p_v_doom

In recorded history there have been plenty of economic setups that have very few or no downtrodden. You just gotta go and read anthropology. Another thing to take into account is where we are as a society - and where we can go. Both with automation and gear we can make such work easier, and in a society where we have more control where to direct research (as opposed to VCs seeking maximum profit) we can focus on solving bad jobs like that. Finally - incentives. Why have someone be a coal miner so that their kids do not have to starve, when we can have it be an exclusive and hard workplace, that is both celebrated in public and comes with the pay package of a director or executive. The coal miner certainly does more and more useful work than the average tech founder.

But I agree UBI is not the final solution. The final solution involves stuff like abolishing wage labor, circular economies, non-transferable labor-time tokens and democractic management.

IMO what we term "complex" tends to be that which the current setup/system struggles to deal with or manage. Relatively speaking google has much much higher complexity, but it doesnt matter as much, because even in simpler cases we are dealing with huge amount of variety and possible states, and the principles of managing that remain the same regardless of scale.

Agreed. The problem is not complexity. Every system must process a certain amount of information. And the systems complexity must be able to match that amount. The fundamental problem is about designing systems that can manage complexity, especially runaway complexity.

Interesting. Before there even was attention I was thinking that the episodic memory model offers something that could be very useful for neural nets, so its cool to see people testing that

The key to universal basic income is that it is basic. There are many jobs that cannot be automated but with the right incentive even under UBI people will do them.

> If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too

Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape.

And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.

> It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is.

Tell me about it. I think its because of established common sense and practice that are deeply entrenched on one hand, people that dont really question or think it through on the other and inertia on the third. I work in a project company and the level of useless tools and stuff that gets in the way is crazy. Its like an artifact of the 60s or something.

IMO a lot of the product managers inserting themselves and being useless is good old school project managers pivoting to the new thing and doing the same old stuff. Likewise I do think product management should be part of the senior engineers skillset. Its incredibly useful. Conversely, there are also tons of engineers that dont have this mindset and want a PM to tell them what to do and a barrier from the rest of the organization... which boggles my mind to be fair

> It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself

So basically, what literally happened after the enclosure of the commons, lol

Most of the greater conditions that people experience today have been the result of markedly pro-social discoveries and forces in medicine, agriculture etc. Likewise the rights and comforts we have are largely driven by a) colonization that makes those of us in the West more comfy b) violent labor movements and revolutions in the 20th cnetury, that means we get stuff like free healthcare, education and the like in more civilized places of the world. There are no such countries with no innovation/enterpreneurship, its just countries with more material capabilities to enable these, and countries with less, and a big reason for this discrepancy is point a above.

None of this has much to do with economic growth, economic growth is an artificial construct on top of the material reality, used to justify a specific way of viewing the economy and the way things are structured.

There is only slack for places that allow it. All too many companies overpack their sprints with as much as possible.

Ive repeatedly gotten at a trouble at a job, for fixing even minor things - like moving a loop around or factoring out a single function, without PM approval. Cause it takes time from the team to review instead of working on their own things.

Problem is that most big companies have "professional" management. And professional management is stuck in completely outdated command and control thinking even today. Whether its people taught by other people at other big companies or freshly minted MBAs none of them really seem to learn or know how to really govern, create autonomy, etc. etc. and there is very little incetive to.When you get the odd curious one they go and find agile, and the first thing they run into is SAFE, LESS and similar, which is the same old taylorism wearing the fresh skin of agile on top like a horrible costume.

Also Microsoft consultants are everywhere, and management consultants like McKinsey usually work closely with Microsoft, and many corporations are already locked in.

In many ways its kind of really scary how so much of the digital infrastructure even of key enterprises and entire states is owned and operated by a private company.

I do agree that you can hide a lot of shit in code. But I think something often overlooked is that code is simply text, and we have general rules on how to write good text. Code is in the end of the day basically applied philosophy and expression of ideas.

If you do not have the experience and skill to express your ideas in text in a clear and concise, you will struggle to write good code (and vice versa tbf).And coders generally are lacking on the more humanities side of their educations.

IDK, Ashby's Law of requisite variety comes to mind. In order for something to control/cope with something else it needs to have the capacity to do so. It seems super trivial when stated like that, but actually has profoundly deep implications.

It holds up pretty well, mostly because it is so general. It is ingrained in a lot of things, and its basically just another restatement of the classic control loop - something that used from rockets to therapy. There isnt that much remaining of colonel Boyds work besides some old presentations, but it is very much grounded in cybernetics and systems theory.

The Architects Paradox is an absolute must read IMO. It really challenges the way we think about software.

Architecture modernization is a must for everyone that works with legacy systems and modernization.

Something not new at all, but new to me is Computer Power and Human Reason - written way back in the 70s it still feels very relevant, and its interesting that they had pretty much the same conversations about AI back then as today.