(And yes, it's telling that the author has clearly used AI to generate the argument, because not only does it weaken their argument, I think they miss the point slightly because of their reliance on it.)

They focus on safety-critical systems in aviation, which is narrow part of all industries, when the bigger issue is organisational resiliency and reproduction. The skills that allow an organisation to weather change and disruptive market conditions are not tied up in proprietary information, but are captured as unwritten social rules and context that isn't passed on when labour is outsourced, either off-shore or via computerisation.

The problem is particularly acute in software development, because software engineers not only make the system that encodes proprietary knowledge and organisation advantage, they maintain it, and without a continual replacement of labour that understands the system and the reasons for the system's behaviour, the ability to extend it or fix it is lost.

This problem predates AI, and even software, where organisations die because they outsourced too much of their critical internal function. It eventually manifests at an industry level, where the critical knowledge to do a certain thing is lost (see, for example, the ability to produce new IMAX projectors as a microcosm, but also the loss of machine tooling skills, etc.) - at the heart of why some countries subsidise inefficient industries because the firms within them have no incentive to preserve themselves but their skills are invaluable to preserving national autonomy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545279

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I agree that many writers fill their works with needless diversions and unnecessary expositions on their life that add nothing to their text, but this is different from a "baroque style".

My current focus is adding support for signals, amongst other things: https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocgtk-development-updat...

^1: https://dune.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorials/dune-package...

That specific combination (ocaml + mingw) has a known problem with ocamlfind that's still awaiting a new release (see https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlfind/pull/112). ocamlfind underpins quite a bit of the package ecosystem, so this one is annoying, as the mingw workflow is otherwise quite good.

It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves

And their board composition converges similarly as those same people are relied upon for their connections to fundraise, hire, etc. They don’t want to be seen taking an unusual strategy as it would be perceived as risky and jeopardising precious donated funds, so the same groupthink emerges.

Even if someone outside these circles was hired, they’d be knocked down with the smallest misstep, with the veiled criticism they weren’t suitable for the position (ie someone with better connections should have been chosen), so even they will fall into line.

Their leadership is often not that much different, with similar people working in similar jobs educated in the same institutions and walking in the same social circles, producing the same solutions to the existential problem of organisational survival.