Finance needs to be held accountable. They’ve skim off far too much wealth for the value they produced.

> How can higher demand lead to lower prices? … a bump in demand can allow for higher utilization of the existing generation … Provided the bump does not violate capacity constraints

I.e. data centers reduce electricity prices, as long as you don’t build new generation to support them. Whereas data centers, nationally are projected to increase energy use between 325 to 580 TWh annually by 2028 [1]. There is no way you are going to meet that without building new generation assets to meet that demand.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/0727-wearedevelopers-tbl/solid...

Now we’re onto AI, so we have suboptimal age verification, with implementations in law written by politicians

https://www.gadgetreview.com/federal-surveillance-tech-becom...

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fe...

“The output constitutes many terabytes of data and requires a high-performance computing system to run,” co-author Pawlok Dass, a SICCS research associate, said in the release.”

The largest zip file I see on the zenodo link is 404 MB in size, I’d be surprised if it unzips into anything more than a few gigabytes.

The agile solution of incremental value delivery is a compromise, and can produce good outcomes for functional changes. But agile has unacceptable failure modes when working on infrastructure and satisfying system constraints. Agile can work okay for programmers, but it's not a solution for engineers. Acknowledging, owning, and managing risk is more scalable, but you have to have leaders who acknowledge that they exist and have the maturity to take on that responsibility.

We have a fundamental failure to communicate, what we're doing. The game project managers and finance believe we're all playing is a regression towards the mean, where everything is additive and rounds up to nice consistent formulaic sums. Whereas software development follows power law distributions. A good piece of software can deliver 10x, 100x, or 1000x the cost to produce it (ex: distribution, cost of delivering another copy of software is near 0 once written). You don't get that sort of upside with many other investments. Finance is happy with an NPV 8% above what they invest in. This means that when software people talk, everything they say sounds foreign, and everyone assumes it's because of jargon. It's not. The fish don't know they're swimming in water. When the fisherman comes, everyone is caught off guard.

So we get what the author talks about

> The estimates stopped being estimates. They became safety railings against being held accountable for unreasonable expectations.

We. Pad. Like. Crazy. Yes this is inefficient. Some project managers recognize this. We get theory of constraints. But rather than cull the layers of hierarchy that lead to the padding in the first place, all the blame for failure goes back to developers. Get hit on the head enough and you will stop acting in good faith and pad to save your ability to feed and cloth yourself.

[1] https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/yokohama-it-business-...

I doubt the efficacy of creating mammoth like creatures, or elephants that have mammoth traits. We’re talking about recreating an ice age creature that, ostensibly we hunted into extinction. But with climate change and a warming planet, even if we were successful in recreating mammoths, where would such a creature live? James Hansen, who testified to congress in 1988 and informed the public about climate change, recently said that the Paris goal of keeping warming under 2 degrees Centigrade is pretty much dead. At 2 degrees we’ll be seeing ice free arctics at-least once per decade. With that future, there’s simply not going to be any habitat for these creatures to live in.

The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2024-04-climate-impacts-global-gdp.htm...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/manchin-schumer-sen...

[1] https://www.a2gov.org/sustainability-innovations-home/sustai...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830206

Points: 29

# Comments: 31

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706687

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

> Koch’s dedication to Deming’s ideas eventually led the company into several sticky situations, not the least being targeted in a Senate Select Committee investigation for oil theft in 1988, a direct result of immense internal pressure on employees as part of its continuous improvement program.

[1]

This is powerful stuff. When you empower people and set a goal, they will do anything it takes to hit that goal, including breaking the law.

[1] https://commoncog.com/deming-paradox-operational-rigour/

To me that sounds like a perfectly rational response to fake job apps. When there exists the possibility of 0% chance of a response for a given application, the only rational move is to minimize the investment of all submissions and maximize the number of submissions.

Recruiters and hiring managers spun it as a problem being inflicted on them because of AI tools and the attitude of people applying, with one commentator writing

> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max… The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews.

On the other side of your argument you have people who see no problem posting ghost jobs, and think it’s a harmless way to boost company morale and increase investor confidence. They see hundreds of “low effort” applications being submitted to them, believe it is a cost being imposed on them, and think it’s 100% a problem caused by the applicants. They see no connection between their behavior and the response they get back from the environment and would see your proposal as absolutely ridiculous.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42531695

> The central thread here is collective action by principled people who will use copyleft primarily as a tool for rights of users and for the improvement of copylefted projects.

Joint stock companies are about hierarchy and control. Free software is very much not about that. Free software is a syndicalist movement by software developers. Software developers have taken control over computing infrastructure, we develop it on our own terms. We have settled on a decentralized model, which shares openly, without constraint.

People with the hierarchical mindset hate another party taking ownership because that’s something they don’t have control over. They would be happy to have you hunched over a keyboard desperately typing while they bark orders at you, regardless of whether or not that produces anything of value. Linux and GCC are both inspired products that grew in the cradle of copyleft, they are excellent because of their open development. Meanwhile, large corporations are happy silo themselves into unproductive morasses and play ritualistic political games [1].

Copyleft benefits users because it produces better software. Enforcement is the only card to play to make sure that continues. Unfortunately our reaction to licensing has been immature. When asked about licensing, we’re happy to throw up our hands and say “I don’t care about that” (see WTFPL) and carry on with development as if some helpful person from legal will do the legwork for us in exchange for our wonderful output. The fact is, legal is still in the 19th-century as far as intellectual property is concerned, and are happy to respond in a formal and threatening way to anything that challenges their hegemony. We have to work with our colleagues in the legal community, educate, and give them a place in our decentralized world. Otherwise, we’ll just be workers fighting for our slice of the pie in a rat race, commanded by people who are happy with consistent mediocrity. Users will suffer.

[1] http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/06/bob-herbold-fiefdom-syn...