abvdasker

In retrospect it looks like wishful thinking, but for a while I held out hope that the transition to white collar remote work during COVID would be permanent so all that empty office space could be converted into residential. Might have gone a long way towards addressing inflation and the housing crisis, but I guess we'll never know what could have been.

Yeah except you get paid half as much and have to wear a button down to work.

Yeah not much background in this article. Affirm is a "buy now, pay later" service (BNPL). It's basically just personal loans with the addition of a fee charged to merchants (on the premise that providing financing will attract more customers to the merchant). Very similar to the layaway offered by some merchants directly but Affirm offers this as a service.

Affirm is a unicorn and IPO'd in 20221. It has quite a few competitors in the BNPL space like Klarna and Afterpay. So far they all lose a lot of money.

In the case of the Uber autonomous car which killed a pedestrian in 2018, Uber reached a settlement with the victim's family and faced no criminal charges (I think the answer to your question is clearly yes). The "driver" behind the wheel of the autonomous car did get charged with negligent homicide in addition to being sued by the family afaik.

I hope you're right, but this feels like an instance of the hot hand fallacy. In a historical sense, nuclear weapons haven't existed for very long. 76.56 years without a nuclear attack is less than the life expectancy of one US adult. It's too soon to tell.

Even if what you're saying is true, I don't see the problem with everyone working less in the remote world. If everyone secretly wants to work less maybe we should all just work less. If we collectively need an excuse like remote work to do what we all actually want to do, then so be it. Everyone wins...

This is the fundamental nature of bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies.

Reminds me of Ross Ulbricht getting busted for running Silk Road. If you're running the largest black market for drugs in human history, why in the world would you stay in San Francisco???

That’s a wildly impractical position to take and isn’t really true in my experience. I spent several years at a seed stage startup where it was me on backend and one other engineer on mobile. We would specify a JSON API and then could work independently (and very fast) to realize the functionality because he’s an expert at mobile programming and I am an expert at backend. We didn’t have the luxury of working at 50% output for a year to learn each other’s specialization while trying to get the product off the ground. He didn’t need to learn the ins and outs of rate limiting with redis and I didn’t need to know how to animate a custom UI component for each of us to be maximally productive.

Division of labor and the interfaces which enable it exist for a reason. I suspect it’s because it reduces the complexity of collaboration between engineers with different specializations. It facilitates the separation of concerns.

I've also noticed this trend, but I never see it discussed or talked about within tech or without. It feels like the second renaissance in computing brought on by the smartphone is petering out. Maybe it's because I'm cynical about cryptocurrency, which is where people say most of the "innovation" is right now.

What if they just passively or inadvertently encouraged it? It’s entirely possible that the algorithms Facebook has used to prioritize content highlight inflammatory or violent content. Maybe in the process of maximizing attention they simultaneously optimized for showing violent or hateful content. YouTube has been shown to have done almost exactly that.

I tend to think acknowledging the existence of hateful beliefs is a good and rational thing, but maybe that's just me.

Second Life allowed for a lot of the NSFW content and interactions that people tend to enjoy both in entertainment and in real life (this is also true of VRChat to some extent). Metaverse will be a sanitized, sterile project for children. Fundamentally the people like Zuckerberg responsible for its execution do not understand what people want, which is why Metaverse has no chance of success.

> Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is.

> Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to modern systemic racism and not partly due to a byproduct of cultural differences

I think what you're describing is that a lot of liberals and leftists are opposed to the use of science to justify what they would probably consider racist beliefs. They might point to the use of scientific racism in the past as a reason not to repeat such mistakes. They might also question the intentions of the (disproportionately white) people who tend to focus obsessively on these issues to the exclusion of many others.

The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college:

> When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college graduates (from both two- and four-year institutions) say college was useful for them in terms of helping them grow personally and intellectually (62% say it was very useful in this regard, 31% say it was somewhat useful). Large majorities also say it was useful in opening doors to job opportunities (53% say very useful, 29% say somewhat) and in helping them develop specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (49% very, 35% somewhat).

I think the cost of higher ed is an enormous societal problem which leads some to feel embittered towards the system as a whole for good reason. But it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to separate the ballooning cost from the education itself.

I'll risk making this a partisan issue and say the anti-intellectual and anti-science bent seems increasingly prevalent among Republicans like Mike Parson and their constituencies. One of the most shocking statistics I've seen recently is the Pew poll which shows that in the space of 2 years Republican attitudes about higher education saw a 20-point swing such that that most Republican voters now believe college is net detrimental to society. To me the attacks on journalism, technology and science feel like part of a larger trend, especially given the COVID denialism we've seen.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...

I wonder if the government ever looks at the laughable compensation of its employees as a security risk. Every time I see salary numbers — even for very specialized and prestigious jobs — I’m shocked at how little they make.

This is a solved problem. Just do what most American cities do with other natural monopolies like utilities: use careful price controls to cap margins and slow rate increases. You don't need to invent some esoteric market-based solution, especially for a service where marginal costs are near zero and supply is almost infinite.

In America we can get unanimous support to provide healthcare for CIA agents suffering from a disease that doesn’t exist, but giving free healthcare to regular people is politically unthinkable.

https://www.collins.senate.gov/newsroom/bill-support-%E2%80%...

> When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)

This sentence was a red flag in terms of the author’s credibility. The wealthy educated class the author generalizes about overwhelmingly despises socialism. This sentence also indicates that the author has internalized that tired misunderstanding “socialism is when the government does stuff”.

I'm glad you put "dissident" in quotes. USAID is notoriously rife with CIA plants and many CIA operatives use the organization as cover, which implies that a nation targeting its members would have a lot more justification than a homegrown activist. That USAID might be targeted by hackers is mostly a consequence of the US government's decision to use it as a front for clandestine operations overseas.

This is a story which was likely written at the behest of the publisher as a pre-release book review. Harden's participation -- and her own book by the sound of it -- is explicitly political. To read between the lines a bit more one can infer that Harden is trying to build a brand beyond academia. My point being that the principal scientist in the piece is no longer just a scientist, so it's appropriate to widen the scope.

I agree with you though that the headline, much of the article, and arguably some of Harden's presentation of her work is irresponsible.

A fundamentally semantic argument like this seems mostly irrelevant to me. It's like calling Google or Facebook advertising services, which might technically be true but isn't usefully descriptive. Using the author's logic you could call high frequency trading firms tech companies instead of financial services. If his semantics here were correct one might wonder why nobody calls HFTs tech companies. The author ignores the more complicated side of the questions about what makes a company a "tech company" — mushy concepts like internal corporate culture, sources of talent, and participation in the broader tech "ecosystem".

Also the idea that Netflix's content strategy is cleanly separable from its tech is totally bogus. Netflix uses some sophisticated tech to decide what content to produce and also has a huge amount of in-house technology involved in the actual production of content.

I didn’t know that. It sort of has the effect of sounding like the voice of amorphous global capital is speaking directly to you and also that global capital writes at about the level of a high school senior.

> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”, the response was a collective shrug.

This is a straw man. People have been protesting the IMF nonstop since the 90s and I guarantee patriarchy is not the main thing they complain about.

Arguably the entire article is a straw man. Also where is the byline? Who wrote this?

The piece is too dumbed down to really touch on the most interesting aspect of academic identity politics, which is the quite intricate system of post-structuralist theory from which it emerged. The question of why this form of theory osmosed into the public sphere but not some of its competitors did not is more interesting.

Funny how as soon as an idea critical of the US and the mostly white mostly male people who have held power here gains prominence the Economist and its ilk seem to change their tune about the “marketplace of ideas”.

This looks similar to a very entertaining game I played a while ago called Orwell. It’s mostly text based and simulates the experience of being an intelligence/signals analyst in a dystopian surveillance state.

There are probably some generalizable differences between software engineers who work for intelligence agencies vs private sector engineers. The most significant factor being that government engineers need to be able to get a security clearance and pass the attendant background checks and interviews. Most of the engineers I've worked with in the private sector probably couldn't pass these checks because of foreign nationality or recreational drug use. It's a virtual certainty that the need for a security clearance produces a strong selection effect. Not saying it makes the intelligence engineers better or worse just that I'm sure there are some significant differences.

Hard to find much sympathy for the wealthy landowners who use violence to clear poor people out of their vacation homes. This is an obvious systemic breakdown where the solution will be either tougher laws against squatting or better public/affordable housing depending on your political ideology.

Shouldn’t Stripe be big enough at this point to have some leverage as a customer?

Hard to outcompete such dramatic cost savings. An engineer India is going to cost a tiny fraction of one in the Bay Area. Not sure that's a winnable competition unless you accept a massive pay cut.