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.

You seem to be a bot, without the ability to provide any reasoning for your statement. People who don't understand how to code also can't DESIGN code to make the AI produce code without logic problems. A very basic and elementary bit of code, ask for a number between 0 and 9...now, what happens if someone puts a letter or other character in there? So, the idea of parsing the input to restrict what can be put in had to be done. It's a BASIC BASIC concept in code, but you still hear the occasional "buffer overflow" issue that can affect security, caused by people who just aren't good when it comes to programming.

Interviewing people to make sure they understand conceptually how to code, even if the need to write code has been cut way back should not change. It doesn't matter what the language is as much as having a good grasp on how to make things work with the tools available. Most people don't have much patience with a cashier in a store not being able to give correct change when customers use cash to pay, because basic skills needed for the job should be known, even when you have tools that make things easier.

MAGA is based on the idea that those from Spanish-speaking countries are unskilled and don't speak the English language. Now, if those who are unskilled and don't speak the language are being hired over MAGA, that says pretty clearly that MAGA is made up of unskilled and worthless people who KNOW that with ANY competition for jobs, they won't get the job.

Seriously, if an immigrant is a better choice, then people really need to look at their own skills before complaining about immigrants taking their job. The only ones who have a valid complaint are when companies will pay immigrants less for the same level of skill and experience, at which point, the COMPANIES should be the ones being demonized, not the people working and looking to get a job.

I'd go with Nash Equilibrium here. DVORK is not inherently better than QWERTY for typing speed, although it is less prone to causing RSI. The big downside is the learning curve and making shortcuts like Ctrl-V harder to press.

User: The annual report is nit ready because IT forced a software update and it broke the report generation. I tried to warn them but they did it anyway...

That comes from mismanagement, and putting people who don't understand entertainment in charge of too many areas of the company. When there are more movies and shows available across many different genres, you get a LOT of people interested. Not everything needs to be a blockbuster production, not everything needs to be a top tier production. It's good when you have all of them profitable, but the push where everything needs to be amazing for a specific demographic reduces the number of movies/shows, and that will cause your audience to shrink.

Unless you are a teenager, you may look at the movies that come out and decide there isn't ANYTHING worth watching. Go for too long where entire segments of the population see that there isn't anything they would enjoy, and that segment will just stop going to the movies. The same goes for shows on TV, if you get too many of a given type, or not enough of another type, you lose a lot of viewers. So, instead of needing everything to be a high cost production and getting fewer people overall, going for a mix of low budget, medium, and high will make people look forward to seeing what is new.

The same applies to games, where the variety in the types of games has dropped like a rock since around 2005, and now, there are far too many first person shooters, and not enough games that are DIFFERENT. The independent studios or small teams can come up with some of the original stuff, but most of those do feel like they would be better if they had a bigger budget for music/sound effects/voiceovers, etc. EA killing off those developers who were doing interesting things, plus the death of Interplay has really hurt the games industry, the same way these big movie studios are killing things with their focus being on "more of the same", without a lot of effort put in to be different.

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 want Ludwig Plutonium, AFU, Kibo, Serdar Argjic and the Zumabots, Ted Frank, and Joel Furr vs. The Green Card Lawyers...

>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.

When you see some CIOs who refuse to upgrade because they don't want to spend money, there is the flip side where these same CIOs keep the software for far too long. In 2026, seeing 2012 versions of programs is a BAD thing in a corporate setting because you run into compatibility issues with newer versions of the operating system(stuff from before Windows 10 having issues under Window 11).

Artificial limits, or subscription models are a bad thing, but when you know something is going end of life, do the jump to something new, before your old software loses support and the VERY important migration path to new software. I've seen it even in the consumer space, the old Eudora e-mail program was going to go end of life(Qualcomm was shutting the project down), and a migration tool to Thunderbird was provided as the path for users. The problem came from those who stuck with Eudora because people did like the program. BUT, then you have the problem where when you DO finally want to upgrade, and the tool to export to Thunderbird no longer works well, or it crashes because of 200+ mail folders. That's where it gets ugly to do the migration.

For Windows at least, Microsoft allowed the Windows 7 to Windows 10(and then 11) upgrade path to continue working, but it's possible that Microsoft may turn off the upgrade from Windows 7 at some point, and that is when it will get ugly for people who want to FINALLY upgrade the OS. Trying to migrate to new hardware for those currently on Windows 7 is already a BIG issue if there are no drivers for this and that.

Make the students go up and demonstrate their work. Assign homework, then have those students come in and test them in person, possibly showing their work up on a board to show how much or little they understand.

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.