electrodank

We’ll agree to disagree. As a founder I often have to draw the line between how founders think and how the rank-and-file employees, including management and even VP suite think. So I tend to sympathize when Musk asks the interviewer, “you didn’t really think I was going to be normal, did you?” (me paraphrasing). For anyone who excels in such an environment it’s a paradise - and founders often do. For everyone else it’s a living crushing nightmare. And the acquiring company called it as they saw it. They may have gone through a similar phase or have had previous M&A experience that left them thinking “yeah we are not playing that fiddle again.”

I facilitate M&A work across companies so first-hand experience for the most part, and a few stories here and there from the colleagues - think death threats for one. That’s what the job is. People in this line of business are fast tracked to C-suite positions for obvious reasons.

Also someone is going through all of my comments downvoting and flagging. @dang I know my comments hit a nerve with the young players but can you do us a solid mate and throttle the rabid down voters?

That sounds like a different sort of toxic culture, just one where “no politics” is given lip service more than at the usual company and different sort of people make it to the top. An ivory tower at the top of the food chain exists even if you close your eyes and believe what you want to believe. A game is played regardless - this is the psychology of humans and exists outside of whatever nonsensical things you convince yourself of as part of a company, and only the useful idiot ranking is unaware of it. The company had thousands of employees for fucks sake this wasn’t some scrappy 20 person shop where anyone could pick up the phone and play CEO for the day talking to customers.

So yes, the new management made 100% right call in how they responded - they have money to make not deal with LARPers. And people who do M&A have a sweet fuck-you side and the brutal “your ass is mine” realist side. You saw both I’m sure. I assume they stopped short of calling you (doe eyed wet behind the ears kool aid drinking employees to be) gullible. In public that is.

Can we track this with KPIs for our annual OKRs?

> Each employee was empowered, expected, and trained, to make decisions as if they are the president of the company.

And compensated at a president’s salary for the new insurmountable levels of responsibilities right?

The person who returned to them the source code disk has done everyone dirty. I’m optimistic Microsoft will eventually open source stuff but goddammit.

There’s been an uptick of insufferable blog posts cropping up on the front page lately that try to pass themselves off as all-knowing with a humble brag in there but are downright stupid in their content.

I read the thing twice and it really reads like a long winded anecdote, hem haw with some flimsy things thrown in to give it more of a serious look. It’s mysticism infused with Science.

If I need medical help I go to a hospital. If my car breaks down I’ll visit the mechanic. An electrician can wire my house practically blindfolded (though it’s probably against the code to do so). Who is the author, what do they do, and what basis of experience are they talking from? Because if I want to read shit I… well I am on HN already I guess. But seriously, who writes these articles?

The largest filter, the Great Filter, these companies cannot overcome is a true digital native workforce and communication mechanism. When your days are haraunged by voice/video meetings because people don’t know how to work asynchronously, productivity plummets when timezone differences are introduced. An absolute shitshow to behold.

Very few, relatively speaking, tech teams understand how to leverage asynchronous work patterns. I think open source projects which are dominated by 40 year old virgin neckbeards (those still exist right?) show the silver lining, but alas, nobody will get it.

Round the merry go round we go again.

What’s the point of this article? I can’t read it through all the bloody pop ups.

If there’s one argument counter to what you’re saying, it’s that the front pages of most social media sites are filled with clickbaits and shitposts. Including HN of course.

Not at all, water off a duck’s back.

Amusing given the subject matter of the article.

Let’s do another round of Haidt’s Coddled Mind next we are long overdue.

You’re saying the purpose of a system is what it does. We can all agree to that. Now what?

Absolutely there are no guarantees but it’s disingenuous to point to what’s happening and claim pikachu face levels of shock, when plenty of people did pay attention, did act accordingly, and things more or less went in their favour.

I’m not a fan of cargo culting “survivorship bias.” It’s flimsy.

Looks like I hit a nerve with the people who have deep regrets about not investing when they should have. Many such cases.

That “attention to the market dynamics debt” will catch up to them, just as it has caught up to all the working adults who are unable to afford living expenses in their cities because they spent their 20s partying rather than investing and looking to get ahead/stay ahead of these things. Anyone in their 30s saying “I’d like to have children but I can’t afford it” has been asleep at the wheel of a global change that has been unfolding in a relatively obvious way.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad - everyone’s free to make their own life choices, I’m saying it is what it is and TANSTAAFL.

Climate change is your fault for placing the thing into blue bin instead of the gray bin!

Callous example of a Veblen good, and many more like it.

>In paintings, it is known that the viewer can get out more than the painter put in.

There’s something very much “Dabblers and Blowhards” about this statement that I can’t quite put my finger on it. [0]

Try painting, I mean really painting, before spouting nonsense. It wreaks havoc on the rest of your comment.

[0] https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

As someone who has the old dead tree version of Intel’s x86 and 64 architecture instruction set reference (the fat blue books), and in general as someone who carefully reads the data sheets and documentation and looks for guidance from the engineers and staff who wrote the said data sheets, I always have reservations when I hear that “intuitively you would expect X but Y happens.” There’s nothing intuitive about any of this except, maybe, a reasonable understanding of the semi-conductive nature of the silicon and the various dopants in the process. Unless you’ve seen the die schematic, the traces, and you know the paths, there is little to no reason to have any sort of expectations that Thing A is faster than Thing B unless the engineering staff and data sheets explicitly tell you.

There are exceptions, but just my 2c. Especially with ARM.

"Our hypothesis strongly indicates that the 'pleasure index' or 'adrenaline rush' of relationships is taking more prime importance in the younger generation over long-term stability," he says. "It is alarming that impulsiveness or confusion can lead to instability in the human relation-maintaining behavior, which is actually affecting the normal social behavior in humans."

This is orthogonal from social media.

Given the same choices the people who voted for Brexit had, who/what you would you have voted for? What do you suspect the outcome would have been as it relates to the matter at hand?

What would you say to the customers who did?

Clickbait titles should be automatically flagged/not even show up on the front page.

What is this exactly? What do you do with it?

After what I have seen in the past few years, I’m not comfortable hosting anything on Cloudflare.

I don’t agree with this. Quick assessment: what makes someone more susceptible to groupthink? To propaganda? Is it the way they write? That doesn’t sound right. It is not an LLM/ChatGPT-borne ailment. So I would not paint these tools as such a boogeyman.

For those of you who do not suffer from dead-on aphantasia but simply have bad visualization/memory recall: you may find great industry in learning to draw, paint, sculpt and immersing yourself in perceptory recall to essentially, in an analogous manner of speaking, strengthen weak muscles. You may go so far as to find the book “ The training of the memory in art and the education of the artist” by B., L. Horace to be of interest. Do not skip on music and try to find ways to engage physically as best as possible. Perception works best in totality, and people who have strong visual recall often have other strong recall functions as well, disabilities notwithstanding.

I don’t personally agree with the term “overcorrecting” because they aren’t correcting anything. The output is already correct according to the input (humans behaving as they are). It is not biased. What they are doing is attempting to bias it, and it’s leading to false outputs as a result.

Having said that, these false outputs have a strange element of correctness to them in a weird roundabout uncanny valley way: we know the input has been tampered with, and is biased, because the output is obviously wrong. So the algorithm works as intended.

If people are discriminatory or racist or sexist, it is not correct to attempt to hide it. The worst possible human behaviours should be a part of a well-formed Turing test. A machine that can reason with an extremist is far more useful than one that an extremist can identify as such.