Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.

You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).

I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.

Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.

Lest you forget that modern computing exists because ATT built unix and then threw it out to the public, at speed, as they drove away from it as fast as possible. (Something about being an actual monopoly...).

There is at least one thing, on that list that I can almost assure you will be coming back (in concept and spirt) in the next 5 years. Likely open source, because google tossed it...

Meanwhile it has other very public and open winners: Golang, Kubernetes being two stellar examples of them not dropping something like a hot potato.

Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3371L000000000

Construction has been DOWN for decades (and is 7 percent of the labor force).

https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...

Food Manufacturing is in decline as well:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN311L000000000

My mother later ended up back in a classroom for a period of time with severely handicapped children. Bound to beds and wheelchairs, non verbal, never going to have independence.

For years after she left her admin job she would go back and spend an evening or two every year watching the kids, so the parents could have some sense of "normalcy".

Her lament was what would the outcome be for these children. Because every one thinks they are doing the best for them by keeping them at home, and close. But the reality is (in so many cases) that the plans for "family to take care of them" almost never works out. Years later my neighbor was an older woman, with an adult special needs child. She died, suddenly, from breast cancer. The brother, who was to take care of him, shipped him off to a group home (because he had kids of his own and lacked the time to care for him properly). That poor mans trauma was doubled when his living situation and life and loss of mother all happened in such a short period.

My own family, I have a severely handicapped cousin (who, became that after a high fever). He too is wheelchair bound and non verbal. However his mother, heeded my mother's advice and transitioned him into a group home early. It worked out well for him as he had a more fulfilling life, and the family (sister, aunts) weren't under pressure for his care, rather just rounding out his life. He still gets out a few times a week with them, and is always around for the holidays.

It's a tough thing for parents to understand that what's best for your special needs kid is sometimes going to be harder on them than all the hard work they doing. And I remain grateful that is isn't a choice I ever had to make myself.

I have never seen this actually happen. I have seen lots of people THINK that someone incompetent got the job over them. The issue is that most of the people who felt they deserved the job were definitely suffering from Dunning–Kruger.

Ikea used to make somewhat reasonable and affordable products, that, in total were much higher quality than their price point suggested.

Now they are just cheap, on almost every metric.

Oakland mayor and progressive DA ousted amid crime complaints: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/09/oakland-mayor-progr...

As a Bay Area resident and someone who leans very far left - I was not surprised by the impact, and outcome of "policy by slogan".

Think about all the fun wifi, zigbee, matter devices that you can play with (if you are inclined).

Meshtastic and LoRa is a great toy to play with.

The kitchen is full of interesting things, Sous Vide is great, the air fryer is... interesting and useful.

Lots of people love their robot vacuum

LED strip lighting has gone from nerdy to high design and has interesting features now.

Those "VCR" and "iPhone" moments are rare. There is a lot of practical innovations that make my life better and I would be hard pressed to give up.

It's Adams defending British solders, and later being very much a supporter of the concept of jury nullification. The fact that the modern court has been allowed to not only block the distribution of this information, but actively seeks to tell jurors that they HAVE to follow the law is, to be blunt, a disgrace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

No more of this nonsense around "arbitration" being OK. Take it all to court, force it to be on the public record.

Hey, I just found 3 niche businesses that I can run because of AI and clear a million a year after costs.

Fight club rules apply, you dont talk about your advantages.

You get lawyers talking about their AI use (sometimes) because they are protected by the requirements of the bar. You people in niche businesses, or where it's about personal productivity, talking about it cause you cant replicate what they have done. You get folks in the sciences talking about how they are using LLM's to generate the python & scripts that make their world function with easy (rather than be a bottomless pit of time). These are people who might talk about their AI gains, but often have better things to do and don't run in programing / tech circles.

Unless you seek these people out you're not going to find their gains. It would be pretty hard for someone like anthropic to even begin to quantify time savings from generated code by "non programers" - because they don't have the data.

If I build something that satisfies me and say 100 users (who all star me) does that really say anything. Are those 100 stars even "real" any more?

All the old problems of the web are new again, and still remain unsolved.

The last 30 years of tech has been about big, the dot com boom, the next unicorn, the magnificent 7 or 11 or whatever.

The thing is that the missing solutions people want have never been the one sized fits all multi Tennant we need 6 rounds of seed funding kinds of problems.

The "app boom" should have been a clue that smaller, niche services are viable.

IF tech were like construction, then most of HN, most of SF Bay Area, most of "tech" seems to be concerned with building the tallest building, or a massive housing development. Your average office worker is more akin to a home owner, who has a busted outlet, a sticky door, a dripping faucet, they just work around it because the resources to fix it (programers) are going to build the next big thing.

Those workers now have tools to address those problems, themselves.

I have lawyers and writers (far removed from tech) talking to me about cron jobs and scripts they are running that solve real problems for them. AI has allowed them to accomplish this.

These things arent showing up on GitHub. They dont make quarterly reports at a publicly traded company. The mountain(s) of change are happening by stacking grains of sand, not one solid rock.

That is the application. AppleScript, VB script, IFTT - and how many drag and drop dev tools has the industry built that were supposed to be for average office workers?

Programers are like master carpenters, and the debates we keep having sum up to joinery and how a chair leg gets turned. Meanwhile there are lots of people slapping up 2x4 and plywood shelves in their garage and bootstrapping their businesses with that.

AI is changing the "is it worth your time" calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) it's delivering on the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.

Im guessing this isnt code that needs to "scale", that needs to "be elegant", that you arent focused on maintainability for the next decade. That its built for purpose and left behind.

Its all the code that for a programer would normally be in this matrix https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth your time) -

Models are trained, they do not learn.

The thread devolving into a debate about "reserve currency" is - to be blunt - deeply misinformed. Chinas bond liability and the currency its priced in is the ultimate contra indicator into how its going to handle the coming storm.

At some point china will loose the ability to keep its global currency (Yuan, should be inflating) decoupled from the domestic one (Renminbi is deflating). They have been keeping long running issues in Banking, and Relestate at bay but a global recession (and were on the cusp it seems) is going to be brutal to china.

I suspect that if (when?) that hits this will turn into another Deutsche scandal.

It is running up your bill.

I will say this again: LLM's tokens are just B2B Gacha.

https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate

70 percent of carts are abandoned. You dont want your inventory sitting in carts, when other people want to buy it. It only comes off the shelf (and gets put in a box) when you have money in your hand.

There is an entire ecosystem around Shopify to reach out to abandon cart holders and attempt to convert them: https://apps.shopify.com/categories/marketing-and-conversion...

> Sometimes it says: sorry bud, item is sold out, frustrating customer experience, who is already mentally prepared to pay and own an item.

This is better than A) taking their money and then telling them you dont have it. B) Them not being able to buy it because someone has it in their cart and is NEVER going to check out with it.

The assumption that a SKU maps 1 to 1 to a cart item is flawed.

If the first item in the cart is a bundle of SKU-A and SKU-B, the second item is a bundle of SKU-A and SKU-C and the third item is 5xSKU-B where do you do you keep the re-agregation of the SKU-X's to track them?

This is without accounting for item location in the reservation - and rules that may apply around that.

You haven't even gotten to the part where different customers will have different rules around shipping from different locations - because that can eat into margins.

You're also making a bunch of other assumptions around transaction flow and where carts are actually stored (and how they get converted to an invoice, with payment attached) that likely do not hold true.

Could you do it more like what you're sugesting -- maybe -- but only in a single tenant system.