I liked this post. I may have some minor qualms (e.g. while I think execs should be proxies for the customer, they have many other competing motivations that can push customer needs way down), but I especially liked the closing section:
> Understanding before criticizing
> Large software companies have real problems. Some are structural. Some are cultural. Many are self-inflicted. But many of the behaviors people complain about are not pathologies – they are consequences.
> If you want to criticize how large organizations operate, it helps to first understand why they operate that way. Without that understanding, the criticism may feel sharp, but it will not be useful.
I see that kind of "criticizing before understanding" all the time on HN, and while that's probably just inherent to an open forum, commenters who do that should realize it makes them come across as "less than insightful", to put it generously. Like I see tons of comments often about how managers only get to their position through obsequious political plots. And sure, that may exist in some orgs. But you can always tell when folks have never even considered the competing forces that act on managers (i.e not just the folks they directly manage, but requirements coming from higher ups, and peer teams, and somehow being responsible for a ton when you actually have few direct levers to push) and solely view things through the lens of someone being managed.
I mean, their escape was quite complex and did actually "work", it's just they didn't get very far beyond that. Any dramatization would clearly need some comedic element
But still, I think the solution is brilliant and I can't wait to try it.
If you ask someone to turn it down, it can immediately come off as confrontational, even if you're being polite. With this solution, though, it's kind of hilarious because in one sense it's more confrontational, but the original music blaster would have to ask you to turn it down - but it's just their music.
I'm a pretty nonconfrontational person, but the one time I lost it was when this late middle aged woman kept chatting away on her cell phone in the quiet car of the LIRR despite other people previously telling her that she was in the quiet car (I believe my exact words were "Hey princess, what part of 'no cellphones' do you not understand" - there is a giant sign at the front of the car that says no cellphone use). But I don't think I'd ever do this in a public situation where the rules weren't so clearly spelled out.
I think I saw this quote somewhere else on HN about a post lamenting how difficult it can be to make new friends after age 30 or so:
Finding new friends as an adult can be exceedingly difficult, but becoming a friend to someone is surprisingly easy.
Lots of people (and if I'm being honest I'm one of them, so no judgement) just sort of expect friendships to come to them. But if you actually do the hard (and somewhat socially risky) work of inviting people to do things, offering to help unsolicited, organizing gatherings, etc. new friendships are much easier to come by.
Agreed (mostly, but going into the Electoral College debate is a whole other rabbit hole, and regardless a majority voted for these people at least once, with full prior knowledge), and in a democracy we get the government we deserve.
But still, I saw a good clip from Bernie Sanders arguing that when people voted for Trump, they weren't really voting for giant tax breaks for billionaires, or making health care much more expensive, or kicking lots of people off food stamps (though I'd argue they should have realized these things were coming if they had paid attention). What they were voting for was a fundamental shake up of the system, and (for better or worse) Trump was the only one offering fundamental change, vs. the incremental anodyne "can't we all just get along" milquetoast plans from the Democrats (or at least the "elite" Democrats).
Also, for this imperial expansionism issue in particular, I'd argue that this really does feel like a 180 flip flop from Trump after all his "America First" and isolationist rhetoric. For a lot of other issues, for example the immigration crackdown or tariffs, I was truly baffled that some people were surprised how dumb or extreme his policies were, as he basically laid out that this was exactly what he was going to do in the campaign. But putting us in the path of more global conflict and territorial expansionism was actually the exact opposite of what he said he'd do. I'm not that surprised because he's such a transparent malignant narcissist, but again, at least on this issue he flip flopped.
I think many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what and why people flag on this site. And as someone who also used to have this misunderstanding, I'll explain how I changed my mind on this topic.
A lot of people view flagging as "that is a troll post/comment" or "that was made in bad faith". But I think another reason many people flag is "this topic is highly unlikely to generate any useful discussion" or "this topic may be fine for discussion, but not on HN".
FWIW, I disagree with the flagging in this instance. Most importantly, I did learn something useful in the comments (the bit about how Apple previously almost banned Tumbler due to unintentional CSAM). But I also don't really begrudge folks who voted to flag. Political topics always have a lower bar for flagging IMO, because they nearly always devolve into useless tribal warfare - useless tribal warfare that you can easily get in spades on nearly any other forum/social media site online. And just look at the comments on this post. Most of them I'd characterize as generally uninsightful, and even disregarding my opinion, tons of the comments here are downvoted. So if some folks are a little too trigger happy to flag because they're at least trying to keep HN's uniquely high value discussions, I don't really blame them.
So while I disagree with the flagging in this instance, I also disagree that HN generally has a problem with bad-faith flagging.
> A lot of people view flagging as "that is a troll post/comment" or "that was made in bad faith". But I think another reason many people flag is "this topic is highly unlikely to generate any useful discussion" or "this topic may be fine for discussion, but not on HN".
I have seen this explanation several times, and it seems like an unfalsifiable conjecture that assumes a lot more good faith than one can expect out of a somewhat-mainstream tech-focused social media site which does not vet the users that sign up for it.
Then again, in fairness, my view is also conjecture. However, I've also noticed in controversial threads it's not uncommon to see reasonably-stated posts getting flagged/dead, and one would expect to see a lot less of this behavior if users were actually at reasonable risk of getting their flagging privileges revoked. So I at the very least feel like there's some basis to my conjecture.
Of course, the ultimate problem is that the flagging behavior seems largely absent of accountability. We don't know who flagged the post, and we also have no insight into how often the moderators of this site yank away moderation tools from their users.
> this topic is highly unlikely to generate any useful discussion
Some things need saying.
It doesn't always have to be a spirited, constructive rich debate in the comments. Some times it's just okay for one of us to tell it like it is.
I agree there are plenty of things that don't need repeating, don't need redundant commentary, and a billion etceteras, but the US is dangerously broken and the tech industry need to do their part to steer her away from endless fascism. This needs to be said, heard, and acted upon.
You may disagree, but 95% of people in the real world understand what "undressed" means in this context and see it as a gross invasion of privacy.
I knew when this issue hit the fan that you'd get hordes of overly-literal engineer types arguing that the person wasn't actually violated, or that "how is this any different from someone drawing a hyper-realistic picture of someone naked?" I can actually even (well, somewhat anyway) sort of understand this viewpoint. But if you want to die on this hill, you will, most people in the real world would condemn and ostracize you for this viewpoint.
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported.
I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
Grok has never been "wide open" to undress people. Anyone reporting that is being extremely duplicitous. Any image-to-image on Grok has stringent NSFW filters for exactly this scenario. People have worked out jailbreaks and those get dealt with.
The idea is that as money gets so concentrated, so does real political power. And with that concentration of political power comes extreme disregard for the opinions of the masses. I think it's a fair argument that the world has always catered to the will of rich people, but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich, and so much wealth is concentrated in so few.
More plainly on my part, though I'm worried sounds like berating when the comments are viewed consecutively: what does that have to do with the article we are discussing?
> “There was an aspect of, like, ‘Fuck the system,’” Masad said. “‘We need to remake civilization.’”
No matter what the political views, running into "real" money radicalizes most people and gives them the impression that they reached a superior evolutionary stage that uniquely entitles them... no, demands from them that they bend society and human civilization to their will, reshape it in their image, make it better because they are better. A sort of messianic complex.
This is the famous horseshoe paradox that says extremes are closer to each other than to the center. They might look completely different in their views but in reality they're back to back in the same place. 2 sides of the same coin. Different imprint, same value.
> but the difference now is that rich people are so unfathomably rich...
Compared to when? How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants). The mid-20th century was an era of mass prosperity in the US and parts of Europe, but it was an anomalous few decades, not the norm.
> How many times in history has wealth been less concentrated?
Mostly all of them! There have been periods where inequality dropped, but mostly it's been rising since at least the 1300s. I'm on mobile and can't link research, but there are a few papers that investigate this.
> As far as I'm aware, for almost all of history post-agriculture, wealth was highly concentrated while the average person lived in abject poverty (think: kings vs peasants).
And yet it was less unequal than now, an era where we've managed to use technology to concentrate wealth at an unprecedented scale. No longer is the richest person you know the king who collects your taxes next door, now it's a SV trillionaire on the other side of the world.
> Understanding before criticizing
> Large software companies have real problems. Some are structural. Some are cultural. Many are self-inflicted. But many of the behaviors people complain about are not pathologies – they are consequences.
> If you want to criticize how large organizations operate, it helps to first understand why they operate that way. Without that understanding, the criticism may feel sharp, but it will not be useful.
I see that kind of "criticizing before understanding" all the time on HN, and while that's probably just inherent to an open forum, commenters who do that should realize it makes them come across as "less than insightful", to put it generously. Like I see tons of comments often about how managers only get to their position through obsequious political plots. And sure, that may exist in some orgs. But you can always tell when folks have never even considered the competing forces that act on managers (i.e not just the folks they directly manage, but requirements coming from higher ups, and peer teams, and somehow being responsible for a ton when you actually have few direct levers to push) and solely view things through the lens of someone being managed.
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