futuraperdita

Many of the decisions Mozilla has made throughout the past decade have felt more like it’s a resting place for a professional-managerial class, post-capital set of leadership who want to perform tech-goodness from within the same playbook as a big tech company. It’s somehow rudderless and declining, but has plenty of time and connections to chase old-boys-club vanity projects like this. Next up they’ll be next to CrowdStrike on a Formula 1 car.

I’m not saying non-profits should necessarily give off the opposite vibe of being derelict and desperate, but even startups choose to run austerity measures when in decline.

For me, Opus 4.8's thinking traces for the chatbot will sometimes willingly ignore instructions, saying something along the lines of "I've noticed an instruction in the system instructions that states I shouldn't do this, but if I don't do this, I'll not provide the answer the user is looking for. I will ignore that instruction."

I’m not sure why this is interesting. Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft, you likely could have retired a very long time ago.

So you turn it off by default in BIOS and allow those that feel it's useful to them to enable it, and you solve for both sides of the problem.

“We don’t have good, unique data” is a pretty good out to keep Wang collecting extreme payouts and fleecing the leadership that has built trust in him, because it also plays to the one place where he’s demonstrated profitable expertise. It’s plausible enough to not be seen as a deflection.

I’m not sure the incentives are really aligned when you’re pouring that much cash and liquid RSUs at someone on normal vesting schedules. News stories of some of the acquisitions state that there are engineers in Meta’s AI organisation clearing 8 figures of compensation. If you didn’t think the strategy was successful, it’s rational (if not very principled) to continue to make excuses as to why until the gravy train stops and then use that to fund your retirement and the things you’d want to do instead.

I’m not an AI stan by any means and certainly no fan of Andreessen, but using the term “clanker” immediately biases your statement and can discredit what is a well-referenced or well-meaning comment.

I found a syllabus for each of the two current classes that they teach:

https://cif.uiowa.edu/sites/cif.uiowa.edu/files/2026-03/syll...

https://cif.uiowa.edu/sites/cif.uiowa.edu/files/2026-03/syll...

Infiltration of government institutions has been doctrine for the group since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.

Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.

I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.

A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

It feels like the output you’d get from an LLM if you had asked it to write in a literary style. It’s not well-written, and reads more pretentious than capable.

9front is a legitimately cool software project and from what I can tell a cool set of people. I find it bizarre how many people have a negative reaction to a community that doesn't dress itself up in Corporate Memphis and idolize startup-world demigods.

We need more of this type of project today. It is the old Internet, still alive.

Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.

but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand

This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.

The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.

I feel like a lot of people that are looking for a nostalgic device can get the experience they need by uninstalling most applications and then turning off all notifications first. In doing so, you don't end up with a device that is much different than an old Treo 650 - PIM functionality, messaging, and no growth-hacking loops.

My point was that it is not "[rolling over] for the government".

Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

It has nothing to do with the state and has to do with getting the RSUs to pay the down payment for a house in a HCOL area in order to maybe have children before 40 and make the KPIs so you don't get stack-ranked into the bottom 30% and fired at big tech, or grinding 996 to make your investors richest and you rich-ish in the process if you're unlikely enough to exit in the upper decile with your idea. This doesn't include the contingent of people who fundamentally believe in the state, too.

Most people are activists only to the point of where it begins to impede on their comfort.

AI middle managers are coming. The highest-level corporate authority can and will continue to exist as a person that makes sure the AI systems are running correctly and skim profits off the top of the AI substructure, with the lowest stratum being an underclass precariat doing the hands-on tickets from an AI agent at a continuously adjusted market price for the task.

But the thing is that they really aren't rigorous economic studies. They're a sort of UX research-like sociological study with some statistics, but don't actually approach the topic with any sort of econometric modeling or give more than loose correlations to past economic data. So it does appear performative: it's "pop science" using a quantitative veneer to push a marketing message to business leaders in a way that looks well-optimised mathematically.

Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.

Which ThinkPad has a 14" 4K 100% Adobe RGB compliant IPS display?

I don't see how the control and enforcement of "social media age verification" solves for the "people who are unable to stop... under their own willpower." My grandparents are more addicted to the phone than I am. Taking the superlative stance of social media being the "most advanced behavior modification schemes ever devised by humans" wouldn't the correct regulation be some sort of threshold of consumption (screen time limits per application), or rehabilitation for those that have crossed a line into psychological addiction? I imagine the easiest, assuming you see "the algorithm" as the problem, would be to ban selective algorithms and force timeline-based feeds or the like.

The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.

Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.

Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.

Alexander Hamilton explains his definition of what "well-regulated" is - and the purpose of a citizen militia - in contrast to the standing army in the Federalist Papers, No. 29. Most of the idea has become much more federalized than intended with the National Guard, but it has long since been misused for its intended purpose.

I have a haptic touchpad on my current X1 Carbon and actually don't mind it. The ancient Haswell-generation clickpads were terrible but the Sensel ones are underappreciated.

For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for.

I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.

There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.

If you're an engineering manager, you should communicate with your team, know their strengths and weaknesses, stay sharp on modern technique, and, most importantly, ask them what workflows work best for them, not us on Hacker News.

If you're hiring a consultancy or a pile of freelancers it's a bit different, but the question here would make me believe you don't trust their capability to start and I would be looking for teams that better align with what you expect as their outputs.

I'm curious when this stops.

I have been thinking over the past week or so that we're likely to see consumer technology sitting well behind datacenter tech perpetually here, and this is not a transient shortage but an overall market adjustment to consumer and SMB being a few generations (or process nodes) behind the hyperscalers. Outside of gamers and enthusiasts, most people can be on anything from the last 7-8 years and be fine with it, and most of what they do is offloaded to the cloud anyway.

I'm also pessimistic enough to see a sort of long-term "compute control", where we see a few generations of technology leak to adversaries through individual channels, and then we start ensuring that _only_ controlled/regulated/registered companies can purchase the leading-edge. After all, nobody needs that much compute, it's dangerous! What if they put it on a drone?

Exactly this. OP, this is basically where this book goes - AI management that directs humans around as automata.

What worries me is that _a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves_ and anthropmorphize them into a sort of human-exact intelligence. The worst-case scenario of Utah's law is that when the disclaimer is added that the report is generated by AI, enough jurists begin to associate that with "likely more correct than not".