sukruh

Good points, but implicitly equating good design with functional design irks me. You can define your terms as you wish, but at least be upfront about it.

> Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.

Functional design is centripetal. "Good" design is one which achieves the designer's goals, which are often much more complicated than that.

It is.

I agreed with almost all of it until:

>My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.

What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers? People laundering wealth into undue political power, regulatory capture, erecting barriers to market entry ("pulling up the ladder behind them") are different problems than people creating wealth. Efforts on creating a just society should focus on the former - preventing wealth creation is not the solution to injustice. In fact, since people have vastly different abilities and inclinations for creating wealth, a just society is also one with vast wealth disparities.

Relevant PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html

If you were comparing what the other company was charging your company for their developers: Labor and software services have different markets. Because, among other things, tax/insurance regulations and the expectations of contract longevity are not the same. A software shop needs to charge 2-3x salaries to be profitable. I was referring to a theoretical free market for labor.

If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.

Yes, fast-growing companies can grow out of my preference zone and as other commenters said, jumping ship when that happens may be the correct way to go.

There are other issues with slow-growing or not-growing companies. When the company is not growing, people are incentivized to take a zero-sum approach to their work relationships. If the pie is not growing, you need to guard your own slice and take from others. This creates a toxic environment. If the company is growing, then collaborating on growing the pie can become the shared attitude.

Most of the people I know who pursue creative/crafting hobbies alongside a software development job have chosen to work for well-known big companies, for prestige and safety, and ended up unfulfilled in their jobs.

Most big companies are not good if you want to solve problems and build stuff. Especially "the enterprise", where software is seen as a cost center so the less of it the better. The effort of managing up eats a creative person's soul.

I want the clarity of being able to talk to "the boss/the customer" and solve their problems and get paid the market rate for my skills. Not prepare endless PowerPoints for my skip-level, who has no ownership but has to act in their own best interests in a swamp of principal-agent problems.

This is why I am very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product. How do other people deal with this?

Reminds me of Dangerous Waters, a submarine/sonar simulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNFcTKo-eVY&t=447s

This reminded me of the story of the VC who tried to avoid meeting Larry & Sergey when they were looking for investment:

> David Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio

The discontinuities at the used care sale prices graph seems like an arbitrage opportunity on depreciation. Buy right after a round number, sell right before another, pay less on dep.

They're probably referring to cloc the counting tool. https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc

I hate to be "that guy" but I find it a little bit sexist that the noob is called "Rachel". OK OK I'm gone.

Sure, but most Maths papers are read by like 3 people in total globally, so there's that.

> the same people prefering stackoverflow over rtfm will gravitate towards this way, and more power to them.

Oh! I'd forgotten how big a productivity boost over manpages/offical docsites SO was.

My 2019 MBP does not support Windows 11 in Boot Camp.

"Fintech" only exists because the banks can't develop software. Change my mind.

> you know you're "enterprisey" if ... you don't know that you're a software company

That hit hard. I've seen so many companies that defined themselves as something else, despite employing more than 1000 programmers. In denial of being a software company - a bad one. Limping along due to strong brands or regulatory barriers to market entry.

Every day I'm getting more and more convinced that this attitude will get their lunch eaten by a company that can software.

Companies like Stripe and Rippling have so much potential displacing "enterprise", it's disgusting.

> But don't overoptimize what you're learning. Don't limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable, and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers.

I am genuinely curious how my learning about the constitution of the Roman Republic while procrastinating will help me.

FWIW ChatGPT is pretty good in generating the specific Bash incantations you need to perform if you describe what you want to do in plain English and don't forget to add the specific version of the OS you're using. Unless what you're trying to do is pretty advanced and would be cumbersome in any other OS as well.

Learning specific API's are over. Mostly.

But that scenario also creates winners and losers, because a loan with an interest rate lower than inflation is wealth transfer from the creditor to the debtor. The privileged, who can access these loans get richer, while others lose access to the housing market due to ever increasing prices caused by these loans.

This wouldn't be a huge problem if it was a mistake by freely operating private creditors, who theoretically, would realise their error and try not to issue long term loans fixed at a rate lower than inflation. One could see this as a "bet" by the creditors that the inflation rate will decrease in the future and they'd make a profit. The problem is when state-backed creditors are forced to issue low-rate loans as a government policy of homeownership. There, a country's tax base ends up funding people who can access these loans, while everyone else ends up further from owning a home. This is what happened in Turkey in 2020.

For what it's worth telling GPT-4 you want it to simulate a text adventure game that lets the user enter their actions and dialogue, and pasting the setting and some characters works much better than AI Dungeon did when I tried it last year.

GPT-4's context size is much larger, and when it starts to misbehave, you can just remind it how the game works and it's good to go again.

I'm sorry or you're welcome.

OK, now integrate another model that creates a textual description of the scene from the camera, put it together with ChatGPT and the physical robot arm in a game loop and prompt it to make paperclips. For science. What can possibly go wrong.

The brain is a biological organ, and like all other biological organs it has its limits. A human heart can only pump a certain amount of blood per minute. A human liver can only perform certain chemical reactions. The brains's limits in mental arithmetic or memorization are obvious, but is its ability to form and understand abstractions also limited?

A dog will never understand how a credit card works. Are there concepts that our human brains are biologically incapable of understanding? Maybe some of the current philosophical questions like consciousness or the illusive appearance of free will are beyond our limits.

I wish I knew more about computability, decidability, the Incompleteness Theorem etc to think further about this.

Cool. One trap worker-owned companies often fall into is to neglect investing into risky/long-term projects and as a result fall behind the industry. When the choice is 2x salary for 3 years or some R&D investment one does not fully grasp, many individual members choose the former.