I used to SOMETIMES visit reddit to go check things out. Now they throw up a "ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! GO SIGN UP RIGHT NOW YOUNG MAN" interstitial ad thing if you use if for more than 20 seconds. I would rather not know the thing, than click on the reddit link and see that ad again. Reddit was a fun 5-10 min a week time waster, and useful for super obscure stuff, but lately it's unusable, especially without being logged in.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

The problem is, that is not true. I have seen multiple cases in which the information in an article is well sourced, in that the facts in the article are attributable to reliable sources, but the subject is considered not notable by many editors because he or she is not considered of sufficient interest. In some cases, the deletion is pretty clearly justified by a specific policy, namely that a person known only because of a single event is generally not considered notable. Even that policy is not a bright line since people known for a single event who have been in the public eye still have articles devoted to them. An example is Lee Harvey Oswald. He is only known for assassinating President Kennedy, but there is a lot of interest in him, so he has his own article, not merely a mention of his role in the article on the Kennedy assassination. Other cases are still more subjective.

One consequence of this is that there is a huge disparity between people in different walks of life. It seems like any band that ever got out of somebody's garage gets or any professional athlete, however minor, gets a detailed article, while people arguably of greater significance in areas that don't attract as much popular interest do not.

It is reasonable that Wikipedia should not want articles about your next door neighbor Joe, who may be a great guy but has not done anything notable, but the current policy is highly subjective and excludes a lot of people whom one might want to look up in an encyclopedia precisely because they turn up in the news or in a specialized area but are not widely known celebrities. The policy in its current form not only allows the deletion of interesting articles about people some people would want to know about, but it encourages unproductive deletion debates.

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.

Well, ed is the default. And I still use ed a bit. But mostly I use Emacs.

I use Emacs daily, as I have done for 44 years. I use it for all of my programming, for editing flat-file databases, of which I do a great deal, for making notes, and for some kinds of writing. Even if I use LibreOffice Writer for a piece of writing, I will often draft it in Emacs first, then use LibreOffice Writer to format it. I find text-editing, as opposed to formatting, much more efficient in Emacs.

We're running a business here. We need real software, not toys created as a fun weekend experiment with a chatbot or burning money to run an agent and get 50% (or more likely 5%) of the way there.

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.

The real world is more complicated than that. For example, we still have a Windows 7 machine in my office. It has some very expensive but still very useful software locked to it that has no direct replacement available on either Linux or Windows 11. Obviously we have to be careful about security and controlling access to a legacy OS like that.

Blunt statements about "forcing an upgrade" are worthless in this kind of situation. Chances are anyone who is still using a system like that has a good reason for it, at least if it's in use professionally. We buy these assets because they solve problems. Those problems might or might not have a useful and cost-effective solution available on a different platform. If there is no modern solution available and the original still works, your statement that "the old ways are obsolete" is by definition false.

What you do need to do is rationally assess the risks and the threats you face and provide other ways of mitigating the risks and protecting against the threats if you can't rely on, for example, a legacy OS that no longer gets security updates to be secure by itself. But then ideally you shouldn't be relying on any single device or piece of software being secure as your only line of defence anyway, and assuming you already have some degree of defence in depth, accommodating unusual requirements is more a redistribution of security responsibilities than a fundamental change of approach.

Yes, it does look like we broadly agree here.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place. But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation. They might now have titles like "senior" or even "lead" or "staff", but they don't have the skills and experience to operate successfully at those levels. I agree the acceleration of everything due to increasing AI use tends to show these people up and I agree that a good mid-level developer using AI might well outperform them. But then I suspect in reality a good mid-level developer was probably outperforming them before AI as well, it just wasn't so obvious.