I've long been a crypto non-believer, but this book made me actively hate it.

It was the human trafficking chapters that really got me. Imagine applying for a job, getting kidnapped, held for years and forced to run scams and being beaten or (occasionally) murdered. The survivor Faux interviewed had his life completely and permanently ruined.

Losing your stupid NFTs or cash is terrible, but the above is a crime against humanity which is enabled specifically by the crypto industry and the inability to retrieve your money after being scammed.

I mean, banks aren't exactly perfect, but at least there's someone to call.

That is always a danger, unfortunately.

In order to prevent the rich from taking over as well as to reduce cost and trolling, I would restrict user creation to a whitelist of domains similar to how early Facebook restricted use to certain .edu domains.

If you're signing up with an @aclu.org email, fine. If it's @reagan.com, sorry but no.

That should stave them off for a while.

My idea is to create a grassroots version of ALEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

ALEC is a billionaire-funded organization that creates 'model legislation', hands it to representatives at all levels of government, and says: "introduce this or we will fund your primary opponent". Famous examples which passed include the Stand Your Ground law in Florida, Right to Work in Wisconsin, and the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

My idea:

1. Web app where users enter a bill idea for the local/county/state level (federal is hopeless)
2. Runs it through an LLM trained on a corpus of laws for that jurisdiction
3. Generate a model bill with references to existing laws, similar to what a legislative aide would do
4. Once complete, pick a representative you'd like to introduce it
5. A GoFundMe-type interface which fundraises to get the bill introduced
6. If the rep introduces the bill, the donated money goes to their next campaign. If not, it goes to their primary opponent (if there is one, obvs)

Anyone is free to run with this independently if they want.

I asked my manager specifically. He's like "yeah, you're definitely up there."

My take-home pay was getting me to the top of the dreaded 'highest paid' spreadsheet, so I have been demanding a 0% raise for the past 3 years.

For our (very large) company's last round of layoffs, our team lost many of our best and most knowledgeable people. The only possible reason is that they made too much, as they otherwise were the most valuable contributors to the product.

Word to the wise: never be at the top of that spreadsheet. 8th or 9th is about where you want to max out.

Good one. I came to post one of her absolutely ridiculous videos.

My personal favorite...Versace Beduoin:

https://youtu.be/_DIuPPmY9mw

The layoffs in February were brutal for my team (an acquired startup), Monday's were even more so.

I'm old enough to have been through this many times. I have yet to be laid off in my career (IC dev here), but as always it falls on those remaining to pick up the slack.

I guess the lesson here is to not work on a product which "only" makes $10mn / year in profits, but for the one which makes $1bn / year. Otherwise you're going to have a bad time.

I worked at a state university (Indiana University) for 7 years, and a private school (University of Chicago) for 5. This subject came up constantly.

I had to read allll the way to the end of the article to get a (passing) mention of state funding:

> At meeting after meeting for decades, Penn State board members complained of the state’s anemic support while they simultaneously approved hundreds of millions of dollars in new construction, according to board minutes.

> The university’s state appropriation fell 39% over the past 20 years, and the school receives among the lowest state support per student of U.S. flagships.

I used to have a better source for this with a graph, but declining state funding is directly correlated with tuition increases over the past 20+ years.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/...

The biggest factor is that taxpayers in all states have decided that universities just aren't worth the expense. Second is all those sweet unforgivable, legally mandated student loans which enable all the construction and unnecessary hires.

> So would you say it will lead to larger amounts of code, produced more quickly, and at a lower quality?

'zactly.

> Would you say that has any similarity to general trends in programming prior to this year?

The only thing I can think of is in the early 2000s when outsourcing blew up and there was an 'IT Training Institute' on every other block in India's major cities (for example). So many enterprise orgs tried to save a few bucks, then paid them right back again when they had to call in consultants to rework critical systems with mountains of unmaintainable code.

20-year industry veteran here.

> I realize that the part I don't understand is some bizarrely convoluted crap that, now that I've wrapped my mind around the issue, should be a simple one-liner
> I realize that I just wasted a bunch of time

I've been trying to use generative AI for the things I look up every time: dealing with dates/times, location, string encoding etc. The above is why I gave up and went back to just looking it up again.

If this kind of needlessly convoluted, not-quite-right code starts making its way into PRs it wastes other devs' time as well, then QA's when it is found to be buggy.

It's hard enough to keep tech debt at bay with a team of senior devs, I predict heavy LLM use will make it 10x more difficult and unpleasant.

I've been using Rails since version 3, which: jeez, it's been 11+ years now. One of its consistent shortcomings is how it handles javascript.

Back then and for years afterwards, new projects defaulted to CoffeeScript for the front-end, introducing all those bright-eyed web devs to the least capable, buggiest, yet hardest to debug version of transpiled javascript in existence.

For Rails 5 we got the webpacker gem instead, another big misfire. Webpack is already nightmarish to configure and customize, but Rails webpacker gem adds a whole layer of ruby/yaml abstraction on top which made it 10x harder.

Rails 7 kills webpacker off in favor of import maps. I haven't tried it yet, but it *looks* like a major improvement (?).

Having created web apps since they were new, for low-to-medium complexity full stack apps I still haven't seen anything that approaches Rails + React for developer productivity and happiness (laravel is closest). Even for giant mega-apps it's at least possible to work around ruby/rails limitations and make it work.

If the project finally gets javascript right by default, and especially if the new ruby 3 type system gets fully implemented and works well, I could potentially see a ruby/rails renaissance.

I puzzled over that as well. I *think* they're saying people value it as jewelry.

Tumblr could conceivably still do it, though it would surely be a huge hassle.

I've got a small startup which is trying this, though it is closer to Instagram than Tumblr.

https://kinkykin.com/

> you'd need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android

Our mobile app is a progressive web app, this avoids the Apple/Google gatekeepers entirely. It has notifications and a home screen icon...what more do you need? Though, notifications only work on iOS 16+.

> take payment in crypto

This is the crux. We are ad-supported like tumblr, but are in a position to take Visa/MC payments for a large number of small social media sites of which Kin is only one. This is tenuous but currently working. As long as our scale stays small it *shouldn't* be an issue.

> do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance

We copy Fetlife and use phone verification, which satisfies the letter of the law. The gold standard is ID picture verification, but currently that's about $3 / user which is way beyond our resources.

> protect all of that identity information

The phone number is only in a third-party database, no worries there. On our side we have no PII except for an email used for password resets.

> make a ton of money

Someday!

Oh hey, a story I have first-hand knowledge of. I work for a large healthcare data startup which tracks patients across care settings (hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health agency, hospice etc). For our customers, COVID status was mostly communicated between facilities via fax or (God help us all) phone calls, neither of which anyone had time for. Back in March we implemented a new feature which flagged patients with their COVID test results automatically for the various EMR (electronic medical records) systems in use and made those flags available to subsequent facilities along the patient's 'care continuum' via email or a web app with CSV reporting, which can then be imported back into the next EMR. Incredibly, it didn't get mired in HIPAA legal issues, everyone was like 'sure yeah, let's do it and figure it out later'. It was astounding to see medical software move so quickly, our industry generally moves slower even than academia. tl'dr: there's a technological solution for this -- either give my employer a huge sack of $100 bills or, since EMRs are now federally mandated, have the feds collect the data instead, put us out of business and standardize it across the industry as though we had a first-world health care system. I would be fine with this.

...and Buttigieg and Yang are new to the national stage. Warren, Sanders et al have run campaigns in the past so gmail users have had plenty of time to sort them into Promotions or Spam. That's what makes up the training set. Yang and Buttigieg will end up there soon enough, especially if they're as aggressive as Warren/Sanders (I subscribe). Google could theoretically have devs customizing the algo but this is exactly what ML is good at, otherwise spam filtering wouldn't be nearly as good as it has gotten.