You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else.

I've commented about lack of slack on several times here on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain.

When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed.

I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.

Of course, it was!

AppleTV show “Severance”

https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...

Per wikipedia:

  IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
  20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
  five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
  the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.

First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.

Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.

We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it

https://postimg.cc/v1v5VP2f

I can see why GGP described it that way.

I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.

This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.

I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.

If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.

Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).

That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).

All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.

In the world of government-sponsored research, mRNA likely would have been passed over in favor of funding research with more assured results.

A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.

This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)

The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for.

And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products to be good anymore, so they just buy the cheapest garbage.

Which, inevitably, is the stuff sold directly by Chinese manufacturers. And so the beancounters are hoisted by their own petard.

We've seen it happen to small electronics and general goods.

We're seeing it happen right now to cars. Manufacturers clinging on to combustion engines and cutting corners. Why spend twice the money on a western brand when their quality is rapidly declining to meet BYD models half the price.

---

And we're seeing it happen to software. It was already kind of happening before AI; So much of software was enshittifying rapidly. But AI is just taking a sledgehammer to quality. (Setting aside whether this is an AI problem or a "beancounters push everyone into vibecoding" problem)

E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Windows is just going down in flames. People are jumping ship now.

SaaS is quickly going that way as well. If it's all garbage, why pay for it. Either stop using it or just slop something together yourself.

---

And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. So much manufacturing knowledge is just gone, starting a new manufacturing firm in the west is a staffing nightmare. Same story with cars, China has the EV knowledge. And software's going the same way. These beancounters are all chomping at the bit to fire all their devs and replace them with teenagers in the developing world spitting out prompts. They can't move back upmarket after that's done.

Even when the knowledge still lives, when the people with the skills requires have simply moved to other industries and jobs, who's going to come back? Why leave your established job for the former field, when all it takes is the management or executive in charge being replaced by another dipshit beancounter for everyone to be laid off again.

Desktop Linux has gotten better, though much of the improvement happened decades ago. I believe the first person to prematurely declare "the year of Linux on the desktop" was Dirk Hohndel in 1999: https://www.linux.com/news/23-years-terrible-linux-predictio...

And speaking as someone who was running desktop Linux in 1999, I remember just how bad it was. Xfce, XFree86 config files, and endless messing around with everything. The most impressive Linux video game of 2000 was Tux Racer.

But over the next 10 years, Gnome and KDE matured, X learned how to auto-detect most hardware, and more-and-more installs started working out of the box.

By the mid-2010s, I could go to Dell's Ubuntu Linux page and buy a Linux laptop that Just Worked, and that came with next day on-site support. I went through a couple of those machines, and they were nearly hassle free over their entire operational life. (I think one needed an afternoon of work after an Ubuntu LTS upgrade.)

The big recent improvement has been largely thanks to Valve, and especially the Steam Deck. Valve has been pushing Proton, and they're encouraging Steam Deck support. So the big change in recent years is that more and more new game releases Just Work on Linux.

Is it perfect? No. Desktop Linux is still kind of shit. For examples, Chrome sometimes loses the ability to use hardware acceleration for WebGPU-style features. But I also have a Mac sitting on my desk, and that Mac also has plenty of weird interactions with Chrome, ones where audio or video just stops working. The Mac is slightly less shit, but not magically so.

This is on me for being a bit too snarky.

So yes, Desktop Linux has "gotten better". What it hasn't done is solved any of the systemic problems.

The Open Source development quirks that created the shitshow of the 1999 is still here. Gnome is better but still suffers massively from mainstream features being declared stupid by the maintainers. (A power button that turns off the machine? Heretical.)

Valve's recent successes are pretty illustrative here. They used their money to directly hijack the projects their products rely on.

For what it pertains the comparison, Windows is not without this "slow" improvement either. 95 and 98 are lightyears behind contemporary Windows in so many ways. Until quite recently it still made about as much sense to use Linux as it did back then; Not much.

Take your Linux Laptop example. Sure, Linux finally kind of worked on some specific models that were tested for it. Meanwhile, Windows had moved from "it'll work with some mucking about with drivers" to "It works universally, on practically all hardware". Really, by the mid 2010s Windows would finally be quite tolerant of you changing the hardware.

Hence my original point; Desktop Linux hasn't really caught up with Windows in any meaningful sense. Windows is just nose-diving into the ground in the last few years.

Gnome have been chopping off their own limbs because it reduces weight. All in the name of simplicity. I think they are not the best example of Open Source development.

KDE on the other hand had a hard fall once and basically recovered and invested long term in Plasma and that has paid off handsomely. Today, it is one desktop that I can say is closest to typical/standard desktop paradigms out of the box while retaining a high degree of flexibility for those who choose to customise it. I have been using KDE on Fedora for a while now and it has been basically solid.

They're not. I'm using them as an example of the "bad" in Open Source development.

But it's also not so much the individual OS components that are a problem, their interactions are just as fragile and usually subject to neither party taking ownership of the problem.

We forget that it this organic nature that makes open source what it is. Nobody charges you entry fee, there are no hidden fees once you enter, nobody is trying to sell you crap but you need to learn how to survive yourself. Once you do that, you understand how to deal with shortcomings of a package or finding another solution to your needs. Sure it takes time, but when that becomes second nature and you stop fighting the nature of the ecology itself, there is no other system like it.

That's why comparing it with advantages of other systems is pointless. I didn't choose to walk into the forest because it was a perfectly tailored experience, I did because I wanted freedom. It required me to learn how to fit in and now that I have, I'm at peace with where I am.

And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).

The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process.

The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore. Once everyone is used to garbage being the only thing on offer, and adjust to cope with it, you cannot compete on quality anymore. Customers won't be able to tell whether you're honest, or just trying to charge suckers for the same garbage with a nicer finish, like every other brand that promises quality. It would take years of effort and low sales to convince the customers to start believing you're the real deal, which (as beancounters will happily tell you) you cannot afford. And even if you could, how are you going to convince people you're not going to start cutting corners again a few years down the line? In fact, how do you convince yourself? If it happened once, if it keeps happening everywhere around across all economy, it's bound to happen to your business too.

Back when I was a kid, my dad claimed house construction firms (in the UK) regularly closed down after building homes to get around having to fix things under warranty.

Regardless of if this was actually true or not, the perception will kill trust.

I'm not sure what you mean with this?

Sure, hypothetically e.g. any western car manufacturer could poach a bunch of BYD employees. But it's not really practical for most businesses.

> The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore.

This is the "Market for Lemons" problem, yes.

It's less of a problem than you might think. Convincing the entire wider world that you're legitimate is a problem. One made infinitely worse by store marketplaces like Amazon preferring to push "aqekj;bgrsabhghwjbgawrjwsraG" brand garbage.

So you just don't. The trick is to start small. The smallest you can sustain. (This doesn't work for cars, or anything that's sufficiently complex. You won't be taking on Salesforce.)

But so long as you can find a market niche where there's demand for quality, you can carve out a living, and from there, scale up.

The problem with that is twofold: Venture Capital has supplanted other forms of investment and "small business generating single digit millions in revenue" is utterly unappealing to VCs, even though the investment required is downsized accordingly.

And problem #2: The cost of starting a business is too high right now. Real estate and cost of living just make it unaffordable to even try. + Healthcare if you're in the US.

Fortunate for everyone that Europe exists and counts as "the west". Real estate isn't expensive everywhere, and much of Europe has affordable healthcare. Even in the current economy, several of my former coworkers from recent employers have founded new businesses.

Yes if you want to wire a neighborhood for internet you can skip DSL and go straight to fiber. That's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in your company knows how deep to put the fiber to minimize problems, how much redundancy is needed, how strong the mechanical armor around the fiber needs to be, how many fibers per cable to meet future capacity needs without excessive costs, which landlords are friendly to you, nobody has the right connections to city hall to get digging permits approved expediently, and so on.

Desktop Linux mostly works these days. It does everything most regular people would want of it, with zero fuss. Including playing games. In some respects, it's easier to use than Mac or Windows.

When it has trouble with some things, one must remember neither Mac nor Windows is perfect, and they can be extremely frustrating at times.

Time to update those prejudices!

I determined that this minimal start was the right confluence of those two preferences with the howto documentation available at the time, so that's what I did.

So I'm going along in rolling releases for years, and even playing games fine (except GTA:V online). Things are fine until there's some weird flickering-window bug that rolls down the pipe and apparently only affects nVidia users who use xfce4. It's an awful and particularly jarring bug.

The workaround is to disable vsync in xfce4, which solves that problem but always causes tearing for me. Even in YouTube videos. (Who knew how reliant we'd become on rote frame synchronization? Why, it seems like just yesterday when I was streaming potato-quality RealVideo episodes of South Park over dialup on a K6-2 box while marveling that any of it worked at all.)

I don't know which party is responsible for that problem, but nVidia has supposedly fixed it on their end in recent weeks. Which is cool, but this distro isn't shipping that version yet. And I'm reluctant to go off-script -- I loathe the idea of letting the nVidia installer do whatever it wants, and I'm not too keen on building my own package for xbps to handle (hopefully with better grace), either.

It was time to fix it anyway.

And I wanted to give Wayland a shot because there's a limitation with SDL that causes the clipboard method used by Factorio to fail to work with large blueprints under X11, so change was already in the air.

And so it began.

KDE Plasma: I couldn't get it to work. With both X11 and Wayland, parts of it would just die without leaving any traces I could find. It was unusable. I spent hours troubleshooting it and only a few minutes of actually using it, which is a terrible ratio. It had to go.

Gnome: It actually worked OK with Wayland. But when I say "worked OK", I mean that it acted like a touchscreen interface -- for toddlers. It didn't crash in mysterious and buried ways, which is good, but it I found it to be an affront to my sensibilities in ways that I simply could not tolerate. I won't apologize for hating it or for feeling insulted by it. That iteration of Gnome is dead to me.

So working down the list of non-ancient desktop environments: Cinnamon? It works. It's alright. It took some kicking to get sound to work because the mixer it comes with makes it impossible to set up default outputs in a way that behaves here and it reverts the system to its own broken ideas every time it runs, but it responded to my kicks without much of a fight and it works. The xfce4 volume mixer is on the taskbar instead, and I removed all traces of the Cinnamon mixer like it was a cancerous tumor, but with that done: Sound works. Regular X stuff works. It's good enough.

I haven't tried it with Wayland yet to see I can work around the SDL+Factorio SNAFU, but it's been behaving itself with X11 for a week or more.

---

Now, that may sound awful. And to be clear, it wasn't fun at all. But at least it's not like my Windows laptop. I've got stories about that, for sure.

One of things that sticks out right now is when that laptop would deplete its battery just sitting in my bag in the car. That was weird, but it became more urgent to fix it when I got the machine out of the bag and it was hot.

The cause for that was an HP printer driver (for a rather old color printer that I don't even own -- I do use it sometimes, but it's 25 miles away) that was periodically waking the machine from hibernation to check that printer's supply status, so it could try to sell me more stuff.

This task was so completely buried in Windows that it took hours to find it, and it was configured by its installer to wake the machine from hibernation -- including, specifically, while on battery. Because that's obviously what every user of any printer needs: Computers that turn themselves on using battery power to sell toner cartridges while hidden unseen inside of a bag in the back of a car.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was this way anyway. I consider that kind of thing to be deliberate in a fashion that extends beyond mere maliciousness: It is instead simply fucking evil.

---

So yeah, Linux is a great desktop.

I'd like to propose a new slogan: "Linux. At least it's not deliberately evil. Usually."

Stock Ubuntu, binary NVIDIA drivers, no tearing on video, excellent frame rate on most games.

A few give me trouble (Space Marine II, one of the Need For Speeds). Sometimes the advice on ProtonDB works, sometimes it doesn't.

Beyond games, everything I want to do works out of the box, with some exceptions which I also remember from my Windows days.

No printer troubles (Mac sometimes gives me a headache here), no sound troubles.

Oh, there was some issue with bluetooth pairing. Which I sorted out.

Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.

Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.

Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.

Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.

Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.

Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.

Aircraft engines are subjected to both.

Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.

The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.

And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.

Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.

> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.

That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.

Labor force participation is ~62%, far lower than historical peaks. I don't buy it.

Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.

Slack by Tom Demarco (2001)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from?

What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

What happens when you pay back the money? Yes, it is symmetric, the money is destroyed! (wild, isn't it!)

So why does the bank do this? They make money on the interest from the loan.

This is how "free banking" works, and it applies to your scenario. Creating value does not devalue the rest of the economy. The supply of money is not fixed, it rises and falls relative to the value in the economy.

I know this is a difficult thing to describe briefly, there are college degrees on this topic.

Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.

I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.

And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.

It was not transferred to him.

The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.

But if you come from “so much money we couldn't even close our safe” as his father put (quote from Wikipedia

Then you do have a leg up

I'd deny even that. He made enough dumb decisions that he was forced out and got rich primarily because of other peoples' good ideas/decisions.

This is an entirely mutually voluntary arrangement.

If the company does not deliver on its contractual obligations to you, you can take them to court, and you'll win.

If you don't get more than you accepted in the contract, you have no cause to claim being "screwed over".

If you don't read the contract before you sign it, that's on you.

P.S. I've added adendums to employment contracts listing the separate intellectual property that was mine and would remain mine. I never got any pushback on that. Also, I've started side projects while employed, and before working on them, I'd get a signoff from an executive that it was not covered by my employment contract. And I never got "screwed over".

At some point, accumulated wealth becomes power, and that power can be used to pull energy, attention, labor, and public resources out of the system for one person’s agenda.

And in Tesla’s case, the stock value creation story is insanely unorthodox, to be charitable. A lot of that valuation was supercharged by years of market-moving hype done personally by Elon: 10+ years of FSD timelines that never happened, the more recent “buy a Tesla, it’s an appreciating asset!” super-lie, the mission gradually being abandoned, GOP craps on EVs and it’s crickets from Elon, etc.

Now we have the ultimate example of wealth gravity distortion: Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional. But Elon is not just benefiting from Trump’s transactional nature. He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.

So with all that, the kind of shady behavior Elon pulled that might normally trigger government scrutiny or enforcement is now being smothered by political influence.

Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype, and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.

And to be clear, I’m not trying to pretend nothing real was built. SpaceX is impressive. Tesla really did help kickstart the EV market. But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.

So yes, maybe the wealth was “created” in an accounting sense. But the concern is what happens when that created value becomes an unaccountable force acting on everything else.

> Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional.

Both parties accept help from wealthy people, and yes, they do expect something in return. I don't see that Musk got anything out of it, though. Musk received 0 benefit from DOGE.

> But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.

What power do you think Musk is exercising now?

> He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.

I gave you examples of no accountability in government things. I don't see any decrease in accountability.

> Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype,

Sure. And I bought TSLA years ago. I didn't believe his FSD hype. But he delivered on it anyway. If TSLA stock implodes, it's only going to hurt the shareholders, not you.

> and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.

What influence is he buying?

Besides eviscerating all the regulatory agencies enforcing rules against his companies and huge amounts of private data from all sorts of agencies?

Let's say Musk has all that private data. What did he do with it? Is he extorting anyone? How does it help his rocket business? Is he draining anyone's bank accounts?

What do you think of the tricks that California pulled to have billions vanish with not a mile of track laid? Or all those hospices with no beds? Or this fun one:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

Unfortunately, as a taxpayer, I am on the hook for those tricks. With a business, I can do some due diligence and then decide if I want to get in or not.

I suspect you and I are being fleeced far more by government waste and fraud than by businesses.

And do you think that firing half of the employees at various gov't agencies has and/or will decrease the waste and fraud?

Do you believe that means there's no hanky panky going on?

lovely how US politicians have been able to successful lie their way into making gullible people like you believe this - quite remarkable… I am always in awe what they can accomplish

Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.

What if I use what would otherwise be a waste product to create something people are willing to pay for? For example sawdust. Is that not value creation?

Consider Japan, for example. No petrochemicals. No natural resources. Economic powerhouse.

Consider Russia. Floating on oil. Not a wealthy country.

He gets to keep the lion's share of the profits because he was the one who took the risk with his capital. And bully for him; well done that man. But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true. It's a myth that the wealth owners tell us.

All of these products would exist with the CEOs who get the credit. If it weren't them it would have been someone else. Their expertise as CEOs is not to get the product done, but to get it done a week earlier than the other guy. And even that much is more luck than skill.

There's no way to say "Musk took this money from someone else". But that's different from "He has a million times as much wealth because he is a million times more valuable."

Obviously not. The investors got their share, and employees got their stock options.

> But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true.

What were the names of the crew of Captain Cook's ship? Who was under the command of General Sherman? Who won the battle of Yorktown? Who created Standard Oil? We give credit to the head of something, not to the people under his command.

> If it weren't them it would have been someone else.

Nobody knows that.

> And even that much is more luck than skill.

If I hit a home run once, I would attribute it to luck. If I hit a home run 3 times, then I have skillz.

Gates maneuvered 3 dramatic changes in Microsoft, where other companies failed at the transition. Jobs made 3 fortunes. Musk has made several diverse fortunes.

At some point, you're going to have to give these people credit.

Musk has created a million times more wealth than others. If his life story was a novel, I would have put it down as absurd.

The government gave Musk a trillion dollars?

> So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest

I didn't say they were all good. I said he created his wealth, it was not transferred to him.

> And stats on inequality just highlights that trend

All those stats highlight is some people create more wealth than others.

- Over-optimizing for short term profit can hurt innovation and value creation.

- The economy is not a zero sum game and new value is created out of thin air.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

Nope. (Any government incentives were available to all the other car companies.)

> Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Where do you think he got the money to sustain those losses? Investors! Including me. That is not a "transfer" of wealth, as in exchange the investors received an ownership share of the company.

> Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

It still is the opposite of short term thinking.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

As for "sidestepped regulations", you'll need to be more specific. He did have some court battles with regulators, and won them.

Cantillon Effect

How much does your bread cost and how much did it cost in the 90s? Where do you think all that value gone? Has bread some what become much better quality or something? Are they lacing it with gold?

They are stealing from your pocket, in many ways than one.

Another point to consider is that musk wealth is on paper only, real value if he wanted to cash out would turn much smaller, it's all hypothetical.

> They are stealing from your pocket, in many ways than one.

You need a more compelling argument than that. Agriculture is not a particularly lucrative industry.

> Another point to consider is that musk wealth is on paper only, real value if he wanted to cash out would turn much smaller, it's all hypothetical.

Back to "what is value?" There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value is what people are willing to pay for something. That's it. If people are willing to pay more, then the value is higher. If the are only willing to pay less, then the value is lower. And certainly the value of x is different for different people, and varies moment by moment.

The value of a TSLA share of stock is no different from the value of that piece of paper you have that says "One Dollar" on it.

If one of those people suddenly "creates wealth" and now has $100,000, then the average value of the dollar goes down and the cost of everything goes up. Person X can trivially afford the increase, but the other nine now have lower buying power, lower standards of living, and the $100,000 now can exert coercive control over those with less.

We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.

I'll just say that every country that decided to get rid of its wealthy people wound up poorer, a lot poorer.

For a specific example, Massachusetts has a luxury yacht industry. The government decided that they wanted to tax the wealthy, and slapped a hefty tax on yachts. The billionaires simply took their yacht buying elsewhere, and the yacht industry collapsed, costing thousands of highly paid jobs. The government rescinded the tax.

You have ~40 responses in this thread in defense of billionaires, not sure which one exactly you're talking about.

Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.

The 40hr work week didn't come by as a consequence of the profit maximization mentality, but as a consequence of hard fought battles by the workers/employees against that mentality. And when I say "hard fought" I mean in the literal sense, with at least 1,000 workers killed just in the US in those days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

If you still aren't convinced, consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay.

Do you have evidence of this?

> consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay

Please define "routinely" and "employees". Part-time employees do not get benefits packages, much less benefits packages worth 40% of their pay. PTO, Sick time, family leave, and other "benefits" are actually legally mandated and I do not see any evidence that companies would offer this if they were not mandated to do so.

Yes. Part time work.

Google sez: "Total compensation generally exceeds base salary by 30% to 50% for many roles, meaning salary often represents only 60% to 70% of an employee's total worth to the company."

Google sez total compensation includes bonuses, commission, stock options, employer-paid insurance (health, life, disability), retirement contributions, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, student loan assistance, gym memberships, employee discounts, Childcare assistance, commuter benefits, and relocation expenses.

None of those are mandated by law.

Meaning it can be changed and adjusted.

Every well functioning market has ground rules. We call that laws.

And every well-functioning market has enforcer of said ground rules. We call that government.

Believing that the market is unregulated is faith-driven nonsense, which flies in the face of evidence.

"Your signature on the contract or your brains" is not a free market transaction.

A check against fraud and protection of property rights can be achieved through force and violence and the threat of violence, so that answer seems inadequate.

Likewise, supply and demand is definitely affected by government policies. The supply of labor, for example, by allowing or disallowing near shore or off-shore work with steep penalties. Or allowing/disallowing gambling.

So that also flies in the face of evidence.

It’s a self-serving, faith-based belief that that desires to put “market forces” beyond the reach of voters. It’s also a colossal delusion.

The idea is that transactions then become mutually beneficial.

You cannot vote away the Law of Supply and Demand any more than you can legislate pi=3.00

It’s a strange blindspot you have where you understand there is clearly some government role to have a free market, yet can’t see that this also means the government can influence—not eliminate, you’re the one making this claim not me—supply and demand.

The government clearly has levers to influence supply, but I’m failing to make it clear it seems.

As for making transactions beneficial between two parties: Which two parties?

Why does this belief not extend to workers and businesses?

Why doesn’t the lobbying by firms to support H1Bs and off-shore prove that government policies clearly impacts labor supply?

Most people do a lot of work themselves that the Richie Rich would pay somebody else to do, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, etc. If it counts as work when you hire somebody to do it, it should equally count as work if you do it yourself.

BTW, cooking in those days was an all day affair. The wood stove required continuous feeding and watching. Today one can just put the food in a microwave.

I cook a steak now and then, it's the only cooking I do. It takes about 10 minutes. The dishwasher does the cleaning.

Rich people hire others to do the cooking because the rich peoples' jobs pay off far more per hour of work. For example, if my profession pays me $100/hr, it makes perfect sense to pay someone $30/hr to do the cooking for me, as I am still $70/hr ahead.

Things went to hell for single-parent families

Life expectancy and average height improved throughout the 19th century.

There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptualized in the first place!)

As a trivial example, profit maximization is directly responsible for the enshittification we're seeing everywhere, which definitely is negatively impacting our standard of living.

Nobody has found a better process. Not even close.

> As a trivial example

It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

Have you ever wondered why communist countries never exported products?

Also, if you want better products and believe people will want to buy them, go into business making them and make yourself wealthy!

Maybe, but as they say, "Past Performance Is Not Indicative of Future Results." The point was, this process may work up to a point, then it may work more against the interests of the population.

I mean, history is already littered with examples of the downsides of this process, like all the rampant anti-worker things profit maximizers tried to get away with that had to be fought literally with blood. Without that bloodshed it is highly likely the average standards of living of the general population would be much, much lower.

You don't even have to look at history, the process is literally playing out right now in various countries.

> It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

I thought enshittification was a pretty specific example? You can find the many articles written about the various ways things are degrading on the Internet with a Google search (the experience of which is probably an even more specific example in itself ;-))

I chose that example because I think it's a microcosm of this process: in the beginning, the profit motive creates great innovation and products. But at some point, like when the market is saturated or monopolized, the profit incentive creates anti-consumer dynamics because companies turn to extractive methods rather than innovative ones.

Thanks

I don't recall ever seeing USSR products in stores, while plenty of manufactured goods from other countries were. (By products I meant manufactured products, not extracted resources like oil.)

My memory from the period is far from perfect, though, as I was a kid when the USSR collapsed.

I bought some Soviet stuff after the fall of the USSR, because it was unique and interesting. One item was a telescope, one was a brand new rotary dial telephone manufactured in the 1950s, and one was a mechanical clock reputed to be from a submarine.

I'm only sad that I abandoned my phone line (as I only received spam calls on it) and so my Commie Phone is a nice, but useless, desk ornament.

actually there was car export. Google "britain lada". I also remember some south american countries having cars from USSR. Cars were mostly exported to countries that didn't have car production.

>> electronics, furniture, apparel

There was a lot of trade going on, but in most countries local electronics and apparel was the better option.

You have to understand, the economy wasn't that global at the time. A lot of countries had american knick-knacks mostly because american soldiers brought it in and exchange it for local knick-knacks.

Most of the global trade was for materials.

On the one side, it has succeeded at reducing costs, which has indeed given rich societies unprecedented access to consumer goods.

On the other, it has outsourced from us both jobs and knowledge, which has resulted in higher unemployment and dissatisfaction, with as consequences the political dominoes we see falling internationally. That and the shoddy US health system (which the rest of the world seems to have decided to follow, for some reason).

And there is the small fact that we're in the process of optimizing the planet to death, and that not-so-rich countries (as well as formerly-rich ones) have starved to death for this high standard of living.

So, let's appreciate our standard of living, but not assume that it's necessarily a good thing in the grand scheme of things.

Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The US health care system is pretty much run by the government. It is not a result of free markets.

A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

Is that free market?

> Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The first example from the top of my head is Argentina.

> A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

This very much depends on the industry. In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

> The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

No idea what you're talking about.

Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/

> In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

??

> No idea what you're talking about.

Watch "Alone". I think it's on Netflix. Compare it with the kit of Lewis and Clark.

>

> ??

During the last 30+ years, the trend has always been to increase hardware use to save on development/thinking time. AI is the latest and most extreme version of it.

> Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/

Are you by any chance moving the goalposts?

When I read comments like this I can’t help but wonder where people like you work. It’s completely unrepeatable to me. I work with really good people, all the way to the tip, and no try to make money by increasing value for our customers.

Apple, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap. Why are people so cynical about a world that offers them unimaginable riches everywhere they look.

Sure there are bad companies. And if you work at one of those, go get a new job.

Try to find something with Google these days. Try to use an Apple product past it's planned obsolescence. They crowd out innovation with their monopolistic rent seeking.

"Can they really breathe fire or did we make that up?"

Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results.

If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.

I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

> You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made.

Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis.

Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the United States since 1947. It's a steady linear increase every single year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Yours is the type of story big company workers tell themselves to feel important while refusing to learn anything new and never taking any risks. But the truth is 99.999% of companies are not doing anything that unique or complex. Most companies are not ASML.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone justify their do-nothing position within a giant bureaucracy while saying the phrase "institutional knowledge" I'd be rich. This is just a sign of a poorly run giant company full of engineers building esoteric and overly complex in-house solutions to already-solved problems as job security.

The truth is all of this "institutional knowledge" is worthless in the face of disruption, and it has a half life that's getting shorter every day.

Everybody talks shit about global just-in-time supply chains and specialization...but just because we had a fake toilet paper shortage for a few months during a 100-year global pandemic doesn't mean running things like it's 1947 for the last 70 years would have been better. You enjoy a much higher quality of life today due to these "evil" JIT supply chains which it turns out are far more durable than people want to claim.

In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity.

Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line?

The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door.

Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge.

I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place

The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses.

When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one.

Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.

I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.

It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.

It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow.

But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time.

But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.

No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.

There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.

This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.

2) unfortunately, LLM's, by their very nature (not having a model of what they do, are prone to introducing subtle bugs, i.e. it is like programming in high-level language whose compiler likes to wing it

I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.

If only you knew how the civil engineering sausage was made.

The amount of yolo'ing stuff based on vibes goes up when testing is expensive/impractical. They just paper over it all with disclaimers of the sort that would get laughed at for being non-starters in the software industry.

Which creates incentives I'm not wholly comfortable with, but the fact is that I'm more productive now alone, than I used to be in a team.

Prior to LLMs the idea was to involve juniors in the engineering process to give them an opportunity to learn rather than necessarily to improve the team's productivity. Some companies famously (and consciously) refused to hire juniors to avoid the performance hit even prior to genAI (eg Netflix).

Involving LLMs in our engineering processes has very suspect implications for both productivity and quality of our output, since unlike juniors the LLMs don't even learn.

I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned.

The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.

In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.

But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.

You just described Lucent.

Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.

The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.

What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.

This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.

In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.

Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.

Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.

There is at least a chance for it to be redistributed, unlike private wealth.

Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.

Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.

Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.

Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.

That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.

We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.

This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.

Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?

Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.

Suppose you don't own a major media outlet or social media company and you have something to say that the major media outlets and social media companies don't like. What are your options for getting more than six people to hear what you have to say if you're not allowed to spend money?

> It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'.

This is literally the opposite of what happens. The companies that own distribution channels can make speech they don't like disappear, or even just speech that doesn't drive sufficient "engagement", by putting it at the end of the feed behind six trillion lolcats and enough rage bait to keep everyone glued to the screen. Then the only way to be seen when your message isn't a dopamine hit is to pay money.

> Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust.

Citizens United has very little to say about anti-trust. What argument are you making that it would prevent e.g. laws requiring adversarial interoperability or break ups of large companies? For that matter, much of the interoperability problem comes from companies using laws like the CFAA and DMCA 1201, and then you don't even need laws to be passed, you need them to be repealed.

Isn't it absolutely obvious? Are you paid bot?

Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.

Inequality society producea inequal economy (and vice versa) which is the economy of any developing country. Few rich,. miniscule middle class and lots of poor people in slums snd poverty.

thought about this too - but not as expressively as you put it.

e.g in China - for early stage ventures - there's cut throat competition - then as Thiel would put it with heavy competition profits trend towards 0 - by then the tech is perfected or close to perfect - then the state uses its funds to back a monopoly. that's how you get a BYD.

While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.

But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.

Suppose someone new made a better mobile OS than Android. What would happen?

Google has convinced a lot of third party apps to use their anti-competitive attestation system that has no real security value but makes it so those apps won't run on a competing operating system even if it implements all of the same APIs, so it immediately has a major barrier to gaining traction. That should be an antitrust violation.

Then the incumbents would copy any innovative features the new OS has so it no longer has an advantage. On paper this is what the patent system is supposed to prevent, but in practice is does the opposite. If you as a practicing entity tried to sue a major incumbent for patent infringement, they would counter-sue and have an arsenal of thousands of patents that could keep you bogged down in litigation for years. Just the cost of litigation could bankrupt a smaller company even if they won, and there is enough ambiguity in the system that they're pretty likely to lose when the incumbent only has to find one patent out of thousands they were unintentionally infringing, or a court is willing to enforce one that ought not to have been granted. So then everyone has to file a bunch of patents for the purposes of mutually-assured destruction and can't really enforce them, which favors larger companies that can afford the overhead. It certainly doesn't protect the little guy and we would be better off without them.

Your suggestion is also essentially unworkable. NFL teams all have the same number of players and play the same game. Amazon and TSMC each have a very different business and largely aren't competing for the same people. Does Garmin get the same number of picks as Foxconn even though they don't employ nearly as many people? How many picks does a startup get? Do we count Apple as doing poorly because the gross margins on hardware are lower than they are on pure licensing, or Nvidia as doing poorly because they have higher margins but lower revenue? How are we accounting for engineers in other countries? What about engineers in China who work for companies in China who are contractors for international companies? What if a corporate contractor has more than one corporate customer? How do we account for open source? How do we distinguish engineers from IT staff or research mathematicians or prevent companies from giving willing workers a job description that doesn't match the work they're doing?

It's also probably worth pointing out that systems like that are essentially price fixing schemes by the industry to pay workers less than they would otherwise be able to get if other companies weren't prohibited from outbidding them for talent.

China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.

Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).

Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.

But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.

If NATO expansion is the reason for the war in Ukraine (not imperialism) then why has the war not stopped now we know Ukraine will never join NATO?

2) mostly face saving, but also: Ukraine will remain openly hostile, NATO or not, planning to have hostile (EU) forces on its territory as 'security guarantor'. Russians still believe Ukraine will collapse (those men will eventually run out/economy will collapse/EU will not send its children to die on the eastern front) and they will be able to have a friendly (or at least truly neutral) government there. Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.

Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)

  > Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.

Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe. Or Merkel's memoirs. Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO.

But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe....

Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomatically engage them, open intelligence, military and financial support of Ukraine 'carefully tiptoing'?What do you propose instead? Open WW3? I am really curious.

As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-formal circles of imperialists and neo-nazis, nor anywhere inbetween, is paranoid about the US, NATO and the West in general. What is there to be paranoid about? They see the West in general as utterly impotent, making big words, but not backing it up with a stick. This week one year ago, Trump wrote "Vladimir, STOP!" in response to a massive air attack on Kyiv. Putin didn't, and what followed? A bunch of nothing.

The answer to your question about tiptoeing is abundantly clear to anyone familiar enough with Russian culture to know what zek and kagebeshnik mean and how to deal with them. Politely asking them to stop has never worked. The idea that you have to talk with people in the language they understand is hardly a novel one.

Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.

I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?

For example, Kennan warned in 1997 that accepting Eastern European countries into NATO would trigger a pivot toward authoritarianism in Russia. The pivot was well underway by that time. The breaking point was the genocidal war against Chechens that Russia launched in late 1994. Internally, it eroded the positions of the reformists and liberals who were seen as weak, and contributed to the rise of the alliance between crony oligarchs and KGB old-timers to undermine democracy and market reforms and restore state-controlled monopolies as their personal piggy banks. Exernally, the Chechen war proved to Russia's neighbors that Russia was no different from the USSR and that transgressions into their countries were only a matter of time. This made them run toward NATO was fast as they could. And personally, Putin, who had started out as an enforcer to St Petersburg's major, was already on his meteoric rise and had broken through to Moscow and joined the presidential administration by 1996.

For reasons that still elude me, western "Russia experts" prefer to believe noble-savage type myths like "NATO paranoia" and not treat Russians as capable people who have their own agenda. It's almost comical how they refuse to listen to what Russians are discussing among themselves, and that applies especially to your question about what should've been done:

  > I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?

The second opportunity was on the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Had forces like the 82nd and 101st Airborne been deployed to likely attack paths such as Hostomel airport, the invasion would have been called off out of fear of direct confrontation with the US. Instead, Biden acted like a chicken and publicly promised "No boots on the ground," which Russians took as a green light to go ahead.

The third major opportunity was during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, when Ukraine made a major breakthrough and Russian forces became so disorganized that they collapsed without a combat in many sections of the frontline. Instead of supporting the counteroffensive with everything they've got, NATO members got spooked by Russian nuclear blackmail and tried to micromanage Ukraine's combat operations. The counteroffensive stalled and Russian forces dug in. The war is now going as most wars do once entrenched positions are established: heavy casualties and minimal territorial changes.

The policy of tiptoeing around Russia has not yielded results because of a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia among western "Russia experts." They interpret fake acts such as "NATO paranoia" as genuine fear, in which case it makes sense to issue reassuring statements (like Biden's). But the fear is not genuine; it is simply a way for Russians to probe how far they can go. Overstating fears to extort concessions is such a basic manipulation technique that I cannot understand how "Russia experts" fail to recognize it. It's a strange plague upon the field. Military experts, by comparison, have been much more reasonable in their assessments and recommendations. The current mainstream recommendation is to stop wasting expensive air defense missiles on shooting down each arrow that Russia fires into Ukraine, and blow up the launchers in Russia instead.

Second, I must respectfully disagree.

The reformist/liberals lost it by mismanaging the transition in the 90's. And the society at large was not ready anyway.

And it was not about the turn toward authoritarianism, but a turn towards anti-west as such; those are not the same.

I totally agree that Russians are capable and have their own agenda, no noble savages there. NATO paranoia is not noble-savages, it is, at its roots, historically well-founded self-preservation instinct.

Btw, your choices of wording in several places (Putin is 'enforcer', 'Girkin's invasion force (of, initially, maybe 60 men)', Chechen 'genocide', Russian's 'full scale invasion' (maybe 1/4 manpower of what USA used in Iraq) is rather strange and reeking of just a little bias (are you, perchance, from Ukraine?).

Regarding 'what the west should have done':

In 2014: a) do you sincerely believe that Russia would have let NATO bomb Donbas like Serbia? b) that would have been a very sharp escalation from what was, at that time, not yet as bloody conflict. Such an action would have required a long logistical and planning preparation and great political will for such an costly and risky action; there was simply nobody in the west politically ready for that. The consent was not manufactured yet. It was simply political impossibility, not a realistic course of action that could have been taken. c) what about Crimea? should had the west bombed the Russians there, going to direct war with them? d) 'they would have lost and would have been the end of it': full-on wishful thinking

Before the invasion of 2022: One of the reasons why Russia attacked in february 2022 (and not some other time) was the apparent preparation of a major Ukrainian offensive to retake Donbas. Believing that a show of force by NATO would have not elicited a response is supremely naive. It is on the same level as 'we will push NATO eastward, and Russia won't be able to do anything about that' (The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski). Eventually, the real red line war crossed and the war ensued. Anyway, there was no political will to preemptively escalate; furthermore it would have broken the narrative of 'unprovoked aggression by Russia'.

Fall 2022 during Kharkiv offensive: That offensive achieved great results, mainly due to major local force superiority (the Russians refrained from conscription and major recruitment, and sent home plenty of soldiers whose half-year duty expired). Expecting the Russians to totally collapse everywhere was about as realistic, as expecting the Ukrainians to totally collapse in February/March. The west was applying the salami slice strategy, incrementally increasing the support of Ukraine (they basically scoured the whole Earth of USSR equipment and sent it to Urkaine). Maybe, they could have sent some western equipment (that was subsequently sent in 2023), but it is unclear how much difference that would have made. Or you mean actively employing NATO airforce/groundpower?

Military experts (Mike Milley) have said in the fall 2022 that this is a high water mark for Ukraine, and they should negotiate now. He was piled-upon; with a hindsight, he was right.

I do not understand: The fear of striking Russian launchers that fire at major European cities every night is indefensibly absurd.

You are advocating for NATO to strike at Russian launchers firing at Ukrainian cities? Because the Ukrainian are doing that, as much as they can.

You know, the main reason I believe the Russia's attack was due to national security reasons and not due to 'imperialistic expansion of territory/capturing natural resources' is simply that there is no economic payoff in the latter. The cost of the war and the inevitable economic sanctions is simply punishingly high. On the other hand, people/countries are willing to suffer greatly in order to ensure their (perceived) security.

To sum up: What you consider 'realistic options that west should have taken', I see as 'highly escalatory and very risky actions that were politically unfeasible'. From the point of view of Ukraine very desirable, from the west's point of view too risky. Simply because Ukraine does not matter to the West sufficiently for the West to be willing to risk their own citizens.

They sure do like to sell to them.

> Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles

This never made much sense. Attacking a NATO buffer pre-emptively, brining your forces out and closer to existing NATO weapons, is basically putting you in the same situation with less resources. The issue is not about weapons "threatening". ICBMs can reach anywhere and smaller munitions from local seaboards (subs). This idea that NATO is somehow threatening by proximity is not credible. The answer to it would not be to rush headlong into a conflict to bring those forces to bear and bring your border to theirs anyway.

It looks more like the Ukraine conflict has been about securing resources, testing capabilities, and demographics (tied to capabilities). Russia wanted more resources to sell to partners and wanted to test the (declining) capability of it's own forces.

It is obviously clear that Ukraine is not about securing resources: Given the costs of war (Russia knew the sanctions will be coming, just did not think their funds will be frozen), the cost-benefit is simply not there. Given the obvious economic drawbacks of attacking Ukraine, the only explanation that makes sense is the national security one. You go to war to 'test capabilities' only if it is a minor thing without serious consequences, which Ukraine war definitively does not fit.

And on shorter timescales you aren't really predicting anything of consequence. You're just assuring all that effort trying to predict Apple's next move (for example) keeps Apple itself alive in the public debate whether they do the thing or not; they'll have missteps but our 24/7 fetishizing of what they'll do next, overall, just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich

You really don't seem to have a grasp of how gamified and propagandized you are

So you’re saying we are being distracted from boosting the lives of the mega rich, which we should get back to doing

This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do.

Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also have resources. They are very often in a position of finding nails for a "write more software" hammer.

It's unintuitive because they all have big wishlist and to do lists and and a/b testing system for pouring software into but...

If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them.

Actual growth and new demand needs to come from arenas outside of this. Eg companies that suck at software(either making or acquiring) might be able to get the job done.

The Problem, bringing this back to the article, is fungibility. A lot of this "human capital" stuff cannot be easily repackaged. It's a "living" thing. Talent and skills pipelines can be cut off, and vanish.

A danger in Ai coding (and other fields) is that it leverages preexisting human capital and doesn't generate any for later.

Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing investments or patterns. That might mean "self-cannibalism", or changing the ecology so that the main product niche is threatened.

Then those opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.

Whether the reason of strategic (like your example), internal politics, insufficient knowledge.... The point is that there is a local equilibrium, and most mature firms are at this equilibrium.

More resources via Ai, at first order, goes after that diminishing returns part of the curve... which is a cliff especially for highly resourced firms topping the S&P500.

A lot of Ai-optimist:s " mental model" of the economy do not account for this stuff at all.

"Save time/money" outcomes are not similar at all to "make more stuff" outcomes. Firing employees does freeze up labour... but reutilizing this labour is non-trivial... as this article demonstrates quite well.

"any" is quite an assumption.

However, it is also true that technology develops and produces changes that in the short term cause pain, but in the long term produce a better outcome in some desirable sense. Coding is not an end in itself. Just as switchboard operators and human computers are obsolete, because the conditions that caused the need for them ceased to exist, it may be the case that a certain manual style of programming is also becoming obsolete.

You can imagine human computers decades ago thinking that computing technology is bad, because people will loose numerical facility. But this misunderstands the structure of the value of practical skills and the difference between knowledge of principles and practical skill. Sure, few if any people today can perform numerical computation as quickly and competently in their heads or on paper as human computers, but...

1. that's different from understanding the principles of computation which is closer to a theoretical grasp and has eternal or at least lasting value

2. the value of the practical numerical facility was rooted in the need for obtaining results as quickly as possible, and that particular set of techniques or skills is no longer practical

Perhaps manual coding is like that. I don't know why people are surprised. Generative programming has always been a desired end in CS for along time. CS grads can still and should still learn the principles of their field and learn them well, but the profile of practical industrial techniques and needed skills is changing. As software eats more and more of the world, it is becoming increasingly impractical for manually fiddling with silly bits of plumbing. We obviously haven't been able to develop abstractions well enough to avoid it, and part of the reason is that appetite comes with eating. Once you make something easier, it makes it easier to achieve even greater things more easily...hence new plumbing and implementation complexity.

Let's be honest here. Much of programming is intellectually dull. It's is plumbing. It's not algorithmically interesting. It's not interesting from a modeling perspective. It's not interesting conceptually. It's not interesting as a matter of system design. Most programming out in the wild is the same old crap being recapitulated a million times over. If all you want is to become skilled in doing the same thing over and over again, then I can understand why you might find LLMs threatening. Your market value as a maker of yet-another-flask-web-app has plummeted hard. People who enjoy that kind of programming are generally not very intellectually motivated people - at least not where programming is concerned - and likely prefer the tedious comforts of rehearsed ephemeral detail. LLMs can keep us from rabbit holing and focused on the domain.

In any case, I don't think LLMs are a threat to the field per se. I just think that the skill set is shifting and developing. I think we are still figuring out what it means to develop the right understanding and intuitions to develop software without the benefit of having had done it manually. Time will tell. However, I also think being able to read code has become relatively more important than writing it. When you have to verify the quality of LLM-generated code and put your name behind it, you have to be able to understand it, and that's a somewhat neglected skill in my view. Programming very often prefer to write code than to read it. LLMs might be just the thing to coerce an improvement in the latter sort of literacy. With this also comes a greater importance of formal specification. That's where I would expect the future of the field to shift.

Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing in the financial markets, doing stock buybacks, lobbying, cheating etc. When your CEO is an MBA and your real market is Wall Street any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits and thus into the exec compensation.

Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements

In those filthy low margin industries that HN loves to regulated across the oceans out of sight out of mind capital investments have service lives measured in decades.

Worse, it might not generate a return. If you have enough profits, you just buy anyone who successfully produced something innovative. Let them take the risks. As Cisco used to say, "Silicon Valley is our R&D lab."

It is a very difficult mindset to argue against.

Plus, of course, each European country has to support their own defense industry, so each one of them needs to have their own howitzer/tank/whatever and they can't agree on common approach that would actually allow for the economy of scale.

https://time.com/archive/6731121/how-clinton-decided-on-nato...

We will see whether the new realities of the war in Ukraine and Trump's approach to Europe will substantially change that.

The whole economic and societal tensions in the west make things tougher...

NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.

People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.

Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.

It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI.

It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit.

This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies.

Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit.

Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position.

This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us.

People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.

in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though

And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits.

I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money).

I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

And uh, healthcare. Among other things.

I'm pretty sure the parent comment is the work of a bot, and I have no interest in talking to an automated sock puppet.

It’s called The Beer Game[1].

One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time.

Short-termism is the death of companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.

And a 2nd time where you minimize buffering and use just in time inventory management.

People who have played the game knows which one outperforms. By significant margins.

You need an integral part that knows what the entire chain reaction time is. But if you don't have a buffer, you can't do that part, you can only react strictly to the conditions your suppliers have right now.

A derivative part seems quite useless in a non-coordinated game. But it could in theory pass a "message" upchain that they need to start reacting. Anyway in any real situation it will be easier to pass a message around by telling stuff to people.

At the end of the day, the relative penalty for storage or non-delivery is what will dictate the optimum play style. But it's perfectly viable to use buffers to attenuate the bullwhip instead of making it larger.

The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing?

The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get.

I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.

Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and their configuration is a total mess.

Something about this feels really broken, when a channel full of domain experts are willing to lend a hand (within reason) for free. But instead, people increasingly turn to the machines which are well-known to hallucinate. They just don't think it will hallucinate for them.

In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they should be even more careful.

A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb.

They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.

From what little I understood from OpenWRT everything looked fine, but nothing worked. I still to this day have no idea what I (or ChatGPT) did wrong.

I just reset the router, actually took the time to do everything by the docs, and then it worked.

Debugging someone's broken code that never worked is a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone.

I think if we want newcomers to lead with human interactions, the onus is on us community leaders/elders/whatever need to be a little warmer, understanding and forgiving. (Of course, some communities and venues are already very good about all of this and I'm generalizing to make the larger point.)

The AI companies have taken all the wrong lessons from social media and learned how to make their products addictive and sticky.

I’m a certified hater, but even I’ve fallen into the exact trap you’re describing. Late last year I in the process of buying a house that had a few known issues with a 30 day close. I had a couple sleepless nights because I had asked ChatGPT or Claude about some peculiar situation and the bots would tell me that I was completely screwed and give me advice to get out of the contract or draft a letter to the seller begging for some concession or more time. Then the next day I’d get a call from the mortgage guy or the attorney or the insurance broker and turns out, the people who actually knew what they were doing fixed my problem in 5 minutes.

It also makes me hate communicating with them because they'll (somewhat obviously) prompt the LLM to make the conclusion they want. For example, "respond to this jira with why this isn't an issue"

Sometimes I don't feel like having to make a phone call, but sometimes I much rather talk to a human

Importantly, you're removing a signal: If I'm not asked things anymore, I don't know which aspects of our domain are causing the most confusion/misunderstandings and would as such benefit most from simplifying the boundaries of.

At the end of the day chatgpt won't be there to hold our hands in the hospital, have a laugh over failing to pick up a date, get invited to a bbq, groan over the state of the code in utils.c, or recommend us for our next job/promotion. They say software is social for a different reason than most of these examples.

It's good to be efficient, whatever that means, but there are no metrics on the gains that get made by talking to people. In a lot of ways those gains are what life is about.

Are you sure it won't?

What a world it is now.

It's affecting their ability to collaborate. They retain the confidence of years of experience, but their brain isn't going through the appropriate process anymore to check their assumptions.

I've seen a similar thing happen to engineers who move into management, but this is now happening at such a large scale.

Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack.

It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans.

When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is different from the first person.

Humans also break in different ways:

* They stop caring - you wouldn't notice it immediately, they will close tickets, but give bare minimum thought

* Communal brain will not be trained when there is not enough room for experiments and learning - which reduces the innovation eventually

This is exactly the reason it is difficult for US companies to compete with Chinese companies in manufacturing, because their communal brain have already trained and produced very good talent.

Next is the knowledge, more you outsource, more you lose it

Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university.

Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff.

Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while

Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else.

Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.

And there are very few large public companies with active enough investors to oust a CEO over this, and even fewer that have both active and activist investors that would be interested in such a thing.

> the CEO can't take actions that intentionally hurt the company

And who gets to define what "hurt" means?

You'd have to prove that the CEO knew that it would hurt the company and still did it or that it's so ridiculously negligent that any sane person should have known.

If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.

What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.

With a myopic definition of "optimize". But as long as they are being rewarded for it, the incentives are broken.

This tracks the experience throughout my carreer, in all sorts of companies. From established body-shop consulting, to minor early-stage startup, to FAANG, and everything in between.

Essentially everywhere I worked, you would benefit to switch jobs. Companies would at times do quite an effort to hire you, but wouldn't try anything to keep you around.

This always sounded bonkers to me, but as I directly benefited with a rapidly increasing salary when I job-hopped, my response was a vague shrug. "Those who care don't know and those who know don't care".

The thing is, in every place, you typically is at your least useful when you just joined. It takes months, sometimes years, to learn the intricacies of the business, the knowledge that informs your skills so you can make better decisions, better designs, better implementation, better initiatives.

This is, of course, just one facet of a larger trend of how things are typically mismanaged. The article brushes on it when it talks about how governments in the US and Europe had to scramble to get 50-year old manufacturing going anywhere.

This is why I laugh whenever I hear someone talking about "governments should be administered like a business". Bitch, businesses are typically mismanaged due to terrible incentive loops, institutional blindness and corporate rot. That anything seemingly works is more a result of inertia and conformity than a sign that things are well managed.

In ideal world (where we don't live):

* Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin)

* Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better)

* Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditions to learn skills and get more opportunities from existing pool)

In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney", because of lobby groups and MBAs controlling the corporations which are pushing these ideas through lobbies

More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems.

This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.

Public education was supposed to deliver that. This is a dream that has failed in the US.

Possibly the most lacking tools are Critical Thinking (not directly taught as a subject AFAIK) and some class with a focus on how government(s) work. The latter was an elective I took in high school (not a core requirement, it should be).

At least when I was in college it helped to have critical thinking skills, but was not a basics (100 level) course. Political studies might be a different degree, but again not a core course. I find that ironic since everyone has to interact with government regulations and vote.

Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects.

But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)

WW2 took slightly less than 6 years, when we count it from the invasion of Poland to the fall of Nazi Germany.

The moon landings took little less than 7 years, so I don't think we are terribly off by the timeframe.

Considering the world's been getting faster (just think about how different the US was before Trump took power a bit more than a year ago), I think 4 years is fine.

This is the wrong characterization, and in fact it's where monarchies lost out to democracies. Without an organized system of replacement in response to poor performance, autocracies with a poor leader are stuck with that poor leader for life. Ask North Korea how that's going. The upside is that if you have a brilliant leader, then you also get the benefit of that brilliant leader for life. The variance in an autocracy is absolutely huge, and that's their weakness in the long term. Democracies take the edge off, and are intentionally designed to have both less upside and less downside, trading performance for stability. Xi Jinping looks good comparatively because we have gormless losers like Trump and Biden to compare to him to, but he makes plenty of his own mistakes as well (the whole Taiwan situation is a unforced error driven by his own ego, similar to Putin with Ukraine), and we've seen historically what China looks like when it's stuck with a shit leader for decades (Great Leap Forward, anyone?).

Autocracies like China, are able to plan longer term. But, because they don't regularly change their leadership like a democracy, the leaders become old, tired, schlerotic and surrounded by 'yes men'. Hence "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.".

And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.

Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.

We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.

And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.

A democracy doesn't prevent long-term planning if only the electorate appreciates long-term projects. Democracies can build stuff across parliaments if differences between parties aren't so overwhelming so as to the majority of them can agree on developing something even if the relative power of elected parties varies over terms.

In a lot of countries the major parties agree on many core views and social code because they share a common nation/society, and the political differences happen merely on the edges or linings of the value spectrum. A government of highly polarised parties voted by a highly heterogeneous pool of voters is not ideal for long-term efforts.

Something like public transit that powers a region that's a sizable fraction of US GPD should not be a state affair in the first place. What Europeans have that Americans lack are perma-technocrats with a long term vision that are entrenched in power.

The company is manufacturing special computers. The initial owner/founder ordered CPU modules and memory cards always looking at the price break. His question was always „how many to buy to get best price?“. So he ordered sometimes 200-300 parts more than needed immediately. Then the follow up order came and he emptied the storage. Now new manager always orders EXACT amount memory cards as ordered computers. Price is secondary thing, most important thing to work without warehouse and get things delivered just in time. What doesn’t work at all for the while already. The high prices buying small quantities is eating up the profit, so people are getting fired to save costs. It is pure greed dominating western world. Everything is done to look accounting nicely at every cost, get whole bonus despite ruining the company long term. I see this pattern recently very often.

I am not so certain:

For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system.

The problem rather is: the volume of documentation that I would have to write would be insane; I'd consider ten thousands of dense DIN A4 pages to be realistic - and this is a rather small system.

So, a new person who could take over this system would have to cram and understand basically all the details of this documentation insanely well.

This insane effort (write the documentation; new workers on the project then have to cram and understand every detail of this incredibly bulky documentation) is something that no employer wants to spend money on: this is in my experience the real reason why it isn't done.

I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up.

If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem.

In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks:

- easy, regular adjustments

- deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system

Any time a refactoring comes up which moves code around, AI (or my coworkers) remove those comments without thinking twice, and I need to tell them "hey this is still valid".

In any case, AI is great for traversing a codebase and producing at least a draft of such documentation.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

I am not sure those are mutually exclusive. We all know if situations where a person knows of tiny and typically undocumented system quirks. We even have a corporate name for it: institutional knowledge. The issue is that executives think it can ALL somehow be done, when even cursory real life project lift will quickly teach one how insane average gap between documented and undocumented tends to be. Add to that near constant changes to API, versions, systems, people and I can't help but wonder at executives, who really do think this way.

I have seen this work only once in my life, and it was so nice to see, but yeah, most code is just a ball of twine, and even if there was a guiding principle beneath, it has been long abandoned, and overruled, and the only way to understand the system is to take it all in at once.

Hacky things will make their way in because it takes a month to do the documentable thing and a week to ship the hacky thing.

It takes a lot of skilled people from varying disciplines to figure out what things are going to survive long enough and be important enough to spend the resources doing the right thing instead of the hacks.

It bites both ways. I’ve seen core business products crippled by years of digital duct tape, but I’ve also seen internal tooling that never really becomes useful because they insist on doing the “correct” thing and it’s constantly a year behind what we need it to do.

These core services were extremely well designed and documented, and if you wrote a component using them, you could be reasonably certain the UI displayed correctly, behaved consistently etc.

But imo even more importantly, due to the patterns these components enforced, if you wrote a component like this, chances were somebody could go in and read your code and understand what it did, and if you depended on external stuff, even then it was very clear on what and how.

A lot of the code was using this correctly, but some wasn't for whatever reason. And the ones that didn't were utter hell to work with, as they could change state any time, did things their own way, depended on implementation details etc..

Essentially had to understand the whole code base, like what services call where, in what order to things happen etc. to work with that code.

Behavior of those components was essentially 'what the code did' and therefore undocumentable.

For reasons, the amount of code belonging in the latter category grew and grew, and eventually it infected the core systems, as the invariants described by the documentation basically no longer be expected to hold in any scenario, and the whole thing became an undocumentable ball of twine, where the code did things not because it made sense, but to work around bits and quirks of other pieces of code.

“It’s not that it’s not documentable. It’s just that it would take tens of thousands of pages and no one would be able to write that or read that to effectively take over the project.”

Okay, so surely this is what OP had in mind when they said documentation doesn’t work… Is it no longer safe to assume reasonable expectations when making an argument? Why the need to “well actually” them with this response?

Yes, you can spend all your time writing docs, or just mentor a junior and let them grok the system through osmosis.

Also your doc won't ever have 100% coverage unless you write an absolute tome. Tacit knowledge are things that are so obvious that you wouldnt even think of writing it down in the first place.

It quickly becomes outdated and at some point you just need to accept that only the code will be the most accurate source of truth.

The Problem is wider than management, it is understanding the extended ramifications of action, understanding the larger systems one is a member and then identifying with them, protecting them, because you and all your peers understand their extended foundational need.

That type of critical analysis and secondary considerations tacit knowledge is developed through effective communications training, which is an entire perspective, a way of seeing the world. This can be gained by reading a wide diversity of literature, of the Nobel Literature quality; the reason being such literature is first person accounts of institutions crushing individuals, and individuals finding the power within themselves to defeat the institutions. That personal transformation is practically a Nobel Trope, but it teaches the reader how to have such insight and perseverance. Read a half dozen or more such novels, and you are materially a different person. A better, deeper considering person with a longer perspective horizon. We need this civilization wide.

Any exec using AI to pay fewer people lacks imagination.

Even if it were, creating good documentation or assessing its quality requires experience in using good and bad documentation. And how would juniors build up that experience if they are using AI for everything.

Basically same shaped taylorism-derived industrial management has imposed itself as the "default dogma" in private and public administration.

my promotion packet at work always included how great of a document-er i am

Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.

the consequences are significant

they do the dirty work

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

Also modern managers: You were in the bathroom for six minutes. I'm docking your pay.

I see many peers getting worse in their abilities. It's especially disheartening to see people I admired for their problem solving devolve into someone who delegates more and more of their reasoning to LLMs. It really negatively affects working with them. If you have a concern or criticism of "their" approach to a problem they either dismiss it off hand as invalid, or they go discuss it with their LLM of choice making themselves a bottleneck to collaboration.

As the article suggests I suspect we're in for a real dark age of software as companies struggle to know who to keep, if they can even trust that those who have vital knowledge and skill today will retain it going forward.

Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does.

At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits.

This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises.

That's what's paying for all this AI investment.

So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.

But applying the military hardware stuff to software is IMO a bit of a leap; I get the similarities, but where demand for software hasn't slowed down at all, demand for military hardware and ammunition just wasn't there.

The alternative would have been to keep all the factories alive, maintained, staff employed (or training staff ready to onboard rapidly hired staff when capacity had to go up), supplied stockpiled (and rotated), etc. And who would be willing to pay for that?

In times of peace the voter wouldn't want the government to spend billions on the military if it wasn't necessary... except for the US which still spends billions a year on the military even in peacetime. But not on their production facilities it seems.

I'm actually very optimistic about LLMs/AI for basically the opposite reason tech leadership/MBAs are - I think it will allow us to overcome organizational/business/marketing ing hurdles that tech companies rely on short-sighted MBA-style 'leadership' for in the first place. And not because I believe in OpenAI and Anthropic - I think the future is self-hosted or community -hosted open models, and open collaboration among willing peers, building open software to solve real problems in honest ways, rather than hierarchical top-down corporate hellholes pumping out pre-enshitified crapware full of ads, tracking and dark patterns.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail.

Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city.

Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.

All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on

China sees itself as a civilization. Russia does too, ish (look up Dugin's Eurasian Empire).

The West has a hard time believing anyone wants to destroy it, so doesn't take the threat seriously. Meanwhile other civilizations are working to both destroy the west and ensure their own place in the future.

So we were OK outsourcing our production and knowledge for a quick buck and it's coming back to haunt us.

Even now, we still don't see ourselves as a civilization, actively work to undermine ourselves and help our enemies who openly want to destroy us, and are barely doing anything to defend ourselves. We seem to have also given up on the idea of a "democratic world", which was in vogue when I was growing up (Bush 2 years).

As for the thesis of this article, the positive is that code and knowledge, because of the fact preserving it is basically free, is still there. AI hasn't been good enough to displace it. And our technological advantage is still pretty wide and our military industrial complex is, for better or worse, coming back.

Exactly. In direct contrast to this would be how Xerox and Bell funded laboratories just to pursue knowledge, without demands of profit. They ended up creating incredibly profitable things when driven my knowledge, and not profit.

I also read a book about math where the author argued that while the Greeks were driven to pursue truth for truth's sake, they ended up being far more productive and innovative. The Romans who were more driven to work for solutions to immediate practical needs, ended up being not so productive and innovative. He used this as a defense for efforts in pure math that seems to have no immediate application but ends up being massively, surprisingly powerful and productive for practical applications down the road. I think the same could be said for software development focussed on truth and correctness, rather than immediate productivity.

No, the problem is much more far-reaching than being limited to just corporations - it's a societal problem.

The article says the west is forgetting how to code, but actually the west is forgetting how to do math, how to draw and edit images, how to make music, how to write, how to read and even how to think.

And have you interacted with any kids recently? They're doing ALL their homework using ChatGPT. Forget kids, adults are even worse. At least kids can be supervised, but who's supervising the adults? How many of us have enough self-control to not reach out to the convenient AI app in our phones for every little thing?

This has massive repurcarions for our society as a whole. The bleak future depicted in Idocracy is becoming more and more of a surefire reality.

A runbook can tell you what usually works, but it cannot tell you when the situation is no longer “usual.” That kind of judgment mostly comes from seeing real systems fail in messy ways over time.

Tools are still valuable, of course. But they work best when they help experienced people transfer knowledge, not when they are used as a reason to remove the people who understand the system.

In my experience, documentation is unwanted because it creates work and no revenue. Which makes the tacit knowledge all the more valuable.