paimapi

I think that's rarely the case in orgs and I say that as someone whose issues have been in remission for a decade+ and is reasonably confident in his work abilities and capabilities.

Responsible leadership models good behavior as a cultural norm. If you normalize language that puts people down, the entire ecosystem changes. I've seen it happen in plenty of companies after outside consultants were hired in as leadership.

There is also no rationalization for the Iran War that would have made sense logistically or morally especially not when diplomacy was proven to have worked - it was an exercise in converting taxpayer money into lucrative contracts for arms suppliers who just happen to occasionally gift a connected family member with yachts and watches. It's a terrible example.

If he can't even do that, he's ill-equipped to be leading a company.

They've also had a vibe that is very AI-heavy but with intentional, fun design hearkening back to 00s UI staples.

A lot of the very high-tech manufacturing in China is still dependent on Western supply chains (ASML is one major one for semi-conductors) and there's a level of complexity and specialized knowledge there that probably doesn't exist domestically yet so the transition to a knowledge-dominant vs manufacturing-dominant economy is hitting a logarithmic wall.

That said, China's intellectual property ecosystem is extremely open and free. This is really a cultural thing, embedded since the early days of China's printing press half a thousand years ago when editing, rewriting, and printing your own versions of someone elses's works is normalized (think AO3 but standardized and normalized at a societal level). So we'll get to see whether or not that business-friendly theory of 'IP exists to protect genius inventors and without it we have no inventions' governing theory bears out or if a completely permissive and free ecosystem is better for innovation in the longterm.

I think about my home city (6th largest in the US) with its singular interstate looping around our metro area - and Beijing has five of these ring roads on top of having a far more robust public transportation system and tons of scooter/bike usage still.

A single carmaker outselling all of US-made electric vehicles is just normal especially given the prices of these cars (down to something like $8000 USD) and the fact that they live in such dense areas that don't require you to drive 20 miles just to, for eg, get to a Costco or something. So you can have these ultracheap cars with maybe twice the range of lithium-powered golf carts and not spend a ton of money on it along with having 5x the population.

They got a 300 million Series E about a year after that flub ;_;

I wish there was some nuanced line for science journalists to not hyperbolize about nothingburger studies in dire need of replication while also making the science exciting, slow of a process as it is. Maybe every article includes a history of the that very specific and narrow sub-branch of the field? That would be really interesting to read, and to have a gauge on how far we've come.

I think about test-driven development and how good versions of that were socialized norms, processes and checks that happened prior to outputting code. Just telling an LLM to do TDD just creates a hellish CI latency tail with too many tests - you have to have taste and discernment there and none of that's built-in. Context rot is still too much of an issue especially if you're on a distributed MS model. I've had a little luck with whole system ADRs helping (with a lot of skills + active prompting) but the context still degrades over longer sessions or the further into a sprint you get.

I've seen some preliminary 'innovations' like this with LLM-driven shared wikis but it's all very hand-wavey and not standardized across the industry. It really feels like people are just waiting for these frontier labs to fully solve code quality (my gut says that the scale of improvement is logarithmic, not exponential, at least not until there's actual revolutionary research on LLM outputs at the scale of something like tensors) or they hope that some outfit with a fully vibe-coded website that promises to solve all of these things will solve all of these things.

Given the speed at which Anthropic regularly pushes updates (eg their ridiculous app versioning that's in the thousands for v4 now) I doubt they're doing anything that looks like quality processes, even AI-integrated ones other than basic code review skills.

I imagine it's as much of a mess internally as it is with any other company whose execs are concerned more with bottom-line valuation rather than maintainability, extensibility, and sustainability. Just lots of spaghetti-at-the-wall hoping that something sticks long enough to drive up the IPO.

My point is that there are bifurcated consumer markets and you only spoke to a narrow subset.

Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.

The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.

If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/apr/25/goog...

https://theweek.com/tech/wifi-signals-now-tracking-users-at-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlbjUvkoyBA

https://wigle.net/

And here's the opt-out steps to get Google to stop scanning your Wifi: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632#how_opt_out&z...

Some of the best moments of growth that I've experienced have happened during adversity, when something I said or did was laid bare for me from another perspective, with all of the problems with my approach pointed out. Those moments are intensely uncomfortable in that moment but so valuable for long-run growth (provided you have enough of a check on your own ego and developed enough insight to learn from such experiences).

My guess is that this trend to sycophancy will happen in every hierarchical organization where individuals at the top are able to reshape their social environment to avoid uncomfortable moments that they don't wish to have. I think it takes someone truly exceptional to avoid creating that kind of reality for themselves, and why it's oh-so-common to see hyperinflated egos from the most powerful individuals.

That said, I would read the hell out of a non-fictional expose covering specifically just the sycophants around some of our most notoriously unhinged powerful people, ones that showed exactly who are applauding these Emperors Nero who play their citharas while their world burns.

Maybe something like "/s"?

The other option would be to embed enough context in a comment that most good faith readers would understand that you, the writer, are not so dense and uncultured that you don't know extremely common knowledge.

If only there was a method for identifying how common certain kinds of knowledge are!

That said, there's also research pointing to LLMs encoding existing bugs as test requirements: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05139

That CS PHD researcher, Konstantinou, in particular, has written a lot on this: https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Konstant...

A rational government might say, "If we provide you with subsidies, we expect stricter regulatory standards." But we're a far bit past rational at this point.

https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/raci...

If anything, you can thank most of the repeal of things like reproductive rights, the Voting Rights Act, etc and enshrinement of corporate personhood, gerrymandering, etc to the explicitly conservative project of The Federalist Society who now have the ruling majority in the Supreme Court.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalis...

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

We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.

Another counterpoint: higher work hour countries have higher rates of death per kilometer of active track [0]

Greece (highest in the EU for work hours) = 22.3 rail deaths per 1k kilometer of track followed by Portugal (another high work hour ranking) with 6.2, Portugal (about 200 more hours than Spain annual) at 6.2, and Hungary (at about 100 more hours) at 5.8.

The only two countries with less deaths per 1K KM of track and more work hours are Ireland and Estonia. All the rest (Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg) have less annual work hours than Spain.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

Social historians have been debunking the thought-terminating cliche that we ever had a trend of merit-based hiring since time immemorial:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-meritocracy-r...

https://archive.org/details/meritocracymyth0000mcna_n6g9

https://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rh...

1) Why wouldn't you have a SSOT for certs and instead rely on patching different apps individually?

2) Doesn't this violate defense in depth? Exploits for a widely disclosed issue now have turnaround activation within hours, not weeks. Not patching all surface areas and actively disclosing as such seems very much like drawing up a map for a jailbroken LLM to gin up a rudimentary attack.

3) Also doesn't this violate the principle of secure by default especially for power users who are more likely to be the ones with higher privileges across distributed systems?

This feeds into the idea that the problem with safety these days are lazy workers, not the fact that companies are increasingly extending work hours beyond what's reasonable, firing keystone employees and shoveling more work onto the remaining individuals, and operating with a general disregard of regulatory safety guidelines around training and rest.

The reality is very different: https://www.railway.supply/renfe-rejects-drivers-union-claim...

> On rolling stock, the union wants lasting technical fixes for reliability. It further calls for correct application of breaks in driving time under article 36 of Royal Decree 929/2020 and an end to the block on early-retirement reduction coefficients under Royal Decree 2621/1986. Two further demands concern a May 7 agreement on hiring new entrants as trainee drivers and a 1990 agreement on support for drivers involved in incidents where a person is hit by a train.

>On new drivers, Renfe called the claim that recruits are being kept on training scholarships false. It said none of the 402 drivers who have joined are on a scholarship.

https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.

>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.

It should have been stopped before it grew into the leviathan it is now but the general consensus by the politicos of the time was that this was just histrionic left/libertarian worry, and that something like that could never happen in the USA, we were too just, too democracy-loving.

Would love to see just one example of a billion+ valuation company with nothing but C-suite and that against the ratio of companies with 1000+ employees who are worth a billion+. The only two sub-dozen workers that come to mind for me are Theranos and Bernie Madoff and I'm not sure they are examples of success.