Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love and crave the experience of working with other people to make things. And I cannot for the life of me understand why seemingly intelligent and talented people like Rands would fritter away their lives and those of others in such trivial pursuits in many cases, and downright evil doings in others.

Here I am, worrying about how I am going to afford housing after a divorce, and I’m reading insightful leadership advice from an author who has seemingly spent their career building this leadership expertise at one company that makes the most insanely technologically advanced gambling distraction devices imaginable, another company that makes war and mass surveillance products seemingly out of a corporate strategy to profit from human suffering, and the least objectionable company that only made the most distracting communication-platform-cum-torture-device when it convinced us all email wasn’t fast enough to get things done™ and that now embodies an actual AI hallucination as a company strategy. Why can we not have good leaders in making a society where divorce doesn’t threaten basic human needs? Or maybe one where healthcare is a given? Food being widely available?

Instead we band together and create more than $5 trillion worth of “value” in three companies that make absolutely nothing of worth to real human needs. And then we read about the games played inside those companies by humans who could be using their skills for anything else useful and we come here to argue about the merits of middle management.

What are we doing? How did we get here? Can any leadership help us work together to dismantle the horrors we’ve created to make room for making things that address real needs?

However, you're right that most people at these companies are so accustomed to the "free money faucet" from ads, huge margins, etc. that it's incredibly easy to end up totally disconnected from reality. That's probably what frustrates you the most.

I will say - after having left Google just about a year ago now - that there is literally no better time to make money in tech than right now. AI is eroding the moat of all large tech companies, and skilled individuals with passion and drive can make a huge impact on the world with an incredibly small budget.

You'll make it. All of us will.

That's not say leaders here and there aren't thinking about what they're building and the macro effects, but you have to understand that unless you're bootstrapped and self-funded, even the most morally minded CEO is still beholden to investors who primarily care about money. You can only be as ethical as your board allows, and that primarily comes from profitability and financial success. In the good times its easy to talk a big game (eg. Google's "Don't be Evil"), but eventually competition comes for us all, and if your morality is hurting the bottom line you will be replaced. The backstop would be customer sentiment, but most buyers (whether B2B or B2C) are also not morally motivated. That's why free + ads is the dominant model, why micro payments failed despite years of techie hand-wringing, and paid consumer apps outside of streaming are vanishingly rare.

It's not all hopeless though. If things reach a high enough threshold of public sentiment then we can put legal and cultural pressure that will actually change things top-down. I think this is where AI is probably going as it's the most universally feared and hated impact across party lines that I have seen during my life, and the leaders in charge seem incredibly tone deaf about how it's being perceived, so I do expect regulation and softer forms of social enforcement to affect that trajectory. But if you're hoping for individual CEOs and leaders to fix our systemic problems, don't hold you're breath, they are just as replaceable as the workers under them.

Personal integrity is something you control for yourself. Nobody "allows" you to have it. If we still taught this and more people lived by it, we'd have a lot fewer problems.

Politically addressing needs has the same issue as regulating money, its unpopular either because of billionaire marketing or general ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Also resource allocation is hard when people interpret any level of cut as murder. So you're hemmed in on both sides while FPTP makes it impossible to be honest with the electorate where jetpacks for everyone and free head is what wins you elections, regardless of its delivery.

While some commenters might suggest socialism is the panacea, I think that's just a different format of the same sort of failure. The fundamental flaw in our societies is ourselves, as we build societies that reflect our own failures. We care for ourselves considerably more than we do others, sometimes aggressively against others, sometimes will utter, wilful ignorance of others. The big picture is too hard for our brains to deal with. We have no baseline emotional regulation, humans can wrap themselves into the same emotional state about leaving Britney alone as they do about the death of a loved one. This means everyone's needs seem the same, which makes resource allocation hard.

We see a similar whine about immigration where the abstract is simply: You get $10k and an immigrant moves next door, or you get $0k and an arbitrary person who isn't an immigrant moves in next door. Solve for the status quo. But people will elect governments on a policy of cruelty to think that status quo won't immediately rubber band back.

Why is justified text so bad on the web? And why do people still use it, despite how terrible it looks? When I was in journalism school I learned how to properly justify text with line breaks, tracking, and other techniques to make sure we didn’t have “rivers” of blank space through the text or other hard-to-read layouts. Is there no way to achieve the same readable outcome today with CSS, or otherwise?

If not, I beg of you: Please don’t use justified text on the web!

I worked at a small company where a significant portion of my effort went toward shielding my team from the distractions created by a CEO who couldn’t seem to help meddling in every aspect of the business. I think it’s because he started out doing, or at least being involved with, many of the functions of the company and had a hard time letting go as we grew. Even after the organization grew to 50+ people he couldn’t keep himself out of the nitty gritty details, but the format of the distraction changed over time. Instead of walking up to people and interrupting them in person (a double whammy according to this study, including both an “important” person and the in-person aspect), he would send what we called “Slack attacks” throughout the day. These were paragraphs-long Slack messages without any semblance of organization, punctuation, or line breaks. Fortunately, many of these messages were sent during the very early hours of the morning so they could be dealt with first thing in the AM, but that wasn’t always the case.

In the first phase I literally moved my team location and reorganized the desk arrangement so it was harder for him to get in and bug everyone. I had to “guard” the area and try to stop him from physically entering the space, which was always a strange dance. I couldn’t control his Slack messaging behavior so I worked with people to understand that while yes “the CEO is asking you for urgent work in Slack” seems like a valid reason to switch gears, but instead let me work to figure out what actually needs to be done and we’ll catch up later about what to do.

It was a weird dynamic but there was no doubt the distractions were a drag on performance. Every time he went on vacation we saw a marked increase in productivity, and more creative solutions seemed to come up as well. I don’t wish this type of environment on anyone but in a way I’m glad to have gone through it and learned some lessons about interruptions and how to avoid them.

When I was a middle manager at a past job, my team kept getting bombarded with meeting requests (it was a "fire drill all the time" kind of place).

I ended up making a 4 hour "team meeting" every Friday morning to give them focus time.

I mentioned to them that they could have done the same on their own if they wanted. My team lead pointed out that since our calendars were visible in the department, having me as the organized gave the meeting more "weight" and so line employees were less likely to push for time in that slot.

But I wonder what would be the CEO's side of the story. I'm sure his behavior was bad, I'm not pretending the opposite. But maybe he also had reasons (misguided reasons, sure, but still reasons) to act as he did. Or maybe he did not have any reasons, it's also possible.

I've observed cases where indeed people were disturbing too much software developers.

But I've also observed cases where software developers were not enough aligned with the business side, despite them being 100% sure they were.

It's a tricky situation: being in the team means that you are not impartial, you don't have a remote view, you are only seeing one side of the story. I had situations where I've observed some non-dev team explaining their needs, then the software team went away, and then came back with something that was not what the non-dev team asked. Not only the non-dev team was indeed not satisfied, but I was agreeing to them: it was not what they explained, I was there, I understood what they said at the time. Worst, in the majority of the cases, the non-devs don't just say "no, it's incorrect", they try to find a compromise. Usually, it comes from the fact they have no idea what is possible or not, and just assume that if the devs did not do what they were expected, it means there are good reasons for that (either it is not possible, or that there were others things they did not know about, such as other requests from other part of the business). As someone with a lot of developing experience, I was able to see that the problem was that the devs just underestimated the need to fully understand the business side.

It's very tricky, because for a dev (or a dev-side person), it is very easy to just ignore that. If they ask for adjustment, it's "they don't know what they want". If they point at some requirements and underline that it does not mean what the devs thought it meant, it's "these requirements were badly written". And in the majority of the case, the business-side just makes do with the sub-optimal solution and the dev-side is considering that they successfully delivered. And similarly, I've also seen some devs being happy to be very productive, going very fast in developing something ... that the business did not need at all. When not adopted, it was again blamed on the business-side for not using the solution they've developed, rather than to wonder if what they have done was indeed productive or not.

Why is it hard to accept that maybe being a CEO doesn't mean you're good at your job?

The fact that one is bad at their job does not imply that someone else is good at their job. Why is it hard to accept that maybe being in a dev team doesn't mean you're good at your job?

Jests aside, I love the idea of incorporating an all encompassing AI philosophy built up from the rich history of thinking, wisdom, and texts that already exist. I’m no expert, but I don’t see how this would even be possible. Could you train some LLM exclusively on philosophical works, then prompt it to create a new perfect philosophy that it will then use to direct its “life” from then on? I can’t imagine that would work in any way. It would certainly be entertaining to see the results, however.

That said, AI companies would likely all benefit from a team of philosophers on staff. I imagine most companies would. Thinking deeply and critically has been proven to be enormously valuable to humankind, but it seems to be of dubious value to capital and those who live and die by it.

The fact that the majority of deep thinking and deep work of our time serves mainly to feed the endless growth of capital - instead of the well-being of humankind - is the great tragedy of our time.

I'm not blind to when this goes horribly wrong, or when needs go unaddressed because they aren't profitable, but most of the time these interests are unintentionally well aligned.

I think this is very obvious and both artists and philosophers understand it.

I'm worried about the mercantilist guild. They don't seem to get the message. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't really know much about what they think. Their actions show disgerard for the other two guilds.

if it's absurd to you to think that a steel fabrication company should care about anything other than fabricating more steel, well that's your philosophy.

there are other philosophies.

In this post the author tries to set up an unassailable scenario where two very similar people end up with strikingly different life outcomes because of “how some of us have chosen to live their lives.” Conveniently, the author is the successful one because he is part of “a small set of humans who don’t act like their lives are predestined.” The majority, and the person he compares himself to, obviously couldn’t succeed without this special character aspect. In reality, it’s the “small set of humans” part that shows the way to the truth. The analysis that says successful people are different because they chose to act differently and not live a “predestined” life ignores all the people who also made that choice without getting lucky and achieving success. It also leaves out the people who lived a “predestined” life and succeeded despite their lack of willpower or special abilities or whatever else we can point to as an explanation.

Like I said, I am victim to the same fallacies in my own reasoning about my life, but I try very hard to overcome them or at least recognize them. The takeaway from this article isn’t that “you are the master of your own fate” but instead something like “be careful when trying to explain your own life’s circumstances, especially when your explanations put you in some special class that only few people have achieved.” Luck, by its very nature, is only for the few.

Bentham might apply if you consider the overall outcome: is the work your company does positive or ethical for the majority of people the majority of the time? It seems like the “greatest good for the greatest number” would allow for some small unethical aspects so long as the outcome is good for the majority. This could also be seen as a shortcoming in that philosophy because it justifies some pretty terrible actions for the greater good (some of which, like the Manhattan project and its outcome, are mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

Kant might make you look at your company and imagine that all companies acted that way as a way to reason ethically. If all companies acted the way your company acts would that be good or bad for humanity? Kind of like the golden rule, but more rational.

There are many more to consider but it’s my view that most of them will get you to the point where you probably shouldn’t work for an unethical company, even if your particular work or area of focus is perfectly ethical. Mainly because you working for the company allows or helps it to exist in some way, and we don’t want unethical companies to exist. So maybe you could reason your way into working there if your sole focus was finding a way to destroy the company somehow. Otherwise it’s probably better to work elsewhere.

As an aside, I consider anything that actively subverts the company, beyond whistleblowing, as unethical, and in fact, it’s a threat that people like me have to defend against, so I would never involve myself in such activities.

They were referring to stuff like sabatoge, I'm sure

There are undoubtedly many areas in which memorization is useful. I tend to use memorization as a second-order tool, in the sense that it is only useful to memorize once I’ve learned that memorization would be necessary.

I memorize combinations to locks I unlock frequently. I memorize names of items I sell in my shop so I don’t have to look them up over and over again.

In school I often memorized equations just long enough to get by. The few that are still with me are not those I used most frequently; they are the equations I understood at a visceral level. Obviously this means I am more conversant in Newtonian happenings than quantum concerns, so maybe there is a place for memorization. Or perhaps I lack sufficient experience in the quantum to really feel the laws that govern the smallest realms.

Either way the article paints a dull picture of learning. What of the feeling in the minds and hands of those future carpenters swinging their first hammer blows? What of the deep learning of the pianist that happens only after the transition from the first concerto as audience to the latest as featured virtuoso?

An exponential increase in the type of “learning” furthered by spaced repetition might be useful to some. I still prefer the linear road to understanding.

For me (in medicine), it is the exact opposite. Memorization comes first, then you start to actually understand and learn things. Everything is so intermingled and there is no "learn this first to understand that". In addition, you can't start practicing things before memorizing them.

I feel like it's the same thing with the mnemonics. It's useful at first, but not very practical or efficient. However, as you use it more, you actually learn and stop using the mnemonic.

Our working memories have a capacity of 4. This means that we basically can't understand something if it requires more than 4 pieces of New knowledge to understand. To understand more complicated things we need to move some of the knowledge into our long-term memories.

We wrote an article on this topic here that i'd love to know what you think of

https://saveall.ai/blog/learning-is-remembering

This comes off as condescending and dismissive. It's a poor way to treat people who have taken the time to engage with your content, especially if engagement is what you want, which appears to be the case given your other replies on this topic.

Take the time to respond to them directly rather than pointing them towards more content you've written, even if it means repeating ideas you've written elsewhere.

This approach has a number of benefits:

1. It has the effect of presenting what you've read elsewhere inline (most readers won't click that link)

2. It gives you an opportunity to revisit and refine your own thinking, and

3. It forces you to think carefully about the criticisms levied

And most importantly, it reciprocates the effort they've put into reading your post and responding to you so that you don't come off like a jerk.

This is how I learn basically everything. That and practical application, so I'd learn cooking by cooking but I'd learn about information theory by just reading for hours at a time and falling down one hole after another. All this makes me wonder, where do you get the "you have 4 working memory slots" thing from? And how would you actually go about forcing things into long term memory?

In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line.

I'm reading the parent, top-level comment on a Macbook Air with a 13 inch screen and the first line is a whopping 194 characters long. Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.

I agree that simplicity is a noble and useful goal, but when it comes at the expense of usability it's hard to swallow.

...resize your browser window? The text is as wide as you want it to be.

On the other hand, I absolutely hate it when I want wider or narrower lines, and resizing the window either causes useless whitespace or a scrollbar to appear.

I have lots of tabs open, and every other site I use chooses a legible width.

You think I'm going to resize my browser window narrower every time I switch to HN, and resize it wider every time I switch to a different tab?

Sites are designed. Legibility is part of design. Appropriate characters per line is part of legibility. Full stop.

Or you could just put it in a separate window of the desired width; maybe then you'd even have enough space on your huge monitor to see several sites all at once!

As I wrote the post above, I had about a dozen different windows open, all of varying sizes. Monitors have gotten much bigger, yet the users seem to have gotten worse at making good use of that space.

(Nor do I have a huge monitor, I'm on a laptop...)

Not disagreeing with your premise BTW.

But if I want to widen a fixed-with design, I can't.

So yeah, I'm with Wikipedia.

Such a cool-sounding job! Any fun stories to share from those days?

> Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.

Agreed. I always browse HN in a window that's half the width of my monitor.

There is something nice about the ultra-simplistic CSS that goes as wide as your window, though. Then, the user can just resize their window to find the sweet spot for themselves. The sites that force a fixed width for reading on everyone really miss the point, I think.

I have yet to experience anything even remotely close to the buzzing productivity of a newsroom minutes before the press deadline. Election nights were always fun because all the information was coming in later so we had to scramble. Obviously we knew about the time constraints beforehand so we could plan for it to the best of our ability, which of course usually fell to the curse of best laid plans.

I’m nostalgic for slower paced information flow and newspapers remain a near-perfect example.

I just tried and Firefox' reader mode automatically limits the width, though unfortunately that's not made for interactive use. I guess it might be a good idea for a browser plugin (if it doesn't already exist), similar to the ones forcing dark color themes on websites using CSS.

I think it's fair to add that links/menu items/buttons are generally too small and close to each other on touch devices.

It’s the weirdest experience because I want so badly for it to be like other shops I’ve browsed and loved. I’ve even considered opening my own bookshop down the street to fulfill my desire for a great used book shop in my city. Maybe someday.

> If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.