus

- People trying to gatekeep higher ROI work for favorites

- Management lying to people and misrepresenting opportunities to get them to join, then rug pulling once they've signed on the dotted line

The "antisocial" behaviors in the post are just the sort of rational emotional detachment which happens when you figure out that you're dealing with shitty people.

Maybe I'll get genuinely antisocial here: a lot of people in general are shitty people. Or at least, if you've attracted shitty people into your life in the past, it'll keep happening in the future and you're better off growing the emotional scar tissue (i.e. "avoidant attachment") instead of this victim blaming. There's something about you that makes them target you and you're better off having the artillery ready

I remember back in the 2000s - 2012ish it used to actually mean something, if someone had autism then they were actually disabled and it was obvious.

90% of the "conversation" around autism today is a bunch of handwavey bullshit. There's no incentive for people to be intellectually honest. It's now a moral hazard because so many people are "attached" to the label and get accommodations out of it. You can pay phony therapists online to just go straight to a diagnosis so you can get accommodations. There are financial and political incentives in diagnosing more people.

People can't have an honest conversation around it either because it's such a charged issue. We either get one side that wants to expand the scope of autism to infinity or the RFK vaccine bullshit

Pixels usually offer better black friday deals, you can get 100-200 off (at least when I got my 8)

> but my USB-C port is failing

I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)

In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6

I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone

The US is just one giant corporate playground that companies force people to move to for the regulatory climate. It isn't meant for raising a family. People will either be transplants or neo-feudal serfs working in kitchens. The whole thing will turn into the Bay Area

People will get to choose between a vibes-based "equity" ideology where achievement is disregarded or the republican woodchipper of austerity. Either thing leads to the same outcome: everything becomes stupider and shittier. The whole system is moving of its own accord towards enshittification. People should just get the grieving over with and leave

> unless by "democratic" you mean the literal Greek etymology of the word

So like, what it says in the dictionary? As in, I'm using the word as it's actually defined?

Is conveniently redefining words to fit your argument supposed to not confuse people?

Here's what it sounds like to an idiot off the street like me:

> "democracy good"

> "letting voters actually get what they want bad"

>"democracy = letting voters actually get what they want"

> a bunch of cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics... let's wave a magic wand here, "democracy = <something completely different that you need to read a couple hundred pages of Karl Popper to understand. The public need not have an opinion here, they just need to smile and nod>"

If you mean to say that democracy (i.e. the public getting what they want via electoral process) is a flawed idea, just say it. It just sounds like you're going through a bunch of bs and vague gesturing to Karl Popper to avoid saying that

> An alternative interpretation, which we advance in this analysis, is that populism enables the expression (and execution) of authoritarian impulses within a democratic system. If this interpretation holds, then merely addressing economic inequalities or enhancing political representation through mechanisms such as referendums will be insufficient to mitigate underlying authoritarian impulses. Governments will need to proactively reinforce existing democratic safeguards before populist actors assume power.

I.e. the solution to democracy is getting rid of democracy. More doublethink I guess

> What if the choice of the majority of the people is anti-democratic?

Isn't the majority choice a priori democratic?

Unless you're saying the majority is saying "let's throw away voting and go back to monarchy"... which they aren't, systemic change on that level is usually a highly niche opinion

I'm sensing some doublethink here

> All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me.

Maybe just keep a war chest and slam them with a bunch of lawsuits if they get annoying. Or at least, that's how the professional bullshitters like Trump solve this problem

I'm convinced there's no way around this mob-like behavior. So much of our standing in society depends on things where there is no due process

The only way around this is to just keep stuff compartmentalized (work vs non-work, social group x vs social group y, relationships vs family, etc)

Or else certain kinds of people will form these "bullshit networks" that are sort of like mafias. Then they use the leverage that comes from it to bully other people around. It's the same network that amplifies a cancellation attempt

I've seen this play out in offices, friend groups, over extended family, etc. The best way to address it is to spot this kind of person, keep them compartmentalized, and give yourself the ability to walk away at any time as a check on their behavior. Or else there's no real bound on how awful they can be

there is no due process in most situations, courts are the exception and not the rule

the only fix I can think of is having a "don't shit where you eat" attitude and just keeping everything cleanly compartmentalized

I wonder at what point people decide marriage isn't worth it and the increase in risk (because of no fault and annoying cultural climate) is priced in

I'm already there personally, it just looks like a rip off

> Also it is still so surreal to me to see prestigious publications like the New Yorker talking about 4chan

They have to acknowledge the internet, even if it's more plebian in nature, because that's where shit happens now. They aren't on the cutting edge of cultural commentary anymore. It's just yesterday's medium fighting to stay with the times

Why is it always a googler writing these articles? Okay, you got laid off, but it's news because the company was google?

> Most thinkers and ideologues that represent what is rotten in modern society have to thank Hegel.

You just need to jump through a few more hoops to get to the self-consciousness and then you'll see, it all makes sense in hindsight

(like the preface to the phenomenology, this comment will only make sense once you've read the whole damn thing)

"Moreover, when this non-conceptual, substantial knowledge professes to have sunk the idiosyncrasy of the self in essential being, and to philoso­phize in a true and holy manner, it hides the truth from itself: by spurning measure and definition, instead of being devoted to God, it merely gives free rein both to the contingency of the content within it, and to its own caprice. Such minds, when they give themselves up to the uncontrolled ferment of the divine substance, imagine that, by drawing a veil over self­ consciousness and surrendering understanding they become the beloved of God to whom He gives wisdom in sleep; and hence what they in fact receive, and bring to birth in their sleep, is nothing but dreams."

-- Hegel

> The average philosopher has zero incentive for constructing grand theories

I mean, considering Hegel's grand theory indirectly lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the 20th century, maybe that's not a bad thing?