abvdasker

Meta does this. Guess what one of the criteria for their recent layoffs was.

This paragraph hit home with me as well. I work at a large tech company that's a household name and the practice of using AI to pad out design documents has become totally out of control over the last 4 or 5 months. Writing documentation is arduous and a little painful, which as it turns out is a good thing as it incentivizes the writer to be as succinct as possible. Why the fuck should I -- along with five other engineers -- bother to read and review your design if you didn't even bother to write it?

It would take one or two not especially complicated law taxing wealth and loans against equity. Congress could do this tomorrow but guess who controls congress. And cap political spending like every other sane democracy.

To anyone with half a brain not poisoned by conservative ideology this always was, and is, obvious. Crypto has always been pitched as a get rich quick scheme which only appeals to the financially illiterate.

Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.

When this is all over and Trump has been consigned to history's dustbin, at the very least the public deserves to know the names of the individual federal agents and entire chain of command responsible for these atrocities. The people responsible for this wanton cruelty need to be charged and tried criminally for their actions. Nobody is going to forget this and I think a lot of Americans will demand justice and accountability once all is said and done.

> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.

Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.

Just because you are ignorant of the significant evidence that this was (and remains) Musk's goal doesn't mean it isn't true. Ashlee Vance wrote about this way back in 2015: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 . Just this year he used his involvement in DOGE to cut federal funding for what remains of the project: https://gizmodo.com/musks-doge-takes-aim-at-california-high-...

At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?

From what I have heard it wasn't just the US but other governments as well which came down on them quite hard. States broadly do not like it when a bunch of huge corporations get together to issue their own currency.

Didn't a number of companies led by Facebook already attempt to do this with Libra (Diem) and basically got nuked from orbit by US regulators? I have to assume this is primarily happening now because there is a more favorable (nonexistent) regulatory environment.

> I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets?

Streets are generally paid for by taxes, which are categorically different than corporate profits. In theory taxes are under democratic control. If you don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law. You have no control over the governance of a private corporation, but it can still pass its costs on to you via externalities (in the absence of regulations preventing it from doing so).

> Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break?

What are you even talking about? What is the externality here? The wages you presumably pay your cleaning lady are hers to do with as she wishes.

> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.

This is not a real definition. Saying "most people" use the term to mean what you want it to mean in this argument is ridiculous.

Capitalism is a system of private ownership of capital. We live under that system. Anything you see that happens now is the result of that system because it's the one that exists.

There is no such thing as "crony capitalism". What came before crony capitalism? Was it regular capitalism? Did regular capitalism turn into crony capitalism? Or — more likely — is it all one continuous process and system of accumulation?

In scenario 1, a corporation externalizes some of its costs. Those costs are then paid by people who may or may not actually use the corporation's product — people who never chose to be part of any transaction. This is coercive because the people paying for the corporation's externalities are forced to: they may not use the product, or do so to different degrees not proportional to the price they pay for the externality.

In scenario 2, the corporation does not externalize costs and raises their prices, offsetting costs by passing them on to their customers. The people paying the additional cost are those who know the price of what they are buying and willingly engage in the transaction for the good or service.

Do you understand why scenario 2 is bad and scenario 1 is less bad?

> socialism in disguise

I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. This has nothing to do with socialism. Corporations profiting from externalities and pushing costs onto regular workers is just capitalism. If you have a problem with it, maybe you have a problem with the inevitable concentrations of wealth and power which result from capitalism.

It's always pretty suspect when you first hear about the opposition to something in its rebuttal. I've heard lots of critiques of the abundance movement and this is my first time hearing anything about housing cartels. Maybe someone had this critique but it isn't the dominant strain of criticism of the abundance people. It feels like Thompson picked the weakest argument to debunk rather than one of the many stronger ones.

I think if you're China the smart thing to do would be to immediately send Iran a couple nukes. Would put an end to the conflict pretty much immediately.

Honest curiosity — why did you choose a service like Redis over a more straightforward embedded solution like SQLite? In my head Redis seems better suited to distributed solutions but I've never actually built a desktop application so I'm probably speaking from ignorance.

Can you tell us more about that?

Democrats haven't put anyone into a reeducation camp as far as I'm aware. Your enemies are imaginary while the parent comment's enemies are all too real.

If the Trump admin's goal were to reduce the national debt it would make way more sense to use fiscal policy (increase taxes) rather than some roundabout way to force the Fed's hand on monetary policy. The tariffs do basically function as a massive regressive tax increase in the form of a sales tax, but that comes with truly immense risks on the demand side of the economy. Guess what happens to tax revenue during a recession.

If I was a foreign adversary of the US I would be salivating at the idea of several unvetted 19-25 year olds with unlimited access to classified government computer systems. The security implications are apocalyptic.

Genuinely insane to the point that I don't believe he'll actually do it. I have no idea who this is for. It will certainly alienate the US tech sector that just spent the last month bending the knee to Trump. It will push Taiwan into the arms of China. I have no idea how this is remotely compatible with all the hawkish AI rhetoric. Baffling on all fronts.

This is almost certainly true. What I find most offensive is the total unwillingness of elected politicians of both parties to admit that protectionism is the real reason for the ban. Our politicians believe we are stupid.

I've thought about this a bit and have decided the main barrier to realizing a software development worker co-op is getting together the sufficient startup capital. A handful of regular tech workers probably lack the liquid capital to self-fund a company. And good luck convincing a VC to invest in a worker coop. The easiest business to build like this would be a software consultancy since it doesn't actually require a product (you could structure it almost like a law firm).

I agree unionization is a very good idea for software engineers and the industry should have tried to do it decades ago. I think it hasn't happened because of the overall weakness of US organized labor and prevailing ideological biases among software engineers which go against our own interests. If unions work well for other highly compensated professionals like athletes there's no reason they can't work for us.

I second this. I took a large salary cut to be 1/2 of an engineering team at a seed stage startup for ~1.25%. After 2 years of pretty grueling work I left to go back to big tech for 3x the pay. I wouldn't call it a total waste of time in the sense that it made me a better engineer, but it certainly wasn't worth it financially. The company still exists and has had a relatively successful series A and "A extension" but I don't think my equity will ever be worth anything.

I really wouldn't recommend anyone work as an engineer at an early stage startup unless you're getting ~5% or more (this would be unprecedented) because the risk is barely less than the founders and the pay is generally terrible. Series B or later (growth stage) may be a sweet spot where the salaries are decent and there is still significant equity upside without the insane hours.

The persistent belief in the tech industry as some kind of underdog I think explains much of the recent deplorable behavior by some of the richest people on the planet. A bunch of unbelievably wealthy nerds are mentally trapped in the past and too out of touch to realize they have become the bullies.

As someone who double majored in English and Computer Science this is one of the silliest grievances I've ever heard. For grown adults to still be embittered because of a real or imagined college rivalry seems very petty to me, and frankly unrelated to the issue of whether this Apple ad was distasteful.

What an unbelievably childish response. What does the New York Times have to do with this ad? What makes you think the New York Times is representative of the "average liberal arts pursuit"? Is the New York Times especially antagonistic towards the tech industry? Do you seriously believe there exists some us-versus-them division between "liberal arts" and "technologists"?

It's genuinely remarkable to witness the Democratic Party spurn their base of young people for no discernible gain. Who exactly is the constituency for this legislation other than China hawks?

Irrelevant. The horrors of October 7th have no bearing on whether Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians should continue.