opportune

This is what happens in a world where “experts” are merely those with “certifications at the expert level” and not people with actual knowledge and experience.

That kind of world is an inevitable outcome of large bureaucracies and over-reliance on qualifications. You don’t just get idiocracy, you get Untruths and policies oriented around expanding the bureaucracy rather than addressing problems. See also: Lysenkoism in the USSR, EU’s model of funding startups through grants.

I honestly think this one of the things the US does way, way better than other developed countries. We pay a price in cronyism and corruption, but we actually let industry experts with real experience both advise on policy and take key government positions. We don’t pretend you need a PhD in X to be knowledgeable about X to nearly the same extent as Canada and the Eu.

You can’t just stick a midwit in a university for 10 years and expect them to be anything other than a midwit, and you can’t expert an organization that values compliance and internal politics more than performance and effectiveness to produce performant or effective leaders. You can’t bureaucracy your way into a free market either.

Who's saying that lady's job is bullshit just because it can be automated? There is real value in paying some up front cost in detection/monitoring/validation of data to prevent mistakes. Just because software engineers would consider her job "beneath" them because they could do it faster or better does not make it not worth doing.

There are mega-efficient factory farms in Nebraska that are immensely productive per-human involved, but that doesn't mean what hobby farmers in Connecticut or subsistence farmers in Africa are doing is bullshit.

I think "bullshit jobs" are less of a thing than people believe. It's just that people devalue assembly-line or cog-in-machine work, even when they're the ones doing it - especially in the US where we grow up wanting to be a unique success story like an entertainment celebrity or rich entrepreneur and so that kind of work is antithetical to our idea of a successful person. Fact of the matter is, machines needs cogs, and we don't have an infinite capacity to replace human cogs with automated ones.

Yeah, it's easy to forget that humans themselves are pretty amazing technology. You can program them with relatively vague instructions using natural language, they come with built in general-intelligence so you can delegate things for them to figure it out and expect them to adapt their instructions according to their situation, and they come with amazingly precise and dextrous arms. They generally cost under $150k/unit/year for most manual applications and you pretty much know what you're getting up front vs hardware/software purchased off the shelf, not to mention the capital cost of acquiring one is pretty low because they already exist and just need to be hired.

But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work.

I think it's fallacious to think everybody has the natural disposition and curiosity to want to write software. Writing has been around forever, and most people don't want to do it beyond purely functional communication, and even those who do want to go beyond that are mostly terrible at it. That lady could have automated her job if she really wanted to and was motivated enough to do it; she simply preferred to be a ditch digger than to design a ditch digging machine.

It doesn't help that "designing ditch digging machines" is in such high demand that most companies are really only able to hire mediocre people to fill those roles. Leonardo da Vinci is not working on sox compliance at a fucking bank.

There's a good chance that the payoff for that bank automating "take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report" is not even there, because the first attempt will have insufficient monitoring or verifications to catch silent failures and introduce an expensive issue caught months after the fact that leads to a huge remediation scramble and requires more development than initially expected to address, not to mention the constant need for maintenance in updating the software and making sure it continues to run (which also involves a rotating cast of programmers joining, needing to learn the software, and leaving). Leonardo might do it right the first time, but he's not doing it for cheap and not going to make it his life's work. Joe Schmoe can do it cheaper but it's going to take a while, have an ongoing maintenace burden, and probably some mistakes made along the way. That lady can do it for even cheaper than Joe Schmoe can without many headaches.

It's way too premature to say we are turning into fragmentation cycle regarding bespoke hardware. GPUs are still universal computers, they just use a different model with different performance characteristics (and applications, which stem from these performance characteristics and also inertia/maturity of tooling) than CPUs. ASICs and specialized processors have been a thing for a long time and their application towards some "new" things like crypto, hft, and a handful of cloud optimizations is hardly a new trend when seen in the larger context of their being used all the time for now-boring, once also-new technologies like networking hardware and embedded applications.

I'd argue that the last three decades have actually had massive shifts towards more generalized and ubiquitous computing that may continue even further. First, with the introduction of PCs the computing landscape shifted away from bespoke hardware and software to more standardized plug-and-play hardware and software. With the internet, everybody got a middleware called a "web browser" that standardized UI development on a single computing model. With mobile computing, we got a more restricted model of userspace that standardized what applications could do and even how (app review, software signing) you could do it. Cloud did the same things to various extents to server software. Except for at the height of Windows' PC dominance, it's never been easier to write software usable by such a large portion of the market, and the absolute number of devices and users that applies to is probably an order of magnitude more than existed during peak-Windows.

Everybody in tech knows single-core cpu performance gains are slowing down and that the remaining incremental improvements will eventually end too, so what comes next is on peoples' minds. IMO this article is jumping the gun though - it's still way too big an undertaking to use specialized computers (and I don't count GPUs as these) for all but the largest scale or most performance sensitive use cases, as it's always been.

I’m from very far outside the tech bubble, far enough outside it that people don’t even personally know anybody that writes software and there are almost no local software companies. People in that group - the vast majority of people in the world but by definition not really possible for an engineer to have much contact with - do not understand what work is involved in creating and running software. How well do you know the amount of work involved in getting your medication into your body or your computer chip produced?

I think with software it’s even harder for some people to appreciate the costs because they don’t have an intuitive understanding of what’s required to make it - even though most people don’t know how a lot of their goods and services are made, they know eg a guy in a factory made it and some other guys transported it, and they can kind of put a face to a name. They might know that someone had to design the page they’re looking at, but they have no idea a backend even exists (why do you think we have the term “cloud”?) and no way to estimate what it costs to run, so of course they don’t also know about CVEs and web standards and wipeout/takeout/data residency and multitenancy and releases. They just see a web page that used to work and now doesn’t.

It doesn’t help that so much of the software they use is free, because it’s being used as a funnel/delivery mechanism for paid stuff like hardware or monetized through ads, or paid for by their employer, or because it’s just cheap to maintain. It’s kind of reasonable to assume that all that software stuff you use is free because it’s easy to make. Even though replit is software-for-software, it seems like the type of thing that’s used mostly by beginners who still probably don’t understand what it takes to maintain and operate paid software to a reasonable degree of quality, so the same situation applies.

I mean, I completely agree that you should always use the best tool to get the job done and should skip a lot of best practices if the payoff isn’t there. It’s good advice that trumps “best practices” but it’s not really what people mean when they refer to “best practices” and I think you know that.

The problem really is just that people don’t understand that “best practices” are not unconditional rules, but simplified advice representing the common experiences of thousands of people doing the same thing as you. Also, more experienced people like you and me know when it’s safe to break them but that’s a lot less obvious to less experienced people.

As someone who has done the technical work of converting a product with a free-tier to a paid product, I mostly agree. I think the problem mostly stems from the transition being inherently painful to a lot of users - it’s not really reasonable IMO for them to expect hosted software to be free forever but it’s definitely frustrating for them to transition off of it if they can’t or won’t pay for some reason.

In my particular case there were a few pain points where I couldn’t help but sympathize with the complainers. For starters, they’re still subject to all the problems stemming from vendor lock-in, so migrating away may require not just a lift and shift but a partial or total rewrite. Another common problem is that they wrote some software for eg a for-fun website or side project a long time ago and don’t check up on it often - they may not even use or have access to the email and other contact info you have at your disposal to tell them that their stuff will break if they don’t pay by a certain date. So a lot of people don’t know about the change until their stuff breaks or they check in one some old project and find it broken or gone.

This was less of a problem for me than it probably is for Replit, but students are particularly impacted because they usually have little money relative to their investment or interest in the thing. Students under 18 without any credit or debit card may not even have any way to pay at all. And also they are still figuring out how things work so they don’t necessarily understand without being told that eg free tiers are primarily meant make it easy for people to try the software before paying for it (the company doesn’t want you to use it forever without paying), subject to a lot of annoying things like abuse, and just generally require a decent amount of operational maintenance to keep running. And of course they haven’t had corporate communication styles beaten into their brains so they’re pretty rude about expressing their discontent.

Basically, I think it’s wrong to feel entitled to receiving a free thing that obviously costs someone money to provide for forever, and that you should just pay for it if it adds value and is reasonably priced. But it’s also inherently frustrating to be on the receiving end of these changes, so grumbling and discontent are only natural.

Check out some of the names on fund.blender.org

I think a lot of people have this misconception that FOSS is produced by volunteers working for no pay. I mean, they don’t literally think that, but they bucket FOSS produced by amateurs and volunteers with FOSS produced by companies with massive R&D budgets. The only thing those software have in common is that they are free to use and modify as-is.

In some cases, FOSS is literally just something a company made to meet their needs (in a way that mostly generalized it) and then decided “hey this would be cool to donate as FOSS.” Blender and Linux are also basically paid software, they are just funded by the many corporations who rely on them. You can’t compare that to abandonware some guy made in his free time or volunteer-produced software that competes against software funded to the tune of billions of dollars per year.

I think there are two competing truisms at play when comparing paid software to acceptable-ish FOSS software in the same space.

One is that funded software is almost always going to be more polished and easy to use than unfunded software. The vast majority of successful FOSS projects are either funded by corporations directly or by nonprofits which usually are still getting most of their contributions from corporations. True volunteers have no incentive to fix your bug or provide support.

Another is software provides diminishing returns the more it’s invested in past the point of viability. That’s partly because 95% of people need from the software comes from a small set of important core functionality, with the remaining 5% coming from everything else, but the 5% differing from person to person. Chasing that last 5% is not only very expensive and time consuming, it adds a lot of complexity and overhead. So there is a lot of FOSS that only solves up to the 95% point because it’s not too difficult and the people maintaining the FOSS have a different 5% than you do.

Anyway, it may not be the case that all software will be FOSS any time soon and GIMP will replace photoshop, but I certainly wouldn’t consider GIMP a failure. If you just need something basic and free for some light editing it works fine. It’d be a shame if people with simple needs had no free alternative to expensive licensed software.

My mostly-uninformed hypothesis is that seaweed’s relative lack of popularity outside of East Asia stems from the industrialization timeline of Asia vs eg Europe. People in Europe could and did farm seaweed, but with the technology of the mid 19th century it was not possible to do so in a mechanized way, while they did have the technology to produce grains, get wild fish, and farm animals in a mechanized way. The double whammy is that as populations grew and the amount of available foraged/small-scale-farmed seaweed per person decreased, seaweed culturally lost relevance and importance in people’s diets.

Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.

Kind of agree, kind of don’t. A lot of companies also bolt on as many features and integrations to their products as they need, to close sales or just because they think it will help expand their potential customer base. A lot of FOSS is maintained by people who don’t want to spend their free time shepherding some code they wrote turning into everything-software either.

There is a particular failure mode in FOSS though - normally in businesses, prioritizing new features is done on the basis of how it will ultimately affect revenue (or reduce costs, simplify things, reduce maintenance burden - still money at the end of the day). For those FOSS projects that are open to new features from randoms, those individuals are mostly adding features they individually want, and the amount of investment in those features is limited mostly by their level of personal interest. So you end up with a set of features that is more stochastically chosen, and some unimportant or minor features may have a huge amount of complexity/configurability/feature-specific code because one person needed it.

A lot of companies that raised a lot in 2021-22 didn’t hire much because the labor market was so tight. Also, I think many knew that the availability of capital was unnaturally high and that they shouldn’t plan as if those conditions would continue.

I don’t mean to be snarky but you really just get what you pay for. A lot of FOSS is produced by people for fun, to solve a specific problem they have, or to learn/play around with some technical concept. Unsurprisingly, people don’t want to do the unfun things like deliver a UX that’s intuitive even for those who don’t work in the thing, or handle support, or play TL/EM/PM with randoms on GitHub.

I use Firefox Focus. It doesn’t block everything but it does stop most annoying ads. I doesn’t support “tabs”, but in vanilla Safari I find tabs to be a graveyard of things that I occasionally clean out but rarely actively use.

Three things:

Many, if not most when taken to pedantic conclusions, seemingly-superlinear phenomena are logistic “s-curves”[0]. Even if you’re taking over the entire physical universe, eventually you run out of some limiting growth factor like “total addressable market” or “particles in the the reachable universe.” This isn’t a purely nitpicky point - epidemics and “viral ideas” initially have little interference like this, but when they grow enough they run into interference from immune or previously infected individuals being much harder to infect. Tiktok for example surely had an exponential growth phase among the 14-24 demographic in the US, but by now everyone in that demographic has at least heard of it, and if it did near total penetration into that demographic it’d eventually be limited by the actual number of people able to use their app.

There are also log returns, which look superlinear (not really exponential technically) but eventually taper. For example, a skilled aerospace engineer could probably make a crappy paper plane for $0.1, a really good one for $100. But for $10000 it probably wouldn’t be that much better than the $100 if at all. Plenty of things are like that, it’s called diminishing returns…

Finally, there are definitely quadratic curves in real life. If you’re looking at communications it’s everywhere, usually as an upper bound or worst case. Additional leaf connections may have their diminishing marginal utility countered by the fact that existing and new connections become incrementally more valuable as the network grows.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

Ok, you got me to dig into the study. Really what’s most noticeable to me is that the dementia rate in the ADHD cohort was 13.2% but only 7% in the general population, before any kind of statistical massaging, which I’d have expected to push even further towards correlating ADHD with dementia given it’s much more diagnosed now than in the past and most people with dementia are older.

But the way they’re controlling for stimulants is very poor. To begin with, out of the 100k in the study, only 730 had ADHD and of that only 163 were in the psychostimulant cohort. So to establish statistical significance regarding dementia, which only affected 96 people out of the 730 with ADHD, would be almost impossible if the relationship were mild. And you see that in the huge P-value for the infra-ADHD comparison (0.74) which shows a slight decrease in dementia for stimulant-takers. Basically there is too little data to take that seriously at all.

The comparison across ADHD and no-ADHD populations regarding psychostimulants is deeply flawed too. They’re bucketing [0] dopaminergic stimulants with modafinil (much less dopaminergic) and even nootropics like racetams - literally prescribed to heal brain damage and treat or prevent dementia in former Soviet Union countries, with an entirely different safety profile and mechanism compared to dopaminergic stimulants. Having trouble finding data on racetam legality and use in Israel, so they may not be in scope given the medication would need to be formally prescribed IIUC. But that leaves the remainder as likely taking prescribed dopaminergic stimulants and modafinil, which for those without ADHD are mostly taken by those with narcolepsy. So the non-ADHD psychostimulant users are likely strongly biased towards narcoleptics with the remainder being those taking drugs for the purpose of treating or preventing cognitive decline, and the intra-cohort ratio is 1.1:22.3 so roughly only 5% of the ADHD-stimulant group is comparable to the nonADHD-stimulant group assuming similar, uncorrelated incidence of narcolepsy.

In other words, their two attempts to control for stimulant use either have a uselessly low amount of data giving a p-value of 0.74, or are confounded by comparing against narcoleptics taking stimulants’ dementia rates (not healthy people taking stimulants; they wouldn’t have been prescribed stimulants so long without having ADHD or narcolepsy) with the possible wildcard of some of these “psychostimulant” users taking non-dopaminergic stimulants or even non-stimulant nootropics.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATC_code_N06

Abusing dopaminergic drugs like cocaine (not dissimilar in effects from methylphenidate) and methamphetamine (not dissimilar from amphetamine) increase the risk of Parkinson’s down the line. It’s possible the same mechanism is at play here, either just because some people are more sensitive to medication at therapeutic doses than others or because some portion of people with this condition abuse their medication (or both).

As others have mentioned, ADHD is also comorbid with other mental health disorders including eg depression and alcoholism. That’s also a reasonable mechanism. Personally as someone with the condition a 6% increased chance does not scare me though it’d be great to understand the mechanism in case it’s caused by preventable behaviors rather than the condition itself.

I think the time to value between the Internet’s hype cycle and real utility was relatively short compared to most other technology hype cycles, because it was like the OG computer hype cycle and so was naturally a bit more delayed than subsequent hype cycles that had as their rationale “better not miss out in case this as big as the Internet”. It only took about 5-10 years to go from the beginning of the bubble to the modern incarnation of the internet and early versions of the products that now underpin trillion dollar businesses.

But, a lot of internet standards had been in the works for a long time at that point. Not so for AV and VR. I think we’re looking at 2+ decades for a lot of technology like that. It’s such a long time it really shakes out the hypemen with short attention spans.

Big data and AV were overhyped buzzwords at the time, but they’re both actual technology that are slowly reaching normalcy.

Plenty of people are using Spark and Databricks, plenty of people are using more abstracted products like Bigquery. No, people developed the good sense not to try to run clusters of janky and poorly documented Apache big data software as if it were “free” (except in maintenance… and bugs… and lack of feature support…) but big data is absolutely a thing. It’s just lost its buzzwordiness in the same way Web 2.0 has.

I’m actually surprised that the AV hype has died down so much because there are actual L5 AV products (Waymo, Cruise) regular people (in SF) can use now. We’re in like the original iPhone stage. They’re having their moment.

Completely agree. I was just commenting on this earlier today: instead of complaining about American big tech incessantly, the EU needs to actually develop viable software products that users want to use. Until they figure out how to do that for more than just CRUD websites, they have no alternatives.

I do think that antitrust should stop big tech companies from acquiring potential competitors (or all their customers) though. Facebook should not have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp. Microsoft should not have been allowed to acquire Activision.

I went to your website, selected “I’m a software developer”, tried to select “what it’s all about” and nothing happened. Doesn’t really give me confidence in the technology or make me inclined to spend time watching the videos on the same page

I’m using Firefox Focus on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.6.1

At least in urban parts of the US, I can go outside and learn Jews are not evil masterminds all planning in conjunction to take over the world, and that Muslims/Palestinians are not all brutal terrorists. What saddens me is that so many fail to make the logical leap that 99% of people you know just wanting to live their lives in peace also applies to 99% of people on the planet.

Serving videos with interspersed ads or selling goods on the internet really are not complex business models. You can hardly call the fact that people choose to use these novel things - when replacements like cable TV and brick and mortar stores are still working just fine - slavery.

The EU really needs to drop their victim mindset about these American software companies and critically examine why their insistence on the grant-model for innovation has resulted in failure after failure in the software space. They’ll try to start a “Silicon X” where literally the only thing in common with Silicon Valley is they try to collocate the jobs they’re creating, which is like the easiest factor to replicate as it will mostly happen naturally if they address the actual other factors like attracting venture capital, letting employees take home a lot of money and switch jobs freely, letting companies hire and fire more freely, actually valuing the software work instead of glorifying nontechnical pencil pushers like project managers…

From afar it seems the EU does not understand how to productize non-trivial (not CRUD) software, at all. They will throw huge grants at incompetents who ship nothing or ship something that only captive users (because of regulation or government co tracts) will use.

It’s partially a chicken-egg problem because they don’t seem to be good at “moving up the value chain” in software either, except in the more developing economies like Poland which get more outsourced international business that allows them upskill. In the developed countries it seems like they are stuck doing in-sourced commodity development of CRUD sites for the local market.

One of the few unfounded conspiracy theories I believe is that there is some kind of unofficial, concerted effort from Western oligarchs to use RTO to bolster commercial office space valuations and prevent a banking crisis.

The problem is, I think the conviction to do this is relatively weak. They’re fine to do it with existing leased or bought office space because it’s mostly a sunk cost and just a matter of prodding their workers into compliance (in an employers’ market, thanks Fed), but most aren’t really willing to scoop these 60-70% discounted empty office spaces off the market. So we may end up with a banking crisis anyway, as word on the street is these huge losses in valuation threaten to blow up a lot of regional banks.

They haven’t owned Bethesda for very long so I think it’s fair that they haven’t released a F:NV successor yet. I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!”

Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.

Interesting. Does that mean the Yellow Turbans choose Yellow to demonstrate a lack of legitimacy for the Eastern Han emperor?

The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs.

I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and also noticed it in myself. I can’t prove it’s not related to age, or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay focused and engaged for a long time.

I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn’t happen to everyone of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven’t gone through that transformation yet.

Yes. This should be an instrumental price of evidence in proving that FTX leadership was not “tragically incompetent” but rather willfully and knowingly defrauded its customers.