Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics & incentive structure here:
Take Mr. World’s First Trillionaire, Elon Musk. He doesn’t have a dragon’s horde, his money is almost entirely invested in SpaceX and Tesla, building things he wants to build. SpaceX didn’t IPO so he could have bragging rights with his Forbes list peers, it IPO’d because it was the most efficient way to get more capital to grow and achieve its various strategic aims—largely set by Elon and its other preexisting owners.
You can take that away either proactively by making such ownership structures impossible or retroactively through taxation forcing current ownership to sell, but the end result is the same: No incentive for folks like Musk or Bezos to use their skills on big, ambitious, capital-intensive enterprises. Control is what matters, not $.
It's possible to have more than one reason for getting $75 billion from public markets. Paying off $20 billion of loans from people you don't want to owe money to (who, as far as I could tell, SpaceX borrowed money from to pay off people you really don't want to owe money to) and getting a really big number associated with your name are not mutually exclusive, and from Musk's previous actions (getting large compensation packages approved by conflicted boards) he obviously does want that number.
Even if only 5% of his NW is in cash, that'd be $50billion dollars in actual liquid cash. Even if it's 1% or less, he almost certainly has over $1bn in cash or practically liquid cash. That's already a dragon's hoard.
Which is why the term "cash," to those in finance or familiar with its lingo, is understood to actually mean "short term treasuries" and other things you would find backing a money market account, unless the context very specifically calls for distinguishing those two things.
Do you have an example of someone doing that? I suppose the argument would be we wouldn't know - but personally I don't buy it. It's possible to not be "famous" as a billionaire, but it's not possible for people in your life not to know.
Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.
The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.
All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.
I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.
At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.
When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.
The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.
All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.
I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.
The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.
I've come to the conclusion that if I ever start my own thing again I will 100% ban all standing recurring meetings. Maybe an exception for projects-in-progress with a firm end date, but I'm on the fence on that one too. Zero high performing teams I've worked within - or led - has had such form of structure.
Standing meetings tend to devolve into performative uselessness. And they add stress, interruptions, etc. And worst of all - they tend to let people have a false sense of accomplishment afterwards.
1:1's I think can be useful for a certain type of employee, but should be 100% at that employee's discretion. The only use I see for them for that type of person that they have a predictable slot held open on their manager's schedule in the event they need to actually execute it. Most of them should be skipped or there are probably other issues in the employee:manager relationship.
I understand I am the odd man out when it comes to "meeting culture" but the more I get stuck in a myriad of standing meetings the more I have ossified my opinion on this subject. Meetings are not productive work. The older and more experienced I get the more useless I think they are.
A random meeting called because there is an issue to discuss and get a decision made on? Totally fine. Those are useful.
Please let me know where to send my CV. :) 10000% agree with this. Not all of us need a weekly reinforcement that everything's okay. And if we actually need something, we can speak up without consulting Google Calendar first and waiting for a scheduled safe space to speak up about it.
Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?
A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.
It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.
the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.
I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.
Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.
Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.
You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.
You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.
You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.
Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?
> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters
This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?
As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.
> As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for?
Absolutely not, no. The opposite of that. You never want to hear negative feedback for the first time at an annual review.
You don't want to be giving negative feedback every week, sure, but you do want to give feedback as close to the behavior as possible. Otherwise, you're just letting someone fuck up for months when they could be learning
The longer the period in between reviews the larger the gap can become between the manager and employees perception of the employees performance.
Personally I don’t think once a week is absolutely necessary but I tailored it to the employees. I let them choose a cadence with a maximum of once a week and a minimum of once a month and had a mixture of choices amongst my team.
Some people also want to feel heard, but I had to balance that out with my other responsibilities and couldn’t guarantee I could drop everything to talk, so I carve out the time on my calendar and also made it clear that we could drop the meeting that week if both parties felt it was unnecessary
Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.
> ChatGPT has 1 billion MAU. People are now getting life advice, financial advice, and mental health help from chatbots at a scale and cost that no human support network could match.
Definitely, it is quite an extreme change. But the upsides of better access to support and advice are huge, even if the potential downsides are scary as well. This feels like one area where we need better transparency and regulation due to how much ChatGPT and others can affect people who listen to them.
I know it's "Evil AL", not "Evil AI", but there _is_ an "Evil AI" at work here - this is aislop, pure and simple. I wondered for a bit why the whole thing felt repetitive and boring, and then I hit this paragraph and it threw everything else into context:
> LAN-LOK is more than a forgotten DOS curiosity, it is a preserved moment in the daily life of Antarctic research stations during the earliest days of their local area networks. It captures the frustrations, humor, and personalities that shaped computing at Palmer Station as it transitioned from isolated standalone PCs to a shared (fragile) LAN.
It's frustrating, because this game absolutely has the vibes of a lot of old DOS/door games and I was kinda interested in learning about it, but this just sucks all the fun and interest out of it.
I dunno, the rest of the article feels very AI-written as well. Immediately after that, it goes into an overly in-depth bullet-pointed breakdown, it repeats information constantly...
It’s either written by an AI or I’m sorry, it’s just poorly written.
Come on, try and imagine the human being who would write that sentence.
The article is obviously AI written in its entirety.
I mean look at this sentence which randomly contains the " - " pattern twice in a row, which is then not repeated once anywhere else in the article:
> Created after the installation of the station’s first peer-to-peer local area network (PalmerLAN), the game captures - through humor, satire, and surprisingly accurate mechanics - the daily realities of early LAN administration in one of the most isolated research communities on Earth.
Using dashes twice like that is valid. It's a bit like parentheses, to frame a tangential statement between them, but with emphasis instead of quietly. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash
I use that construction in my totally human writing often enough. Some of us missed a few English classes it seems.
> Are you seriously going to claim that this is not LLM generated?
Do you see me making that claim? My comment seems to be about grammar. Do you always jump to conclusions?
> I made no comment as to the validity of the construction.
See:
> I mean look at this sentence which randomly contains the " - " pattern twice in a row
They're called parenthetical dashes. They're not random. And it's one pattern, not two. You'll find it used with parentheses (obviously) and commas as well as dashes and perhaps even other punctuation[1].
As to whether or not the post was written by AI, I don't care either way. That seems to be something you care about. But you shouldn't base those conclusions on the use of parenthetical dashes.
I'm curious if you have any evidence stronger than your own vibes about this one sentence. I didn't get that sense from the article at all, and continue to assume that it's a genuine piece of history.
There's a TikTok going around with a guy telling us about how his daughter stumbled across a "Weird AI" online, which takes popular songs and makes them funny.
The section “The Origins and Descendants of the Break/Fix Game Mechanic” is where I clocked out. It’s pure 100% AI filler. No human being would think to include multiple paragraphs associating a 90s DOS game about PC sysadmins with the film Wreck-It Ralph. Downvoting the article.
I think you're missing the part where they quote the recommendation from the HTML spec:
> For this reason, it's generally better to avoid using noscript, and to instead design the script to change the page from being a scriptless page to a scripted page on the fly
That seems perfectly reasonable for modern sites and browsers to be able to do. `noscript` is effectively a relic from older days where you just didn't have the same budgets, tools, and browsers as today, where you couldn't seamlessly enhance the site how you can now. We shouldn't continue to use it in the same way we shouldn't continue to use `marquee` or `blink`.
I feel like <noscript> does a fine job at what its meant to do. The article's complaint is that it isn't magic and can't solve all problems, but nothing can.
No, noscript doesn't do a fine job, because it will be handled incorrectly on browsers that fit any situation like the ones on the article's list of examples.
A tiny minority of people that disable javascript does that in a way that is handled correctly.
But writing a page that works by itself and modifying it by scripts will work almost everywhere as long as you add any external dependency in a way that invalidates your script on errors.
No, I didn't miss that part. It's irrelevant to my point.
The noscript tag is just a way to conditionally display some HTML. There's no reason to avoid using it unless you are deeply entrenched in a pseudoreligious fight against javascript.
It really is just whining.
> didn't have the same budgets, tools, and browsers as today, where you couldn't seamlessly enhance the site how you can now
noscript came before modern CSS, it came before XMLHttpRequest, it was around before a lot of things. It was before we had modern standards and practices around progressive enhancement. A lot of things that are commonplace and easy to do now would require hours and hours of hand-writing javascript, instead of using modern libraries and selectors to easily target and replace content.
I don't know if you were coding back in those days, but I definitely remember how much more work it was to do progressive enhancement back then if you wanted a really JS-enhanced site. We were all basically individually inventing it, because it hadn't be standardized and popularized yet.
I honestly don't understand the framing of best practices here as "whining." I also don't understand your refusal to read the article, because you say "no reason" but the article explicitly states the reason:
> The noscript element is a blunt instrument. Sometimes, scripts might be enabled, but for some reason the page's script might fail.
I dunno, I like having my page continue to reasonably work when unforeseen errors happen. (And they do happen. We've been at this business for decades, but errors have happened, can happen, and will continue to happen.) I generally prefer my users to have a good experience when possible. And if I can design my page intelligently, to progressively enhance, instead of displaying a blunt "WHAT ARE YOU, A JAVASCRIPT-HATER LOL" error message, well, I'd prefer that. =)
Oh my god, yet _another_ "developer-focused" laptop with full-sized left/right arrow keys, which are an absolutely miserable experience to actually use.
How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
( Yes, I know they used full-sized keys for a while, I moaned and cursed them at the time as well.)
Sorry, I've never seen this perspective, why do you want the smaller ones? The small arrow keys on my MacBook are one of my least favorite parts of the keyboard.
You want the smaller ones so you can easily locate the arrow key cluster without having to look. The empty space above the left and right arrow keys is a good tactile indicator that your fingers are on the correct location.
Real developers use hjkl, which, if this keyboard uses QMK like their previous ones, you can just remap to actual arrows (with a modifier key). I am only slightly joking.
I agree with you that having full height left-right and half-sized up-down is a pain, because of the inconsistency.
The problem I have with laptop keyboard is that the arrow key height is too small, and the cluster itself is too crowded to sit my fingers on comfortably when using arrows. I want the arrow cluster to have full sized keys.
We've been here before. Outsourcing of coding was really big for a while, until the reality of that situation caught up with those who practiced it - if you were saving a bundle on outsourcing your coding work, you were only saving money _now._ Down the line, you'd have to pay extra for someone competent to re-implement the work with an eye to quality.
(Sure, there were good outsourcing shops, but you didn't tend to save too much with them, since they knew they were good and charged appropriately.)
"Slop" ai-generated code is the same tradeoff as cheap outsourcing shops. You move quicker and cheaper now, but there will come a day when code quality will dip low enough that it will be difficult enough to make new changes that a refocus on quality becomes not just worthwhile, but financially required as well.
(And you may argue that you're using ai-generated code, but are maintaining a high code quality, and so for you this day will never come and you might be right! But you're the "good outsourcing shop", and you're not "saving" nearly as much time or money as those just sloppin' it up these days, so you're not really the issue, I'd argue.)
It's more Zeno's paradox. You take one step, get 90% of the way to the finishing line. Now you look ahead and still a bunch of distance ahead of you. You take another step and get 90% of the way there. Now you look ahead and see there's still more distance ahead of you,...
This is why I've been pushing back on the "just have the AI generate the tests!" mentality. Sure, let it help you, but those tests are the guarantee of quality and fit for purpose. If you vibe code them, how the hell do you know if it even does what you think it does?
You should be planning out the tests to properly exercise the spec, and ensuring those tests actually do what the spec requires. AI can suggest more tests (but be careful here, too, because a ballooned test suite slows down CICD), but it should never be in charge of them completely.
I managed to avoid learning React long enough to become a manager.
I'm not saying I won't ever end up in engineering and won't ever have to learn it, but at least right now, it feels kinda like I got away with something.
Wealthy, sure, but becoming a billionaire effectively destroys your place in any of your social circles. It obliterates any dynamics of trust and interdependence you may have and replaces them with a gnawing unease about if they’re still hanging out with you, or if they’re hanging out with the money.
Not to mention, Graham entirely fails to differentiate between EARNING a billion dollars and HAVING a billion dollars. You can be part of a structure that earns a billions dollars without “cheating”, there are all kinds of companies that do that. But if you let that wealth accumulate in yourself? There’s something wrong there. You are almost guaranteed to be under-valuing the contributions of others, or the externalities of the systems in which you operate or SOMETHING.
And even if you’re not? That’s a dragon’s hoard of money. You’d have a very difficult time spending that much money on yourself and your lifestyle, and I find it hard to justify sitting on the rest, just to have it. It is literally a hoarding problem at that point. You do not need that money, it is actively making your life worse (look up the Billionaire’s Social Calendar: it’s the list of ultra-wealthy-only events that billionaires must attend if they want even a chance of interacting with people as peers instead of dependents), just let it go.
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