johnnyanmac

The answer is always "if you are chummy with the manager and make them feel good". Any accomplishments made is secondary as long as it can be spun to satisfy this condition.

It's partially historical; I'm sure if we redesigned GPGPU today from the ground up, we'd have an entirely different pipeline. And partially due to hardware vendor lock-in; you can't really design an alternative to Vulkan/d3d12 even if you had the skill and drive to do so.

But also partly in the fact that the GPU is specialized for certain operations over a CPU. It wants and need to obtain data in a different way from a CPU to maximize throughput. So language constructs are designed around making sure developers stay on this fast path. The complexity can be seen as some intentional gatekeeping to signal that this kind of programming is only for specific kinds of problems.

>Tesla is the only EV company in the US making a good product. People also like the techieness.

Well yes. Those were things in EU too. But those didn't override the fact that he tried to control their elections. The US has some people who swore off Tesla in similar protest, but the overall sentiment didn't seem to impact their bottom line.

I personally want to hold out and see if/when the US gives up on tariffing progress. But I have driven a 2008 car for almost 10 years and can't overlook the scenario of needing to replace it one day.

And I'm interested in an FEV for my next car. Tesla is completely out of the question, but I really haven't been impressed with most other offerings when I could peer over the border and see what BYD, Xiaomi, and others are doing. Maybe I compromise short term then trade in when the time comes?

>Have you ever contemplated that the "racist, xenophobic and homophobic" behaviour is what is keeping those communities and used to keep other communities homogenous and thereby ensured high-trust?

Not much, no. A small community that only trusts itself and pushes any out-group away (regardless of disposition) tends to be called a "cult".

> it seems more likely that the heavy presence of scalpers making it difficult for average people to acquire product at MSRP has been causing the demand to skyrocket, in addition to celebrities like Jake Paul hype streaming.

Those are definitely factors, but even the most influential celebrity can't sell a turd (see: the insane advertising push for NFT's). There has to be some value in the cards themselves for an influencer to multiply it, then that lack of supply from time makes it easy for scalpers to scalp.

>they have no problem printing cards that look identical to the originals other than a small logo, which many people get and feel no need to acquire the original Charizard.

Yup. I personally am fine satisfying my nostalgia with some later print edition that is $10 instead of $1000 for some "early print" version. I don't fully understand this value of "I must have the original print!", but that admittedly existed long long before we had social media campaigns to influence such desire.

Not unpopular enough to tank Tesla sales (like in other countries) or not be pubic enemy #1 after literally stealing America's government data.

He did screw up Twitter/X enough that a new competitor managed to make a blip on the map, though. So that leads some credence.

Infinite theoretical printing supply. In reality, that specific really cool Charizard from my childhood stopped being printed decades ago, and natural wear and tear reduces the supply compared to 1999 (or whenever it was printed). Nostalgia kicks in, demand skyrockets. I don't know why Pokemon specifically did this, but it's far from the first trading card series to have this effect.

As for utility: it's still entertainment. remember that this is a TCG, so there technically is still a formatted game to play with these cards. Even if most effects in older cards have been long irrelevant in competitive formats, other TCG's can have card prices surge due to new strategies being discovered.

Nope. Money still buys votes. It's just that Musk is so opaquely unpopular outside of the US that it negates his riches. Which really says something.

>I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.

You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.

>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?

yet another proprietary format?

And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.

Good to see the side of tech that gives us a negative reputation. Most businesses would at least pretend to care and say how important things are while being greedy in the background. Some of tech will simply say "screw it, let it all burn down and maybe we'll rebuild".

Substitute "php" for "COBOL" and you may understand why that question is a pointless one.

Because we all know why COBOL is still used and why those old institutions are still important for functionality. PHP isn't on that level, but isn't far from it. many/most 20-30+ YO legacy codebases in web likely have PHP in some important part of its stack.

Yes. That's why I left the rest of my commentary on media.

Yes. Because it is not my job to optimize for sales. It's to optimize for time to ship whatever features/fixes the manager/boss gives me. There's an entire sales wing who can answer the question on how/if shipping this out faster will actually make the company more money.

Asking the workers why they need to justify the responsibilities they were hired for is a small part of what's pumping this bubble up.

just clicking on your link: Final Fantasy Resonance would likely be regarded as "excellent". If you're a fan of RPGs.

But I suppose that's part of the problem with all media. We have more media than ever, so tastes get more divserse. This can consequently be bad for "cultural" purposes because you can meet 1000 people and struggle to find more than 2 who like the kinds of games or movies you watch regularly. So you instead default back 20 years ago to The Wire or Sopranos or The Dark Knight Rises, etc. Around the last time we have "mass culture". or Sports.

For gaming, GTA VI will be an interesting time, even if I don't personally care for the series. Because that may be the first time since perhaps Pokemon GO where you have so many subgroups of gaming aligning together for a single release.

Yes. I was mostly talking about social hoops to convince people to adopt such practices. There are basically zero hoops as it stands and it seems many in the field want to keep it that way.

I worry about that because at some point, legislation will catch up, and without subject matter experts any implementation will likely be flawed at first.

> why you were too embarrassed to say it.

I'm not embarrassed to say it at all. But I don't like when conversations derail into morality scaling. How about we just make sure we create good incentives to do good and vice versa?

Not particularly. But under that lens, sure. If he could have stayed Gierek for 8 more years, he might have gotten a pardon. That's how bad things are these days.

I was simply saying that FB's scale of damage and money impacted is much higher than Madoff's

Perhaps so. That liability means doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. need to push back because now their skin is truly in the game.

But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.

>because we have vastly higher rates of crime.

And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.

https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...

>what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?

the jury's ruling?

- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury - the duration and repetition of the conduct - the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred - the involvement of senior Facebook leadership - the size of New Mexico audiences reached - clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements

That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.

You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.

>How is the circle of passing draconian laws

Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.

didn't think we'd win the race to the bottom of rent-seeking, but humanity's ingenuity for self-destruction continues to astound me. Einstein was right as always.

Negativity bias means We'll mostly remember the smug person who wanted to advance their careers and not their field, as opposed to the hundreds of well meaning people who want to do their work. And sadly that smug person tends to be on leadershi. I've seen that pattern in several different industries, at least from the US perspective. I

see no reason to find this field different.

Nope. That's why a lot of knowledge comes down to compressing large concepts into chunks we can understand from new ideas and concepts. LLM's don't tend to be very good and synthesizing such concepts.

Because fundamentally: certain humans desire power to rule over other humans. Even if the fields (metaphorical or literal) can be done more efficiently by robots, they desire that power to exert over others.

So they will keep some ready for those tasks simply to fuel that irrational desire. They will instead use the more efficient bots to enforce work on the fields rather than work the fields themselves. Or perhaps we go full Matrix and find uses for humans that robots can't properly replicate.

A bit sad other knowledge workers feel that. I know my job isn't anything trying to better humanity; I just make video games. But making those games (or rather, the tools to make those games) has an end result to have people enjoy themselves a bit in a decreasingly enjoyable world. So there's my fulfillment.

But I understand it from a blue collar perspective. I tinker at toys in a metaphorical basement and I live a cushier life than many who give their bodies to their duty. That doesn't feel fair at all. But I mostly wish that was motivation to band together and get blue collars paid better rather than cause this inter-class divide while the capitalists ransack all of society.

A lot of people are upset that people are praising garbage and outright stolen output, and any attempt to disagree with this praise labels them as a luddite who will be behind on the times and is against progress.

Such a take on "people don't feel special" feels borderline bad-faith. People of science tend to be some of the most humble people as their knowledge to seek the truth constantly leaves them with more answers than questions. It's instead this borderline cult of people praising output that is understandable to them that seems to be the ones with the hubris to try and claim that thinkers will be obsolete.

>No one will pay me for raising my kids.

In the near future, this may very will be the case in order to address the population decline. But I digress.

The big assumption here is that "problems are being solved" in every field affected. Which they are not.

Just as the most basic example: software is not currently being made faster, nor performing better nor at a higher bar of quality. Maybe developers are able to report higher velocity, but this is not leading to faster shipping of software/features. In fact, people seemed to feel software is buggier than ever and companies are doubling down on it and simply adding placeholders of "AI can make mistakes". Unforgivable 10 years ago if we tried that with humans.

If anything, the rent seeking is with people reporting "being more productive than ever" and despite that less real world problems being solved than the previous decade.

What doors will there be left open in 5-10 years for those who have yet to start their career?

The fear of the atomic bomb is relatively instant (at "best") or as bad as finding out you have cancer. if you die, you die. You won't even perceive the pain. if you don't die, you do your day-to-day until some sickness hits you from radiation and then die.

The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.

AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.