"Build me a high speed railway. Make no mistakes."
Now that SaaS CRUD apps can be built in 10 minutes, we can maybe do something more worthwhile, no? So much wasted effort has gone into this field already, in my opinion.
Here's how I see what's going on, turning subtext to text...
* Person 1: "$THING is a problem for a significant chunk of people. My audience here probably doesn't experience it subjectively, but it's still objectively true."
* Person 2: "But what if we are feeling it!? Ah-hah! I found an error! You goofed!"
* (Me): "That's really not their point, stop nitpicking the disclaimer."
A surprising number of people unfortunately seem to believe that bad things happen to people that deserve it, especially when it comes to addictions. This has been a prevalent problem with drugs, and it makes addicts ashamed, resulting in them not getting the help they need. For a long time, opioid addiction was a problem for weak, godless, poor people shooting heroin in flip houses that couldn’t possibly affect pill-popping suburbanites.
“Gambling is a problem for poor people, but not the smart, educated folks on this here forum” smacks exactly of that. So while that detail might be orthogonal to the original point, I’d agree that it’s not just a nitpick but a very real problem as a statement that is worthy of being called out.
But it's not not the point. Assuming any group is immune is just folly at best. I guarantee that there > 0 addicts reading this forum. I'll even guarantee that it is > 1.
I think your metaphor is certainly possible. I feel it is much more like a "dragster for the mind" in my personal experience. In both cases you remain seated and your legs don't do much. But perhaps a wheelchair can get you more places...
You, and people like you, really need to get it through your head that most people need to work to eat.
"Oh ho ho, unemployed? Why not spend the thousands of dollars you certainly have just lying around to dick around with chatbots, with all the spare time you have?"
If this is how you're thinking, you are not living in reality.
That’s correct, one of the many gigs I did during my 10-month search for a new full-time job this year was working 11 hours, 6 days a week, under the blazing desert sun, building solar and battery systems at Burning Man to take diesel generators offline. What were you trying to say about that here?
… are you trying to equate "going to Burning Man" as "having money", when they list working at Burning Man (and as a vendor, not even working for Burning Man), not going to it, on their resume?
Yeah, like it or not at this point if you have to be an effective politician, you have to be a good influencer too much as I hate saying that sentence.
No, he was clearly always a corporate shill his entire time as governor. He tried to get NYC to pay for half the subway without giving us increased power of how it's run [1].
Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.
He sucked. He probably still does.
[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.
He kept the budget on time, played an equal role in getting the 2nd Avenue subway opened and presided over economic growth. He fumbled with COVID and was being a rapist in the background, which is unforgivable, but it’s not unreasonable to say he had positive impacts, even if I’m not sure whether he was net positive.
> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent
I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.
ETA:
That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.
> this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started
I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.
Sure, I'm not sure he made it "worse", just think it's fine to blame him for making no significant effort (as far as I can tell) to fix it in the ten years he was in office.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.
A lot of the people referenced in this post were in Developer Relations (or something adjacent). That's all going away [1], and going offline is the (over)-reaction to what is undoubtedly career-ending.
I know cynics would run to say this, but on the whole the lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be. And they even know this, but somehow it's still expected for people to just innately understand what's going on, but they don't. And everyone else who does have the insight just ends up perpetually frustrated.
The "lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be".
I think it's far more ambiguous and less measured of a net negative, than it is a clear, measured net positive for the "powers that be" if we define them as the wealthy.
You can take a very clear, measured look at wealth distribution over the past 50 years.
I have never worked with anyone in business who wished their customers had less economic/financial literacy. Just endless frustration.
On the other hand, you have a massive contingent of people who are constantly scoring own goals because their economic insight is purely an emotional surface level intuition.
It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel.
A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees.
The predatory loan market is a fringe market though, and it's not even that lucrative because delayed payments and default rates are so high (and bankruptcy rinses the lender).
Don't confuse the existence of people who profit on inefficiencies as being a sign that the system works best with those inefficiencies, or that those inefficieces are even particularly profitable.
Did anyone ever do a software project before AI? You can predict costs far better than you can with people.
Yeah, that guy you hired to write the prototype went on a 2 month bender and created 0 usable code. Did you budget for that? Oh, okay. The strategies to deal with spending on tokens are nothing compared to the overhead of managing actual people and their outputs.
I actually thought of this song while writing the post. I was definitely feeling my hubris at that moment, but I would at least liked to have given it a try in 2020-2022, when WebAssembly/Rust on the web was getting good and we were all stuck inside.
Now that SaaS CRUD apps can be built in 10 minutes, we can maybe do something more worthwhile, no? So much wasted effort has gone into this field already, in my opinion.
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