More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work.
DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
Not that these often doesn't have negative aspects when they strive for even higher value extraction, looking at something like John Deere. Still it does allow massive efficiency gains in farming.
It's much more helpful to ask, "What would we lose if this company were broken up tomorrow into parts no larger than (say) the median company size?"
I guess such a big company is here because they managed to create a need. The question may be: "were we really worse off before we had what this company built?".
Example: if GitHub disappears tomorrow, that's likely a pretty big problem. But we were fine before GitHub, we just had different (not worse) workflows. GitHub created a dependency.
The claimed reason why C-level executives are paid so well is that they have to solve the insanely hard problem of finding new growth opportunities for the company over a longer period of time. Well: by this criterion many CxOs fail to deserve this huge pay (more precisely: they build Potemkin villages to pretend growth where in reality they burn the company's substance).
If there were legal and regulatory pressure that crushed and broke down these behemoths (e.g. a FTC and judges that believed that predatory pricing was real and prosecuted accordingly) VCs wouldnt be quite so desperate to breed them.
Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people.
IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.
Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.
USA: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...
I'm sure there are nuances but according to this particular source European life expectancy went from 75 to 79, US life expectancy went from 78 to 79 with a period of a decline between 2013 and 2018.
But your point is valid, life expectancy is not the same as quality of life.
I'd personally rather live five years less and be in great general health than be slogging through pain and medical bingo for my last 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Source of 12 minute arrival policy of ambulance:
At the same time, a lot of the increase in life expectancy in the EU is due to improvements in medicine that are significantly driven by US-funded research.
Also, why do you think that the European live longer thanks to the medicine developed in the USA? Maybe the USA develops medicine thanks to the free and equal opportunity education culture in the Europe? If you look closely to the researchers, you will see that lot's of the people who develop these things have European roots and by roots I don't mean their grandpa was Irish, I mean they were educated in Europe and it just happens that the organisation that develops these drugs is incorporated in the USA.
The tech revolution that changed the world was also developed in Europe, the web was developed by the British in EU, Linux was made by a Finnish guy called Linus.
Also, we are at a verge of AI revolution and some of the leading researchers are Europe educated people.
Maybe the USA is just the industrial zone off Europe? Maybe the US appears rich and acts poor simply because because the richness comes from the accounting choices? Just kidding of course, the USA is a superpower and is actually rich thanks to many things like it's abundant resources and brilliant people but the notion that the Europe is doing better because they just drink smoothies and meditate all day on the American resources and innovation is ridiculous.
It's very safe to say that US-originated science had a major influence in life expectancy worldwide, including Europe. What's so controversial about it? The increase in life expectancy in Europe, then, was "significantly" influenced by US innovations.
However the US subsidizes European defense (refer to current events) allowing European countries to spend less GDP on their military.
Talent comes to the US from all over the world. That's how it works and has since almost the beginning of the country.
Easier access to capital (and easy bankruptcy, etc), entrepreneurial mindset (less Tall Poppy syndrome), etc etc means business is generally easier in US.
Linus moved to the US. The web was possible bc the internet was funded by the US (arpanet, etc).
Europeans enjoy the Pax Americana without paying tribute to the Amerian empire.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nato-spen...
But I like the Linus argument, however this complicates things further: Are tech becoming European when the tech CEO's are having a vacation in the French riviera?
And by the way Europe has nukes.
Frankly, I don't believe it's true, for two reasons. First, the European Big Pharma is quite strong. It would be more fair - but not precise - to say the rest of the world benefits from the advances made in the West.
As for the second point, it was succinctly put by Dr. Marcia Angell from The New England Journal of Medicine in her famous book. From the blurb: "Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective."
I suggest that perhaps it’s a difference in perspective on rights. In Europe, there is a positive right to healthcare. In the US, there is no such right apart from certain circumstances. We turn our nose up at “handouts”. The US expects the free market to handle it instead, which it has. This has led to large portions of the country with few doctors and even fewer affordable ones.
Basically things in America got more expensive (gas, health, education being big contributors). There is lots of wriggle room in the numbers but the vast gulf by nominal GDP is surprising and so unlikely .
Now, the city wants to show GDP/capita growth. Simple : let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k. Now the GDP is 95k+ 55k (let's say the gardeners are on the same pay and have the same work). But wait, maintenance can be done by the company Y! Now the GDP is 95k+55k+20k (maintenance fixed cost 10k+worker time 7k+ 3k profit). But wait, now during winter, our gardeners have nothing to do! That eat into our profits!
Now the GDP is 95k + 50k (what is paid to the temp company)+20k+45k, and gardeners are both paid 20k/year gor this job, and can do other stuff during winter (I hear a repair shop need temp workers during inter to fix gardener tools).
The GDP grew from 75k to 160k, a bit more than 100% growth, and we optimized the economy as now gardeners can keep specializing and do gardener stuff during winter instead of learning about motors and mechanics. Great!
There is an assumption behind GDP: people generally pay production for a fair amount of money. The more untrue this assumption is, the less meaningful GDP is.
Where does that 95k come from?
Or you're asking generally where money comes from? It's a good (and complicated) question. Google monetary and banking. In multiple senses, money DOES come out of thin air.
I'm joking: even without corruption, you can find an ideological reason, as a company will surely be more efficient than public servants!
But more likely because of incertitude: what do we do if a gardener resign? Paying an existing company 95k/year instead of spending 75k/year directly isn't a huge expense increase, and if 20k/year is the price for peace of mind (no new equipment to buy, no HR issues...) it can very well be worth it.
I'm not saying this is good or bad by the way, i'm saying this is how GDP work. It's factual. Yes, there is a left-wing slant about how i presented it, but it wasn't heavy, and a liberal could use the same example in the same way and justifying a better distribution of work and concerns (while still finding that GDP is worthless in this case)
This is interesting as an indicator, it's meaningless as a target.
This is the mistake the OP made. You can't "goose" GDP by borrowing because that money has to come from somewhere. And the money used to "goose" GDP is money that doesn't go to other productive uses.
I would not cite this as a success story. Europe does not seem to be heading in a good direction imo. The consequences are largely unrealized. Even pretending the war never happened and they continued slurping Russian gas.
But even had that not happened Europe wasn’t trending very well.
Also now America can supply Germany with Gas.
Is all by design. American Hegemony.
But I think your analysis is poor. The homeless rate is higher in Germany than the US for example. Germany isn’t on fire, but I think it’s awkward to color it in a way that implies people are doing better there than the US. It will be a painful economic transition.
JB = Jacques Baud, who worked for NATO.
https://mronline.org/2022/03/31/the-policy-of-the-usa-has-al...
Claim a small corner of (digital) land so you can grow some revenue. Now you can produce content. But now you need to sustain your content production infrastructure for the benefits of revenue. We've now justified our initial claim. Then claim more land, tilling over organic content for an optimized, manufactured experience! Now that you have more land, you can grow more revenue! Now that you have revenue, expand your business! Oops, now your business needs more revenue or else it will starve. Claim more land! Rinse and repeat.
Hahahaha that’s funny. Europe has one of the richest and strongest economies in the world. Thousands of European companies are world leading in high tech areas, exporting high tech to U.S. and other companies around the world.
The worlds most advanced microchips can’t be built without machines made in Europe. European Airbus came from nowhere overtaking Boeing in a short number of years. The European invented ARM is now the leading CPU instruction set used worldwide etc. etc. etc. There are many more examples.
And focusing just on software: C++, C#, Linux etc. were invented by Europeans.
You might as well argue that the US economy is a failure because European and Japanese companies overtook US car manufacturers or that the US is a failure because Americans needs to take illegal drugs to handle the misery of living in the US. All equally silly arguments.
The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has exploded while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors.
> More people needs to understand this.
I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”
One idea here is more progressive taxation.
Riiight. See you at the voting booth.
Broadly speaking, any system that depends on an unbroken chain of good people who do the right things out of the goodness of their hearts is bound to fail much sooner rather than later. So I agree.
The system should be designed so that people taking action out of their own interests nevertheless advances society as a whole. As Adam Smith put it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The system that was designed this way is capitalism, warts and all.
> One idea here is more progressive taxation.
I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from your premise. If you want to set up incentive structures such that people chasing their own interests also ends up being useful for society, then you want to make sure that people voluntarily pay money for goods and services that they value. The supplier of that value makes money, the consumer of that value is better off, and society as a whole is enriched as a result.
This also means that the state takes action to break trusts and monopolies, and (more difficultly) guards against regulatory capture, all of which end up making it so that people involuntarily pay for goods and services that they don't necessarily value. Rent-seeking behavior such as this is one of the highest economic ills.
"More progressive taxation" does many things, but it is also exceptionally good at enriching the politically well-connected, often in the form of rent-seeking behavior I described above. Look at world government spending as a fraction of GDP[0] as a good proxy for "more progressive taxation", and tell me between France (58.5%), the US (38.5%) and Singapore (15.4%), which you consider a well-run country where people do more useful things for society.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
It's like folks who claim people are motivated only by money: no, you're only motivated by money. Most folks see money as a means to an end, namely, a safe, normal life lived with loved ones.
It's fine, but it's no unicorn. And having such a business might be the closest and only chance the people involved have at real wealth and impact - they are 90% there, and only need a little scale, or so they think.
If you were in their shoes, you would do the same.
Many tech companies are only plausible with VC funding. In order to get VC funding, you generally have to have a path towards being a unicorn.
VC’s aren’t interested in your “smallish business that turns a profit” and neither are the LPs that invest in the fund.
I can’t find it now. But Spolsky himself wrote about how Fogs Creek Software could be what we now call a “lifestyle company” that could grow slowly. But he felt he needed outside investment so Stack Exchange could grow fast since it was only useful if it had network effects.
A hundred and fifty years ago people risked incredible suffering in order to strike gold. All when slow and steady profit could be made by owning a farm.
Its not possible to run a business that loses $84 million. You will run out of money.
I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question", but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.
Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.
If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing.
Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.
Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?
I can't say the same for other enshittified companies.
(Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and also for turning undocumented and badly documented examples of JSON into a collection of (swift) `Codable` structs.
I'm pretty sure it's the main usage of almost all the programmers who use ChatGPT.
Dear [Recipient's Name],
I trust this email finds you well. I am writing to express my appreciation for the time and effort you invested in composing the recent email you sent my way. Your commitment to clear communication is commendable, and I value the insights you often bring to our exchanges.
However, I must admit that due to the current demands on my schedule, I have not had the opportunity to read through the entire content of your email in its entirety. Recognizing the importance of your message, I feel it necessary to be transparent about my current time constraints and commitments.
With a view to ensuring that I can fully grasp the essential points you wish to convey, I would be grateful if you could kindly provide a condensed version or a summary of the key takeaways from your original message. Rest assured that your efforts in doing so will be highly appreciated and will enable me to offer the attention and consideration your thoughts deserve.
Please understand that my intention is not to diminish the significance of your communication but rather to ensure that I can respond meaningfully and efficiently to your input. I truly value our professional collaboration and the valuable contributions you consistently make to our discussions.
Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to receiving your condensed version of the email at your earliest convenience. Should you have any questions or require further clarification on this matter, please do not hesitate to reach out.
With warm regards,
[Your Name] [Your Title/Position] [Company Name] [Contact Information]
First, the request is bizarre. “I don’t have time to read the email you sent me, so rewrite it and resend it” is an extremely strange thing.
Second, this email has about 10x the words it actually needs. This isn’t being polite.
Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.
The key element in the success of SO was not technical: it was Spolsky and Atwood leveraging already-established (Microsoft) audiences they had, to create a virtuous circle of sharing that snowballed for years.
But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics.
If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO.
But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.
If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with.
I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.
This will probably come in handy for all the weird cryptic errors that they get along the way.
This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.
Or move it to zulip or zulip like so it's at least threaded in a way that works over months. But as is it's just two different purpose tool and cramming one's use case in the other just doesn't fit.
It is to provide answers (preferably one) to a question.
So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...
For one, it's almost never a chat. You go there, and the other person who might be talking last posted 12 hours ago. That's not an immediate conversation. These are still "comments". It's a clumsy interface. Then, despite no longer having to be a "comment on a question" like in the main interface, it's still this crappy pseudo-IRC that doesn't give you full markdown to work with.
> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO
Such they claim.
It could use it to improve its search. However, it should be trained on SO, because the language is quite specialized.
For new users the edit does have to get approved by 3 other users to give some check on vandalisim.
Thus answers are wikis.
I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.
Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.
This comment just made me feel old :-)
A bimbo is a woman who makes up for a lack of intelligence or competence by having sex appeal.
Don't take my word for it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo
Did you mean to use a different word?
This claim is unusual enough that I wanted to know if it's what my parent commenter meant.
Please god no. Why this tendency to grow something you like until it includes everything?
There are other places to discuss including the actual Reddit. SO is about question-answers, that's why it got popular. You try to turn it into Reddit, you will add Reddit-scale moderation overhead across 100000 simultaneously running threads to already existing moderation overhead for actual answers. If you didn't notice Reddit can't even manage their own overhead so they freeze discussions after a while.
This is the opposite of what SO should do, which is focus on discovering and improving existing information instead of adding more and more ways to contribute low-effort junk
Mods are the worst. Community moderators are ruining SO faster than the CEO.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.
I use GPT to implement classes with many interfaces. Even though I often have to make corrections, it's still way faster than looking up the documentation for each of these interfaces. Saves a lot of time in these cases, all the more so I don't have to ponder on which interface in the class hierarchy tree I need to implement.
I did use GPT4 for a lot of the minor things that i am too lazy to remember and would have „relearned“ on SO every time… maybe others have a similar experience and management just sees visits dropping? Maybe they just focus on developing a target audience for a tailored product.
Google algorithm changes have absolutely curbstomped SO visibility, probably due to third-party sites mirroring their content and making it appear to be a linkfarm to google.
It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone. Even just pushing a site down a ways in results will massively reduce the amount of traffic, even for us technical users.
Good point!
Your response just made me remember why Copilot & later ChatGPT came in so handy. It was a weirdly perfect timing . It was after i have been so annoyed with all these trashy low quality code snippet sites just copying SO content appearing multiple times on the first page for almost any code related query. After months I even made a Ask HN because i wondered, if only I was so incredibly annoyed by these sites popping up.
I just stopped googling for much programming related questions because of this.
OT: A silly thought crossing my mind: I never really understood the value of these sites. In hindsight now, does it seem plausible that microsoft or openAI were behind these or had something to do with these sites?
Wikipedia isn't run like a business, but relies on charity. Wikipedia doesn't have to be profitable to exist so of course it isn't run like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is backed by a foundation that gets plenty of donations. Maybe SO should adopt that model, but that's an entire different question.
If Wikipedia had to be profitable it would be a very different platform.
Both are crowdsourced (so are reddit, facebook and youtube), and the similarities stop there.
Imagine sanity checking old answers for new versions of language or Library. Adding probabilistic merit to new user answers. Asking the question asker to review machine generated answers in troubleshooting questions with little traction.
Obviously, enshittiffication is at work in how these social0-esque sites try to use tech.
Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.
Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.
SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has.
Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.