undoware

Yikes. Good points. And a good time to admit that the person described is an amalgam of what I heard from (at least) two artist friends, in somewhat different industries, about things that happened in the early days of the pandemic. No actual creatives were harmed in the making of this post :)

In the future, I'll try to avoid exaggerating, and additionally, think more adversarially.

All the same: it's very, very hard to be a creative right now, if your creativity is anything other than coding. My fellow coders need to realize that the circumstances that have led to our overpay are indeed temporary, because of the way job titles function as positional goods, and become themselves fought over.

The other field I've seen this occur in are postgrad humanities, where the adjunctification of academe has been accomplished by inflating the status of the work. (And I speak as someone who dropped out of a PhD in the humanities.)

If you're expected to be honored just to be in the room, you can expect to earn only an honorarium.

And that's the future I see for our industry as well, eventually.

There must be some sort of general principle of growth and decay involved.

I have the following argument, applying market principles to discourse.

There are four categories of claims:

1. Easy to hear and false

2. Easy to hear and true

2. Hard to hear and false

3. Hard to hear and true

The first category is the domain of spin doctors and marketers. Let's ignore it for now.

The second category encompasses a lot of facts, but generally these won't show up in discourse. Because they're easy to hear, they are already known to both parties and agreed-upon. Let's call these "common knowledge" or even (more tendentiously) common-sense.

The third category show up in discourse as "things you want to make your opponent believe about themselves or their worldview." These are your psyops, basically.

Finally, the fourth category is pretty much every true thing that you need to actually point out. They need pointing-out because of a natural (and relatable!) human tendency to avoid discomfort. If they weren't hard to hear, you would have let yourself hear them already. Thus, most of discourse takes place here.

If the foregoing breakdown is correct, it also suggests that the *hardest-to-hear truths* are going to be the ones which are most significant, because of all the truth claims, they are the ones which have not yet been universally admitted.

HN's current posture toward discourse seems to encourage making hard-to-hear truths even harder, by literally fading them. And moreover, the guidelines prohibiting the discussion of our collective moderation decisions in-thread is itself a way of figuratively moving *even the awareness of the problem itself* from `color: #000` to `color: rgb(130,130,130)`.

This is why I now try to read the greytext first. For every one comment faded because it was offtopic or whatever, there are three which were faded for telling us emperors about our new clothes.

in 2015, Deep Dream hardly replaced artists.

Five years later, and Imagen/Dall-E/SD are on the cusp of blowing up the entire field.

Sure, the celebrity artists will be fine, but the twenty-somethings who took out 90K of debt to attend SAIC are in for a miserable five decades.

Coding, like illustration, will evolve, or die, or both.

Why is this downvoted?

Are we really at the stage where we simply downvote people who say things that are hard to hear?

Parent is right: there's an imminent correction, and it will be unevenly distributed, because so is everything else.

I have a friend who is a composer for film.

She has made some of the most exquisite thought products I've ever experienced (a strange way to talk about music, but I'm trying to cleave to the OP.) She works 90 hours a week, has been well-regarded in her industry for 10+ years.

I've seen her drop everything, on any night of the week, to hit the deadline for wrap, dozens of times in the last year alone.

She has $400CAD to her name, has no car, and rents. If she weren't in a housing co-op, she'd need to move out of the city -- and as it already stands, she lives in the roughest neighbourhood in town.

The moral of this story is that enjoyable, well-regarded work where you feel a deep connection to the end-product almost inevitably becomes part of its own compensation package.

There will be people who will code for free, for 'exposure', and there will be a lot of them, not too long from now at all, because coding is a delight, and is becoming more delightful every day (cf CoPilot).

I think a lot about how the romanticization of coding as a profession parallels the romanticization of the music industry in the 80s and 90s. People work cheap for hallowed dreams. Pride goeth before the fall.

..nor the ideological mob lacking basic human empathy or prosocial scruple

I plan to rival TSMC and Samsung myself. I have a garage and a UV flashlight

He might be a terrible CEO, but he sure is entertaining <3_<3

The last time I enjoyed watching a money bonfire this big was Windows Phone

...I can't tell if this is willful misinterpretation or not, but I certainly did not mean to imply anything at all about twitter censorship.

confused sounds

EDIT: above, read 'FOR EXAMPLE, ....' when I begin to talk about Twitter. HTH

I take great pride in achieving a -2 point rating on a post because it means that I've spoken truth to the powers that read HN.

I take even greater pride in talking about commenting of comments, _contra_ the guidelines, because a rule that you cannot discuss collective moderation decisions is like forbidding your subordinates from telling you that you have spinach in your teeth.

The spinach abides.

No one needs to -- the Free Speech Debate is not really about the government, is it? Elon didn't buy Twitter to protect it from the fed. He bought it to protect it from what he calls a "woke mind-virus" -- aka, progressive politics.

This article is trending because -- and I'm generalizing here -- HN skews center-right (what I like to call 'business-right'.) As a result, it has fallen prey to the false narrative of corrupt left-wing mainstream media unfairly maligning good honest billionaires.

It's wild that HN, forum that seems disproportionately in favor of unregulated speech should feel uncomfortable when a newspaper chooses a critical editorial stance.

You agree that, by your own lights, editorial stances of newspapers are none of your business, yes? Free speech, yes?

Everyone says 'both sides' but that's not actually the case, is it? Shoe, meet other foot.

[EDIT]: typos removed

You do understand that critical thinking is literally the point of journalism, right?

In 2022, I'd certainly give the same directive. Our industry can and should be held to account, just like any other seat of power. (Because that's what we are now, whether we like it or not.)

This sounds like pretty much every network admin gig I've ever had, but I'm old.

My first job in 2001 involved running around trying to back up everyone's Outlook files and yeah, you see a lot of email.

The tone of this comment suggests a young'un who has never been face to face with a /var/spool/mail that is mounted over NFS because your supervisor worked at BAE in 1992 and it was SOP there for reasons that were never, ever, ever relevant in your shop of 14, but NFS didn't come up this morning so you're trying to figure out where the hell everyone's email went

And yes this is vaguebooking about my supervisor from 2001 (you know who you are)

You've nailed it.

I bailed on a MAAMA job in the states to move back to Canada.

Salary expectations (and currency!) are generally lower here, but the job market itself is hotter than I've ever seen it here.

My theory is that USA tech companies are friendshoring like mad.

In other words, Canada is picking up the recoil from the trade war with China. Biz that used to go to China (or even India) is now going to Toronto.

And every time a US company looks at their bottom line, they will recall that, if they hire three hours north of Seattle, they'll get something like a 40%-50% discount on total comp, PhDs out the wazoo, and a convenient, well-funded federal immigration system.

It's a no-brainer. What kind of fool would start a business in a politically unstable disaster-country where some populist executive order could cut you off from your supply of H1Bs next year?

Your job is moving to Canada (or possibly Europe,) and if you're smart, you'll move with it.

If it wasn't Butterick I wouldn't be interested.

But I write this to you in Hermes Maia

shrugs

The article is as-yet unwritten -- the premiss will be that in general, the privilege of being permitted to worry about any given thing is, in an organization, the most critical plank of status. The opposite of a window seat.

Pay, equity, everything else -- not as important.

It has little to do with my former employer specifically. It's anthropology.

"I can't believe they gatekept MY package," says user who enthusiastically downloaded WalledGarden Distro.

cf https://twitter.com/cavalorn/status/654934442549620736?lang=...

Yes :D

It reminds me of this:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/butterflies-parasitic-... "These Butterflies Full of Wasps Full of Microwasps Are a Science Nightmare"

The market and I agree that you are misreading things, but we can agree to disagree.

By my lights, winners don't have to take all in order to have won -- approximately half the market is sufficient. Enough to dictate terms for most users most of the time. That's Apple in 2022, and the market is reflecting that fact. In fact, I daresay that if Apple hasn't won, it is, at the very least, mate-in-three, or thereabouts.

A more interesting question is, what psychological comfort is there in minimizing one's perception of their hegemony?

I'm thinking in terms of avoidance of discomfort. Ideologically, I've been a FOSSian my whole life -- I'm in my forties, and I was a teenager when I first installed Red Hat.

But I'm increasingly aware that, despite having won the battle with the NT kernel, we somehow lost the war. Specifically, we were co-opted by Apple, Amazon, and, yes, now Microsoft too.

It puts food on my table but it leaves me feeling a little empty. I don't know about you. <3 Maybe it's the same?

It's hard to admit you're a bird in a cage. It's even harder to admit that the next generation will be.

What changed is that the M1 is causing them to lose the platform war. Performance-per-watt matters enough to users that Apple's incredible parsimony with the juice has effectively secured it both the desktop and the mobile markets.

Sure, yeah, MSFT sells an OS and a cloud -- both are actually pretty awesome these days. But they only got those things on the back of performant Intel silicon. Network effects did the rest, but those network effects were, as it were, tethered to the world by the quality (and modest cost) of the hardware it empowered.

I propose that, like a hurricane moving over land, a software-platform company that loses the first battle -- for the immediate hardware-mediated user experience -- is going to start unwinding.

We don't have to look far for examples. Facebook is currently in just such a death-spiral, in no small part because Apple --- now in a place to dictate terms --- decided its users would be better off with more privacy, and cut FB off from the flows of data it needed for targeted marketing and ML training.

The ability to simply shrug off a behemoth like FB (and leave said behemoth scrambling, vainly, to own the next hardware platform) should surely be enough to get any unbiased observer's attention.

Awareness of the Home-Hardware Advantage is, I imagine, also why my former employer foists Edge on everyone with dark patterns and nagware. They're afraid of Google creeping down the stack. (Like they did on mobile.)

Leaving Apple as gatekeeper for both the desktop and mobile is essentially to submit to Apple hegemony.

I no longer have a horse in this race, but from where I sit, it looks like Apple has outplayed everyone, and the market knows it. (Hence my original comment.)

What do you think Apple will do to Microsoft, once Microsoft products are primarily accessed over Apple devices?

What does anyone do to their competitor, once they can control where, and how, that competitor can talk to its customers?

It really feels like you're not looking at the chessboard at all.

I believe you may have misread the parent -- I believe the author is implying that it's MSFT that has nothing new to sell (IIPC[1])

Storytime! As it happens, I was working at MSFT when the first M1-based MacBooks rolled out.

I actually ran around trying to get people to look at the specs and talk about this serious emergent threat. Rank & file SWEs just shrugged, and the vibe was that I wasn't senior enough to be allowed to worry about it.

I don't know what management was thinking. But, looking back over the years since, I'd reckon that whatever they were thinking was too quiet.

(There is a sidebar I am omitting about Permission to Worry, which is the name of an upcoming newsletter article I intend to write about this phenomenon -- I've come to regard it as the singular most important privilege that an organization can assign an employee -- but it is well beyond scope for this thread.)

[1] If I Parse Correctly

Not only this, but, critically, there is now an entire *industry* devoted to preventing cloud-provider lock-in. You can't throw a penny into an SF crowd without hitting someone working on this.

Because capitalism is efficient, and because there are lots of dollars chasing the Lock-in Problem, and moreover because AWS is the market leader, it has an enormous amount to lose. Even if 0.5% of the aforementioned startups succeed in reducing dollars lost to lock-in by (say) 10%, on average, that's billions that AWS stands to lose. (By my armchair math)

The market prices these risks in.

Hadn't noticed that Freetone was Semple's brainchild. It checks out and I love him for it.

I dabble a bit, and Black 2.0 (havent' tried 3.0) is like magic.

I also heartily recommend Semple's glow-in-the-dark pigment, but be sure to mix well, it's a non-soluble powder and can yield unintended 3D effects if the mix is off (or you did not mortar/pestle)

I have bad news for anyone who recognizes the name-reference instantly

You're old

Like me :P

Showtime, cynergi

My fave German/English confusion is still the word 'Mist' -- I'll never get over hearing how Rolls Royce couldn't understand how their luxury car, the Silver Mist, sold so poorly in Germany

I'm lowkey waiting to hear about Applet's other sister-ship, JDK

...implausible? Really?

Ha! You can't tell me you've never thought about what you'd name things if you were warped into the past and worked as a Swedish shipwright.

Like, it's just too tempting to troll 21st-century conspiracists with anachronistic ship names, of course it would be a thing you'd do.

Call this the 'anthwarpic principle' (no I don't care) and by 2022 epistemological standards, it's as likely to be real as anything else

OK, fine, downvote me, you cowards

That's just it -- I don't think there are any great interfaces, yet. Jupyter scratches only the surface of what literate experimental coding could be.

I also have a back-of-napkin argument that the field is due for an invention as revolutionary to ML as the beizer handle was to vector art, or the spreadsheet was to money management.

I'm interested conceptually in eventually leveraging eg VR and sonification for aid in exploring very-high-dimensional datasets.

Meanwhile, yes, there is a lot of just nuts/bolts Good Design to worry about. :)

"fluor" is not a morpheme I enjoy seeing in a chemical name; this seems possibly quite toxic? (I am not a chemist)

My advice is to get 'ML' on your resume, some way, somehow, along with some selection of: TypeScript, React, Python, C#, Java, Linux, and Kubernetes.

Start with a good online free course like https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...

You don't have to be a full-bore data scientist to benefit from the surging interest in ML -- for example, I've made my current focus 'UX for data scientists', I focus on trying to make interfaces that are pleasing to people working in ML, and this, I am pleased to say, just got my ass hired.

It's also salient to know that, over the next decade, while tech salaries will likely trend down (esp. as CoPilot, nocode/lowcode, etc continue to make our lives easier and hence less lucrative ;D) the *amount of addressable work* in ML specifically will almost certainly offset this change.

YMMV in other tech specializations, but I'd still rather be in our industry than most others. Again, there's plenty of work in MLOps that does not require being a data scientist.

Finally, if you can physically live in a geolocation with lower cost of living (or better yet, a currency that is weaker than USD) you can be the lower-cost option that everyone ditches Fancy McSanFransiscoPants for in 2023. Be sure to blog and show your work on GH ;D