meh99
Academics, thinkers, have been warning about private power eroding public for decades.
Oh sure SV specifically is new NOW, but they haven’t done anything Walmart didn’t do to little communities decades before, or ATT hasn’t done; co-opt control of public government for private gain.
I’m done with this community. It’s a bunch of ostriches who are equivocating their failures as political agents; don’t login. They lose their power.
Stop living in the bespoke simulation in your head.
When did we switch from capitalism to socialism? You own their infra and agency now?
The slippery slope is every pleb thinking they’re David going against Goliath. Really you’re all just berating and competing with your neighbors. Turning them into ephemeral ideas all living behind a blue bird logo.
The masses cheered this all on ignoring the political reality they exist in. The chemical bath washing through your brain isn’t the same as others.
God said let their be Steve Jobs and suddenly human communication…
Privately owned infrastructure was never for you. It’s for the elites to corral you all along.
Believing Twitter was ever on your side was your first mistake. They were Walmart; moved in with low prices now they’re raising them.
It’s an emotional con to keep you focused on a political narrative (American dream of free enterprise; for some, toil for depreciated wages for the majority) and not exploring alternative communication pipelines.
How free is our speech if it’s constrained to Wall Street, tech companies, SV, and DC? You walked right into constrained speech in order to fit in.
If you all don’t like it put your agency into dismantling these power structures rather than logging in to the matrix they erect
It’s humans who don’t want to perpetuate other humans speech.
I’m not going to live in your unscientific epistemology about nation states being worse than corporations; both enabled by humans. It’s all just humans.
I don’t have to important other flimsy humans who aren’t of godly abilities. Tailoring my speech to keep my neighbors happy, seeing the nuance their way, is a direct attack on my speech.
Houses will build themselves!
Food will magically fill your fridge!
Can we get over the old wives tales?
Scientifically people will work to support biological survival.
What they don’t want is a job for another human who has nothing more than artificial political advantage keeping them from real work.
They don’t want a job that elevates Bezos and Gates to ungodly levels of wealth, while their friends and family struggle to pay rent and buy insulin.
Our current economic reality has nothing to do with willingness to work.
It’s an emotional Ponzi scheme, properly groomed for TV and emotional manipulation: “Chase the dream.”
People will work to survive. They won’t work to help aristocrats who don’t work thrive.
Stop coddling the minority and the majority will snap to.
How much political scrip such an organization generates given esoteric economic measures should not outweigh real world impact
Mass delusions are easy to propagate as they require little emotional nuance; a salute, tattoo, incantation… those used to be enough to bind large groups.
Groups are out though. We’re leaning into enabling humans as atomic agents and automating away the utilitarian social obligations, and work of biological survival to get there.
Relativity; being poor isn’t a character flaw. Lack of experience means not knowing what one should be fighting for.
Relativity is a scientific fact yet in the free world we enable class-based suffering. Do we throw them in a gulag?
No, we let them rot in the open in tents under bridges, and complain about it. We’re far more civilized.
Even for engineers buying power is incredibly diminished by inflation to prop up Bloomberg’s and grandpa’s property portfolio he was able to afford starting in 1970.
Normalized agency in deference to political nostalgia not what communities need isn’t constrained to China and has real consequences on lives. Is it jackboots with machine guns? No. But the effects are just as measurable.
I get the difference. It doesn’t absolve our culture of ignoring it’s deficiencies. But look what happens at a university in 2008 when students simply sit on the ground.
Is there a difference? Or have we just accepted our fate?
I don’t think I’m the one that needs to take tour advice.
If everything I do is being validated for value by management and bosses, and my buying power is managed by bankers who have inflationary powers to dilute my earnings, we’ve just made managed economy ephemeral. We’ve socially normalized grift and protection rackets.
Some estimates suggest up to 30% of inmates are innocent. And when plenty are in there for marijuana, that’s a bit more petty than a billionaire disrupting an entire society.
Rather than real prisons we let people die on the streets from preventable disease so we can say we didn’t force anyone into anything as if letting them rot is glass half full.
It’s a shame the “I am educated and worldly” community hasn’t put much though into the depth to which relativity applies to human existence.
If we’re going to intentionally avoid lifting people up at the cost of putting agency into propping up the already rich, well, the poor can never experience the alternative to form meta opinions.
This bantering in traditional political memes is patronizing and ignorant af given our scientific understanding of reality.
The dystopia for HR is the burden these apps alleviate.
Stop accepting contrived gate keeping and gifting unwarranted political privilege on corporations if you all are sick of this.
It's public agency that’s the problem. Everyone hates the way the world works while they keep shuffling into that office or opening that laptop.
I have little sympathy for smart people who fail to realize Bezos and the rest literally have no leash attached to them.
They do not have an information advantage, just a political one.
And we can see how concerned the general public is with taking control of politics for its gain. It very clearly prefers to be hands off and let a minority manipulate public agency for their gain.
Take society as an organism in the abstract and it definitely needs to mutate.
Crichton was a pop science author, right-wing believer in America. His idea small groups get things done was lost on this guy who watched entire corporations publish his books and movies. I’d take his philosophy and science creds with a grain of salt.
The masses were too busy collectively validating his banal artistic efforts, so of course he would balk at collectivism philosophically while ignoring it took a village to lift him up.
Those folks are scared that if everyone can have time to write mediocre sci fi they’d have to get real jobs.
Employees do not care about financial or literal waste.
They only meme in mind when they go to their job for “make money”.
I goto meetings with a vision and zero fucks about the implementation all the time. Why you expect that to be different otherwise in the same culture is beyond me.
I simply do not believe meritocracy can exist.
Our biological sensibilities are too easily confused by concepts we don’t fully grasp, and come on; there is so much rubber stamping and favoritism (even now I know the founder of my company is invited to private sessions in DC to hammer out rules that favor us and we’ve proven nothing).
This forum seems to have too much of a naive and weirdly trusting belief in such subjective and hand wavy ideas when literal reality is offering plenty of evidence to the contrary in the political sections of a newspaper.
We keep buying in with our time and being told there isn’t enough to go around when it comes to affording a life.
I know the historical context for a Ponzi scheme is financial, but yesterdays definitions need not be our own.
When the outputs are socially restricted, it’s not as if work from home is enabling free thought and novel productive agency.
IMO it’s merely step 1 to on a long path ending the aristocratic control of productive output. Somehow what we do has no value unless they can own and speculate about its financial value.
I see no merit in emotional grifting by a minority. That’s the binding we need to question. Not the middle manager who is aristocratic in title only.
Privus lex should be universal. Currently it clearly favors those with financial control of the planet.
Here we are discussing the supposed leverage engineers have, but frankly, in 25 years working in circuit board design and software, engineers are some of the biggest snowflakes who fight over text editors, and libraries that help us produce more effectively for the aristocrats.
Meanwhile, a community of spreadsheet fanatics are showing solidarity.
Highlighting how little leverage engineers really have despite all their big talk and brains. They’re largely just cattle for the status quo.
SOPA blackouts changed things.
Teacher strikes change things.
So long as the masses are happy to be apathetic their is no motivation by aristocrats to do better by their subjects.
Off with their heads (figuratively speaking). I would shed no tears if billionaires were suddenly multi-millionaires of it means other families still have those they would otherwise lose to preventable illness.
So much for gritty and exceptional. Kowtowed and low affect is the power engineers have.
I’m disinclined to trust our contemporary society with deciding whether autism is good or bad.
A difficult scenario for parents, perhaps, but I feel that’s better handled by society pulling its head out of its ass and providing a system that supports such situations.
Engineers also could collectively tank the economy; wfh makes a strike a matter of not opening a laptop.
Even just the serious threat would put aristocrats on notice. Look what WSB has done to Wall Street with GME.
The last generation has no information advantage. Just a political one. It can be taken away with little to no violence. I mean for one they’re a gerontocracy.
Go forth. Disrupt.
Kids can be taught otherwise. And a minority of the rich can be told to stfu by the masses, or enjoy working in the coal shovel jobs.
We pretend there’s a meritocracy lifting these folks up, but it’s been argued well it’s nothing more than network effects and really just seeing no upside to being egalitarian while the masses sit around being apathetic political agents.
And believing you’re going to achieve perfect sovereignty is non-sense. It’s a shared planet. Nation state politics worked fine when technology and access to the world were control by monarchs.
Not enough old people are going to be around to confirm their common sense awareness of these heavily distributed “truths”.
The social narrative will be whatever the political engaged make it.
Avoiding political engagement all but insures this.
Come on software engineers; social media problems are all there is.
As the author kindly points out… member of Gen Z … ah, inexperience… happy to forget I read this and give them a break.
I tend to believe these arguments just curve right into confirmation bias.
I’ve been on teams that worked fine with managers and those that did not. It depends on the commitment of the actors in question.
Anything else is reading what we want to in the tea leaves.
Edit: Been working on distributed systems since the late 90s, from public uni to big corp, to day 1 startups. It’s just computer configuration. Not magic.
I am not a carpenter and context switching is expensive when it comes to thought work (probably because it’s still just typing, lacking the mechanics of swapping a hammer for a screwdriver).
Anyway, the point is by now, 20+ years into an IT career, I should have at least ONE option that can handle these needs without flip flopping through an entire operating systems “tools”.
The desktop metaphor is not the only real world model computing needs to get rid of. I want an interface that can do the job, not a million “tools”.
Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their expectation. It is their agency.
Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality? We have documents in place to cover all these things.
Yet here we are still.
You’re doing what the people you aren’t ok with do; expect everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new perspective.
We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from the aristocracy.
The species has done this again and again. It’s not new.
The west wants to be free of life’s problems while also being free to optimize time to avoid dealing with them.
It’s almost as if physical reality is full of real constraints our imaginations can refuse to acknowledge.