Google will delete OAuth clients falsely flagged as unused
8 points by panstromek 17h ago 7 comments
Ask HN: How do I start my own cybersecurity related company?
4 points by babuloseo 1d ago 4 comments
The Who Cares Era
669 NotInOurNames 696 5/28/2025, 1:07:57 PM dansinker.com ↗
The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.
Nobody wants to be Atlas.
People who’ve succeeded in tricking you… likely will do so again in the future.
And maybe with even less scruples.
I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.
[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025
[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024
[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?
https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat...
Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes and 346 deaths in 7 years - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024
As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737-spir... - June 16th, 2024
Boeing’s Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to Shareholders Above All Others - https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-traced-... - April 8th, 2024
Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024
https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0...
It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion.
If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
(GE also took substantial time to fall apart, but with no deaths to my knowledge)
They don’t necessarily have to be classified as the same contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance. If a manufacturer did the same today, it’s negligence because those are known engineering principles.
Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures for safety critical design. They also admitted to conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the above categories would you put those in?
Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
It's not about prioritizing short term results.
> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
Come on.
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.
Some fight it off longer than others.
I.e. they've been reinventing the business. They were probably burned to the ground in WW2 and had to rebuild the business from scratch.
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
> It's not about prioritizing short term results.
Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.
But why?
Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).
> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer
The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.
I’m not sure what you intend to convey with this statement. If price reflects reality, the current price should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to see how Boeing’s prior culture prevents them from succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does not point to that (they actually cut corners on bureaucratic requirements).
>The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
(Hint: it’s because they wanted to rush the design to market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product. Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the proximate cause.)
Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now and have been for about a year, and if you look at their stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined. Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the market in all markets they're in. But they don't get anywhere close to that.
The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the other person's hand.
The value of a stock is all pure speculation about how much you can sell it for later.
We probably agree that the stock will eventually reflect value. I think we’d quibble about how long that takes. As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. In other words, don’t bet on the market always reflecting reality.
Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times, Tesla.
I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it took more than just a lack of good competition to accomplish what they did, back in the day.
Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.
There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is reinvested.
If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree would be able to continuously pocket money.
if the stock goes up 10%, sell 10%. The value you hold is the same.
In a way it is, its logically a machine that makes money. The actual business doesn't matter if it's making money.
It's a long form rug pull, where you make money until the company no longer can and you hope you're not holding the bag.
(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).
(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.
(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).
(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.
In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.
So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Results now are way better than results later.
There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.
Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.
And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.
In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
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That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.
> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.
So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.
> Results now are way better than results later.
So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.
>So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
> You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.
Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing?
>> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.
There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.
Sure, but let's be clear, we shouldn't be taking any lessons from the Trump regime on how to live in virtually any aspect in one's life. If anything they're a shining example of everything not to do.
Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.
Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.
> Results now are way better than results later.
I don't see why you can't have both.
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
No wonder people become cynical.
The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.
If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.
When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).
If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.
In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.
I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.
I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.
>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.
What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.
I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.
Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.
This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.
We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME.
How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.
I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in my life. Open worker hostility.
When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?
People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...
High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.
I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.
Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps
Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
Nobody would've thought the rise of MAGA in the US was gonna be feasible two decades ago.
Maintaining ideological blinders for what is feasible is how entrenched interests prevent systemic change.
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.
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Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
You should change your name to Walter Dim.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...
I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.
Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.
What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
You're using the past tense. Is that intended?
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I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.
It seems companies hate their employees and customers
They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit
I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.
Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
I think strong unions are the only way forward
In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.
It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?
1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes
As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.
In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.
Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.
That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.
“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.
So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
You don’t.
I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:
"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."
https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m
Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.
Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.
I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.
Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.
Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.
I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.
So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.
Do we? https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts "According to the latest estimates, as many as nearly 14 million children in the United States live in "food insecure" homes."
> The gender and color barriers are broken.
Are they? https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-...
> All the rivers are mapped
Not really, plenty of unmapped rivers in jungles, also the ocean, and also, you could always FOSS map it: https://www.mapillary.com/app
> Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet?
Maybe a world like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)
Or this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning
Or this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-ga...
Maybe? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed
This? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41824495-fall-or-dodge-i...
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.
Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.
Or look at food prices. The USDA says inflation's "moderate," but try explaining that to the diner owner who's paying double for eggs and bacon while his customers stiff on tips on tips because their paychecks buy less. Meanwhile, Tyson Foods posts record profits, not because they're more efficient, but because they've got pricing power and a Fed that's terrified of "deflationary shocks" (corporate margins shrinking).
And don't even get me started on healthcare. Hospitals jack up bills 8% a year, insurers shrug and pass it on, and the economists call it "normal." But when a nurse asks for a raise to keep up? Suddenly it's "wage-price spiral" panic. Funny how inflation's a "tool" when it's squeezing workers, but a "crisis" when it threatens profits.
The game's rigged. Inflation's just the cover story. They'll print to save banks, but let Main Street eat the inflation tax. They'll cheer "record GDP" while your real paycheck buys less. And if you dare demand wages indexed to inflation? You're "unrealistic", but God forbid the bond market misses its 2% target.
So yeah, inflation's not the problem. The problem is who gets the upside (asset owners) and who gets the shaft (everyone else). And until that changes, all this talk about "necessary inflation" is just a con.
Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Finance
> One of the main themes of the book is the role played by the central bankers' insistence to adhere to the gold standard "even in the face of total catastrophe."[1] As Joe Nocera, a book reviewer at the New York Times, stated, "the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve around the gold standard...Again and again, this straitjacket caused the central bankers — especially Norman, gold’s most fervent advocate — to make moves, like raising interest rates, that would allow their countries to hold on to their dwindling gold supplies, even though the larger economy desperately needed help in the form of lower interest rates."
Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churchill, egged on by Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, made the fatal error of pegging the pound at its pre-war parity, overvaluing it by 10-20%. This wasn't gold's fault, it was sheer political hubris. Had they adjusted the peg to reflect actual economic conditions, the ensuing deflationary spiral could have been avoided. Instead, British industry was crushed under the weight of an artificially strong currency, all so London's financial elites could cling to the illusion of imperial prestige.
Then there's France, whose central bank, rather than stabilizing the global monetary system, hoarded gold, which ended up sucking liquidity out of the world economy. And let's not forget the Federal Reserve, which in the early 1930s raised interest rates during a depression to defend gold reserves, turning a recession into a full-blown catastrophe. These weren't flaws of the gold standard, they were acts of economic malpractice by central bankers who either didn't understand the system or deliberately sabotaged it to serve creditor interests.
The classical gold standard, which had functioned smoothly for nearly two centuries before World War I, delivered price stability, facilitated global trade, and forced fiscal discipline on governments. It only broke down when politicians, eager to fund their wars and welfare schemes, suspended convertibility, then tried to haphazardly reinstate it in the 1920s without proper adjustments. The problem wasn't gold; it was the refusal of policymakers to play by the rules.
The truth is, central bankers like Norman didn't cling to the gold standard out of blind orthodoxy, they used it as cover for deflationary policies that protected the financial elite at the expense of workers and industry. The Bank of England sacrificed British manufacturing to maintain London's position as a financial hub. The Fed tightened money when it should have eased, deepening the Depression. The Banque de France hoarded gold, destabilizing the global system. These weren't "prisoners of economic dogma", they were architects of disaster, hiding behind gold to justify their incompetence.
And what did we get when we abandoned gold for the "flexibility" of fiat money? The stagflation of the 1970s, the financial crises of 2008, and the inflation surge of the 2020s, each one a direct result of central banks printing money with no anchor to reality. The Keynesian promise that we could spend and inflate our way to prosperity has been exposed as a lie. The gold standard didn't fail; governments failed the gold standard, and now we're paying the price.
The lesson of history is clear. Every time we discard monetary discipline, we get short-term euphoria followed by long-term collapse. The "gold standard caused the Depression" narrative is nothing more than a smokescreen, designed to absolve the real culprits, central planners and political elites, of their catastrophic mistakes. The bill always comes due, and this time, it's going to be paid in devalued dollars and economic ruin.
Further reading: "Did France Cause the Great Depression? by Douglas A. Irwin"
The idea that the Fed "matched" gold supply growth with disciplined printing is historical revisionism at its worst. Throughout the 1950s, the Fed quietly monetized Treasury debt to bankroll Cold War spending. By the 1960s, it was cranking the dollar printer into overdrive to fund Vietnam and LBJ's Great Society fantasies, policies that sent inflation to 6% by 1969, even as the Fed kept interest rates below inflation (a.k.a. financial sabotage of savers). The so-called "2% rule" was fiction; the Fed was juicing the system for political convenience long before Nixon officially torched the gold window. And let's not forget the Fed's role in the speculative Eurodollar market, where offshore dollar lending exploded without reserve requirements, an early preview of the unregulated shadow banking systems that would later implode in 2008.
The fatal flaw was baked into the Bretton Woods design from day one, a paradox economist Robert Triffin warned about in 1960: To serve as the world's reserve currency, the U.S. had to supply dollars globally, but the more dollars it printed to meet demand, the shakier confidence in its gold backing became. This wasn't an accident; it was a structural time bomb. By the late 1960s, foreign central banks were drowning in dollars they couldn't redeem without triggering a run on Fort Knox. Meanwhile, the U.S. hollowed out its own industrial base, outsourcing manufacturing to Asia and Germany while replacing real production with financialization, Wall Street alchemy turning debt into "wealth."
Fast-forward to today, and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The dollar's purchasing power has cratered, 92% loss since 1971. The national debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, nearly triple U.S. GDP. Decades of negative real interest rates have turbocharged asset bubbles, turning housing into a speculative casino while wages stagnate. And now, thanks to Washington's rampant weaponization of dollar sanctions, the BRICS nations are actively dismantling the dollar's reserve status, with China stockpiling gold and brokering oil deals in yuan. The Fed's response? More printing, more deficits, more pretending the laws of monetary gravity don't apply.
The breakdown wasn't caused by "abuse" of the dollar system, it was the inevitable result of a system designed to be abused. Fiat currencies don't fail because people mismanage them; they fail because they enable mismanagement. Gold didn't collapse in 1971, the U.S. government simply abandoned it to avoid fiscal accountability. Now we're stuck with the consequences: a financialized husk of an economy where billionaires mint fortunes in leveraged speculation while workers get paid in depreciating digits.
This is one of those situations where averages hide the harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a problem, particularly in homes of certain value in growing markets (like Atlanta: https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-own...).
The only two I remember are Circles and LedgerLoops.
In Circles, each user gets their own currency not fungible with anyone else's. Payment channels are set up between each user and their immediate friends; users also allow automatic conversion between their currency and their friends' currency. Payments are routed through the trust network through a route that has capacity at each step - this is the anti-Sybil design - you always receive coins of your immediate friends' currency. Each user's coins are minted at a certain rate, and the system does accounts for the devaluation over time of each user's currency, so it's a bit like balances can be somewhat negative, and reset towards zero from either direction with time.
That's obviously a complex system, and radically unlike ordinary currencies. There are many reasons it probably doesn't work; I hope they all turn out to be wrong.
LedgerLoops is the other one I remember. Users post things they want to buy and things they want to sell. The system finds loops where each user gives something to the next in the loop. Apparently this is surprisingly efficient. There is no currency at all. This one, by contrast, is extremely simple, and also radically unlike ordinary currencies. This doesn't have a UBI component.
My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream', but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses. Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk food, already not really fit, segment).
Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.)
Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job.
You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop.
Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job, but stay in it purely for the money as very few other careers pay as well as what you can make in tech without advanced education.
Oter "bike shop" jobs I think you'll find in mostly hobby places - photography/camera shops, outdoor gear shops, local/independent bookstores, and craftmanship work - woodworking/hand-made furniture, musical instrument repair, some mechanics.
Aside from that, you're a mechanic. Motorcycle dealers/car dealers/random car lots hire mechanics too any may or may not care what you do on your own time.
Plenty of maritime industries need that same skill set, as do mining operations, agricultural equipment dealers and all of the medium size shops that repair heavy equipment you've never heard of.
Fab shops are great, if you want a bicycle shop experience but bigger and with 100% more yeehaw. You can teach yourself how to weld for a pretty low sum of money if you've got a couple hundred bucks, some space and creativity.
Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
A lot longer than that. See C. Northcote Parkinson's books.
Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
So I don’t get to do interesting things but my ego doesn’t feel stupid.
That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.
This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically different for people born even 5 years later, I think it largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back then.
Under-explored topic perhaps.
Gen-X in a nutshell, isn't it? People rarely seem. To remember that that generation even exists.
I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.
That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more.
When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.
Btw there hardly was a new technology in iPhone at the time of the launch.
Plus a shitload more that reached enough maturity to be broadly useful. CNN's Vr Cheap Thermal cameras
You seem a bit too pessimistic to google things for yourself, but technology is genuinely moving pretty fast
One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.
But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.
The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.
Sure there is, that organization is called having your own business, or consulting.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.
(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?
I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.
It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
Who says they are shirking? Perhaps they are working really efficiently, and doing their job in 1/4 the time.
also the wage differences between tech and a public service worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure environment, of course they won’t care. we get what we pay for with publicly owned utilities
In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay them if you feel that the goods and services you receive are not worth the money they are asking for.
If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be robbed blind and sent to prison for life.
Quite a big of a difference, in my opinion.
My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.
To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.
Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it.
The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.
The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.
People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".
[1] https://kai.kendal.org/
Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each street had 3 names:
1. the name on the map
2. the name on the street signs
3. the name given by the person giving you directions
I learned to navigate by counting intersections.
I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.
AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...
You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.
We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.
(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here.
How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors?
Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided.So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter.
In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)
In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.
In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
[1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit.
But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone.
While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.
He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed.
(And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.)
Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20.
40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs.
I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired".
I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!"
I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
As a non phone user, when I go out into the world, I feel like I'm on that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where I'm surrounded by these weird non-humans everywhere, and nobody thinks any of their behavior is odd but me.
However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation.
Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.
Yea, showing transforming economies to established economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You have two huge things happening at once. A massive transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to service style jobs away from manufacturing.
In a few decades the same will happen with China as it converts to a service economy.
Some of these issues are also safety issues. Being distracted is certainly obvious in a car, and massive fines and even criminal charges are now the result. But there are subtle things one must do in many jobs, just generically paying attention, which results in a save vs unsafe outcome. Boredom at work used to be filled with paying attention to ... work.
The garbage truck example I mentioned? I can think of a dozen safety issues. Safety for the employee, safety for someone walking by. Any accident could result in criminal charges for negligence, surely, but workplace safety rules are an issue too.
Soon, eventually, workplace safety rules will likely mandate "No phone at work, period"... at least for many professions. At least, that's how I see some of this resolving.
As for the garbage man... can you blame him? What reason does he have to maintain the appearance of vigilance? Their routes are long, getting longer with cuts, they're largely understaffed, and they deal with both the contempt of the public and their refuse.
Conditions are actively getting worse for some; the UK's second largest city has proposed cutting wages by up to £8,000 p/a due to a bureaucratic nightmare of their own making [1].
It is a thankless job with no opportunity for progression which most people would rather put out of mind completely. Frankly, they deserve better.
[1] BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98gv5dpr7lo
What activities make life worthwhile?
I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power, and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if not for the larger organisation I will care about my immediate peers/team.
If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times), or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating.
Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence, but in general I don't think most people just turned the "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety, money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people disengaging from the activity.
The throughline I think is that there's no consequence for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but I've also never been sacked.
That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect them to feel the same way about their work that I do about mine.
I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have been included in mass layoffs and restructurings throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if they were secretly not meeting some metric.
I filter out people like that because
A. They’re not on the same level
B. I won’t hire them and I wouldn’t work with them
C. They serve no purpose to me in my life because I don’t even want to hang out with them
Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.
Ugh..
People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”
I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.
People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.
Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...
https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...
I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.
Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.
I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
There's an excellent movie called Eighth Grade. The main girl in it, as a pastime, records videos for YouTube or similar in which she delivers nostrums to her audience about confidence and being authentically who you are and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in her real school life, she's plagued by self-doubt and pressured by peers into being something different, something "better" than who she is.
That movie hit so hard, looking back on my xennial eighth grade experience, and it still injected ancillary commentary on modern social media trends.
I have an uncle who takes interesting holidays and writes great updates on what he's seen as he travels. This is all A+ what Facebook should've been...but not what it became.
Because that entire experience...would be equally well serviced by a group chat bar some interface issues. And that's what Signal actually provides for super short form stuff now - I mostly lament that it can't quite fill that longer update niche.
One Nation under God
has turned into
One Nation under the influence
of one drug
Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation
- TV, the drug of the nation
edit: stoopid HN parser
I would also add other contributors: inflation along with salaries not increasing, and housing crisis in many cities around the world
Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
> Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.
> Amos: That sounds bad.
> Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.
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I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.
This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?
>There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
> To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.
I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.
It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)
If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.
One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.
Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.
If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
If I were to guess at what true universal human values were, I'd take a look at history, anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness. Humans seem to universally deride greed, selfishness, cowardice, causing harm to other humans, injustice, unfairness, and boastfulness.
I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism, and capitalism at its worst punishes those that live the desired values.
It sounds like you disagree, so, some examples:
In my characterization of the worker / employer relationship, the employer that best is able to exploit their workers (without going so far as to have measurably negative consequences on output or turnover), will have the highest profit margins compared to their competitors, all other things being equal. When they've all found all the other inefficiencies in the market, the last that remains is how terribly they can treat the workforce and still turn a profit. The investment market will see this organization having the highest margins and reward it with the largest stock price. The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it, being executives and having equity. They might even build career reputations on being able to come into a company and find the maximum possible level of exploitation (it won't be called that, it's called cost cutting or similar).
Thus capitalism rewarded treating humans poorly and short term thinking. Conversely the employer that treats its workers well won't have as high profit margins or growth, money to spend on stock buybacks etc, and so will have a lower stock price, lower valuations, etc, and will be punished according to the KPIs of capitalism. "How happy are your workers" isn't a KPI of capitalism.
Next, the cigarette industry. People like smoking tobacco. People would have bought paper tubes with tobacco in it. But they wouldn't smoke it as much as paper tubes with tobacco and a shitload of known-toxic additives. So, the companies that added a bunch of toxic additives (that increase addictiveness, etc), were rewarded immensely under capitalism. When non capitalist mechanisms kicked in to limit their profits, the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying. Thus greed and harming humans was rewarded under capitalism. Marlboro is worth far more than your given indie tobacco purveyor that doesn't add additives.
Just look at the overall state of our society and the fact that capitalism rewards our most derided values and often punishes our most treasured values is fairly obvious: teachers make less than investment bankers. Landlord success is correlated with tenant misery. Public transit in the USA died to feed the automative industry. I mean, America turned its healthcare into a for-profit industry, and just look at the results. But, the health insurance industry is worth 1.59 trillion, so, by capitalism's values, it's awesome!
Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.
>The trend seems to be that humans universally value selflessness, sharing, doing good to one another, long term thinking, justice, and fairness.
Not universlly, and that's the problem. And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.
>I argue that the derided values are those that are rewarded the most under capitalism
For the purposes of the discussion, I am even ready to agree with this to a certain extent. It's just that without capitalism, people with such qualities get everything, including other people as slaves.
>The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will be compensated well for it
The people who made the decisions to treat the workers poorly will not receive a single worker. Because there is competition for labor and because the worker has the freedom to decide where and how to work. This is why workers under capitalism get the best conditions among all social systems.
>the companies leveraged their capitalistic power to maintain margins, through lobbying.
That is, through other non-capitalist mechanisms. The obvious problem of the lack of capitalism
It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.
Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.
Granted, the horse got shipped off to become glue, rather than ground down by life, but the effects are pretty much the same.
My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.
And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.
So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
Everything capitalism, especially of the American variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can argue against that.
In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.
I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.
A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.
I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way.
You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.
In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.
He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.
> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash
In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.
If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.
Eh, I disagree with elitist...
We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.
I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.
A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here.
You are probably right somewhere else.
To be fair, the society decided to encourage such behavior.
The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.
So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer.
Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did not have background in this field. This guy just roped into this project and stayed.
I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.
I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a decision.
Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly what were the problems)
To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.
So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.
I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should be my default attitude when working.
Now I am in "Who The Fuck Cares" club.
Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?
If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.
Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.
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Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.
The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.
The OP here, basically has a simple (and common!) 3-way collaboration/communication problem:
- OP did not get along with 1 single fellow coworker that he was assigned to work with; this coworker reportedly does not listen to reason, does not read the research or background info that OP shared, etc.
- OP tried to seek help from a manager/lead type person, but that person was also not useful (i.e. not able to force a course-correction towards better collaboration).
Note: OP did not actually indict his entire team, or the entire eng organization, as all being hopelessly useless. OP said he had a problem with 2 specific people, and asked for tips to deal with that (small!) scenario. But instead of giving "small" advice for a "small" (and again, common and usually fixable/at-least-improvable) problem, both the toxic hive-mind as well as the HN commentators here have completely avoided trying to solve the actual root issue (which isn't nearly the impossibly-large-turnaround effort that everyone's making it out to be)... What we have here, is fundamentally an XY problem (https://xyproblem.info/), in that OP asked for help with X, but got advice about Y.
EDIT: Okay so I guess I should offer some concrete advice to OP for what I'm calling his "small" original problem -- usually there are 2 categories of options from this point: either escalate again, or try to resolve interpersonally without escalation.
- Escalation route: OP tried the 1st manager/tech-lead, who couldn't bring a resolution... that's... pretty common actually! So escalate 1 more level, calmly and professionally. Whether it's a skip-level director/VP, or a project manager, or whichever stakeholder is appropriate in OP's context -- explain politely what steps you have tried to solve the problem so far, why the counter-proposal / alternative is bad or won't work, and emphasize that you are still happy to collaborate further, but you are currently at an impasse and need a more senior person to weigh in. Then, OP needs to be prepared to "disagree and commit", if the decision doesn't go his way. NOTE: if the decision doesn't go his way, it could mean 1 of 2 things: a more senior person brought in extra context or expertise that OP did not know about and hence made a better decision that OP can learn to appreciate, OR it could mean everyone is an idiot and OP is the only sane person in the company... there's no reason to jump to the most negative conclusion as the only one, but certainly I acknowledge it's possible (I just don't think it's good advice to assume the worst, without even trying a simple +1 extra round of escalation... OP could at least try 1 more time).
- Non-escalation interpersonal route: OP can find a professional way to say to the problematic coworker, "frankly, I still disagree with your approach, and it's my job to document my disagreement with our manager(s), but at the end of the day, if you insist on doing it your way, then go ahead". Sometimes, the only/best way to learn, is to let someone else try and fail. This isn't callousness or retribution, this is actually a common lesson for mentors who might otherwise struggle to try and protect their mentees from ever possibly making a mistake or being wrong about something... an overbearing/overprotective mentor would need to learn how/when to take a step back, to let a mentee try and fail and learn-how-to-learn from their failures. Of course, OP is not this coworker's mentor, and does not need to feel obligated to assume that role, but I am simply pointing out that letting someone go off and do something you disagree with, can actually be an act of caring (rather than a form of not-giving-a-fuck).
If you care enough to leave, you actually do care about the quality of your work. No, you can't fix other people, but you can change your environment.
* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded
* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks
* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time
* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job
So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.
At this point you're better off working on your own thing because the company is usually, always with few exceptions mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile.
The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to delusion and abandonment.
I am in a proper place now, but I regret not getting a second job in my previous fintech job.
We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.
What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.
So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."
I give a fuck.
I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.
I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:
1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).
2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.
That's the balance I'm currently taking.
An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before having found the better job because sanity matters.
No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.
(To be fair and for background, Google did not invent this - but perhaps pushed it much further than it was before. For example some variations of this at Wall Street firms in the 70s?)
Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.
I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just going through the motions.
(Compared to companies of people who care about what they're doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving money.)
One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).
So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).
To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.
They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.
But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.
It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter.
I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger.
As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength. Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as you can?"
I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."
His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds exhausting."
We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if their differences were amusing to him.
His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.
There's big things we should care about, and then there's little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground, a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that occupy our minds.
It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks. Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.
It's one thing when "public affairs" and affairs of your local community are one and the same. But modern democracies seem to be actively preventing citizens from being actually informed about anything, and the granularity of elections ensures people's opinions (ill-informed or otherwise) are uncorrelated with end results.
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The Serenity Prayer is very real to me. So is "be the change you want to see in the world"
Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.
The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.
We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.
Be optimistic. Life is good.
Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.
I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.
> The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
If you think that bitcoin and facebook are examples of "real newness" that we only perceive in retrospect, I think we're not seeing eye to eye. Those to me are exactly the kinds of things that represent a colossal waste of human time, effort, and money.
I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.
>Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.
>HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.
It's not?
>An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.
An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.
>Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.
I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.
Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.
It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.
I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.
As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optimism. Now, though, I think there is a widespread feeling that tech, as a whole, is no longer in service to the improvement of human society. It just feels like it went off the rails in the past 15-20 years or so, where for a lot of us tech feels like it's made our lives worse.
I no longer look forward to the newest tech or gadget. If anything, I look forward to going for a walk in the woods and leaving my phone at home.
When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.
When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.
When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.
When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.
When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.
The future has been a lot more interesting than people are giving it credit for, atleast my brief slice of it so far.
If you only look at a relatively short slice by itself, you just see the change. You need to look back at history to compare the relative pace of it. And when you do, it's hard not to get the impression that things have slowed down substantially.
I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.
That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.
Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.
Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.
You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.
Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?
Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.
Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
https://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-fr...
The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.
My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.
This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.
I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is necessary to inform the present. It gives us a measure for peoples and corporations behavior. Don’t be fooled that this is an accident. “Who cares” is propaganda for a very different future.
In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.
In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).
Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.
There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).
It seems to be contradictory, the very fact of the price wage disparity suggest many many people care to an extremely high degree of working within that literal specific geographic area.
Which demonstrates they care very very much about their economic interests at least.
And this is where the crux lies: you'll get paid better for your work in London, but unless you become truly rich, you'll still not earn enough to afford your own roof over your head. All your money will go on transport, rent and living expenses. The amenities afforded by a city, restaurants, cinemas, etc - these all cost money and are more expensive than outside of London. So you end up paying through the nose for the reasons why you actually moved to the city.
So you do the grind for 10 years, say you are actually quite good and have a bit of luck and you are now earning 5x the salary you could earn in some bumfuck village in the country, but you still can't afford to own anything, you are permanently feeding rent seekers on everything. Once this realisation hits, it's difficult to care about doing a good job. You realize that you could do a shit job, put the minimum effort and still get 80% of your "peak" salary, and this marginal decrease won't affect you in any material way. Perhaps you have to cut back on eating out, or maybe lease a 2 year old car instead of a brand new one. But you realize that this marginal 20% increase in salary won't get you anything that'd be worth all the extra stress coming from caring about your job.
You'd need to sacrifice all your social life, your energy and free time, put in a hardcore grind, save every last penny you can, and then after 10-15 years you can buy a tiny rowhouse on a mortgage with a postage stamp sized garden - if you are lucky. And then you realize you spent the prime years of your young adulthood but instead of a landlord you are now beholden to a bank and an interest rate. You are terminally burnt out and haven't been able to properly enjoy life in any way up till now, and the grind isn't over. Instead of paying rent, you now have to fund the mortgage payments for another 10-20 years.
Even if millions of Londoners hate it that doesn’t change the fact that they are continuing to do so day after day… so something must still outweigh all the downsides combined.
So their care is very high, just focused on perhaps a very peculiar basket of things, so to speak. I can’t see any other explanation for such large scale behavior.
They still feel better off than doing a shit job in the countryside, otherwise they'd move there. But the question we are discussing is: "Why don't people care about doing a good job?"
I don’t see how one relates to the other, I wasn’t questioning the latter point? It’s undoubtedly the case for many.
You
hit the nail
on the head.
Such a simple thought. How did I miss it? Haha. Thanks for mentioning. A bad deal is my siren seducing me to check out at work.
I'm a high school grad who had no desire to go to college, but I've always had a love of reading and usually questioned everything. I made a living in the trades and have very little complaints. I worked with hundreds of people, both young and old, and noticed something most had in common. Most cared very little for learning anything outside of just getting by. I saw very few with a book in their hands and was questioned many times as to why I was reading! I was even told I would never need to know that, when reading about technology.
I'm trying not to be overly critical, but I still don't understand why knowledge to them wasn't valued. I'm also afraid it's being reflected in society today based on the blatant refusal to read today's happenings and the lack of wisdom to interpret the possible outcomes, or to even care.
Your mind goes into a completely different state when you are immersed in a single topic vs when you are consuming textual content that causes context switches every 10 seconds.
I love her, but it's truly mind boggling how little she cares about learning stuff.
For example,
* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?
(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)
* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?
* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?
I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.
We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.
I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.
For some people now, i would be hard to summarise them. To describe them, other than 'plays games' or 'watches videos'. And you can tell something is missing, they're not happy, but distracted enough to not care.
And the worst-kept secret is that people have to be told what to care about.
That's not a direct response to your concern, but I think this quote applies in a parallel manner -- I've seen this quote applied as a statement about what it means to be "punk", and how simply being content with yourself (meaning you don't fall victim to all the ways society attacks/preys on insecurities or tries to sell you drugs or makeup or clothes or surgery or whatever to change yourself), is actually incredibly "punk". You don't have to dress up weird, or go out and do graffiti, or get into fights... just being content with yourself is "punk", within a capitalist/post-capitalist world.
So, in a similar vein, I think this author is saying that, "caring" is also a form of being "punk", in a world where seemingly not-caring is mainstream now. The thing is, being "punk" doesn't need an external "why" reason to justify it... the whole point of "punk" culture is about authenticity, that just being yourself is what's important, that you don't need a special reason to reject capitalist consumerism or mainstream opiate-of-the-masses media or to dress how you feel instead of how society thinks you should look. In that way, being "punk" is quite Buddhism-aligned actually, to center on existence and enlightenment through self-realization, instead of pursuit of external "why" reasons for doing X or Y.
Caring is the punk thing to do, because it is who you actually are. You don't need a special reason to care, if you subscribe to any kind of "punk" mindset/philosophy about life. Don't care because it will yield better material rewards, get you laid, or whatever. Care, just because.
At least, that's the argument... up to you if you buy it or not.
this happens when the person paying the money and the person judging the work quality, and the person "punishing" are different entities.
Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say. Politicians spend, department beaurocracy spends, and hires, etc. The workers get hired, get paid, but their performance is not judged. The final recipient of the work - specific citizens - get poor service for the taxes paid.
I would claim this is not a good example at all.
A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.
If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.
All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.
Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.
Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.
I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.
>> all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending
this is exactly what i mean by having different entities judging the quality of the work, and the one doing the punishing.
If it was the same person, bad quality work gets judged, then immediately punished. The reason why rules/documentation/red-tape exists _is_ because the judging and punishing is delegated away.
The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.
I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.
The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.
And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.
When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community.
Now we have reality TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies and the hype generated by social media as major influences for children growing up today.
Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.
I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. We in the tech community are partly responsible for this.
I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author suggests is a good start. Start caring.
Just thought about something:
There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines vs word (took me a while to come up with an example, essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so old it's useless to know them. Like making butter, sure you can do it if you want to, might be fun, but in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. Then there's stuff that is in decline but needed anyway. Like being able to read a book.
Maybe you could express this as a 2D graph, where X is how much people know it and Y is how much people need to know it.
That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do. This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds.
In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd otherwise delegate to others. You could write memos and reports yourself, instead of asking your secretary. You could manage your calendar and tasks yourself, instead of having someone else do it for you. You could design your own presentations quickly, instead of asking graphics department for help. And so on, and so on.
What happened then, all those specialized departments got downsized; you now have to write your own memos and manage your own calendar, because there are no secretaries around to do it for you. Same for graphics, same for communication, same for expense reporting, etc. Specialized roles disappeared, and along with them the salaries they commanded - but the work they did did not go away. Instead, it got spread out and distributed among everyone else, in tiny pieces - tiny enough, to not be visible in the books; also tiny enough to not benefit from specialization of labor.
Now apply this pattern to all other categories of software, especially anything that lets you do yourself the things you'd pay others to do before.
And then people are surprised why actual productivity gains didn't follow expectations at scale, despite all the computerization. That's because a chunk of expectations are just an accounting trick. Money saved on salaries gets counted; costs of the same work being less efficient and added to everyone else's workload (including non-linear effect of reducing focus) are not counted.
I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care.
We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point).
These tools operate with or without time and effort from another non-specialist person. In the case that another human needs to do SOME work they didn't have to previously, this is effectively the definition of overwork in the presence of the same expectations.
This other person must now be the executor of whatever that work is because hiring a specialist in that area does not make financial sense.
And so gradually we erode the quality of all the intersectional work 15% (for example) at a time, while adding a small amount of work to the remaining (fewer) people.
Now maybe we can build a tool that is 99.9% the quality of a human for negligible cost. But it still doesn't take very many multiplications of 99.9% with itself to end up with shit.
Every generation has some form of “kids were better when I grew up” and there has been a very long history of kids not respecting others, your generation included.
Things are changing as they always do, but when it comes down to it humans have not changed that much.
Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to get us anywhere.
It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work, etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty. So why keep up the pretense?
Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care again by appealing to those older values.
On the other, there are many, many examples of artists and musicians and museums and galleries and others who are - still, always have been, always will be - making extraordinary, brilliant, unique, beautiful things. There’s not a day goes by on HN that I don’t see stuff that fits this mold.
I think there’s actually extraordinary opportunity here, to continue making things that are great and unique and rough around the edges and cared for. The author sums it up well: but I’m not sure the scene is quite as dire as he’s making out at the beginning of the article.
Surprised this didn’t smack me in the face when I first read the post. This very site does indeed serve as a bit of a counterpoint.
How could we compare and contrast effort and apathy across time, apples to apples? Maybe comparing farmhands or authors… e.g. the average reception of authors’ works vs. length of writing time
(bad example, maybe someone has a better one)
They pretended to care because it looked bad if they did not.
But when you started talking seriously about effecting change ( in context to workplace situations), they would diplomatically excuse themselves.
That's why I avoid big corporations where this behavior is endemic.
I mostly worked at smaller companies and left when they got too big.
As someone who has cared deeply about sometimes esoteric things, I've found that caring is actually the shortest path to being _hated_, mostly by other people who care about the same things but for different reasons.
The best thing I did for my own sanity was to stop caring so much.
But this is still the case. One of the things I care the most about is having a consistent moral framework. I care less about the specifics of that framework; everyone's is slightly different, and I think that's a good thing overall. However, I do care that people apply their own frameworks consistently, and when they don't, I call them out on it.
Still mostly just ends up with me on the receiving end of a lot of hate.
Which is ironic, given that in my experience, the worst of it had come from people whose moral framework is presumably incompatible with hate!
I care deeply about that, too, and it's really not healthy for me.
This is too true, and ive been guilty of being the hater more times than id liek to admit.
There are people such as yourself who live by rigid guidelines, there are people such as myself who live by morphing guidelines, and there must be people who live by nothing at all. I don't think one approach to life is strictly better than the others.
That's where I imagine the negativity you experience stems from. I don't know anyone who appreciates the imposition of rules on their lifestyle, regardless of how well you think you've profiled their framework. Especially in a casual setting, most people just want to get along.
And it can earn one a surprising amount of hate because you aren't willing to make exceptions.
My first rule for myself is that I must always acknowledge that I could be wrong. This demands that my opinions remain fluid, because it's not possible for me to be right about everything I think I think I'm right about.
So I think you're wrong, and I think you're making a huge number of assumptions based off of very little concrete evidence.
The negativity stems from seeing the current world of social media, in which people constantly put forth strong moral statements, full of black-and-white thinking and absolute statements--and summarily contradicting the very moral frameworks they purport to uphold in the process of doing so.
And then seeing the hundreds (or thousands, or even millions!) of people agreeing with them, all not sparing a single thought for whether or not they're being internally consistent.
The social world is frothing with righteous hypocrites, and the most frustrating are those who claim to stand for inclusion, positivity, and the denouncement of hatred, while simultaneously being quickest to hate when faced with disagreement.
So, no, I'm not convinced that people "just want to get along". More and more, I think people just want to be "right", without any regard for the truth of the matter.
Because, relationships are a two-way thing. If you notice people are being mad at you .. then know that's one of the "two-ways". You are doing something which triggers them. Now I need to be careful of course about victim blaming here, but assume I'm you know a fair and kind person just giving some orthogonal advice :-). I am.
And it's not The World is just against change. It's More often the message, and how it is delivered.
Specifically, it's the emotional weight behind the message. This is where it gets difficult because we're not like trained emotionally, by many of the western cultures.
Briefly, analyze Like, why do you care? Why do you care about the subject that you are saying needs to be changed. And then you can start to think well maybe the way that I care comes out in terms of intonation. Or brevity. Or the way that I cut people off. Or the way that I force the conversation to be focused on my concern. Note here I am transposing me and you.
And of course all of this is just my two cents based upon speculation, so feel free to ignore it :-)
The trouble I have with this advice is that every specific example or suggestion on how to change my message has ultimately boiled down to "soften the message enough that the recipient can feel okay with ignoring it."
But that defeats the whole purpose! If someone is actively entertaining a cognitive dissonance of some kind, "softening" the message merely gives them the "out" they need to continue to hold the dissonance!
Unfortunately, because I've been given this advice so frequently, and because it always ends up being "just don't challenge people", it comes across as rather condescending. I'm sure that's not your intent, but next time, please consider that maybe I've already done that analysis a hundred times over, and still reach the same conclusion.
Perhaps I'm just stubbornly wrong! But I really don't think the issue is that; I think the issue is that we've made it socially unacceptable to call people out for being inconsistent. Just look at what the typical responses to such a thing are: whataboutism, radical generalization, ad hominems, retreat to an echo chamber, the classic gish gallop of tangentially-related things, etc.
Perhaps what we've really made socially unacceptable is the admission of fault?
If there’s one book I could “force” everyone to read, it’d be the Dawn of Everything. The David’s (Graeber and Wingrow) describe how the fundamentally most interesting attribute of humans is how much we tinker.
I love this article because it shares those same values. It’s so crucial for us to reject abject passivity and even when things seem impossible, to tinker and play and never assume that everything is as it will be.
But my own "force" recommendation is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Also a very clarifying read on how exactly we got to this Who Cares Era through the mid-late 1900s.
These are the people who had their applications rejected elsewhere since the AI didn't like them. I use ChatGPT to create my resume since it gives me at least a chance I'll get a response. Manually written resumes get ignored.
This is the first I've heard of this and I'd love to know more. What is it about AI generated resumes that get paste AI resume filters that manually-written resumes don't have?
During my formative years studying pure math, I learned that the hard work of _caring to understand_ is rewarded---for example, by your internal sense of beauty and by the enthusiasm of other mathematicians.
For my Ph.D. I decided to try bringing the mathematical toolbox to the field of artificial intelligence, which seemed to be facing some interesting problems. Overall, the message I've received loud and clear is that understanding is _not rewarded_ in this field, and actually discouraged.
The work of an outwardly successful machine learning scientist is to make incremental improvements to well-established methods and package the results in easily marketable papers. Learning about and using previous work is rewarded to the extent that it improves marketability (for example, by improving Greek alphabet or \displaymath density) but is discouraged if standing on the shoulders of giants in this way renders the paper incomprehensible to a goldfish with a knowledge of high school algebra.
I think it's clear that our current paradigm on deep learning is struggling to make scientific progress. The hard work of reshaping a paradigm must involve looking back and _caring_ about the perspectives that have been developed over the last 60-odd years. Learning other points of view is hard work, but it's what you're supposed to do as a scientist! Unfortunately, it's hard to overstate how little people care about anything beyond their diminutive research niche. (I had one colleague who said their work hasn't been intellectually demanding ever since LLMs got good at writing pytorch code and others who seem to feel that LLMs are "experts on math.") Every day I look at my own research group and the boatload of "top conference papers" and feel sad and angry that we call this science.
It's certainly poetic that LLMs---the emblem of people who don't care---is backed by a "research community" that, on average, doesn't know what it means to care about science.
"don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization in the western world.
Same thing as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." They aren't just surrendering responsibility, but accountability as well.
Finding the reliable sources of data or enough metadata and experience to make your own judgement is the key skill today.
I would argue -in cases like this- the reader doesn't exist, closer to a dead internet society
I think "If it's worth doing; it's worth doing half-assed." is a personal working philosophy that is probably thousands of years old.
It's just that now, we have better tools for half-assing it.
Our whole corporate culture is based on the idea that business doesn’t have to plan more than a quarter ahead, because engineering will pull a magic trick instead.
For decades after the Cold War, politicians and financiers are gradually moving to the "apres moi le deluge" mindset. Now it drips down to ordinary people because the Cold War generation is dying.
That's it.
Even when work is 100% done by people I regularly see output that shows no one cared.
Humans can only mentally handle so much. In this era of humanity, we are overloaded on many dimensions. Therefore we should expect the byproduct and blow back from being overloaded.
It's like trying to teach a toddler how to manage a non-profit organization of 100 people. Is not going to go well.
The truth doesn't even matter. It's not factored in. Even liars care about the truth enough to deceive you. Bullshit is worse than lying.
We disagree? Ok. You believe your facts, I'll believe mine. We can scream into the void with our respective audiences.
It's hard to maintain the energy to seek the truth because there is so much bullshit. The peddlers of it are filling every single form of media with it. Every text box on every webpage and in every app is an invitation to add more of it to the world.
I think people get overwhelmed by it. And you have to have the bullshit cop on your shoulder exhorting you to care. It takes time and energy to care. Most people are too tired. So we let things slide. We stop listening to the bullshit cop. We become more selective. We care about the truth in some contexts but not others. It's survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
I consider myself as someone who cares and takes pride in creating software. I barely can take working in the industry anymore… It’s time to become a goose farmer.
It comes down to values, of the people that you are working with, and of the market in which your groups people is operating.
If you can dial those things in to match your own proclivities about how you like to be treated, then you're golden.
I'm not even anti-AI. I use these tools all the time to make "zeroth draft" documents that I can build on. It actually saves me a lot of time! But everything is in service of me delivering products I care very, very much about getting right, and I don't assume their output is anything other than very sophisticated text autocompletion.
This might be a variation on one I've seen a few times: I'm an expert on something, and advising someone who wants to instead go with advice from their friend who isn't even involved.
(And who usually has little-to-no experience in the thing. But it's like calling up your nephew at Google to ask why your computer is slow. After the knowledgeable neighbor who looked at it already told them it's because they have very little RAM, and they're pushed into swap by this one program they installed. But the Google nephew hears "home PC slow", says they probably picked up a bunch of malware, and to reinstall Windows, and please stop calling during work hours.)
I think this can be a psychological quirk, or social dynamics pressure, or an inability to assess competence due to a lack of understanding of the field/subfield.
If I had to guess, I'd say the last one is probably the factor in being overruled by ChatGPT.
One end-run around that is to have some validation of your expertise in the decision-maker's mind, and it might be stupid. For example, in the minds of some decision-makers, if the person has some credential they value ("They went to MIT!", "They worked at Google!", "I'm paying out the nose for their consulting fee!") the decision-maker will put a lot more weight on that person. Maybe even more weight than they give the ChatGPT superintelligence they imagine. It's nice to be listened to, even if it's for the wrong reasons.
It’s always the climbers, the middling intellect crowd that play the petty dominance and status games in a large organization, believe that their advancement is enabled by unwavering confidence. I say they keep rising but there’s a limit—they generally end up at the top of the peon pyramid but never ascend to the very highest leadership roles. But, unfortunately, I still have to deal with them.
* Option A (bad choice for company) has some angle upside for them, such as something they can credit to themselves or that increases their status, but option B (the best choice for the company) would be owned by one of their rivals.
* Loss of face, such the best option for the company would too clearly expose and reverse a mistake they made (when they and/or the org doesn't believe in acknowledging mistakes).
* (Speculating about some weirder ones) They are all about confidence projection, as you say, and further, they've come to believe their own BS. (Maybe this falls under the psych quirks I mentioned earlier.)
So the confidence in ChatGPT, or in anything else, might not be irrational or misinformed, but merely part of their internal sales act for selfish advantage.
Fortunately, I haven't run into any of these problems a lot, but have enough experience to know they can happen. Today, I would recognize some BS quickly, and move to confirm and correct it, and probably leave if there was too much uncorrected BS.
After I post a job to hire a developer or designer (freelance), I get one application every five minutes, until the job gets taken down. Say I leave the post up for a week, that means that I have 2,000 applications to sort through.
It is shocking to see the quality of inbound responses.
60% obviously don't read the job post, 10% read it but don't make an effort to do anything other than the bare minimum, 10% have a huge delta in skills vs expected salary, and the rest are a mixed bag but at least made an effort.
I think these numbers stack up pretty accurately across my day-to-day interactions with people in the world. 60% are totally checked out, 10% are doing the bare minimum, 10% show up but are maybe in the wrong role.
So 1 in 5 people can be expected to care and make some sort of impact.
It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or perform consistently.
And then social media gives us post after post about how your coworkers are not your family and how dumb you have to be to give 100% to your work. A lot of people seem to mindlessly prescribe to this train of thought that would otherwise have questioned it if they went to a church or had some belief system that emphasized the inherent importance of doing good work.
If the individual expects that society doesn't care about the individual than the individual has no / less reason to take care of oneself for the benefit of society.
A solution to this is to be more conscious of one's own values. What do you value for how strangers who are nearby you should be treated? Kindly? Aggressively? If those values are being met and are shared by your immediate society, then it's a chance that you might also feel like you are being taken care of. Which then might meet your sense of stress and satisfaction which might then allow you to feel comfortable interacting with society in a playful manner more comfortably bringing up your own needs in the group, and having a shoulder to cry on when when you need to, and having a group just help step in and take care of some of your needs because they have the bandwidth to do so. And they also care because they share your values.
Values are, I think, an underappreciated concept, these days, partly because of all sides shaming, but also because the algorithm as they call it is what is supplanting our values. The algorithm is pushing views on us. And you know the old saying, you are what you eat, that also applies to you are what you read.. we're undergoing conditioning by reading all this stuff about all these different ideas about all these different things which we were supposed to care about. So our values are becoming a little soft and squishy, about what it is that we want or need. We are trying to get what we need from a environment which is being driven by the algorithm and its values.
So anyhow, pay attention to your values... And shape your interactions with the world including social media based on those values. And you'll be happier.
In short: the problem is the customer/consumer. All of us.
Who really doesn't care? The person paying. Or at least the median person paying. For most industries the customer does not care about hard work or whatever. It's always something else. Ongoing operations cost money. Growing costs money. In the end you need revenue to pay for on going work and justify investment or loans to help make more money. But the customer who will provide that needed revenue DOES NOT CARE about all these things we want.
This happens with citizens and infrastructure. This happens with businesses and their internal dev teams. It happens inside FAANNG all the time.
I don't know how to fix it, but certainly demanding change against an uncontrollable reality is not a sustainable solution. In the face of such a reality you can certainly understand how and why "not caring" is the only rational response.
Probably the only way to escape it is to work at companies that are pre-revenue and have enough external investment to fund their operations. Oh hey...
Meanwhile, from Pineapple Street Studios in 2024: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wonder-of-stevie/i...
If you do not care about something you are not going to become competent. And once you are competent you are also more likely to care:
E.g. once you learn a music instrument, or a craft, or the arts, you suddenly see all the flaws in other peoples work as well, not just your own. Sometimes it can even be hard to enjoy these things like you did back when you were ignorant.
Unfortunately, if you have neither you are stuck.
Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses because it doesn't "feel" good!
This is a self-fulfilling prophesy that violates the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Important contract terms are buried in a 100 page mortgage contract. Wasteful government spending on someone's pork project is on page 980 of a 2000 page spending bill that no one reads before voting on it.
Why care when—if you're the average bear—you can work incessantly and never really get anywhere close to what past generations enjoyed? I'd prefer to live in a world where people cared more, but if the incentives aren't there, we can expect to see the amount of "care" continue to decline.
This is why the "fix the money, fix the world" ethos of Bitcoin should be given more attention by detractors.
[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap
I see that you're an artist. The concept your writing about here is obvious to most artists but not so to technologists (generally speaking). What do you make of that?
I used to seek out tough challenges that had tight deadlines. Early in my career. This helped me gain a lot of knowledge about my craft. However, now that I've acquired a lot of knowledge I don't go actively seeking work I'm not being asked to do. It's not because I don't care, but it's because I value my life outside of work.
The other part of this is that there were never tangible rewards, such as a raise or promotion (besides the experience I acquired) so at this stage in my career by asking to do extra work and spend more stressful hours in a salaried job environment for nothing in return would ultimately be a bad decision on my part.
In Buddhism, we talk sometimes talk about how apathy is the "near enemy" of equanimity. That is, equanimity is good and apathy is bad, but sometimes apathy looks like equanimity.
I was a software engineer for several years, and what was hardest for me was this exact "who cares" attitude. I wanted to do good work, but that was not the culture.
Now I seek the extinguishment of suffering. No one here says "who cares" here about this work. It's deeply refreshing. I feel very lucky to be here.
"It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do for those we know.) A great many people now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the birdsong and the frosty sunrise."
Many people nowadays don't. Their job sucks and they don't care about it, they have no relationships, no real interests. They just distract themselves with meaningless things they don't actually care about. They watch videos/shows/streams they don't really care about. They play games they don't really care about. They eat food, but don't care about it. And they don't feel any motivation for anything anymore.
Increasingly, we have larger corporations eating everything, including other companies, leaving consumers with fewer choices. In recent years there has finally been some pushback from the government—antitrust was more or less nonexistent ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist in 2001—but it remains to be seen whether this will end with more than just another wrist slap, and whether the new administration will roll back even the small progress made. When we have more competition, more economic choices, more companies, indeed more smaller companies owned by individuals rather than by collectives of fund managers (effectively a tragedy of the commons), we're more likely to have people in power who do care, and the people who don't care have to compete against the people who do, which incentivizes caring. On the other hand, corporate consolidation leads to a small number of people controlling everything, who care about nothing but profit.
At the lower levels, below the C-suite (with their golden parachutes rewarded regardless of success or failure), job insecurity has become a fact of life for everyone. The epitome of this situation is the so-called "gig economy", in which millions of people don't even have permanent employment or hours (or health insurance, for that matter) but are forced to live day-to-day with tenuous connections to giant corporations and the odd jobs those corporations may throw their way. Even people who do have full-time jobs can be tossed away unceremoniously like so much trash at any time in mass layoffs, for any reason or no reason. The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them. There was a time, many decades ago, when companies were more like families, felt some community responsibility, and an individual could work for the same company their entire career and retire there. The incentives were more aligned to caring about your job; it was similar to caring about your own family.
The way that humans behave depends crucially on the environment: place them in a healthy, supportive situation, and they'll tend to behave well; place them in a hostile situation, a war of all against all, and they'll tend to behave badly. We need to arrange our society intentionally so that the incentives are aligned for mutual benefit and caring. We primates are inherently imitative.
So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?
I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?
This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting" (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and no more).
I'm a bit puzzled about how this reply is supposed to relate to or add to my comment. For example, I already said, "The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them."
What I don't see in the reply is any kind of contextual or critical analysis. You speak as if this is simply an immutable law of nature rather than a product of our contemporary economy. "You're not supposed to take work personally." Where do you think this "principle" comes from? I agree that a lot of people say it, and indeed that it's a rational reaction to the economic circumstances. But must it be this way, and why? And if so, what do you expect to be the outcome, aside from animus and anomie? Is it a good way for us to live together, forever?
I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how ridiculous this was. If the company was going to lay you off, they never gave you any notice at all. You were just told not to come to work the next day.
So this is not just about current economic circumstances. It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a long time.
Why do you think that was? Expectations don't just arise out of nothing. In 1974, there was more job security and less frequent layoffs.
> I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how ridiculous this was.
Alternatively, it wasn't originally ridiculous, but the economic conditions slowly changed to make it ridiculous.
> It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a long time.
Of course things didn't change overnight. I never said they did.
You should care about the people whose lives are affected by the result of your work at the very least.
If you work in property management, for instance, you shouldn't repeatedly bill your tenants after charges are due then accuse them of late payment. Ditto for double-billing them for a month and doing the same anyway... if these bogus "late payments" end up on one's rental history then it's a lot of work to fix even for a completely honest person that's never paid a bill late in their life.
Or, if you're a doctor, you should probably read a patient's blood test results correctly so that you don't prescribe them the wrong medicine or tell them to take an incorrect supplement. If you have somebody take the wrong chemicals because you can't read a piece of paper then bad things could happen to them.
I could go on and on and on but the bottom line is that you need to give at least an iota of a shit when your fellow people are at the mercy of the quality of your work. Missing a topping on a sandwich is whatever but messing with somebody's finances, shelter, or health out of lazy defiance is outright sociopathy. The fact that you don't like your boss is your problem; stick it to your employer on your own time.
The real incentive in large corporations / organizations seems to be about "building strong relationships / trust with people in power". Not about "becoming good at what you do".
This incentive structure was probably fine in a "post-industrial age", but is very wrong for the "information age". Eventually I think this way of thinking / organizing will go away via natural selection , but probably (sadly) not until most of us are dead. Because there are so many entrenched interests who espouse this kind of hierarchy.
Additionally, AI generated content, AI pictures and deepfakes have a numbing effect. I guess I can say "who cares?"
I would say it started before, when the supposedly most powerful country of the world was ruled by a senile person and it was not replaced immediately. Instead half the country negated the evidence that we now know was true.
I am not American so I observe those things with curiosity from outside and from inside only as a visitor.
But I don't know: the weapons of mass destruction, the too big to fail. Most people didn't care them unless it affected them personally, like savings.
My theory is the opposite, that people care too much. Company owners wanted free money so if the country gets destroyed in the process, they will "not care" as much for the people that printing money throws under the bus as the "care" about them and their personal proffit.
In a two-party system the same thing happens. They do "not care" about having a senile president as much as they "care" about not losing the power for "their" party. Now the same thing happens with Ukraine and Trump.
The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power.
Actually, no, the issue is corruption. The two party system is fine. Both parties are corrupt. Have 4 parties... still are going to be corrupt. Citizens United, meme coins, insider trading and no term limits equals a bad time for John and Jane Doe.
When someone lies to you enough times (or, if you prefer, speaks with total disregard of the truth enough times), you stop listening. It's not worth your time to sort out the truth from the not-truth. Worse, it's unhealthy to listen to lies in volume. (Think in bayesian terms: If you update your priors at all, then if the lies come in great enough volume, they will eventually become accepted as truth.)
I care some. I care about where the country is going. I'm concerned. But I can't care about every post and every back-and-forth and every he-said-she-said. There's too much.
AI... I can't be bothered to care about anything written by an AI, for the exact same reasons.
In the Dark was a podcast I came across recently that struck me as being in the former camp. The reporters cared, the organization supported them, and they created content that was gripping and demanded the listener to pay attention.
I’m sure this is the wrong place for a podcast recommendation but I wanted to play my small part in surfacing the work of people who do care
Less and less people: - want kids
- want a hard work, only a few hours sitting in an office with a secure, albeit low income
- want to advance in academics
- read books
The underground reasons are debatable and I leave them for comments. Increased AI usage is both a result and a reason.
Expecting people to pay full-time attention to 90 minutes of talking about some hip-hop group from the 1990s is a big ask.
if all loudspeakers scream "care about this", but don't give a thing (or worse) about something /you/ care - you stop caring in response
It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.
With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.
The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.
That's not necessarily a negative, a lot of entertainment has been predicated on non-thought (Seinfeld was great in part because of no hugs, no learning) consumption. However, when it leaks into how we access and shape the world, there is an increase in 'slop'pily made, low quality structures and products. I feel like its ushering in an era of 'Chabuduo' [1] across the globe that's going to be very difficult to come out of.
[1] https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...
The true Dunning-Kruger effect is not that low-skill individuals believe they're better than high-skill individuals but that low-skill individuals do not know what skill looks like. (Hence the title "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments").
When you cannot evaluate the output of something then _any_ output looks good.
I view this as more epistemically significant, it’s the Post-Truth era. Politics and national discourse has been heading this way for some time, but now AI may mean that nobody can distinguish truth from falsehood, at least for online content.
We need new methods for attesting and chaining trust.
You won't find AI writing at The New York Times because their leadership has a sustainable business model. They have adapted well to the digital media upheaval, using their gaming, cooking, and product review businesses to drive up subscriptions to a point where subscriptions are contributing a larger share of revenue than they did in the print era.
The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Enquirer are papers that have struggled financially in ways that better-managed media companies have not.
(always has been)
It used to be a staple of society to read the paper. Everyone read the paper. We read the feed now, and it's been that way for some time.
Triage your caring like you handle high or low priority requests in any other job you would. Being mindful of what is consuming your time and your brain's free cycles is so imporant.
Some people have become burned-out of caring, and it's dangerous. Burned-out by the internet pulling at their attention all the time, their phone notifications blasting to them telling them something is important but it isn't. Breaking news, but it's about a celebrity's dramatic encounter at a rewards event, and not about our politicians stealing from us.
The era of smartphones have made us emotionally stunted and and opposite of mindful.
It's hard to care or be passionate when you are certain that anything you produce which is worthwhile or original will be crushed, lost in the ocean of slop.
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If the website can successfully prove to the advertisers that some human likely did indeed view the ADs then it's "mission accomplished". It matters very little what the content contains, as long as the AD revenue stream (the only revenue stream for most online sites) keeps rolling in. So really the only text to get right is the "Clickbait Titles" and "Clickbait Imagery".
So the longer canonical form of our Era is "Who Cares, We Made Some Money...Era"
In a more authoritarian state bent on information control, the leaders of the institution might have a different metric, especially if they were a state-funded institution - namely, ensuring that their content didn't offend the heads of the authoritarian state, resulting in either a removal of state funding or a visit from the thought police.
Of course there is some intersectionality here - if the ad revenue is controlled by a few monopolistic corporations, then they might respond to critical investigative reporting on their industry with the removal of their advertising revenue from the media institution. In a monopolistic situation, this might not hurt their own revenue that much as consumers have nowhere else to buy products, but in a competitive market situation, refusing to advertise is likely to result in lower revenue.
For the media institution, generating fluff from a chatbot instructed not to offend either the state or the corporate conglomerate is the safe route when it comes to fiscal solvency (and staying out of prison).
Fundamentally, if the economic system is so corrupt and soul-crushing that the vast majority of people dream of acquiring enough capital to escape the system ('f-u money'), then something is very wrong with that system.
if you want to use an LLM to produce code, OK! have it produce a PR, then review it carefully yourself with your human brain, then send it along. if it fucking sucks, that's on you, and you should feel bad and bear the social consequences of it. if you're not skilled enough to review the PR, then why are you sending it? ditto bug reports. ditto emails.
you, the human, are the one sending it. you, the human, need to take responsibility, instead of pretending it it is someone else's fault, or no one's fault. you, the human, need to use your judgment to decide if sending an LLM-edited or LLM-generated PR or email is a waste of time or not.
> something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.
It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.
15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.
A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o
I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.
I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local.
Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now.
I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".
It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.
There are plenty of people out there who live their lives rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it is really hard to make an argument that their lives are any worse.
I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.
I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong way and there will be more awareness.
Additionally, there should be more awareness that protests are less tolerated by the government, which seems a bad thing.
If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change anything, the few people who do care enough to vote get to say who's elected.
A previous generations old guy told me about this. He worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of things for the engineers. Then the government changed the way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the project) had to start handling all those other things themselves and most of the support staff went away.
It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.
I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers.
In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.
The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.
I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.
One, don’t attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely necessary. Necessary because our parents and grandparents lived better lives because they weren’t as dehumanized. Necessary because so few people in this community specifically see it that way and it *needs to be pointed out repeatedly*.
Perhaps it would resonate more if you, too, had heard a couple of C-suites & their chosen MBAs joking about this exact topic. Perhaps dehumanizing people would make your blood boil if you experienced it as casually and often as I have.
But perhaps not. One of the great things about the WTFC-era is that I can disregard your opinion utterly.
There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.
It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed.
Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
Just moving your head around in a forest also gives an amazing amount of input. And if you're being chased by a tiger through a jungle, you cross about 1,000 different species of plants and small animals.
Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.
But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.
The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time.
I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways.
Seemed like it went downhill so fast.
> Be yourself.
> Be imperfect.
> Be human.
> Care.
It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.
What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.
If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.
Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.
It's exhausting.
There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever.
Turn shit off.
Or drown, I guess.
Turn off all notifications. Don’t listen to radio, don’t have a TV, don’t buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden, go on toddler led walks, go hiking/fishing/swimming/camping.
Live in the real world and fill your life with things from the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and keeping you in a state of panic or concern.
You wouldn’t put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don’t put this toxic crap into your awareness.
As an example of out-of-fucks, a regular engineer literally couldn't be convinced to care about customers when a corporatized management creates 10,000 hoops for them to jump over - such as scrum.
Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them to not do it again? Nothing!
And the reward for working tirelessly and successfully to ensure those fires never start in the first place is being "downsized" / laid-off because the job you do is apparently pointless, as "we've never had any problems in that department..." Damned if you do, damned if you don't... and double-damned if you do...
I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person.
But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered.
Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again
"No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.
It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something.
We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times.
Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure.
This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves.
I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.
I agree with that. At some point you just give up because there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to be very selective with what I choose to care about
Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was.
Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.
Nope, I don't care.
Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get there specific instances of outrage no longer happen.
The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to circumvent it.
The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation.
The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.
Here's something I implore tech business leaders to think about: If you believe AI to be the world-changing technology you say it will be: It follows that you must believe that intelligence will become commoditized. What is going to differentiate your business from every other business as thought workflows become a commodity? I'm not sure I know the answer, but while most business leaders seem to believe the answer to live in "how much AI can we shove down our employees and customers throats", I suspect the real answer is the opposite. If AI is an omnipresent, powerful substrate of business delivery, like computers are today, available in-kind to every business, what will differentiate your business is how you handle the gaps between what AI is capable of. What is your human element? Are the humans just glue between AI agents or are they actually a differentiating factor?
All this is why I tend to believe AI is going to mean slow but complete death for hyperscale companies, and there's nothing they can do about it. The only survivors will be the ones providing AI services, and they'll be the next generation's IBM. The winners are going to be small companies, teams of ten that can now operate like a team of a hundred. These small teams will have access to the exact same thought workflow automations that the hyperscalers have access to, but they also have something that the hyperscalers don't: human agency and agility.
Bureaucracy is a type of complexity that occurs once systems become to big for a small well trained group of people to manage.
AI/humans managing the system will work for a while, we'll be able to manage the current complexity better, but it won't last. We'll make even more complex systems that become unmanageable.
HN "flagged for politics!" enforcer mob caught unawares. good
If society is going to fall apart anyway, because of nuclear war/climate change/Trump/demographic collapse/soil depletion/microplastics/forever chemicals/peak oil/whatever, why should I care about trying to build a future? It won't come anyway. Why should I care about the quality of my work? Why should I care about having kids? Marriage, even? Why should I care about anything? "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (bad advice in any era, but seductive to those fighting against apathy).
I grew up poor. Trailer park, unemployed father, chronically ill mother. I did the "right" things, got degrees, worked my ass off in tech, climbed the ladder. And now, at 30, with a high household income, I still can’t afford a single-family home near my job. The American Dream has been geographically priced out of existence. It's a tautology: you need to be near economic opportunity, but that proximity makes the spoils of that opportunity unattainable.
And let’s say I could buy a house without draining my savings and becoming house-poor, what would I be buying? New builds are laughably bad. Developers optimize for speed and cost-cutting, not longevity or quality. Even the “luxury” apartment I rent, which was built in 2018 in a fairly affluent area, is $3k/month for water leaks, a cracked foundation, bargain-bin appliances, and slanted floors. It’s a high-cost, low-trust ecosystem. Everywhere.
What’s replaced those dead pathways is a schizophrenically fragmented collective ethos. A thousand micro-cultures screaming past each other about what actually matters. For some, it’s hustle and the entrepreneurial grindset. For others, political purity. Or aesthetic curation. Or spiritual awakening. Or personal brand optimization. Some chase passive income, others clout, others raw dopamine. One group preaches family values and self-reliance; another insists that simply surviving is oppression unless all conditions are ideal.
There’s no coherent worldview to plug into anymore. Just a buffet of ideologies, all half-digested and shilled beyond recognition. Each individual has to construct their own belief system out of whatever cultural detritus they happen to trip over. And the result is a populace with no shared reference point, just competing, incompatible theories of meaning, each as brittle and anxious as the next. A non-stop race to the bottom.
And when nobody can agree on what matters, nobody bothers to care. A Boeing tech doesn’t torque the bolt on a 787 properly because, why would he? No one else seems to care. Drivers treat public roads like a demolition derby because enforcement is a joke. People skip car insurance entirely because the odds of meaningful consequences are laughably low. If you're in a fender bender, just drive away! Nothing will happen to you. Steal stuff from the supermarket, nothing will happen. Why pay taxes for your small business? You're never getting audited! See an old lady getting mugged in an alley? Meh, not my problem. Nothing compels people to act in the collective interest anymore... not law, not shame, not pride.
The U.S. increasingly feels less like a country and more like a clown-show economic zone designed not to nurture citizens, but to extract from them, manufacturing wealth from thin air for a rentier class while selling everyone else the illusion of mobility. Unless you were born into money, got absurdly lucky with crypto, or won a scam lawsuit, the system is rigged to keep you running in place, and spare me the cope about “the best time in history,” when modern medicine is a privatized racket pushing pills over care and our “peacetime” economy is bankrolled by an endless carousel of proxy wars and every tech "innovation" in the last 15 years is just a new medium to drill ads into people's lives.
As Jon Blow once said, we live in a profoundly unserious country. And the logical endpoint of that unseriousness is a culture of nihilism, malaise, and quiet surrender. How do you fix it, or is it simply too far gone?
Citation needed. The current mortgage rate is 6.8% for 30 years.
> a lack of antitrust enforcement
Citation needed. Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple are all in court for antitrust cases.
Being brought to court is not the same as being brought to justice. Look at our president, he's been to court a lot--been indicted even--and he's still in the fucking oval office. These companies will get a slap on the wrist and nothing will change.
Antitrust enforcement is when it's enforced. Court cases are merely attempted enforcement so far.
I'd wager you'd argue there was such a thing as late stage socialism, no? You're inability to imagine anything else than capitalism is a fallacy. Google Capitalist Realism.
>the cream rises to the top
No it doesn't. Success is largely determined by who had access to the most capital, or who was able to build a moat around themselves fast enough. The meritocracy people love to imagine they live in, is nothing more than a myth for a majority of people.
110 years ago it was WW1, then it was WW2, then postwar euphoria. Then it was Democracy vs Commies, golden age, space race, rise of Hollywood, disco, fast cars, cheap housing, economy booming.
What is there now? Everybody is scared shitless of war (and for a good reason), economy is not doing good a small guy (only for trillion dollar behemoths), space race is dead. Mindless scrolling, degradation and grinding are the only things left.
> As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light.
He wouldn't have used this wording if he had actually spent sometime on understanding how wasteful the previous governments have been. So in a sense, Elon was correcting the previous Who Cares mistakes and not actually committing new Who Cares mistakes. This shows that even Dan doesn't care enough to ground his opinions in facts.
This is, of course, on top of the administration claiming that Elon was in no way in charge of DOGE. He was evidently just one of the president's personal advisors.
Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't care. There's a lot of care there. As an analogy, when I program, I'm always on the lookout for performance improvements, and that involves cutting non-performant code and doing less. It's the bro-coders that slap together dependencies to cobble together a monstrosity that don't care. Not the cutters. Cutting waste is caring.
The more accurate "Who Cares?" moment is the fact Congress refuses to codify any cuts and in fact spends more. Just paying off friends, the impeding doom of our debt, when seriously deep cuts of everything will be forced, is just shrug.
DOGE is a propaganda exercise (in part to provide false justification for policies undertaken with other motives, and in part as a distraction), and the appearance of energy is important for that.
They care, but not about the thing that it is the public rationale.
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