fleshdaddy

So how do you feel about the ending thesis that now you are also this American family?

How are you commenting? I thought the internet was turned off in Iran.

Yeah the deal has also changed. Right as I was leaving the messaging started changing a lot and there was a clear top down “you all need to work harder”. They hired an ex Amazon guy to run my org which really drove the message home.

To be fair though I think Microsoft has decided they are fine with rank and file being mediocre. I don’t know how interested they are in competing for top talent except for at the top.

You’re right to call this out.

This is such a nightmare. Burning down the world so I can read this shit.

So dumb. I wish these clankers had the decency to add a message saying it’s AI. People are responding genuinely to other comments.

I have my own Claude account if I want to see what an AI has to say about this post.

Are you an AI?

I went down a Reddit rabbit hole, a sub called /r/noctor. Basically people, mostly doctors, complaining about the prevalence of nurse practitioners, PAs practicing independently/outside of their scope, etc. The general consensus I see there is that the only people benefiting from this are private equity firms trying to squeeze more profit since they bill the same based on whether you see a doctor or an NP. This in turn has an affect where it doesn’t make sense financially to go through so much school and take on so much debt.

God I love that line. I almost wish the story ended right there.

I think that’s a little naive to how these massive dinosaurs operate. Microsoft doesn’t build anything in an afternoon, not even Minesweeper. There are probably multiple careers at least partially dependent on the metrics from this. Everything becomes an ongoing process at MS scale, for better or worse.

Yeah exactly. That’s how we end up with ads in our taskbar.

Often times when this stuff comes up I think it’s Microsoft’s organizational structure that’s to blame. Namely that each team operates like their own little company in many ways. So the team and PM for minesweeper forget they’re just a small part of a broader ecosystem.

Opposite for me. Much rather have an extra day where I can do anything I want with no one bugging me. Workdays are basically a wash for me anyways.

For me at least it’s not actually the price of the Uber but that I know what it will be up front. I wasn’t really taking cabs until uber was ubiquitous though so maybe that’s not the same for everyone.

Well there are limits. You can’t for example protest in my living room or by breaking into the Capitol building. Trespassing can be a form of protest but it’s still illegal.

I think that is the crux of the problem actually. Same with Teams, what the buyer wants is misaligned with what the end user wants unfortunately. Most resources are put towards making it an easier sell rather than towards a product the end user loves.

That’s interesting. I wonder if it has to do with size. I work at a really large company and the commissions are apparently lower but the sales jobs appear more stable. The companies my family member has worked at all fall in the 500-1000 range. Not small but definitely in the sort of high growth phase.

I think it complicates matters with her being in sales. It’s a much more cutthroat area in companies the size of Cloudflare from what I’ve seen. If you don’t perform you get cut loose really fast. I have a family member in tech sales and it blows my mind how easy it is to get fired.

Maybe just lowering the allowed concentration of thc in products. It’s wild how strong some of the weed is now. Splitting a joint now I imagine is quite a bit different than in the 70s.

I think there's another dynamic at play which makes you both right in some ways. My mom and both of my sisters began having kids in their teens. Despite my family always struggling with money I don't ever recall it being seen through an economic lens. My girlfriends family on the other hand is very comfortably middle class, and when her brother had a baby a year or two shy of 30 there were a lot of economic concerns from her parents, they were almost upset at first. It seemed odd to me since him and his wife both had decent jobs and were doing way better than any of my siblings with children, but I realized it's because they weren't going to be able to raise their kids the same way they were raised. It seems like a big problem is that if you're from a middle-class background and want to have a family you'll likely have to come to terms with being worse off than your parents.

I think it's much more a problem for middle class families because unlike poorer families they seem more cognizant of what they have to lose, or at least the perception of what they have to lose, and maybe there's also an aspect where it's more ingrained that they should do better than their parents. I don't know maybe that's obvious to everyone but it was something that got me thinking.

I don’t know tbh I’d assume those people donate because they made some money off of the work done on processing and want to give some back to keep development going. I’d think if you wanted to donate to the stuff they’re on about you’d find a non profit specifically for that purpose. I’m sure there are plenty and they’re probably better at it than a software foundation haha.

Yeah it’s really bizarre. It reminds me of times when I’ve gone to a charities website and things start getting weird and eventually I realize it’s run by some religious cult. Sucks though, seems like at a certain point you should just be honest that you are more interested in social issues so that people who want to support the actual development of processing know your foundation isn’t the way to do so.

I don’t know that seems like a good way to make sure no one knows how to maintain these things after the core contributors die. I’ve seen PR ping pong mentioned elsewhere and it’s odd because “PR ping pong” is part of how I became an effective member of my team and eventually eased some of the load for everyone else.

Yeah it just seems like a bad strategy on the maintainers part. Seems like one of those perfect places to teach a new contributor style guides and make them more useful in the future. To me approaching it this way comes off as disinterest in welcoming new contributors, which maybe now they’re not needed, but being so unwelcoming could one day leave us with no one capable of maintaining these projects.

Reply all did an episode about the Foxconn stuff at a specific town. Looked it up and it’s called “Negative Mount Pleasant”. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened but I remember being very skeptical of the whole thing as well. I just have no idea why Foxconn would ever have an economic reason to pay for American labor when presumably they have a pretty large pool of much cheaper and closer labor available.

It’s been a long time since I read it but I think that’s exactly how it was beat in Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother.

Yeah if we did that I think we’d need to build some systems for these things. We need artists and writers and what not and precluding anyone who can’t afford it would probably suck for society. We’d need some good scholarship type programs to help out there. Honestly we could probably use those now, I don’t know how realistic a lot of these things are under our current system.

Why do you say that? It seems like it’s going to be really hard to build a network of fast charging stations for EVs and Tesla has a big head start it seems like.

I think regardless Tesla is positioned to have a lot of value. Granted I don’t know a whole lot about it so let me know if I’m wrong but it seems like even if their cars fizzle out eventually they are still building the majority of electric car infrastructure. If more and more companies cut deals with Tesla to use their stations they may end up being some majority of the countries “gas stations”. If I were investing in them it’d be as an energy company instead of a car company.

Wasn’t in a non profit back then? Do they actually have shares? I thought part of the point is they don’t turn a profit to pay out to investors.

From what I’ve seen of airbnbs where I grew up a contributing factor isn’t just quantity of the airbnbs but also the particular houses they choose.

A lot of them are what I think most people would call “starter houses”, relatively cheap pragmatic homes in decent areas. I would assume it has to do with people maybe upgrading houses and doing short term rentals on their first house and probably just that if you’re looking to invest in real estate they’re of course cheaper and a good fit for airbnb style short term rentals. I don’t know though I’d also assume it’s such a pain in the ass to manage that most people would rather sell and get money towards a new house.