unsui

Because the hype will always outdistance the utility, on average.

Yes, you'll get peaks where innovation takes everyone by surprise.

Then the salesbots will pivot, catch up, and ingest the innovation into the pitch machine as per usual.

So yes, there is genuine innovation and surprise. That's not what is being discussed. It's the hype that inevitably overwhelms the innovation, and also inevitably pollutes the pool with increasing noise. That's just human nature, trying to make a quick buck from the new-hotness.

Reminiscent of the recent HN submission for "Security is a Useless Controls Problem", re: 5 monkeys & ladder expt.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110149

The crutch isn't the EdTech itself. The numerous examples regarding WGU's success for some self-driven training here suffices to suggest the tech isn't the issue.

It's the metrics required as part of legislation such as NCLB that effectively bind administrations to ensure adherence to a common curriculum, regardless of capacity or competence.

This effectively imposes Goodhart's law, since the only way to meet these measures on scale is to teach to the test, and only the test.

This ensures that no actual deep learning occurs for those falling back, while hamstringing those who master the subject matter early since there is no mechanism for rewarding early mastery.

There is a certain mindset amongst engineers and developers that reachest its zenith in SV: pathological optimization for its own sake.

I say pathological because it's a mindset that optimizes for optimization.

This mindset is exceedingly effective; it works by looking to discard any obstacles to its own optimization. In a way, it's basically the paperclip problem but done in meatspace.

And that is what I see this article highlighting: the costs of Founder Mode (i.e., the slip towards accidental authoritarianism in the pursuit of optimization-at-all-costs).

Now, there is much value in having a unified vision for a product or service; Too Many Cooks (TM) can water down the broth.

But that doesn't necessarily entail that the antipode (my way or the highway) is the correct answer either.

In a world where the value of consensus, of distributed alignment, itself is at stake, it helps to remember that it's not all-or-nothing, but a balancing act. And THAT is worth optimizing for.

> it's disheartening to see people actually defend companies when they set these policies.

HN is full of temporarily-embarrassed CEO-wannabes-in-waiting who tend to side with the disruptor, not so much with the disruptees.

Completely agree.

Am luckily in a postition where my org is 100% remote (for the time being), and I am cherishing it for as long as it lasts.

Many (most?) HN posts that discuss WFH seem to be from the POV of the employer/management, with topics such as:

* ensuring employee vigilance * reducing employee wasted cycles (with the corner case provided often being workers with multiple side gigs) etc...

(side note: seems like those comments are coming from temporarily-embarrased CEOs-in-waiting)

OTOH, looks like reviews of WFH from the IC level are often pushed aside in HN, and it may show a skewed appreciation for the true popularity and benefits of WFH.

While it may not be for everybody, for a great many of us, WFH is the best thing since sliced bread.

And to have that removed for X reasons (whether legitimate or not) will incur a significant pain for those of us who have aligned to (what I consider) an optimal productivity lifestyle. Let that pain be heard, rather than pushed aside as invalid.

2nd this.

Bought 2 of them since I "lost" the first one (then later found it), and now that it's been discontinued, one of my best backup purchases ever.

Daily driver for my 85" gaming TV/media center. Tried other couch keyboards, but always ended up coming back to this one.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems that you're taking the wrong lesson from the above quote.

It's not an instruction manual on what parts of the human experience are not yet fully captured by AI.

It's a condemnation on the entire purpose of AI as actualized in our economy, re: it's presumed lofty sci-fi-inspired aspirations (giving humans more creative liberty and freedom) versus how it's actually being operationalized (replacing their creative liberty and freedom).

Embodied AI will only accelerate that trend.

why would they have that right?

The only thing that seems to work nowadays is name-and-shame (unless you run for president, apparently).

Who are these folks that deserve to be outted for gutting an American institution? I'm sure they're still around, practicing their strain of vulture capitalism.

UPDATE:

Looks like the article points out the following main culprits: * Jim McNerney * Dave Calhoun

> Although this is incredibly shady

Understatement, to put it kindly.

Likely taking advantage of EULA-burnout, most users likely just agreed and installed on good faith.

Yes, caveat emptor and all that, but unethical (if still legal).

no they don't.

They were effectively working at embedded scale, trying to capture state within tremendously limiting constraints.

This is a case of interpreting past decisions based on current criteria, when those same conditions would have prevented modern methods from being implemented.

source? (I am challenging you :) ).

The quote "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" is a fairly robust heuristic for determing what skillsets are valued today by Big Tech. I'm sure there are exceptions (there always are to every heuristic), but overall, probably a fair assumption.

brought to you by GabeN-vidia

"rent" is the most common mental model that most accurately describes the transaction.

It may not have 100% fidelity, but people understand what renting means instinctively.

A different term, even "licensing", loses that impact (which is precisely why different language is preferred by the contract holders, to hide the true intent).

While I appreciate the sentiment for bending your mind, rather than the spoon, the practical reality is that developer time is far costlier than compute time.

It is easier to map compute structures and syntax to existing mental models than to formulate new mental models. The latter is effortful and time-consuming.

So, given the tradeoffs, I could learn a new language, or leverage an existing language to get things done.

And yes, given sufficient resources (particularly time), developing new mental models is ideal, but reality often prohibits the ideal.

we've actually had the opposite, insofar as we are leverging remote technologies to enhance mentoring and training where meatspace critically falls flat.

Things like (a) using remote screen sharing for facilitating pair programming (much better received than sitting next to each other), (b) slack threads for persistent (searchable) on-the-fly collaboration and documentation, (c) focus on async communication which focuses sync (e.g, zoom meetings) to be more impactful, vs meatspace meetings which often devolve into creation of cliques, time-wasting, etc.

I wonder if what you may be optimizing for, via meatspace, is actually socialization, vs productivity. I agree there is a role for meatspace, but I don't think that necessarily entails degradation in mentoring and knowledge-sharing, vs other benefits to socialization (e.g., morale, transmission of culture, etc).

legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions, such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives.

Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc).

Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons.

That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).

> There seemed to be a general understanding of "people are running their business off of this stuff so we need to make it work".

I think this is the part that Microsoft gets, at a deep level, and Google doesn't (or, more likely, doesn't care)

Responding to some of the comments saying that jamboard had a good run and people shouldn't be outraged that google made a decision in their own interest...

Everybody remembers the old saying, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

Well, there should be a reciprocal saying: "Anybody who ever buys google should be fired".

If the lesson here is "caveat emptor", then the real lesson is this: don't buy google.

seems a bit hyperbolic, especially for a supposed free-speech bastion like HN.

While I do think that is a great example, it would appear that your peer group might have a self-selection bias for increased security, vs the normal population.

A quick google search leads to multiple articles suggesting that the vast majority of people do not lock their phones.

As to whether they would give you their phones or not is a different question, but I would wager that many (most?) of those who don't lock their phones would also not necessarily care if someone looks at their device, or at the very least do not take measures to prevent others from doing so.

> Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some

This is going back to slippery slope argument issue.

What makes you think there isn't pushback to create an equilibrium of policies?

Why does it necessarily need to be one-sided, where giving in to one iota entails giving in to the whole enchilada?

Complex systems entail dialogue and pushback across competing incentives and motivations. Yes, each side works on the basis of self-interest, but what is to say that giving one inch necessarily entials giving up entirely, unless the original premise is that one cannot give up anything (i.e., uncompromising by definition). That doesn't seem to scale in any real-world system, only ideal systems.

Why does it have to be absolute/binary?

If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world.

Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage.

Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech as free as is possible", with considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on", etc...

As an extension of the Spolky-ism that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky, all production systems have edge and corner cases that can't (or shouldn't) be contained within a blanket uniform policy.

Yeah, it's messy. But, as with many regulations written in blood, there are legitimate use cases where exceptions to blanket policies and statements are better to include than not include.

> Why is it so important to reduce inequality

Generally said by those who benefit from said inequality.

Agreed. Those are all straw men, rather than the the natural consequence of a journalism education.

> I guess I should have applied for a grant.

But you didn't.

Echoing the sentiment from many of the replies, it's easy to arm-chair quarterback and criticize others' work (and moreover, the existence of the work itself) as intuitively obvious, and therefore lacking value.

Besides the fact that it has value to someone (therefore the grant award), the devil's in the details, and a grant like this isn't just for the idea, but also for development and productionizing.

But, going back to your point... if you think you can do better, than by all means do so. Seems like sour grapes that someone else is capitalizing on something that is intuitively obvious to you.

> but what would you have them do?

I dunno....maybe SUPPORT THE DAMNED PRODUCT?

As much crap as microsoft gets, they know how to support a product.

Spin it off? Open-source it? so many other options.....

Do something to return the investment that the users have made in the product (after all, a product alone has no value without its actual users).

Anything but simply killing it off.

yeah, it's a ridiculous idea that a company that has repeatedly stated in the past that its focus is on the community and 3rd-party app outreach would renege on its mission to foster and support the communities that made it a place with any value whatsoever.

ridiculous

> And the fact that usually the term is just dropped in the conversation. And no actually realistic solution or alternative is even provided.

Description of an issue doesn't necessarily require resolving the issue. It's ok to raise the issue without already having a proposed answer for it. I don't know where it is written that you can't raise an issue unless you also propose a fix for it.

To be fair, I'm rather glad people don't generally do that... too many armchair XXXXs already that claim to have an answer for everything

Will take a page from George Carlin on this, regarding "soft language" and euphemisms that conceal the underlying reality (e.g., Carlin's example of "shell shock" vs "PTSD", and many others...)

The reason "enshitification" hits so hard is precisely because it doesn't hold back; it's supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.

Would you prefer a more sanitized term? (one that more thoroughly obscures the intent with safe and harmless language?)