I loved that book but it was a thick one and a long time ago, so I don't remember that specifically. But I believe you.

I am reminded of Ted K's writings - specifically on the enablement-virtuous-cycle between tech level, state control, authortarianism, etc.

The replacement of uniform broadcast media with "decentralized" culture and media has thrown a wrench in things. The tech we had in the 50s-80s enabed one form of mass control. The changing tech broke those specific mechanisms, but the System responded.

The fight over control of twitter was actually like trying to re-litigate WW1 The dying princes of the dying imperial system were all trying to install their preferred ruler; not realizing that decentralization had already won.

People will occupy twitter if they can, but holding that territory was already non-essential by the time it changed hands.

The system response has certainly not let go of trying to reclaim overt control over all top-100 information warfare tiles on the board, but has invested in subterfuge and compartmentalization as well.

If the system cannot control a single monoculture, it is also happy to have significant influence over 100 microcultures that are functionally disjoint with non-porous boundaries.

Ted K would say that America has become functionally ungovernable. I agree. We have much evidence of being a failed state. Now, if you shut off the internet and the news, and just went about your life, you might not see any evidence of it. But we are sort of like an observer on the ground, watching a plane fly overhead at FL350. The plane's engines are out because it is out of gas. From the ground, to us, it looks fine. It looks like every other plane. It will stay up there, really high, for a good long while. It will have passed out of our view by the time it has lost enough altitude to notice.

But the plane is doomed. The people onboard know. The people with the right sensors know.

America is like that plane. It is going to fall out of the sky. But most observers don't know that yet.

Internet censorship won't restart the engines. That doesn't mean they won't keep trying anyway.

Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

Firefox was never there for the "Good Ole Days"

Firefox was a reaction to Mozilla becoming too ambitious and too unfocused.

The Netscape/Moz split was already after things had gotten bad. Moz completely jumping the shark was already bad.

The Good Ole Days were NCSA Mosaic and Navigator 1.1. Before the AOL invasion. Before people on the internet expected you to care about their feelings, and before politicians and mega corps knew how to screw it up.

Once upon a time, having friends on irc or usenet was like the nerd equivalent of _living on a pirate ship_

(except the avg pirate was at least +1SD on the IQ scale.)

It was the last vestige of freedom.

There is no "good internet" with Tay Zonday on it. Or girls.

>I find this very stupid.

I agree with you.

>Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

Agree completely.

>I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS

It doesn't.

The people manager track and individual track are separate tracks, and both go all the way to the top. There were hundreds of Partner Software Engineers who didn't have any people management responsibilities. These engineers, because they were Partner level, had a minimum of $1m total comp some years. (The higher your level at MS, the more of your pay at MS is contingent: bonuses, stock, etc. MS has a "low" guaranteed salary and a wild bonus/stock award range, all based on your performance and overall company performance)

There are level 70 people who are not people managers; the job title changes to "Distinguished Engineer" somewhere up there, and somewhere past that becomes "Technical Fellow".

There is a level floor for being a manager; but (effectively) there is no level ceiling for being an individual software engineer.

IIRC, When I left, they wanted people to be Senior level before being people managers. But there were more senior level engineers than senior engineering managers...

Here's some quick lingo: an "M1" is a manager who only has engineers reporting to him. An M2 is a "manager of managers", e.g. an M2 has M1s that report to him - and may have 1 or 2 engineers engineers or support staff. There are also M3s, but M1 vs M2 is the main useful cutline.

MS generally wants an M1 to have at least 5 people reporting to him, but not more than 15. So the "span" is pretty narrow; MS R&D is pretty management heavy, with an M1 typically having around 8 people or so.

(I was an M1 for a few years, then went back to being a normal engineer with no people management responsibilities.)

Being an M1 at Microsoft is kind of a dual mandate: you are given a staff of engineers to go work on a problem that is (was?) too big for one person. The M1 has engineering & product responsibilities (e.g. make sure the right thing gets built on time and works correctly). The M1 also has people management responsibilities (coaching people in their careers, rewards and promo justifications, delivering bad news, etc)

Good M1s wrote code and reviewed code, but also burnt a lot of time in meetings ("what are the other parts of the company that are near me doing?") and individual meetings ("i have 8 people who report to me and I need to have a dedicated meeting with each of them every week to see how they are doing, give them career feedback, etc)

M2s rarely wrote code. They would occasionally write code for some demo or prototype, and then show it to people. If the idea had legs it would get spun off to underlings to flesh it out.

I say all this in past tense because I don't think how it was in 2022 necessary holds in Oct 2026. I know that I am not developing software or managing software engineers the same way now as I was even at the beginning of 2026. AI has changed all of it.

An article says:

>Employees at internal levels 64 and below received one week of base pay per six months of service, for example, and employees at levels 65 to 67 will receive two weeks of base pay per six months of service, according to offers reviewed by Business Insider.

Within MSFT, here's what those "levels" mean for software dev positions:

68-70: Partner & Above [entirely different comp structure; limited quota]
65-67: Principal
63-64: Senior
61-62: Engineer 2
59-60: Engineer

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

People who made it to Principal could park their careers at the principal level and stay there indefinitely, so long as they were providing good results (but were still subject to random layoffs not based on their own performance)

The VEOs and other "voluntary" downsizing plans have been targeting older, higher-level folks. Yes, those folks are more expensive. They are also more male, more American, and more white.

>I believe the future will include AI but it will be small models that are self-contained and that people have on their own equipment and not not spending vast amounts of money on paying for tokens to third-party companies

Why do you think there will just be one picture of the future?

For sure, self-hosted models will be part of the future (even if they are illegal). But I think paid services will also be part of the future.

Self-hosted and unencumbered workflows are a key part of the future for freedom / autonomy reasons. And for some, economic reasons.

But paid services and private models are also going to continue to exist.

Right now, 99% of humans don't even self-host their own _email_. Not only do they not run it on their hardware/environment, they don't even manage the service on other people's infra. They have no involvement whatsoever in their email service.

Some businesses are going to choose to pay an AI subscription, just like some businesses use cloud services today. In both cases, operating local IT infrastructure isn't their core business.

I don't.

The creator of the pi harness did say that the claude system prompt changes often enough that he had to build his own tooling to try and improve reliability and repeatability.

I'm not convinced the differences in roles I've observed are claude personality differences as much as humans giving different prompts.

How do you decide to trust code you write?

How do you decide to trust code someone else wrote?

Tests. Design discussions. Code reviews. Code review questions. Design Questions. "What about this problem?" Real validation testing.

I was in a funny situation last week. Two different humans told their claude agents to fix the same bug. Claude came up with two _slightly_ different implementations.

I told _my_ claude agent to code review both implementations - using a new prompt I'm working on to try and automate away a lot of the code review value I was adding manually.

Same model; same bug, two implementations, and the code-reviewer agent found different bugs in both PRs.

We ended up blending the best things from both PRs into the one that shipped.

I am really confident that the code I ended up shipping here is better than what our specific humans would have done without using AI, and 10x-100x faster.

I am spending more of my time telling agents how to think like me, what to look for, what tradeoffs to make, etc. They wont do those things unless I tell them to. They don't always do those things perfectly.

(Neither do the real human software engineers who work for me.)

Use a paid subscription to a frontier model. Make sure it knows how to run your build and run your tests.

If you're worried, have it write tests. Look at the tests; see if they look like the right tests.

Tell it to ask you questions if it needs to resolve something ambiguous. Have it explain what it thinks it should do to the code. Ask it probing questions if you aren't sure it understands. Ask it about design tradeoffs.

I have yet to find a problem where AI generated code doesn't get me at least 90% of the way there. Multi-domain, multi-language, multi-platform. That includes stuff I was doing a year ago. It's gotten dramatically better in 2026.

If someone has an example of a software engineering problem that AI actually did really badly on, I would like to know the model and see the prompts. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying I haven't seen it yet, and I'm really curious.

I've done software development professionally since the 1990s. I started coding on the Apple ][ in 5th grade. I've had AI do the wrong thing, or misunderstand something, or miss something that seemed obvious to me. But on all of those same criteria; I've had human software engineers do far worse, far more often.

Hello fellow Frame owner.

I bought a Frame 65 just because of how beautiful the display was in Art Mode, and I want pretty art in my house for the 90% of the time the TV would otherwise be off.

I use the "Art Mode", but only with my own sideloaded content.

One thing that stinks is that sideloaded art doesn't support the full Art mode experience; specifically no Metadata. I seeded the display with lots of public domain images of classical and romantic european art (my taste - and why I never considered a paid art mode subscription), and I'm not cultured enough yet to just remember what all of it is. So I wish I could get the tv to show metadata sidecars for my custom images.

The Samsung firmware is garbage. I hate it whenever I accidentally hit the remote button for voice assist or AI assist or any of that garbage.

But the way the display looks when showing paintings is too good to pass up. If i could get a firmware that took out home screen nonsense and disabled 80% of what the TV did, but added metadata display for sideloaded images... it would be perfect.

Why is Palmer Luckey a "creep"?

Are you a TikTok girl or something?

Have you actually looked into his relationship habits?

He is a huge anime and retro video game nut. He married a cosplayer. (He did a little cosplay himself). They've been married since 2019 and have a kid together.

He won at life, basically.

Don't you have to roll trucks more frequently for copper though?

It looks like the OPEX for FTTH vs Copper broadband is actually quite a bit lower.

This has to do with better basic reliability of FTTH vs Copper, and possibly some energy and field equipment savings.

Anyone in the industry actually know?

So It sounds like if Comcast had invested more in FTTH upgrades (high CAPEX), they'd now be enjoying the lower OPEX that their competitors are theoretically enjoying.

Upgrading infrastructure to FTTH is high CAPEX, but there's usually federal money to help with that in the US, and, there are always very favorable tax and accounting rules for CAPEX spending.

It looks like Comcast's problem is that they are irrationally married to an outdated business model and outdated technology. If they get priced out of the market, "the system worked"

it could also be price anchoring. they could know the price is BS but they are anchoring something unrealistic now to help later.

if we spend the next 2 years thinking the next xbox is going to be $1800, when it launches for $999, some people will be overjoyed at the great deal they are getting.

but their concerns were ultimately proven correct, over and over.

there were significant LPEs in other OSes that were exploitable because of kernel lock bugs and race conditions.

and since the smp days, entire new classes of bug (eg info disclosure because of observable side effect bugs in cpus w parallel speculative execution) have also been invented as new processor architecture features have become common.

concurrency is still hard, 30 years later.