Accountability.

It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.

And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.

I'm lucky though - as a hybrid engineer/manager, I've been able to lean away from the former and into the latter.

And I've come to notice that humans doing agentic work seem to need more emotional support per unit effort than those doing traditional engineering.

So there are opportunities there. I don't want to spend a second longer than I have to prompting machines - there is zero dopamine loop in that for me, I get more doing housework and at least that makes my wife happy - but I'm happy to support a few other humans engaged in that kind of work.

It's sad though. I used to love dreaming intricate machines into existence and then watching them come to "life", or at least actually start working. That dream seems dead for now, I hope it comes back but I won't hold my breath.

And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.

Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.

Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.

National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.

Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.

A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.

It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).

It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.

Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements.

And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.

It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.

In Wales and Ireland we have the opposite problem, the sheep strip everything bare, the old trees die and the forests cannot regenerate.

The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century that gave us egalitarianism and Turing computers.

It's mostly true, but not entirely, and the few percent that doesn't fit that model is enough to matter, and perhaps explains some persistent social phenomena which don't fit the picture.

More evidence of the environment producing subtle heritable modifications to DNA.

The world we live in is still far more Mendel's than Lamarck's, but it's perhaps more like 95:5 rather than 100:0.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814572

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.

But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.

There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.

The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?