I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.

I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.

I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.

We need more of this type of project today. It is the old Internet, still alive.

This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.

The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.

It has nothing to do with the state and has to do with getting the RSUs to pay the down payment for a house in a HCOL area in order to maybe have children before 40 and make the KPIs so you don't get stack-ranked into the bottom 30% and fired at big tech, or grinding 996 to make your investors richest and you rich-ish in the process if you're unlikely enough to exit in the upper decile with your idea. This doesn't include the contingent of people who fundamentally believe in the state, too.

Most people are activists only to the point of where it begins to impede on their comfort.

Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.

Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.

Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.

I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.

There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.

If you're hiring a consultancy or a pile of freelancers it's a bit different, but the question here would make me believe you don't trust their capability to start and I would be looking for teams that better align with what you expect as their outputs.

I have been thinking over the past week or so that we're likely to see consumer technology sitting well behind datacenter tech perpetually here, and this is not a transient shortage but an overall market adjustment to consumer and SMB being a few generations (or process nodes) behind the hyperscalers. Outside of gamers and enthusiasts, most people can be on anything from the last 7-8 years and be fine with it, and most of what they do is offloaded to the cloud anyway.

I'm also pessimistic enough to see a sort of long-term "compute control", where we see a few generations of technology leak to adversaries through individual channels, and then we start ensuring that _only_ controlled/regulated/registered companies can purchase the leading-edge. After all, nobody needs that much compute, it's dangerous! What if they put it on a drone?