Greed

Self taught in the programming sense, or the people management sense? Because I feel like the letter is much more common than not in software. Just curious in case there's an expected background you're thinking of when you say that. I have no point of reference for CTO backgrounds beyond generic MBAs or senior devs that either gave themselves the titles as founders or failed upwards.

Agreed. Even as an enthusiast if I could take the performance hit and keep the M4's battery life, I'd do it in a heartbeat just for the ability to run linux.

Why do they do that? Are they penalized for working overtime too often?

Influencers say things they were paid to, certainly. But the reason that someone is willing to pay them in the first place is because they have an audience that knows them and trusts them. Influencer advertising is generally a VERY targeted endeavor that hinges entirely on the fact that an influencer builds a relationship with their very specific + curated target demographic. It's right in the name. Hard to influence anyone if they don't care what you have to say.

I am like you, I'm someone that can happily code for eight straight hours on task and then happily jump to a side project afterwards in a totally different language / domain. Take it for the single point of data that it is, but: I have met equally as many high performers who do NOT code at home as I have mediocre ones that did. And the number of programmers who code solely on the job is far, far more common than those who take their work home with them. Statistically speaking, at least in my personal experience, that makes the at-home coder notably worse on average. As someone that used to think like you, I think the only thing you're really doing is the boys-club-esque equivalent of what the old Ivy League managers used to do (Oh, he's from MIT! That's perfect, we only hire MIT grads here). You're hiring what you know because you understand people with that background more.

You might find on the opposite end of the spectrum that someone with a perfectly equal skillset is laughing at the idea of taking on personal projects when he can just optimize for getting hired somewhere where they prioritize paying you to learn on the job.

I mean, I was speaking more to the breakdown of the metaphor than the argument itself but if that's your response then it tells me that there is no reasonable way that Suno can ever really claim fair-use. I can't imagine being one of the artists whose material Suno has trained on and being told: "We have no idea when or if it will generate copyrighted content, or how to test for it. But we will continue to use your material and arbitrate on a case-by-case basis as it is brought to our attention." That sounds insane.

Surely, for Suno to claim fair usage and be given free reign to build a commercial business off of literally anyone's original works then the bare minimum bar for allowing that usage would be: make a satisfactory test to prove that you're always doing something transformative and original, within practical limits.

You may be reaching the limits of the metaphor here, but restaurants are absolutely responsible for the e coli if it's found in significant quantities whether it's in the initial ingredients or the cooked end product. A restaurant is required to vet its suppliers and ensure food safety protocols throughout the entire process with several independent checks at many points, and is ultimately directly responsible if a customer sues. A restaurant does not get to cook bad ingredients well and then point at the supplier. They will find themselves shut down immediately, andpermanently if they do not resolve the situation.

In this context, this would be the equivalent of Suno explicitly placing stop points throughout the training, tokenization, and generation processes to verify that there was absolutely no chance of it generating copyrighted material through some kind of clean room reconstruction test. They would also need those tests to be audited at random by a third party governing body. Obviously they are not doing this, so the metaphor definitely does not track here.

But are any of those things a strong enough motivator to warrant the average person paying several hundred dollars more for an incrementally improved device?

You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?

For those of you who don't know, the project was archived in 2024 but there was at least one modern fork of XChat in the form of HexChat: https://hexchat.github.io/

Given how many times the tech industry as a whole has been collectively and expensively wrong about trends as they dominate the zeitgeist, I think that first option you gave is more damning than you think.

What is populist is rarely what is correct in this context.

You speak of intentionality beyond the explicit reality of the data involved as some great irrationality in their statement, but we literally have a corresponding term for that. Spirit of the law. If the law were as black and white and ends-oriented as you're implying it is, we wouldn't need judges for the interpretation of it. The fact that they have prioritized the underlying authors affected over the traditional interpretation of the law here is not the condemnation you think it is.

> If I were in one of these high crime neighborhoods where people are getting shot, I would want more surveillance and police. This position that they're being exploited by surveillance is mostly a rich white cosmopolitan belief rooted in fantasy

But ARE you though? I'm in Chicago where we're in the tail end of phasing this system out specifically because it did not address the problems it claimed to. All it did was aggravate and harass locals _after_ the fact that had nothing to do with the initial crime.

The deterrence factor was not insignificant, but it definitely wasn't worth the far greater instances where it was not only creating false positives but also proactively CREATING crime in accordance with other "high tech" solutions like predictive crime algorithms which only really served to reinforce existing biased patrolling practices (which were driven by data generated by shot spotter, in part).

See: https://www.theverge.com/c/22444020/chicago-pd-predictive-po...

I think this is a lot more common than one might think. The trend of hiring "Only Seniors" puts a downwards pressure on both engineers and those managing them to focus on titles over pay increases. The engineer gets the title thinking they can leverage it for more pay at a different position, but in reality they end up trapped at their current employer because they are from then on interviewed as a senior level engineer and unable to pass merit by that benchmark. Should they aim for a non senior role, they automatically face negative hiring bias because the hirer assumes (probably accurately) that they will demand more pay for the same role compared to non-senior applicants with the same years of experience.

Strange catch 22 situation where the title promotion actually locks them in where they are for at least another few years.

I've always wondered what exactly that "useful productivity" cap is for programmers on average. I've been gifted with the capacity for 100% productive eight hour days, but it's definitely easy to recognize that as extremely unusual talking to coworkers for more than ten minutes over the years. In discussing the idea of "maximum productive hours per day" I've found that not only is the variance on the teams I've been a part of huge, but also that it's pretty hard to correlate that number with work ethic. Great engineers often know when they're out of that maximally effective window and pivot to other things for the rest of their day.

A related aside: I've noticed anecdotally that as you become more senior you get pretty good at feeling out what that number is for each of your teammates and it becomes a pretty useful metric to leverage in your day-to-day toolkit. I'd be curious to see what a workplace would look like if folks were actually allowed to be transparent about that (without repercussions) rather than it having to be guesstimated.

It's too bad that SASS has fallen out of favor. With SASS, that would have been:

```

  a.link
    border: red

    &:hover
      border: blue

```

Your usage of Kashmir as the representative for democracy in this context is a little less credulous given the region is generally synonymous with fascism, ethno-nationalism, and extreme corruption driven by startling inequality and poverty.

I don't think you're wrong to say that it can happen to nominally democratic countries too, but India as a whole (and ESPECIALLY the smaller states) is probably not the best example to prove the point.

What makes it so that only 4chan users would have empathy for the death of other programmers? Terry's death was quite tragic and his work was often discussed in technical circles for it's novelty...despite his eccentricities. Love him or hate him, no human being deserved the circumstances of his life or of his death.

RIP Terry. A. Davis

The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly skilled contributors with very different programming styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in its approach than another the difference is negligible to the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single color is different for design elements. And they complain extremely loudly about it.

On the contributor side:

- Visual style guides require much more time and skill to create (relative to style guides for code) and still generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity of a single great designer with total control.

- If you commoditize your design elements to the point where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult to do it yourself to begin with.

- Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than the pass/fail nature of code

Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.

The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly skilled contributors with very different programming styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in its approach than another the difference is negligible to the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single color is different for design elements. And they complain extremely loudly about it.

On the contributor side:

- Visual style guides require much more time and skill to create (relative to style guides for code) and still generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity of a single great designer with total control.

- If you commoditize your design elements to the point where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult to do it yourself to begin with.

- Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than the pass/fail nature of code

Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.

You can test this pretty easily, it's not like that model doesn't exist. Play your average driving videogame at 30fps in first-person mode. Crank up the brightness until you can barely see if you like. We do it just fine because the model exists in our head, not because there's some inherent perfection in our immediate sensing abilities.

Realistically when you buy a phone you have a choice between two storefronts-- what are these other phones with no storefront you're referring to? Surely you can't be presenting conventional flip phones as an alternative here.

Blackberry now produces Android phones and the Windows phone is defunct. That just leaves the myriad of fly-by-night Kickstarter phones that wouldn't be able to run these apps in the first place.

The difficulty in criticizing Bitcoin and what it could have been is that everyone willing to engage you on it is quite literally invested in being right.

Zealots betting the house can't afford to be wrong because it would often make them bankrupt.

Without commenting on the quality of the Bloomberg piece, exclusion is quite literally the reason that HOAs were created. The original, explicit, and completely legal purpose of an HOA was to exclude specific races and creeds and we cannot dispute that.

Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written directly into the deed.

Wasn't that long ago, and many of the people who wrote those bylaws are still alive...

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Homeowner_association#/History

I agree wholeheartedly, I've had the pleasure to work remotely for the majority of my career and it has been nothing but bliss to be able to focus on the living part of life and not just the working part of it. There's nothing I enjoy more than having deep technical talks with very smart people, but I'm not really interested in living within that tech bubble 100% of the time.

How many times can you have the same conversation with someone complaining about <outdated software library> and being underpaid at <six figure salary>? It's amazing to me how few people in this industry have exposure to the world of experiences outside of the pinhole purview of techworld concerns. Going remote means you actually get to choose your day to day friends, experiences, social life, and culture instead of having them forced upon you! Craft your life the way you want to live it.

Out of curiosity, why do you see VR as being a necessary step towards the creation of AGI? Those two don't seem related at all in any way that I can discern.

It's actually NeXT.

This comment is so strangely off the mark I almost wonder if you're basing this off of some secondhand hearsay. Until recently, Python's largest arena of usage was web development and API scaffolding by far. A simple search would have revealed literally thousands of web development focused libraries, most centered around the Django ecosystem [1].

As another commenter mentioned: Django, DRF, Flask

But unmentioned... The old titans of Pyramid, Pylons, CherryPy, Bottle, Tornado, wheezy, web2py, and more.

A _gigantic_ portion of the community is centered around web development, and the fact that almost all web packages have centralized around Django, DRF, and Flask is a function of dozens upon dozens of popular frameworks merging in a "survival of the fittest" fashion into the best possible union of ideas. You seem to perceive "many packages" that all perform a similar function to be a good thing, but speaking from the perspective of someone who writes 70% Javascript and 30% Python I'll tell you that almost every other sane group of developers considers the highly duplicitous JS ecosystem to be a massive weakness.

The NPM ecosystem has an _ocean_ of shallow, highly similar, and one-off frameworks because Javascript developers tend to "divide and conquer" rather than bring good ideas together. Python developers deprecate their packages in favor of better ideas, or just open a pull request to alter the project rather than creating a 99th competing framework in the first place.

[1] https://pypi.org/search/?q=&o=&c=Environment+%3A%3A+Web+Envi...

If it sounds ridiculous to you, it's because it is. The fact that you find it absurd only really underlines the point being made there, and that point is that "doing things while black" is a lifetime of uncomfortable, unnecessary, and subtly discriminatory experiences that you learn to expect and prepare for.

I assume if you're on HN that you have at least one well-paid black coworker in tech. Ask them how often they get uncomfortable, questioning looks while walking around their own neighborhood and you'll see exactly how hyperbolic that statement is.

95% is a bit of an exaggeration, it's more like 30-40% inclusive of ALL Hybrids including the Prius. The one factor you're missing here is that many drivers consider a somewhat expensive non-hybrid luxury vehicle as an investment because they're able to solicit higher tips.

Carai an Ellisande! Tai'shar Manetheren! Tai'shar Malkier!