I personally don’t think we had a problem at all taking things like Rails and making extremely valuable software with them.

Like, no sort of problem that requires going all-in on tokens to solve. No problem at all, really.

But people think I’m crazy to say that.

So I think it’s a shame that DHH went in so hard on agentic engineering. They didn’t need to do it, they already were printing money.

Yeah again, you’re confusing wealth accumulation for progress.

I dismissed EA a long time ago as a way for already-wealthy people to continue accumulating wealth at any cost while avoiding paying as many taxes as possible in service of a deferred payout to rebuff problems that are intellectually possible but entirely hypothetical.

Microsoft is a monopolist that makes some of the most hated products on earth.

Facebook has been shown to derange young minds and has been a nonstop firehose of disinformation into global public discourse.

Crypto moved an insane amount of wealth from the poor to the rich through and uncountable number of scams and empty promises.

These? These are what you call progress? Yes, the created wealth for a few individuals, but progress? No, my friend.

> Microsoft is a monopolist that makes some of the most hated products on earth

Really? That is quite a claim. You are talking about one of the worlds most successful software companies. What fact based research or large scale survey do you base that on?

I’ll cop to not having facts to back up the perception of its software, but its status as an illegal monopoly is cemented by its successful prosecution by the DOJ.

But Facebook is extremely successful. Some crypto companies are very successful. I don’t hold any of these up as exemplars of the progress of humanity.

EDIT: My response to the GP, whose claim was that the only reason for the haters is that in each case they wanted the business to fail because they weren’t part of it, should been, no, actually there were at the time other and valid reasons detractors of those companies thought the way they did, and the same is true this time.

I was being sarcastic. I hate all of those with a passion.

Bravo, the sarcasm went right over my head :)

I’m paying top dollar for what I thought is an ad-free tier. First ad I see and that will be the end of that.

Agreed, Viable nonviolent protests are a useful signal that society has not (yet) converted to outright authoritarianism. This is their only use IMO. They cannot effect meaningful change. But their existence signifies we can still effect such a change without resorting to violence.

There is a threshold beyond which change can only come about via violence. I don’t wish to speculate how far away from that threshold we currently find ourselves. I think we’re closer now than we were 10 years ago.

“Net” is not relevant, nominal tax rate matters, and billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far, stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups.

> “Net” is not relevant

If it's not relevant then just give every government employee a million dollars a year raise, but on the condition that it's taxed at 100%. Then you've raised all the taxes you need and the private sector doesn't need taxing.

> billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far

Even if this is true (no evidence cited, of course) they still pay the most tax in terms of dollars, and their businesses generate far, far more tax downstream as well.

> stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups

I'm not blaming them. I'm just judging them by your standard. Get a better standard, and don't call it my "weird hangup".

A parent of your comment cited a ProPublica study that references real tax return data that showed billionaires paying an effective tax rate in the single digits. If their accumulated wealth were regarded as regular income, they should be paying 37% on most of the gains. Look it up yourself.

If you look at “net” like you want to, sure, they pay far more in tax dollars than pretty much anybody, but they are able to legally dodge paying tax on most of their wealth accumulation because if the way the IRS treats unrealized capital gains.

Imagine doing away with income tax and replace it with a wealth tax payable in whatever wealth you have. % of your house, % of your investments etc

I'm an ex-Salesforce engineer and I can attest that very few line-level engineers are ever invited to attend Dreamforce. This would have been an ordinary day at the office for the SRE team.

I'm an ex-Salesforce, and yes, at the time I left, there was a huge change freeze surrounding Dreamforce. Unless a demo of an announced feature was coming in really at the buzzer, change velocity would have been low since a few weeks ago. I worked in a sub-cloud, so I can't even speculate as to the reason for the failure.

Something I wonder about is whether SRE responses were delayed due to having to be emergency-change-approved because Dreamforce was on. I don't recall a global outage ever occurring during a change freeze when I worked there, so /shrug.