In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:

1. Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.

2. Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.

THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.

Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.

I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.

Musk faces challenges attracting engineers

No shit. I have no idea who still works at Xitter. I think they must have whittled it down to workaholic Nazi pigs who personally share in Elon’s psychopathy. Because no self respecting tech workers would put up with his bullshit when there’s a whole industry they could go work in.

SpaceX is different. Aerospace is a narrower field and SpaceX is truly at the forefront of it. For a time, Tesla was also at the forefront, doing things that no one else was.

But Xitter and xAI or whatever the fuck it’s called… they have zero advantages with which to attract engineering talent. Elon doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing when it comes to software and never has. He tries to push tech workers around the same way, he’s going to find they can get other jobs at superior organizations and likely for more money.

Cory Booker, Ezra Klein, and Reid Hoffman aren’t people I generally consider evil. I wonder if we can get them to say something about this whole affair and what goes on there.

They’re trying to create a new something. and there doesn’t seem to be another idea. The iPhone really only blew up the world because of the quality of its execution. The idea had been bouncing along for a long time. So every asshole thinks “we’ll just execute right and nail this thing.”

There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.

Yes I mean nothing is free if we try to be strict about it. The word would have no meaning. I think we all understand “sold at zero price” but there are always people in the crowd who want to pop up and say “it’s not free! someone pays!” Typically their next move is to start breaking down who pays and why it’s unfair. I have no patience for them.

It’s an almost universal problem. Everything wants to grow so it starts doing things their existing users don’t like, because they’re trying to appeal to people they don’t already have.

Their situation is: they’re a tired social media site that is traded on the stock exchange and it’s just all downhill for them unless they change something big. They do want to be Steve Jobs, the guy who created a trillion dollar platform ecosystem, and they think hey we can use our social media site as one big ad for it to get things going. What else are you going to do with a tired social media property? You can at least fool some shareholders by telling them no, we have a whole new chapter about to begin. It’s a stupid game, I think driven more by market capitalism than personal ego, though of course there’s also plenty of that.

There are so many health services that can be delivered en masse at very little cost. I once lived in a “3rd world” country with state sponsored healthcare. They had an army of nurses in shop storefronts delivering vaccines and basic meds for common illnesses. Just walk in. Nothing fancy - one of them literally reused hypodermic needles after sterilizing them with a bunsen burner. But how fancy does it actually need to be?

True that’s how I get my flu shots and such. It’s often extremely modest accommodations. Once my feet were resting on a pile of discarded coat hangers and other detritus from the drugstore’s retail floor.

Even setting aside the deceptive propaganda around this, “they” meaning right wing voters of modest means, still have two problems with tax funded services of any kind. The government may not be “taking money away” as in making it vanish, but they are taking away the choice of how that money should be spent. Conservatives see a moral hazard here where their taxes will pay for the poor lifestyle choices of others - and actually they are right, just not the way they think they are. It’s not abortions for slutty brown women they should worry about but metabolic syndrome brought on by their own white neighbors horrible diets that will burden the system most.

Their other problem is they don’t want to benefit from this kind of public good themselves. They see it as “taking charity” and although white people accept plenty of advantages, they like to stay proud about it. It doesn’t help to say “look, you’re getting something here.” So there just isn’t any way of making them comfortable with the setup, even when it isn’t being grossly distorted to them.

The whole “I don’t take no charity” is a very old American value and part of a complex system we have for giving people ways to feel superior to others. We don’t have a formal class system in this society but we service the same instincts in a hundred other small ways. Farm subsidies? Of course! Do you know how important farmers are? Healthcare supports? What… so I can pay for abortions for some illegal immigrant who couldn’t keep her legs closed?

We’re terminally stupid here and everything is about feels I don’t see how we’ll ever get past all this.

Yes we’ve begun to track “token use” all over my company so it doesn’t spiral out of control, as it easily can do when you have agents managing agents connecting to MCP servers that themselves use the models to generate responses. The engineers around me say that they basically have multiple agents cranking full time and just keep an eye on them every so often. They will even queue up things to run overnight to make use of the time. They never actually close their laptops. This is an insane amount of usage, well beyond what anyone can do in the ChatGPT application by typing with their fingers, and there’s no way it can continue like this.

I didn’t realize anyone earned anything on Twitter ever. Is this just video views? Is this new?

Also, fuck Musk, etc.

Practical answer: because they haven’t installed concrete wheel stops on the ground in that parking lot. If that’s a used walkway, they should.

I know, people are assholes, etc. I’m just mentioning a solution that is actually available, where unassholing everyone isn’t.

How do you declare war on a state you don’t recognize?

On the other hand, one can understand why Google doesn't want to continue to pour resources into an ancient platform just to keep it on life support.

Bullshit. “Pour” my ass. Issue a legacy build of the app that controls them and walk away. What horseshit. This is shameful. The only reason it won’t blow up into a huge debacle is that these products targeted wealthy early-adopters in the first place and those folks can afford to upgrade, and most probably already have.

I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.

The Verge has been covering the shit out of the Reddit death spiral and I’m so here for it. Good for them.

I make and restore wood furniture. I have taken plenty of “all wood” furniture apart, repaired it, or just salvaged whatever actual wood scraps I could find.

Whatever idiot wrote this has no idea how expensive true wood furniture is. There is hardly ANY actual wood furniture in the market, PERIOD. You think it’s wood, but it’s veneered ply or fiberboard. That is the state of the entire industry, not just IKEA. This is a simple fact of life in a world that has already been heavily deforested even before all 8 BILLION PEOPLE currently living were born. Wood is precious. You also don’t need solid wood for your fucking nightstand. So maybe you should buy a nightstand made out of the particleboard that is waste product from milling lumber for other uses, like construction. That’s called using everything, wasting nothing. It’s sustainable.

There is nothing wrong with IKEA furniture for most people’s everyday needs. And you are not going to get a 150-year all wood piece for the same price. LOL fuck no. When you are in your 40s and have made it big time you can go to a craft furniture maker and get a solid oak bedroom set. It will cost more than your first car did.

IKEA furniture does not fall apart in 3 years, either. I’m about to go get my pajamas out of the IKEA dresser I’ve had since 2001. It won’t last centuries like a real craftsman made wood dresser. But it’s not 3 year garbage either, and looks and works like the day I bought it, despite me using it daily for 22 years and moving it between at least 4 houses in that time.

IKEA furniture is good for what it is and very cheap. One of the reasons it’s cheap is that it is flat packed for efficient shipping. Assembly by the customer also saves cost. And seriously, if you can’t figure out the IKEA instructions, you must not be trying very hard.