2,281 karma · joined September 23, 2025
Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
Are companies release more software with less developers? If the answer is no, then the productivity has not improved. It might SEEM like it improves because you're able to produce more code and you spend less time programming, but that might not be the case in actuality.
From what I've seen, AI is very good and very popular but it hasn't improved programming productivity in a meaningful way. The bottlenecks are unchanged so writing more code faster doesn't help anything. A lot of companies let a lot of employees go due to AI, and their product velocity has noticably gone down and their quality is noticably worse.
The media DOES occasionally say negative things about tech. But of what they say, they scratch, like, 1% of the bad stuff. And they make excuses and let people off easy.
It's very similar to how the media is overly sympathetic to Trump. Yes, Trump is critiqued - but everything he says is interpreted in the least crazy way possible, even though he is a lunatic. MSNBC and co will even go as far as fabricating reasoning for Trump's actions when he doesn't provide any - and it's good reasoning!
Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
There's this thing in the mainstream where people feel like the best way to handle people doing bad things is to just pummel them into the ground as much as possible.
While that might feel the most justified, that doesn't actually solve the problem. Suspending licenses doesn't stop drunk people from driving, because cars are more or less a necessity.
So, knowing it's a necessity, we have to design the car around that and enforce safe operation by an alcoholic.
Which is a stop-gap solution. A better solution is making cars not a necessity. But until then, we should do the stop-gap.
I mean, Christ, we have good spray tans, I know we do.
I think using agents is great. I'm just saying that lots of people haven't been using them not because they're dumb or a (sigh) luddite or whatever, but because they can't.
The economy is really big, and while most companies play fast and loose with data, many don't. Of the ones that do, most of them probably should not, but because it's not technically illegal, of course they do. That principle is a big part of the reason why the US sucks.
For us though, it is actually illegal, so we don't. And we're not the fucking CIA or something, again, we make bad stupid products. So, if that's the case for us, that's the case for a lot of companies.
We legitimately had to buy a new datacenter for this shit.
In American society, sex is in it's own corner. It's icky, immoral, unpure, and stands alone in it's perception. Violence, blood and guts, exploitation, injustice - these are all much easier for Americans to swallow than sex. A company laying off 500 people and potentially ruining their lives is business as usual, but a woman showing a part of her body to people who consent is unthinkable.
The reality is, I think, we all sell our bodies, and minds. And, out of all of us, OnlyFans models sell their bodies some of the least. After all, they are not at higher risk of heart attack. After all, they do not get carpal tunnel or arthritis. After all, they are much closer to self-employed than me. After all, they write their schedules, they define their work, and they set the expectations for performance.
That's not to say it should be celebrated. But I think we should view it honestly, for what it really is. A way to make money. People want to see other naked people, and they're gonna do that, so why not? And, is the human body really so repulsive that we have to degrade people for showing it off? I don't believe so.
This is always the case. There will always be murderers, and thieves. But technology just helps.
There are real solutions, and fake ones. Fake solutions include "make people not bad anymore". This just doesn't work, there will always be alcoholics, end of.
If there was less of a reliance on cars, there would be less drunk driving. We take drunk driving as a necessary consequence of transportation, but that's just not true. And, if we had less of a reliance on cars, we could actually suspend licenses sooner.
But as it currently stands, we cannot. We would just be permanently fucking people over in such a severe and unnecessary manner. Being unable to drive is one of the most reliable ways to become homeless in many parts of the US. This will only lead to more crime.
The companies are doing this "unknowingly". Of course they're not stupid, they're fully aware they're hiring a lot of undocumented people. But nobody, on record, knows that. To them, all their employees have documents which appear valid. It is pretty easy to forge I-9 documents.
Part of this is because the US has incredibly poor identification infrastructure. Often, not even US citizens can be reliably identified, as seen in commercial banking. The other part is that companies cannot choose to not hire people because they think they are undocumented. You can't hire someone because they're too brown and not American sounding enough.
That's not to say that I think the solution is universal identification or legalization of racism in hiring practices.
The reason we have this loophole is because many industries, particularly in the South, rely directly on immigrant labor. The republicans cannot risk alienating their consistency or further hurting the already brittle economy of Red states. That's why we get a constant flow of completely ineffective and performative solutions, like ICE.
Just start locking up executives who have employees that are undocumented, and the problem would disappear before your very eyes. But, building a wall is easier, and you can see a wall.
Not to mention DUI is a fairly recent development. In the 20th century, it was pretty easy to drive drunk and get away with it.
The ideal solution is needing less driving overall. But excessively punishing people doesn't fix the problem. They're still gonna drive, most likely.
Even if we get robots who can, say, build roads start to end, there is still a HUGE gap between that and it actually being used. There is a hard floor, too. Robots are made of physical things, physical things have scarcity, and there's no way around that to our knowledge. Even if you can build the robot for 1 cent, the material cost will still exist.
I think we basically lost this when software/computer/internet entered the mainstream. Now, like everything else, it has to be bland, unoffensive, and a commodity.
I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken.
> Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions.
Ehh, I kind of disagree. The work is the same, at best it shifts to something else. Asking for more productivity is a monkey paw. Best to just take it all in and try to enjoy the simple joys of life. Or, uh, work.
But TikTok actually fixed that, so now Confluence is back on top. Good on you, Atlassian.
Meta could've saved billions of dollars if more people told Zuck that the Metaverse is stupid, because it was. The end result is the same. The death of the idea. That much is actually unavoidable, because stupid and bad ideas will always fail, with or without support. So, it shifts to a question of it being a long, drawn-out, expensive death or a quick Old Yeller type putting down.
I think the issue we're seeing across a lot of companies is that leadership is incredibly stupid. I think we have this wrong idea that, because a CEO exists purely to make decisions, they must be pretty good at it. But that's not really the case. You can only be capable of doing one thing and still be shit at that one thing, it's definitely possible.
The problem is, I think, we assume that CEOs and other leadership work like normal people, but I don't think this is the case. I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful. It's becoming evident to me that the human brain was never intended to be in that type of situation, and there are consequences. There's a sort of detachment of reality that comes along with that, and it almost seems unavoidable. Like a type of delusional psychosis that just onsets when you become rich and powerful enough.
It's not a new thing, either. You can basically see this across all of history with kings and rulers of all kinds. The really good ones do something remarkable: they predict their own oncoming psychosis. They build in controls and preventative measures so that, when they inevitable go off the rails, the damage is minimized. It's wild, isn't it? I think about everything George Washington did prior to his rise in US politics, and it can only be describes as stopping his future self from eventually becoming drunk with power.
If the system is simple and you don't give a shit about performance, it's very very easy to make C++ safe. Just use shared_ptr everywhere. Or, throw everything in a vector and don't destroy it until the end of the program. Whatever, who cares.
Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever. It will never forget to remind you of something. It can give you directions, sort your emails by how important they are, help you find shops and restaurants. The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. And, even then, I think for most of them it's an ego thing, not an "I need this" thing.
Like outlook, which is also an email client. I'm sure there's an outlook smartphone app, haven't used it, but it's certainly a completely different UI and application.
I can usually spot mobile first design from a mile away. Because the app looks stupid on desktop and sort of feels like a toy. Huge buttons, enormous white space, menus for no reason.
Sure it doesn't prevent malware, far from it. But, it does relegate to basically only bad actors that we want in jail. Who are, usually, smaller and less organized.
Walmart, Amazon, the US government... these are big, big, big and very organized. If they use facial recognition tech, it's 1000x worse than some criminal. But if that's made illegal, they won't. Probably.