The author postulates a few ideas about manners and courtesy, and starts to recognise that business transactions (employment relationships) don't actually care about these things, even though the human beings who populate these systems hold these values.
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
Many countries have financial incentives provided to its citizens to have children. Requiring half of a citizens median salary to be given to a faceless middleman to provide this service seems untenable. I cannot imagine a society that does this would be able to survive.
When your country is led by a person who seems to find children and marriage inconvenient, you're bound to see that mentality propagate throughout everyday life
This is a good article that is critical of narratives around behaviour within organisations. I particularly enjoyed his criticism of the 'morality tale'.
The author then postulates some guidance for how to survive in organisations more generally, working above these strange social structures largely unique to silicon valley. It wasn't the purpose of the article, but I wish he was a bit more critical of these structures in general.
no - this is a lesson an engineer learns early on. The time spent making the tool may still dwarf the time savings you gain from the tool. I may make tools for problems that only ever occurred or will occur once. That single incident may have occurred before I made the tool.
This also makes it harder to prioritize work in an organization. If work is perceived as "cheap" then it's easy to demand teams prioritize features that will simply never be used. Or to polish single user experiences far beyond what is necessary.
One thing I learned from this is to disregard all attempts at prioritizing based on the output's expected value for the users/business.
We prioritize now based on time complexity and omg, it changes everything: if we have 10 easy bugfixes and one giant feature to do (random bad faith example), we do 5 bugfixes and half the feature within a month and have an enormous satisfaction output from the users who would never have accepted to do it that way in the first place . If we had listened, we would have done 75% of the features and zero bug fixes and have angry users/clients whining that we did nothing all month...
The time spent on dev stuff absolutely matters, and churning quick stuff quickly provides more joy to the people who pay us. It's a delicate balance.
As for AI, for now, it just wastes our time. Always craps out half correct stuff so we optimized our time by refusing to use it, and beat teams who do that way.
I think the writing style the LLM produces is an artistic decision made by committee prioritizing for inoffensiveness - what a coincidence that it comes out sounding like LinkedIn slop.
I don't really see any innate reason an LLM couldn't write well - it's an active decision by its creators to tell it not to.
Do you ever see later stage episodes of good shows where they’ve either changed writers or run out of ideas and formerly nuanced characters become stupid caricatures of themselves. Homer Simpson and Michael Scott are obvious examples. I think emulated writing is a bit like that, it’s very hard to copy a style without emphasizing the superficial stuff over the nuance that makes it actually good. I’m not convinced it would be easy here.
The nice thing about the current “Deloitte consultant” voice that all AI has is that it’s completely superficial and un-nuanced anyway so very easy for a computer to emulate.
I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force?
In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills.
The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak.
Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.
The title of the post is 'the kind of company I want to be a part of'. This presents a more abstract philosophical question of what one should do and how one should be. I clicked the article expecting a piece about social utility, intellectual stimulation, or the role of firms in an increasingly complex moral environment.
Instead the author posited a point about pluralizing nouns.
This is the Californian ideology - do not engage with fucking anything at all, because we're all getting rich off pluralizing nouns.
Hi HN, after reading through the comments sections on blog posts about RAG, I was finding a lot of differing views. Many people have had an entirely unique experience trying to implement a RAG system, due to the nature of their data, the scale and their goals. The underlying tech also changes so quickly that new methods show up every day, and old methods become outdated quickly.
I put together this blog post trying to capture some of the experiences we had building a RAG system at TrueState, and trying to put together a centralised, up-to-date review of the concepts.
If anyone has any feedback, suggestions, or wants to flame me for something I've gotten wrong, please let me know!
The nash equilibrium in a buyer-seller market like the employer-employee relationship is for both sides to defect. Humans don't behave optimally, because they aren't pure rational creatures, they are imbued with some socialisation and cultural memory. So humans try to treat with these organisations as though they are other humans, and will respond to good-will with good-will, but this is not rewarded, and ultimately they change their behaviour in response to a poor environment.
Capital does behave short term optimally. Optimal economic behaviour is to betray the person opposite you, and violate and exploit the commons until the commons collapses entirely, like what we see today. At some points in the past, capital has been subdued by a human operator who will apply courtesy and social norms to prevent these ugly actions, but capital has now become too intelligent to bother with this, and the result is a sequence of increasingly insane and inhuman processes, such as what we see here with the job market.
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