I couldn't agree more

I do understand why the concept of the corporate veil exists, but there's a really big flaw: there are people in corporations who are in decision making positions who can financially benefit from steering corporations to behave unethically, if not downright illegally

There's a huge incentive for those people to drive the corporation to do shady shit to maximize their personal profits from it, and it's very very difficult to hold them accountable. That's a really bad combination and anyone could predict it leads to a lot of corporations doing shady shit

Oh sure the corporation gets fined once in a while but the shareholders and the executives laugh all the way to the bank. It's such a farce

> "Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots

Yeah this is two different things

The blue collar workers are the manual carpenters, not the dude managing them

Ok, then why were their damned fridges connected to a network then?

"The chain wanted to have Internet enabled control and dashboards about their fridges" or something?

You don't get to say you want the perks of being Internet enabled and then turn around and say that protecting against the downsides would cut into your margins too much. Sheesh

Support is cheaper if the support agent can remote access your hardware instead of flying a dude out.

What kind of support does a goddamn refrigerator need that can be fixed over a network?

I would assume that ~100% of refrigerator based problems would require a new part to be installed, not exactly something you can fix over the network

Imagine instead you had 100 fridges and 3 walk-in freezers and 5 industrial compressors. Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?

Now imagine you had 50 such stores.

MPLS? Multi-site Domain? VXLAN? Absolute fantasies, can't be done.

But seriously, networked fridge systems are one of the most straight-forwardly practical use cases for networking tech to improve logistical latency in a supply chain. There are definitely lots of different solutions for securing it depending on scale though.

The fridge only need to push data to the board then, there is no reason the board can send commands, and even less commands that can ruin the ware.

> Might you not think, hey it would be great if one person could sit in an office and look at an internal dashboard instead of physically walking to each unit and looking at the temp and other gauges?

Sure I would. And my very next thought would be "how do we secure that"

Obviously not the approach that was taken here

I dated a professional photographer for a while.

Yes, she knew an assload about lighting, composition, etc.

But her primary skill was marketing herself. Next most important was the editing. Lightroom and such.

You would be surprised how easy it is to take an awesome photo. But you can't just deliver an awesome photo to your clients when you're a pro, you have to deliver photos that look like what they want to remember, not necessarily what the camera captured

Since the technical skills are probably not so valuable anymore, probably the same will happen in software and science. The people who market themselves best or who pretend to know most without any shame, will get the jobs and AI will compensate the most of the lack of other missing perks.

> IMO, the initial reading shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. More than that (so a big diff) it should have been discussed upfront, and the design agreed

Part of the code review process is to verify that the writer actually did build the agreed design too though.

I think successfully sued and meaningfully punished are pretty different

Better for who?

It's certainly not better for you and me that Google is able to do whatever they want at the cost of a fine and nothing more

I was speaking from google's point of view -certainly not ours!

Better for whoever Google is doing free work for in exchange for the permitting people not being dicks. Like usually the way this works is the developer grants concessions or signs a "I promise I'll make a park out of this other parcel" or whatever in order to get their easy approval. If they have to fight for it that'll probably go away.

I think if you're saying it's good for one group and no others, "fair" is just categorically the wrong word to use

The system advantages wealthy people, full stop. White people tend to be more wealthy on average, and white men tend to be more wealthy than white women, but let's not confuse things. Wealth is really the biggest dividing line here

For instance, given the choice, would you be have 10 million dollars and be a nonwhite woman, or be an average-wealth white man or even above average wealth white man?

Wealth changes the equation more than other factors

But maybe I'm wrong, I am after all, a pretty thoroughly average white guy

Yes the fact that we have seen this pattern play out in the past and are very aware of all of the positive and negative effects it has should be sufficient to slow us down but naturally people are too selfish. The people who benefit will happily step over the graves of those of us who are fucked by the "benefits of industrialization" and then whoever survived will pat themselves on the back for a job well done while the rest of us rot

But there's no reason for us to be angry about it or resist it, of course

The only people who even somewhat successfully resisted industrialization are the Amish. Is that what we should be doing, forming religious communities that are increasingly isolated from the rest of humanity? Unable to contribute meaningfully to the discourse, but still subject to the externalities of the dominant paradigm?

Shoot—if the true believers are right and there's ultimately never again going to be an economically viable justification for anyone without an MBA to have a single independent thought, maybe the Amish were onto something after all.

They at least have the notion that you've got a soul, and that it's a thing that should be tended to. A boss who has genuinely internalized the belief that the value of all human knowledge and expertise has gone to zero—such a man is unlikely to be similarly burdened in his assumptions about you.

As if the only possible two options to how society can operate are "Amish" or "Hyper-extracting wealth from labour"

Call me crazy but the tone of your writing doesn't inspire me with much confidence that you're actually even remotely receptive. I think you just want to argue

I'm not into it. Go ask Claude instead. It has more patience for this sort of ignorant attitude than I do.

You're crazy, I'm...not even arguing. You'll see that even in the course of this one thread that I've been quite ambivalent. And I've already talked with Claude about it plenty, and few ideas that feel workable in our present climate. I don't feel like I'm "ignorant" but then we never do, right? Would love some pointers to ideas. What you got? Communism? Georgism? UBI?

We don't even have to go that far. Why don't we start with "capitalism that takes meaningful antitrust action against overly entrenched corporations"?

Maybe "capitalism with more substantial taxes for large corporations and the wealthy and fewer loopholes"? Can we try either of those?

> We're being asked to adapt, but perhaps we should just accept that things are not going back to what they were, look around, and decide not to do the things we used to love in a new way that we cannot love

I would love to take this path but unfortunately I have to make money to pay my bills and afford to eat. I don't know how I would afford to keep my home without continuing this career, as mangled as it is now thanks to AI

It doesn't have to mean abandoning this career. For example, if you used to program because you love the details and the control, doing the same with LLMs and pretend it is still about details and control will make you miserable.

But you might be able to choose to leave that to others, and fill some other role in the development process where you don't have to pretend.

It will still be with LLMs, though.

> But you might be able to choose to leave that to others, and fill some other role in the development process where you don't have to pretend.

That is abandoning the career.

Only for a very narrow definition of career.

Yes, but that other role is a change of career.