> To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.
Even if they are right about quality, people on here vastly overstate the value of quality. From socks to dishwashers to airfares, slop is a valid product as long as it is cheap. Security from a business perspective has been proven not quite optional, but it is hardly catastrophic if it fails.
I recognize that my experience may not be typical, but I spend the vast majority of my development time improving the quality of the systems I work on, in response to specific customer demands for it. The last time I had multiple consecutive weeks of greenfield development was in 2021.
> with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating.
I dispute that this is a fact. Maybe within a small group, but startups shouldn't be possible if masses of more cooperating people led to better outcomes. A large company should always win there and that does not happen.
> What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members?
We don't come anywhere close to this on a global scale. Most countries aren't this way on a national scale.
Startups generally _don't_ end up with better outcomes. Large companies stay stable, startups are volatile and often end in failure.
Stability means removal of volatility, which means to stay stable they end up becoming more generalised, rather than the laser focus a small team like a startup can have. That laser focus can work out when applied to the right problem at the right time, but is very much not a guarantee.
Yes, it certainly sells more than tires. It is basically a WalMart style discount store. And yes, it owns several other chains as well. But still, he says he's never been to Canada, and Canadian Tire and the other chains aren't operating in the US.
I think his point in general sticks, i.e. that businesses that he will never use, or have any common interest with, have got hold of his data.
I frequently get spam emails telling that the American tax service needs my details or my American medical insurance does. Sometimes I get ones telling me I've been shopping at some automobile store in the USA. I don't live in the USA, so neither of these are relevant to me, but it lets me know my email address is on some databases with a number of Americans.
One of the comments notes that Canadian Tire were "the only ones bothering to warn people that the company they use was compromised.
"Over here in the US I remember seeing something like that a number of years back. The card systems a bunch of retailers used was compromised and Target was the only one that bothered to tell everyone. And most people never knew if they used those other places they were compromised even if they didn't go to Target."
One of the well defined failure modes for AI agents/models is "laziness." Yes, models can be "lazy" and that is an actual term used when reviewing them.
I am not sure if we know why really, but they are that way and you need to explicitly prompt around it.
I've encountered this failure mode, and the opposite of it: thinking too much. A behaviour I've come to see as some sort of pseudo-neuroticism.
Lazy thinking makes LLMs do surface analysis and then produce things that are wrong. Neurotic thinking will see them over-analyze, and then repeatedly second-guess themselves, repeatedly re-derive conclusions.
Something very similar to an anxiety loop in humans, where problems without solutions are obsessed about in circles.
yeah i experienced this the other day when asking claude code to build an http proxy using an afsk modem software to communicate over the computers sound card. it had an absolute fit tuning the system and would loop for hours trying and doubling back. eventually after some change in prompt direction to think more deeply and test more comprehensively it figured it out. i certainly had no idea how to build a afsk modem.
> We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people.
I am surprised at how little this is discussed and how little urgency there is in fixing this if you still want teams to be as useful in the future.
Your standard agile ceremonies were always kind of silly, but it can now take more time to groom work than to do it. I can plausibly spend more time scoring and scoping work (especially trivial work) than doing the work.
It's always been like that. Waterfall development was worse and that's why the Agilists invented Agile.
YOLOing code into a huge pile at top speed is always faster than any other workflow at first.
The thing is, a gigantic YOLO'd code pile (fake it till you make it mode) used to be an asset as well as a liability. These days, the code pile is essentially free - anyone with some AI tools can shit out MSLoCs of code now. So it's only barely an asset, but the complexity of longer term maintenance is superlinear in code volume so the liability is larger.
> A big part of the story, as she tells it, is that American kids used to be hungrier at mealtimes
This is putting it extremely mildly. There are entire groups of nutritional health concerns that virtually nobody knows of today that were common at the turn of the 20th century. Rickets, Pellagra, Goitre, Xerophthalmia, etc.
All of these are caused by poor nutrition. Children back then were much smaller, again, due to lack of food and poor nutrition. During the world wars, double digit percentages of recruits were rejected due to being malnourished.
> Children in the 19th century happily consumed wild plants and organ meats. What happened?
If the product I’m trying to build doesn’t exist yet (and can’t meaningfully exist without deep technical execution), is the move to prove distribution somewhere adjacent first? Should I be finding a sales position within a tech-startup?
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