I guess I’m so old that I remember time without autocomplete. Where programmers just knew what functions existed and how to use them. Usually by looking them up in a manual and then -gasp- remembering them. Languages shouldn’t be optimized for laziness or not using your brain.
Stair steps could be 450 mm high and work, but building codes make them 200 mm for a reason. And you are not "better" by saying that "I am fit enough to climb 450 mm steps, and you are all lazy for wanting stairs built to ergonomic standards".
I advise checking out the users other comments before jumping to conclusions. Doesn't look AI generated to me, rather just an "individual" writing style. Only because it's possible doesn't mean its true. Maybe user can confirm?
Otherwise just downvote or flag I guess, but this comment of yours just reads as an insult to a person that maybe did not put the most effort into writing their comment, but seems genuine to me at least.
this is cool but acting like this is some insane usage is funniest part for me. emacs and 100 other tools can do this easily and have been doing it for 30 years
This is the most childish thing I’ve read. And shows a lot about he doesn’t have any people relying on him or community to support. He takes one hike and throws away 60m. Doesn’t try to find anything interesting to do at Atlassian just calls his coworkers NPCs. This is zero-empathy Peter Pan syndrome at its worse.
Sad how he just goes adventure hopping to try and find meaning. The problem is no matter where you are you are also there. Time to look inward and not outward.
You are catching a lot of flak for this, but there is one thing you are right about. If you make tens of millions of dollars, and can't figure out what to do with those resources, you shouldn't be calling your coworkers NPCs. You're the NPC.
I truly mean this in an entirely non-judgemental way. I wish the author luck in achieving his dream of becoming high agency rather than simply high freedom. I wish it for everyone who wants it.
The article author hasn’t figured out that he got to where he is because he was lucky, not because he was special in some way.
The cringe comes in with the way he does it. He seems to realize he is an Elon bro but still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
It’s amazing how even millionaires and billionaires don’t understand that national debt doesn’t work like personal debt.
But anyway, that’s a tangent. The guy dumped his girlfriend so he has no family to spend time with, and he’s wondering why he’s bored. His only attempts at stimulation involve self-service: how can I be smart and successful especially in a way that everyone will know it?
I can only imagine how being financially set for life would positively impact a typical fiscally responsible family (people with the restraint to hire a financial advisor). Imagine being able to cancel daycare and spend your days with your family instead of burning your life away in the office.
I even know a person who has no children but thanks to a windfall just does his hobbies and hangs out with friends. Still works a day job for health insurance but now work doesn’t define their life. They’ve done things like learn how to DJ and travel to see their international friends on longer visits and not just little two week vacations that corporate zombies get to take.
But the author is struggling to find a way to make work define their life, to get their life to return to capitalism that they have been blessed to escape.
Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.
> The article author hasn’t figured out that he got to where he is because he was lucky, not because he was special in some way.
It seems like a lot to assume that suggests the author is not a fast technical learner and builder.
> Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.
That sounds like good advice for me, but not to the author. I sometimes follow orders from random people for fun, but I infer that the author does not.
The author traveled off the paved path. Reality gave him with wealth and time, but unsatisfaction instead of satisfaction. His role is now to figure out a path back to satisfaction, perhaps it will be a short path or a long path, a common one or a one the world hasn't seen before.
I think it’s the natural result of someone who has ‘won’ a game they have been obsessing about/that defined them.
People often find a similar lack of purpose (albeit much, much shorter lived) after being engrossed in a book series, very hard video game, or any other pursuit.
The big difference here, IMO, is this is a game that society is literally constructed around - for its own survival. The ‘rat race’ puts food on everyone’s table, provides care when we’re sick, defines what future our children can have (and if we can even have children) - even what rights we have (or don’t have) in many cases.
Is it so surprising that having won that game, some people - often the ones most obsessed with it - struggle to figure out what is next?
I don't know! But I don't think that changes the argument very much. Unless one thinks that we can choose to be smart or a fast learner or have interests that happen to be lucrative, we should be very thoughtful about how we choose to reward people who are successful. This isn't a new or original idea, it's an old debate.
There is an implied collectivism in your statements. The idea that "we choose to reward people who are successful" implies there is a collective with the legitimate authority to make such determinations. I reject this idea. Instead I propose that legitimate authority only exists to create a liberal ecosystem, not to meddle in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. A person's fortune (or misfortune) to be born with particular traits, into a particular childhood environment, is entirely their own. I see no source of legitimacy to redistribute that fortune to other people without explicit consent.
This view makes no sense given any cursory view of history. What about European countries going to the Americas, taking people's land (with out consent) and gold (without consent) to enrich themselves? Or what about the relative success of any tribes in the Americas prior to Europeans showing up by defeating other tribes?
At what arbitrary point would you like to start counting as to where we should start respecting this "consent"? Do you want to undo any previous actions or should we just take whatever arbitrary power structures we've landed on and start? C'mon, this is ridiculous.
We live in a society which, by definition, requires multiple people participating. Your right to consent (or not) sometimes doesn't exist because society takes priority. There is no high philosophy here, it's just the reality of how things work. Get over it.
First of all, I'm not talking about international conflict, where the law of the jungle still effectively applies to this day. I'm talking about domestic liberalism, where ideas like the fundamental equality and the consent of the governed are held to be self-evident. If you disagree with these ideas then I suspect you will be intractable.
> At what arbitrary point would you like to start counting
There is no need to keep count. We are all born into this world with no possessions, and we all negotiate with those already here for everything we come to own. It is true that people and circumstances vary widely, but that doesn't provide legitimacy for one person's claim over another (equal) person's legitimate good fortune.
> We live in a society which, by definition, requires multiple people participating
It is exactly the nature of this participation which I am litigating. I hold that it should be maximally voluntary and consensual. The only justified violation of fundamental liberty is in defense of liberty itself. Drafting people into the army (effectively enslaving them) is justified in direct defense of the nation (not to attack eg. Vietnam). Redistributing legitimate (earned through consensual exchange) wealth by force simply doesn't pass this test.
> There is no high philosophy here, it's just the reality of how things work. Get over it.
Funnily enough this is the exact sort of reasoning has been used to rationalize the most horrific atrocities ever perpetrated.
> First of all, I'm not talking about international conflict, where the law of the jungle still effectively applies to this day.
Then why should we take this seriously? Some huge disparities in outcomes in this world are the consequence of "international conflict". What do you want to do about Native Americans in the USA, for example?
> We are all born into this world with no possessions, and we all negotiate with those already here for everything we come to own.
This is not meaningfully true. If you are born into a rich family, you almost certainly are going to live a life with more access than those who are not. If you are born into a country with socialized medicine you are going to have access to opportunities that someone who isn't does not. We are not born equal in any way that is meaningful.
> It is exactly the nature of this participation which I am litigating. I hold that it should be maximally voluntary and consensual.
It isn't and can't be. Any right of consent you are given in society is society choosing to give you that right. It doesn't exist above society. That's just the breaks.
> Funnily enough this is the exact sort of reasoning has been used to rationalize the most horrific atrocities ever perpetrated.
People find any reason to justify their actions. You'll find a lot of terrible things have justifications that overlap with non-terrible things. It doesn't really say much.
Yes, it does. Or at least that's the line of reasoning you seem to be disagreeing with.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The entire line of enlightenment liberal thought that gave rise to our society fundamentally disagrees with your position. The right to liberty is not bestowed by the good graces of society, but is fundamental and unalienable.
> That's just the breaks.
This isn't a justification, it's a rationalization, and not a particularly good one. I am arguing that liberty, ie. the right to interact with other people on a consensual basis, ought to be the primary determining factor as to whether any particular action is legitimate. You have not replied with an argument on why this ought not to be.
> It isn't and can't be.
Yes, it can. Or at least, it can be more consensual. I hold that charity is a more ethical means of wealth redistribution than taxation, exactly because of charity's voluntary nature. I also hold that before the New Deal, the status quo was much more liberal. Government was a small entity mostly charged with administering the vital institutions that maintained the liberal order. There were of course still overreaches and failures, as with any human system. Do you really think that tearing down much of the New Deal can't be? I think it can, whether it will remains to be seen.
> You'll find a lot of terrible things have justifications that overlap with non-terrible things.
Then the justifications are wrong. The ends do not justify the means. Legitimate action should be possible to justify from first-principles in a manner that precludes illegitimate action. Otherwise how could we possibly come to an agreement on a distinction between the two? I would also note that the ideas I'm articulating do exactly that: provide a concrete, universalizable framework to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate.
> The entire line of enlightenment liberal thought that gave rise to our society fundamentally disagrees with your position. The right to liberty is not bestowed by the good graces of society, but is fundamental and unalienable
You're quoting a document that is defining what rights it will give to the people. Whatever language you want to add around it can't get past the point that the document is giving rights to people and we as a society are agreeing to follow that document.
And please, this document is written in a time where many of its signers were holding slaves. Clearly not every man was considered equal.
The document does not give any rights to anyone. It is a piece of paper. What it does is describe an idea. The idea is that there are certain unalienable rights. You may disagree with that idea, but you cannot deny its existence.
> many of its signers were holding slaves
I can separate the idea from the people that held it. Can't you? I think this idea of liberty was a very good idea, and I support the expansion of those who qualify to be as free as described. What I'm arguing against is the erosion of the definition. We are not nearly as free now as free people were when the document was written. We are subject to much more authority.
It seems as though in your view, anything "society" does is legitimate, is that so?
My claim, this entire time, is that the reality is that you, as an individual, have no rights to consent or volunteer beyond what society bestows upon you. Your usage of documents from the founding of the United States of America, if anything, entirely support my argument. The Declaration of Independence might talk about equality but the reality is that blacks and women were not equal. It took society choosing to give them rights for them to receive them. That's not an idea, that's the reality. Whether or not you like it or not or think it's a good idea doesn't get in the way of that is what reality is.
> We are not nearly as free now as free people were when the document was written. We are subject to much more authority.
Tell this to a slave in 1776.
> It seems as though in your view, anything "society" does is legitimate, is that so?
No, "legitimate" is a judgement, I'm saying that what society does is what society does and there is no philosophy or higher abstraction defining it. It's just reality. I think if society is functioning in a way we disagree with, our only option is to try to convince enough people to change it. We can use language that tries to define philosophies around consent and individual rights in order to be persuasive but if society doesn't agree then you don't get those things, even if you really think that's how it should work.
It depends wether you believe in determinism. If you do, then everything is just "luck". If you believe that your mind is something special that can come to conclusions truly independently (create information out of thin air) then the consequences of actions are skill or intelligence.
Or whatever. "Luck" is just a dumb concept we humans use to handwave away edge cases.
It does not require believing in determinism to believe a majority of one's outcome is based on context that they do not control. For myself, I didn't choose which country I was born in (I happen to be born in a wealthy country). I also was not born into abusive parents but rather parents who valued science and school. We happened to get a computer early because of my dad's job and I happen to have enjoyed it. That doesn't mean it's a deterministic outcome, but it is chaotic, in the sense that given all these inputs it's not possible to predict the outcome. And small perturbations can have significantly different outputs.
> "Luck" is just a dumb concept we humans use to handwave away edge cases.
Or maybe this view is just people who really want to believe there is something else. What is that something else?
Luck is a combination fortune and the ability to exploit it. We all have examples of the right ideas at the wrong time, as well as serendipity dropping the right circumstances at the right time.
> It seems like a lot to assume that suggests the author is not a fast technical learner and builder.
I'm a fast technical learner and builder. I will never be where this guy is, in part because most of my resources are going into keeping myself afloat. I live my life as though "luck" isn't a factor (what's the use in declaring defeat?), but it's certainly not merit that separates the rich from the poor.
> It seems like a lot to assume that suggests the author is not a fast technical learner and builder.
There are a lot of really, really, really smart people who never become generationally wealthy. Generational wealth almost always includes either luck, or intentionally heading down a morally reprehensible path.
You’ll have a tough time convincing me the guy who invented loom is smarter than or contributed more to mankind than Nikola Tesla.
Which is probably a perfect example because Edison took the morally reprehensible path.
Your examples are at the extreme end. You can be a fast technical learner or builder which does make you special but not be an inventor or someone who can grok science and systems similar to Tesla / Edison.
Loom != DC or AC electricity its a helpful tool not transformational technology such as electricity.
Op said he got lucky, the response implied he didn’t. My example is extreme because the circumstances of making several hundred million dollars on a startup exit is EXTREMELY rare, and has far more to do with luck than skill.
There is truth to what you say. But I sense what I wrote came off more negative than I intended, and I am not sure it makes any of our lives (our lives or his) better to be hard on the author. Self actualization is legitimately extremely difficult.
I think he IS special. You can't easily have $60m income and be this bored. He could probably, say, get a million dollar in $1 note and burn it dollar by dollar in the backyard one evening and be a YouTuber overnight. Getting exposure is stupid, so what, he could pay an "NPC" do it for him.
What this guy is missing is creativity. And we don't have data to determine if it's contributor, detractor, or tangent to the position where he is at. I'd bet it's a bigly contributory, as gains from x-factors are called gambling.
I suspect burning $1 notes one at a time might take a very long time (it takes longer than you might expect burning bundles of £50 notes [1]) and as you say "What this guy is missing is creativity", just burning $1m dollars just for the sake of it, unless you're making some creative comment some would probably see as pointless/divisive.
The girlfriend thing was very odd. At one time, "making it" meant now you can marry the girl, have a bunch of kids, and become a pillar of your community.
Get rich? Move to a small or mid-sized city, marry your girl, have some kids, and get involved. Need to be busy? Run a local business that hires locals. Use your money and expertise to improve your community, which is a lot easier to do as a big fish in a small pond.
Yeah, the "I dumped my girlfriend of two years as soon as things got a little bit hard for me, why is my life boring and meaningless?" thing also stood out to me. As well as this:
"Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups."
DOGE is run on Signal, and his conclusion is "so smart," not "that seems like a huge red flag." This guy sounds like he's in line to be the next George Papadopoulos, the guy who gets thrown under the bus when everything goes sideways.
Federal entities require transparency and various rules to be followed to enable investigations and oversight. Remember when a certain political party was concerned about somebody’s emails?
The signal of using signal for running the business is that by working there you’re likely committing a crime every day by working there. If you’re not DJT’s bff, or when Elon gets kicked out of cool kids club, you’re boned.
The funny thing is that the "Department of Government Efficiency" is not a government department, or any kind of official government entity. It is probably (or will be) a federal advisory committee. Federal advisory committees have official rules on open meetings and reporting.
So the fact that they think it's a good idea to just start a bunch of chats on Signal should be surprising, but it's Trump and Elon, so I guess it's just another thing in a long list of insane things that just happen, and we just kind of ignore them and pretend that everything is fine.
I think he's saying that "running" DOGE via a messanger app sounds more like some cryptobro hustle university / shitpost chat group than a serious organization. The description in the blog of working there that sounds like cokehead bender doesn't help.
there is a wonderful quote from a soviet movie called guest from the future, you can watch the whole movie on youtube with english subtitles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BB6bwJ9agM
(en français, of course. I link to it in its original language as I take issue with the usual translation of the very title as "Diversion", which immediately lacks the double-entendre of "Divertissement", which in french stands for both "diversion" and "entertainment")
Maybe what TFA author should do is spend some time standing on the shoulders of giants and read some philosophy?
> Tel homme passe sa vie sans ennui en jouant tous les jours peu de chose. Donnez-lui tous les matins l’argent qu’il peu gagner chaque jour, à la charge qu’il ne joue point : vous le rendez malheureux. On dira peut-être que c’est qu’il recherche l’amusement du jeu, et non pas le gain. Faites-le donc jouer pour rien, il ne s’y échauffera pas et s’y ennuiera. Ce n’est donc pas l’amusement seul qu’il recherche : un amusement languissant et sans passion l’ennuiera. Il faut qu’il s’échauffe et qu’il se pipe lui-même, en s’imaginant qu’il serait heureux de gagner ce qu’il ne voudrait pas qu’on lui donnât à condition de ne point jouer, afin qu’il se forme un sujet de passion, et qu’il excite sur cela son désir, sa colère, sa crainte, pour l’objet qu’il s’est formé, comme les enfants qui s’effrayent du visage qu’ils ont barbouillé.
I wouldn't be so sure about this, this might depend on the personality of the player. Some might think that introducing monetary stakes in fact ruins the game itself. And you can even take it further : the winning itself might become secondary - at which point playing the game is probably more akin to a form of artistic expression, infused with a different kind of meaning. (There are also games where you win, but in cooperation with others rather than against others.)
But then this passage also reminded me of this recent thread :
"More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market"
> Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.
It's a common enough idea to tell someone rudderless to volunteer, but I feel like it's never tempered with the perspective of having volunteered and reflected on how the donated time has effected one's own life. Shaming someone rudderless into volunteering doesn't help them for exactly the obvious reasons it won't. At least no more than anything else you can lean hard into in life to avoid something else. Suggesting it as a fix to ennui is bad advice, the virtuousness of volunteering just masks how terrible it is.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. To share my experience as someone who volunteers, I find it to be one of the most gratifying (humbling, helpful, makes me see the value of life) things, and I think it's worthwhile to share the idea that it could help someone who is searching for meaning. I wholeheartedly recommend volunteering for everyone who can afford it (which I recognize not everyone can).
I'm not sure GP here needs to necessarily state "I volunteer and found it worthwhile" every time they recommend it.
What are these "obvious reasons" that volunteering won't help someone seeking direction?
I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.
>I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.
I do. I did not start to distract myself from other life issues, I joined because I wanted to help the org accomplish it's mission. It's rewarding and fulfilling, but I'm not using it as a mental defense from something else in my life. Whether or not it "worked" in that sense is simply not a thing for me.
It certainly shifted a lot of my mental focus. That's why I mentioned you can lean hard into things in life as a distraction for what's consuming you. And I've certainly used that mental defense over the years, it just happened that the things I used didn't include volunteering. And over the years I've noticed through others that volunteering is a particularly good way of self-deception that you're not just employing that defense.
That's why shaming someone into volunteering when they're rudderless bothers me. It's hard to argue against because it has intrinsic value AND can work in the "the true $whatever was the friends we made along the way" sense, plus the slim chance they find a new life purpose. But also maybe it doesn't and they really should have been shamed into joining the clergy instead because that's where they would have found their calling.
How do you find a good volunteer organization? I volunteered for a couple years at different orgs, and it was a bad experience. All the bad parts of the workplace but with worse people and no pay.
my suggestion to the author would be: spend some time volunteering and get over yourself (by that i mean their own ego which seems to be putting them at the centre of everything).
in my experience, some things tend to come out of it
- gratitude for where i am at in life because i’m struggling less than the people i’m helping
- empathy because jesus yeah these people are struggling and i’m seeing just how much it’s affecting them
- humility because you know what, i really am limited in what i can actually do for these people, none of my “technical prowess” is actually useful here
- purpose because man i feel bad for these people and id like to do more to help than just showing up once a week
i don’t volunteer because it’s “virtuous”. fuck virtuosity.
i do it because i need to for my own sake — to experience the stuff above. it’s selfish-selflessness. by helping others i also help myself.
edit — added the one about humility which is quite important
edit 2 — donating money (philanthropy) is not the same as volunteering. in case there’s any confusion. boots on the ground are required.
Is there any single daily life situation where any person from around the globe and in the entire history of humankind who is not judgemental? Perhaps not at a job interview? Or maybe at dating or when trying to sell or buy something or simply when looking at that person?
> He seems to realize he is an Elon bro but still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
Based on this blog and the needs of the overseeing oligarch, DOGE appears to be a therapy programme for millionaires and billionaires.
Now that is a hilarious take. It really is blatantly obvious how badly people like Elon Musk need therapy.
But we shouldn’t downplay what the program really intends to do: gut federal government spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy to a sensible level.
Most federal government spending has very real benefits to the average person and should be thought of as more of an investment than a cost. But the DOGE mafia wants to cut programs that help the average person to protect their own fortunes.
E.g., the average person is harmed by shutting down the department of education. The wealthy who go to private school their whole lives are not.
>> still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
I'm not convinced it's the later. There IS a looming financial problem with our government and nobody else is doing anything about it. Federal spending is up trillions of dollars (per year) in the last 5 years with nothing to show for it. There is huge inefficiency and Elon wants to take a stab at fixing it. Yes, the man has his flaws, but he's trying to fix things nobody else will even try. Not sure why people have to hate on that.
BTW, I do expect so over-cutting will happen and there will be fallout from that. But hopefully the budget gets fixed and congress learns something about fiscal responsibility.
> He seems to realize he is an Elon bro but still thinks DOGE is an important national priority and not a problematic oligarchic downsizing of our important federal services and regulatory bodies.
I'm confused by this belief. Anyone who has ever interacted with a big government in the West knows they are a knot of old and confusing regulations that cause every thing to be slow and expensive. A leftist should be happy that the state gets to accomplish more with it's existing budget.
The problem is that no one believes Elon and company are actually trying to "accomplish more with it's existing budget". That would be a great goal, but I don't believe that's what they're doing or even capable of doing.
Remember, Elon downsized Twitter by 80%, and then Twitter lost 80% of it's value. Simply firing a bunch of people doesn't accomplish more, it can actually destroy the value of the thing to begin with.
We've all seen this with republicans before. They take over, make things worse, and then use the fact that things are worse as an excuse for why the government shouldn't do the things it does. Elon isn't an expert in efficiency, he's an arsonist coming in to destroy the government so he and his buddies can extract more value out of this country.
Many people believe Elon in that he's trying to right the ship. Elon has been very clear on his ambitions and he isn't what you are trying to paint him as (a political republican). And the counter point is that Elon and large portion SV have remained in the center while the Dems marched steadily left leaving everyone in the center without a party.
Twitter was broken and full of bloat as is clearly obvious given that it is performing in many ways better than before engineering wise. It has become much more of a wild west given his free speech absolutism perspective but you can't possibly argue that what he didn't proved all the critics wrong - lights stayed on, kept shipping products. It certainly hasn't lost 80% value from his actions - he bought it at the height of ZIRP mania.
Now whether Elon has a enough inertia to actually be able to tackle some of the truly endemic issues of the Federal government is another question. Some of his new found friends will certainly poison the water but my take is he is authentic in his attempt to reduce deficit and lower the debt for the US while increasing growth.
>he is authentic in his attempt to reduce deficit and lower the debt for the US while increasing growth.
The only way he is being authentic is if he is an idiot.
If he knew what he was talking about and was being authentic, he wouldn’t be publicly stating that he is going to cut $2 trillion from the budget.
Payroll for the entire Federal civilian workforce is only $300 billion.
I guess he could just be suffering from delusions of grandeur and he think he’s going to be able to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, or the Military.
He's planning on going after Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That's the only way to cut that much from the budget. Republicans have been transparent about their desire to remove the social safety nets for awhile now.
Yes, the republicans will cut spending. Next election cycle the Democrats will be able raise spending, but now from a more sound basis. The deadwood will be pruned. DOGE is good for both the left and the right.
xAI and X are two separate companies. xAI is raising funds with a target valuation of $40b, but that has nothing to do with X. The article you linked to makes this pretty clear and validates what I said about the 80% lost.
> The new valuation means xAI has surpassed the $44 billion Musk paid for Twitter in October 2022. X was valued at $9.4 billion by Fidelity, one of its investors, in September. The firm, which invested $19.6 million in the platform, has written down the value of its investment by nearly 79% since 2022.
Cutting 80% of the staff happened during the same time period when Fidelity dropped the evaluation by 79%. Cutting the staff doesn't seem like a good move at all.
The problem isn’t that someone is trying to improve government efficiency.
The problem is that we picked a billionaire professional internet troll to do it whose stated goal is cutting 2 trillion from the budget.
And ignoring the fact that Elon is already running 3 companies, you couldn’t possibly find someone with more conflicts of interest than the richest man in the world.
Here’s a quote from Reason (hardly a left wing publication) that sums up how absurd their goal is.
“Musk and Ramaswamy's public pronouncements thus far do not inspire confidence. Musk's promise to save "at least $2 trillion" annually—approximately one-third of all (noninterest) federal spending—suggests a lack of familiarity with the federal budget. Roughly 75 percent of all federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans, and interest, and the final quarter includes priorities such as infrastructure, justice, border security, health research, national parks, unemployment benefits, disaster aid, and disability benefits.”
Large organizations are inherently inefficient because id the non linear growth in communications overhead. If you don’t understand an organization, coming in and hacking away at it is insanely dangerous. How many companies have been ruined when hedge fund buys then and starts trying to “maximize efficiency”?
Yes cutting $2T is not realistic. If they manage to do a few percent of the goal it is still going to be good for everyone.
Bloat is a major issue that prevent anglosphere societies from achieving goals that poorer societies do easily. Ex: Spain or France do awesome public transit for 3 or 5 times less than we do.
You don’t accomplish things by setting wildly unrealistic goals that you know are unobtainable.
And he’s not going to completely reorganize society so that we can build cheap public transit. Especially not by running a “government agency” that can’t do anything other than make recommendations to the president.
Do you know how many similar commissions we’ve had to reduce waste and spending?
I don't know i agree. I think its brave to be honest about it. Being able to acknowledge you don't have it together is the first stage of growth.
Most people struggle with meaning, most people don't have it figured out.
So what, dude who suddenly fell into massive wealth tried a bunch of cliched things to find meaning. Did they work? No, these types of cliched things usually don't. However you don't find meaning without trying things. You have to fail before you suceed.
But both of you can be right. I would not judge the author for their attempt to find meaning but it is hard to read something like "all coworkers are NPCs" and dehumanizing expressions like that.
No, your coworkers are complex human beings with complex lives of their own seeking stability and a content life for themselves and their families. Blaming people for not always maximum pushing and risk taking is very simple minded. It is fine to enjoy a content, stable life without aiming for the stars all the time. It doesn't block you from being a star seeker yourself.
Responsibly raising a family is a massive and tiring task on its own but of course you can take the easy way out like Elon and delegate "family" to others starting at insemination because you burned your brain with drugs and had too many conversations with Peter Thiel. Most people don't want that.
And when he mentioned DOGE it was an immediate red flag. These people do not care why or for what purpose governments exist. They only see the inefficiencies and blockers and fail to understand that governments are not profit oriented companies. This is pretty much like failing pre-school. These folks belong in emotional special needs schools.
> but it is hard to read something like "all coworkers are NPCs" and dehumanizing expressions like that.
They did not say that all coworkers are NPCs.
What they said is "I knew that staying at the acquiring company was not it for me for the big company reasons you might suspect (lots of politics, things moved slowly, NPC coworkers, etc.)".
You should read that as "in a big company, there are more coworkers who don't do anything useful" rather than "at a big company, nobody is doing anything useful".
I read it more as - in a big company there are a lot of people there just to get a paycheque who don't really care.
Which isn't really surprising. That is kind of what a job is. Company gives you money in exchange for them telling you what to do for a little while. There is a very real way where "becoming an npc" for 8 hours a day is what it means to be employed for a lot of people. That is not a dig at the person; we all need to do what we need to do to put food on the table.
It would be interesting to learn what a bunch of people actually do with found wealth.
I've read that lottery winners frequently become seriously unhappy.
Maybe some of us aren't ultra-rich like this guy, but we might deal with some of the same existential issues either planning or encountering retirement.
My intuition is that (sudden) wealth causes some amount of additional isolation (for different reasons: jealousy, privacy, security, etc), so if you are not someone with preexisting social bonds that are strong enough to weather that change, you’re going to ultimately feel emotionally worse off once the quick pleasure hits start to fade. If you’re someone going into that situation without strong social bonds, you end up even further isolated.
Yeah that comment just reads like someone who is pointing down at how unenlightened someone is, when that someone just finished telling you that they don't know what they are doing and being honest about it.
Would it be so much better for the author to hide this phase of personal growth, and then later on comment on other people's struggles to mock how far they are from them?
While the tone of the post might come off as childish, I don't think it should be dismissed quite so off hand, because I think there's a lot more behind it than one might think.
I cannot but help think that there's a fair bit of truth behind Terror Management Theory [1], which paraphrased states that a lot of human activity is centered around the need to get our minds off the topic of our mortality, or to find something meaningful in it. I can totally see that someone who spends much of their life working towards a goal of essentially getting rich now finds that he is somewhat rudderless after that point. Is finding something interesting to do meaningful? I mean, it's completely subjective.
Nihilism when understanding/dealing with the problem is also a common trap in Buddhism, and a big reason why Monks will often discourage unguided meditation practice. The Void is a powerful thing to grasp, and can very much be ‘held wrong’ [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81]
Ultimately, that nothing ultimately matters, also does not really ultimately matter.
All we really have is now, and the conditions which have led to now, and our ability to do things within our power now. And that does matter, as much as anything ever can. Which is something. Getting through to that point is not a given.
IMO, part of what made the Buddha, well, the Buddha, is he tried to make it better. Despite knowing all this. And despite it being much, much harder, messier, and more painful than the path he could of taken - which is opting out.
Will you make it better (in your judgement)? Make it worse (in your judgement)? Rely on someone else’s judgement? How accurate is your judgement?
Or opt out (and what does that mean)?
Buddha (depending on the tradition) taught a path to reduce pain, and in some cases opt out (for Monks, at least, to some extent) by hopefully seeing the truth as best as one can.
That form of Buddhism is not very popular.
Religions that give a narrative involving conquering (Islam, Christianity in the recent past), surrendering (Modern Christianity, Jainism), or being chosen/made (Judaism/Hinduism) for/by a deity to achieve heaven or have one’s fate decided are much more popular.
I expect for much the same reason that action movies, dramas, and epics are more popular than quiet walks in the woods.
I read "The Way of Zen" by Alan Watts and it completely changed my existence. It really got me away from concepts like searching for meaning, purpose, and making things better.
Indeed, and I think your comment throws some light on the depths of the topic. It's easily one of the most profound topics, and is worth exploring in and of itself (even if in this case the blog post author came off extremely tone deaf).
You can see that's what OP did: he watched a youtube video about robotics (door fixtures), immediately wrote to 70 people (bought a nice old house) to start working on it.
But then he realized it's not what he wants to spend his time on
Nope. His motivations are capitalstic in nature and his idol is Elon Musk.
He doesn't care to help people or getting into robotics because he is interested in it.
He doesn't have a real deep relationship with someone to share his live with (he mentions his ex-girlfriend).
He is the type of human being who got lucky rich, but doesn't realize he is empty inside. Elon Musk is even worse.
Captialism as an endgoal for society doesn't bring us any closer to a Star Trek future and there are probably a Billion happier but a lot poorer people ou tthere than him.
He doesn't want to spend his time on it because his capitalistic thinking is so narrow that he doesn't care about the things which are already around him.
When you read the last thing from him " It’s the only thing that feels authentic." even his 'just learning physics' is not even authentic. He doesn't do it for being curious, he does it to " I can start a company that manufactures real world things. "
And the only interesting thing about this blog post, which i will forget tomorrow, is because we tent to like to read things which are more rare than others. There was not much insight or brilliance in his live at all.
OK, but what is the solution? To get a (or multiple) child(ren)? Make a "family" that you don't actually want just so you can have people who rely on your support? And what then when you use your millions to support and nourish your kids? Then you get to read on HN about how they are "nepo-babies who did nothing on their own and are worthless human beings".
How do you know what he did at the company? When you get acqui-hired for large sums you are dropped somewhere in the management block where lets be real most people have no idea what they are doing and they dont even care they are there just for the money.
Buy a RocketLab Electron launch and insert a literal hunk of lead or a beam reflector cube into geostationary graveyard orbit. They never had GTO launches before, let alone direct GEO, and I think no one had ever done an intentionally passive object into GEO let alone commissioned by an individual, it'll be an all around achievement. It's going to stay there for a geological timescale with negligible risk of space junk and gets its own Gunter's Space Page and Wikipedia article with legitimate interest from public.
There are countless stupid fun in the world that money can do that isn't about buying out a human or legally punching an NPC in face. As well as legit meaningful businesses that may or may not make money but kinda fun and useful. The fact that this person is being unable to come up with such a task suggests existence of a problem, though I wouldn't know if it's mental or developmental or physical or circumstantial.
That’s said, if you’re struggling with humility and connection, legally punching someone in the face and being punched in return can be quite rewarding.
So, go join that boxing/bjj gym and learn just how pathetically average you really are!
David Brooks has a good book called “The Second Mountain” where he details the shift of priorities later in one’s life. The “first mountain” is what this guy achieved, monumental material success and freedom in pursuit of the “aesthetic life” that is overly portrayed in social media as the ultimate goal. But Brooks’ position is there is a “second mountain” to climb focused on commitment to a purpose beyond ourselves. Somewhat paradoxically, the second mountain is defined by a constraining of the freedom we pursue originally because it requires dogged commitment.
Familiy is an option. But being curios and having hobbies also. Or helping people around you. Or starting to think about the people around you and enjoying the support you can provide.
I had my nihilistic depression phase for a decade. There is not much to it.
i know therapy has helped a lot of people in my personal life, which is why i tried it, but i think it really made me feel alone that the only person i can talk to is someone that i pay to listen to me.
i went to therapy for 2 years with this perspective that the therapist would fix me like the mechanic fixes my car. I spent 2 hours a week with a psychiatrist & therapist bitching about my life thinking eventually I would get "better".
but then i realized that wasn't getting any better. it's not their responsibility to "fix" me. the only person that could help me was me.
the first thing we reach for is an external solution to solve or escape our current problems and everything is so commoditized that there is something that we can fixate our attention on.
i think that reflecting this fixation inward has made all the difference for me personally.
The hard part is finding a therapist that works for you.
Therapy is such a broad spectrum from psychoanalysis to behavior therapy. It is very unlikely that you just click with the first therapist that you visit, it can take years to find someone.
Two years without any tangible progress sound extremely unethical from the therapist. Yes, therapy takes time but it still something you do for a fixed time period with hopefully clear goals where you track your progress.
And yes, the actual work is done by the patient. Just like a personal trainer can not just work out for you.
Therapy isn’t a social relationship. What you’re paying for is someone to be non judgmental as you unpack things. They can help talk you througj it. Friends don’t know how/wouldn’t want to do that.
I mean yeah? He clearly needs to talk to someone and feels isolated. A neutralish third party to talk to (and is trained to help!) is a excellent suggestion. Therapy isn't a cure all, and is expensive (not that it matters in this case) but your comment sounds like:
> The modern cure to all problems. Going to the gym if you feel unfit. Incredible insight.
What for? Because I don't want kids? And what could they possibly say to fix the world? I can re-consider after we get rid of Putin, Trump, and Xi and fix the economy to a place where I don't constantly have to hear how people can't afford homes or even food.
Before that you are irresponsible to bring new people into this world and should be ashamed.
Abstracting out the details, it’s the same theme as the general who wins the war and now there’s no war to fight and thinks to himself, “Now what?”
There are many people struggling with far greater challenges in life and with far less support, but feeling directionless and without a purpose is a common struggle that many people go through.
Many "generals" turn to crime because it's largely compatible in the way things are achieved, types of rules in place, and the rewards (at least here in the Balkans).
Possibly speaks more of the culture I am surrounded with than "generals", but maybe not.
David Stirling, who is currently being lauded in a show on BBC One for creating the SAS, spent his later life running mercenary companies and, in one particularly ignoble episode, organised a coup against the British government.
To be fair, he was not calling people at Loom NPCs. He was saying that he didn't feel like joining a big company Atlassian coz he feels he would be surrounded by "NPC coworkers" there.
> So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very <strike through>autistic</strike through > smart
Dude really sounds like a bozo again, being brutally honest is no excuse to be unkind
Atlassian presumably also hired a bunch of his people from Loom, so to some extent he is implying that all the Loom folks became "NPCs" during the acquisition.
I've seen several founders who kept their team together within a bigger company after a buyout, and went on to do pretty significant projects together with big company resources. It's not a given that you have to be swallowed up by the bureaucracy
Because most men can't admit they need purpose or what's lacking. Therapy isn't the cliché of bawling into your therapist's shoulders (although it can be that). It's often them telling and pointing out to you what others, including friends, won't. And an experienced professional can be excellent at bringing that out. It's also not for everybody, but often the most hostile people to it are the ones who'd benefit the most.
From what I've gathered in his post, this guy needs to be told he pushes people away and has trouble forming non-professional relationships (platonic and romantic) as well as as a deep seated desire to be liked, which he can't get out of a professional setting that he was at the top of. But it could also be much more deep than that.
Of course, finding the right therapist is like finding the right mechanical keyboard. You'll go through tons you hate before you find the right one.
Many people, myself included, are skeptical of "therapy" and do not automatically consider its practicioners to be legitimate authorities. These are people who need a job just the same as you, and this is the one they landed in. Whether they do anybody any good is hard to say.
One source of skepticism is that they are not really invested in you. If you succeed or if you fail, if you're happy or if you're sad, what's it really to them? Will they have to live with the consequences? At least in a relationship the "therapist" maybe "has some shares" in the other person. (Granted, you can also reverse the logic, e.g., "my parents didn't pay attention to my happiness and just pushed me to become a doctor" / "my wife just wanted me to have money because she wanted to spend it".) This is also why I am skeptical of startup advisors: I'm sure they mean well, but, if you really don't know what you're doing, it's probably better to be an employee for a while, under a boss who succeeds only when you succeed.
Another is that, when I hear therapistic language, a lot seems to embed assumptions of omnipresent psychic violence, and this disturbs me. Perhaps there are people who truly are trapped in situations of "psychological abuse", "gaslighting", and so-on, but my sense is that these words usually become weapons that people wave around, as they adopt darker and darker interpretations of their own, imperfect but basically good, relationships. Then the cynic in me says: Wouldn't causing people to reject their "organic" relationships, create dependence on the relationship with the therapist?
That "therapy" grew out of psychology also is grounds for caution, to me. There is an underlying manipulativeness in the field. Many of the famous experiments, stories of which attract students into the field, were quite manipulative. Some of the core theories of psychology that you learn in school, like operant conditioning, are fairly inhumane. If this is the ground that you build on, what kind of structure do you get? Who is attracted to the field to begin with?
Also, the very fact that the meme is gendered tells you something. Sure, men don't trust therapists, any more than college-educated women trust bearded imams. If a whole school of thought seems somehow not to be on your side, you're not going to trust it. (And I do not mean to imply that to be "college-educated" is ideology-neutral, or that the hypothetical imam is not actually on the hypothetical woman's side.)
...
In the context of this blog post, though, I kind of get it. The guy literally climbed, if not Everest, then some similar peak in the Himalayas. So when you focus on that it's kind of funny.
I'm not sure how what he's doing is "wrong" and what other thing he could be doing would be "right" though. What is the therapist going to tell him to do, and why would that thing be superior to climbing mountains at random? Does existential angst even have a solution?
...
Some of the religions have their own answers, which would encourage different behavior, I suppose. E.g.:
a.)
> 36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
> 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
> 38 This is the first and great commandment.
> 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
> 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
If the author of the blog repeated the second half of verse 39 to himself over and over, he might do something different. You do pushups, you develop muscles. You repeat mantras, and, if those mantras are really meaningful, you can shape your own mind.
Or, the works of mercy:
> feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead
> admonish the sinner, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afflicted, pray for the living and the dead
Add in Galatians 3:28 and you've got the high points of Christianity. If you take the words seriously they can affect how you think and what you do: "Right thought, right speech, right action".
One virtue that it emphasized, which is not emphasized to the same degree in Christianity, is honesty. Yes, Christianity inherits the Ten Commandments (which are actually good), but "thou shalt not bear false witness" seems like a somewhat more narrow thing. In much the same way that "though shalt not kill" is really, debatably, the more limited "though shalt not murder". Indeed, Jainism seems to go further than Christianity in many respects. Those virtues, by the way, are (per the previously-linked text):
> 2. Mardava - Tenderness or Humility (To observe the virtue of humility subduing vanity and passions.)
> 3. Arjaya - Straight-forwardness or Honesty (To practice a deceit free conduct in life by vanquishing the passion of deception.)
> 4. Shaucha - Contentment or Purity (To keep the body, mind and speech pure by discarding greed.
> 5. Satya - Truthfulness (To speak affectionate and just words with a holy intention causing no injury to any living being.)
> 6. Sanyam - Self-restraint (To defend all living beings with utmost power in a cosmopolitan spirit abstaining from all the pleasures provided by the five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing; and the sixth - mind.)
> 7. Tapa - Penance or Austerities (To practice austerities putting a check on all worldly
allurements.)
> 8. Tyaga - Renunciation (To give four fold charities - Ahara (food), Abhaya (fearlessness), Aushadha (medicine), and Shastra Dana (distribution of Holy Scriptures), and to patronize social and religious institutions for self and other uplifts.)
> 9. Akinchanya - Non-attachment (To enhance faith in the real self as against non-self i.e., material objects; and to discard internal Parigraha viz. anger and pride; and external Parigraha viz. accumulation of gold, diamonds, and royal treasures.)
> 10. Brahmacarya - Chastity or celibacy (To observe the great vow of celibacy; to have devotion for the inner soul and the omniscient Lord; to discard the carnal desires, vulgar fashions, child and old-age marriages, dowry dominated marriages, polygamy, criminal assault on ladies, use of foul and vulgar language)
In particular, I note both Arjaya and Satya.
(A new thing to me, that I notice now, is the inclusion of abhaya (fearlessness) as a kind of tyaga -- a kind of renunciation, a giving-away, a charity. This is food for thought.)
(And personally I would moderate Sanyam.)
My point is, if one needs direction, perhaps these are where one should be looking?
Depression doesn't care about how mundane your problems are. Some people have horrible things happening to them and they don't get depressed - while others struggle with common setbacks that everyone experiences.
IMHO, the author sounds like he's missing a lot of perspective on things, and talking to other people could help with that - preferably even in a group setting.
Victor Frankl, psychotherapist, wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" in which he propones "logotherapy", which is literally a therapeutic regimen based on finding meaning.
I agree, but rather than just laying into them, perhaps it's a symptom of too much money. Perhaps that's the cause, not something that has happened upon an already vapid simpleton.
It follows that completely removing any potential scarcity might separate you from other people. And how long would you last stewing in your own mental urine before you started thinking of others as less?
Honestly I read this as something to pity; a situation to avoid. Megalomania robs otherwise interesting people of all their humanity and having read a few more comments here , the best thing he could do would be to throw as much money as possible into therapy. You don't have to spare any sympathy for him but Vinay desperately needs help.
I agree. He could give the money to greater causes and start over. That’s a challenge worth a post and a read and good use of time instead of what he just did.
Even beyond trying the min max strategy and finding an effective charity you can like, fund free daycare for your community or something. This a really lazy reason to not donate money if you are rich.
Not all charities are created equal and you can find rankings of them to see which would make the best use of the donated money. There are whole organizations designed around tracking this. But one thing to be thoughtful about is it a charity can handle a sudden influx of money. It might be better to make a fund that invests the money and feeds it into various charities over time.
As a founder, the people relying on him would have been the employees at Loom. But now that’s done. Far from the first story about a founder feeling unmoored after a buyout.
To me it reads like the author wants you to think this way. There's more than a little self loathing in there, starting with the title.
But IMO it's not surprising. When I left my first "real job" after ~4 years, it took months before I stopped dreaming about that job. I was amazed how wrapped-up I was in it.
What is surprising is that they put this out there so plainly. Unless they're just trolling .. but I'm going to go with "not trolling", because cynicism just leads to sorrow.
BTW, Honey was, not in fact stealing affiliate commissions.
Because if they were, that would have been a crime, and a tort, and at some point in the past 7 years you would have seen a class action lawsuit or criminal investigation over it. Hell, at the very least a short report about their business model being extremely risky. But even though the details of their business model have been public for 7 year...none of those things has happened. (What's the next counter argument guys? That prosecutors in 50 states and countries around the world are all in league with Honey? That absolutely every shortseller on Earth didn't want to make money? That thousands of supposedly aggrieved influencers in the most litigation-happy nation on earth all decided not to pursue any sort of litigation because they were all too embarrassed?)
Honey used its own affiliate codes because that is how it tracked purchases. Sales platforms generally don't provide multi-level affiliate reporting, so that is the only technical way they have to capture transaction-related data. Before the Paypal acquisition (and for some time after) they shared their commissions with marketing affiliates. Whether they still do or not depends on the particular arrangement the marketing affiliate makes with Honey, though based on their current website it appears that revenue sharing is now the exception to be negotiated and not the norm.
Seriously, honey is not the evil conspiracy you all think it is.
I have a different take. Most people in corporate jobs are NPCs, me included. I don’t mind it. My meaning and purpose is the family I’m trying to support. If that means things at work are on autopilot so be it. It’s just a matter of priorities.
So yeah - it’s fine to call me an NPC. I just have my priorities figured out better than the author.
That sounds like the opposite of an npc. Someone with a personal life. One of the reasons its a stupid insult. If you want to rag on people for being shitty or minimumn effort workers then do so. NPC implies you cant tell the difference if they were replaced by a shitty program that repeats the same lines over and over.
The irony of calling other people NPCs is that a player character in a computer game barely has any more freedom. All the possible actions and end states are pre-designed and scripted.
If you think of yourself as “Player One”, you are literally thinking inside the box. The first step to freedom is to stop thinking about games and scores because they are not the world.
Well, most people in society are forced to repeat the same behaviors as every one else for a minimum of comfort: friends, family, etc. For the college-educated in the US that often means getting a professional job and joining a hobby club of some sort and getting married and having one or two kids. Most of them are happy with that, but most of them also remember the freedom they had in college and know that deep down they are settling for less than the most they could have, because they’re probably afraid of what that would mean. I can understand why someone who is freed from that world of the “normal” might not know what to do outside of it.
> Most of them are happy with that, but most of them also remember the freedom they had in college
The freedom you have in college is a shallow, parasitic kind of freedom. College is the apex point of your being an uncontributing member of society. Up to that point all you've done is receive. Becoming an adult is taking on responsibility, contributing to society and earning the real freedom to live a life you value. If you maintained the supposed freedom you have at college you're just blind to the fact that you're totally dependent on other people. A more authentic version of the college freedom would be to go live in the woods and forage for sustenance.
With the amount of excess wealth in today's society we can afford to give everyone that same level of freedom that people experience in college; there is no need to have people "go out into the woods" if they don't want to, that's insane! I'd rather people go out into space or explore new territories than just try to survive on their own, starve to death meaninglessly. We do not live in wandering bands of hunter-gatherers, we live in an advanced capitalist society with the most marvelous technological capacities in history--your imagination is limited to survival alone?
Plus, you're ignoring that in college many students have the opportunity to spontaneously begin working on projects together that they would never be able to outside of a college campus. I remember reading on here even that a student team broke a world record for a rocket launch I believe, and all the commenters agreed, it could not have happened outside of college, it could not have happened with those exact "responsibilities" that you refer to. Elon Musk has eleven kids just because, you know, he can--many aspiring parents in this country today struggle to have just one.
Those responsibilities? They are the crushing of individual creative potential in society through the extraction of wealth via wage-labor. Oh, but it's "privileged" to be a creative, its privileged to build something on your own for your own sake, its privileged to go out and explore and discover new things, its privileged to have children; perhaps you might see why many believe their own society has it out for them, and why this whole logic of "building character" is just a horrific repetition of their daily lives filled with meaningless toil just to survive so some millionaire can have an existential crisis because they can't imagine a world outside of it.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I don't believe that we should all be off in the woods on our own. Quite the opposite. I think human society is an incredible thing but it requires contribution from those involved in it.
Being insecure is indeed a pretty basic human "drive", but I don't think it's particularly mature either. I don't have any data but my intuition tells me that those tend to wane over time.
Human drives are reproduction and power. Or maybe just only reproduction actually?
This guy blatantly and strategically got himself talked about and you guys call it "insecurity" and "childish".
It is a meme that guy in loud ferrari has a small something but we poor people say it to each other to cope. it is a working mechanism to get noticed by girls and girls will look on that ferrari. These are facts.
"insecurity" is not it. "childish" is not it.
"poor taste" maybe it. "selfish" maybe it. Try those instead.
Edit: yes, maybe guy in ferrari has a different taste than you. But also he will get noticed by more girls and that is just fact. Another fact: getting noticed is first step to talk about how sophisticated you are with someone who already has 100 people competing for attention and full DMs. If you ignore those facts and you think you are not the one being childish, I don't know...
> It is a meme that guy in loud ferrari has a small something but we poor people say it to each other to cope. it is a working mechanism to get noticed by girls and girls will look on that ferrari.
That's the thing, mate, this is attractive to a cohort of people but this adolescent view of the world is, well... Rather childish.
I know many women in my adult life who are absolutely put off by a guy flaunting how rich they are, it does attract some others but it isn't this zero-sum game where the rich guy has all the attention and is so much more attractive to everyone.
It's not a cope, I used to think like that when I was young but it's all quite bullshit being force-fed to insecure guys, it's childish to see the world like that since there are so many different types of people that might like/dislike very different stuff.
But good luck, get yourself a Ferrari and go get the girls you want to be attracted by it, I realised that those are really not the girls I'm attracted to in the end :) and that's fine, there's people for almost all tastes.
Just shed away this adolescent worldview, it makes you look pretty insecure and immature.
why is this site allowed to be posted? most of his stories are completely fabricated with no evidence. he doesn’t even live in Japan but just cosplays as being a resident here. so frustrating seeing his content taken seriously anywhere online.
Rails (and possibly Django and Laravel) are just light-years ahead of any other stack for building web apps. They have dealt with all the tedium, know all the requirements, and actually get out of your face when building an application. I have been developing web apps for 15 years now.
I have tried Meteor (back in the day), Remix, Nextjs, Node w/ Express, etc. Always talking about how much better they are. But in my mind web dev is a solved problem. The js stuff is mainly just developers wanking off, driven by a bunch of dollars from big companies.
Systems stuff, deployment infra, etc. is great for stuff like Rust & Go, but shoehorning into web dev makes no sense. I would love to just move on from this debate but it seems thats going to never be possible.
I must say that even if it’s not a trendy stack, I find Spring Framework/Spring Boot to be the best all-around web application stack. Very easy integration with the tons of java libs you have around that can do virtually anything, a statically typed language which can help in a lot of situations (just data binding by convention via Jackson is great since forever, while it’s an afterthought in dynamically typed languages).
I've been incredibly pleased with Ktor and Kotlin, as well. JVM underneath, robust libraries, easy to use infra, using Exposed for the ORM which is mostly (genuinely) a joy.
The best thing I think Rails still has is ActiveAdmin. Everything else, I really can take or leave.
Admin is the one area where Django has the edge, but it's enough on its own for me to push Django over Rails for a lot of "just put a UI around some data, please" use cases.
> The best thing I think Rails still has is ActiveAdmin. Everything else, I really can take or leave.
ActiveAdmin gets you off the ground very quickly, but is also extremely inflexible (and, IIRC, poorly maintained). The last time I worked on an ActiveAdmin backend we had to use all sorts of weird hacks to build the interface the way our backoffice team needed it to be.
AA is really just some wrapper and glue around some other tools… which aren’t super well documented either, but it definitely does mean that a) you can do weird/custom stuff, and that it’s a PITA to figure out how.
In another company I had to completely replace ActiveAdmin with "vanilla" Rails abstractions as it was quite buggy and caused Rails to hang indefinitely as soon as you edited any ruby file. The admin part also turned out to be the most used part of the app, so it probably made sense to replace it in any case, but the bugginess at the time was more than I could handle.
I did write a lot of Java but never called myself a Java developer, and in my current company there are a lot of hardcore Java devs who used to swear by the Spring stack (some even liked JSF!), and a lot of them are moving things to Quarkus (https://quarkus.io/). No idea why, just an observation.
They are moving there because it's new and shiny, not because it's better.
Spring and Spring Boot are incredibly productive and give you a ton of stuff out of the box, whereas some people actually enjoy writing a lot of plumbing code as a distraction/challenge from boring business code. Those people will migrate to "lean" frameworks because it will give them the opportunity to write more low-level plumbing code.
That sort of proves my point, though. Spring support for GraalVM is ongoing and will likely be quite useable and mature out of the box.
The people jumping to Quarkus or Micronaut are more eager to chase the new shiny and are willing to spend the time debugging not-yet-mature stacks.
Edit: To be clear, the reply mentions fanboyism but we are talking about the maturity of a stack. Spring has been around for 20 years and is not going anywhere. Quarkus just reached 5.
The GraalVM is significantly more performant. Calling that "chasing the new shiny" redefines the meaning of the expression, which has historically been about side-grades for unclear advantages.
Especially considering that Springs support isn't full yet, and quarkus has been around for 5yrs now.
They're both production ready stacks though, really strange to have spring fanboyism in 2024
If Rails is fast enough, I doubt plain old Java on a standard JVM is slower. We’re talking comprehensive and productive web stack, not raw speed, otherwise we go back to the Go and Rust case.
My impression after many years of working with JSF: PrimeFaces or not, it's a lot of server-side state making it hard to work on the front-end and an unnecessary burden on the server.
I have also some nice things to say, and I'm not going to make a detailed analysis here but IMHO, it's really not worth the tradeoff.
Agreed, and yet the celebration of stuff like Blazor Server, Phoenix, among others show that some folks really like this approach.
Personally the experience with JSF and Web Forms, is what makes me appreciate any framework that exposes the underlying browser stack, instead of pretending it is something it is not.
I think part of the problem may be that a lot of people are familiar with old versions of Java before things like lambdas and anonymous interface implementations were possible. Writing Java without some of those things can be pretty painful.
From my experience, these frameworks are like the express lane for kicking off a project because there are no big decisions to make. But once you’re knee-deep in Rails, Django, or Laravel and need to do something off the beaten path, things can get dicey. Why? Because you didn’t write the glue code yourself, so there's a gap in understanding, not really a technical roadblock (most of the time!). My point is, if you dive into these frameworks and actually learn the guts, you'll save yourself tons of time coding by, well, reading code.
Now, do I actually do this? Absolutely not. Rewriting everything is way too much fun, and I live for the thrill of trying new things, even if it makes zero business sense.
When I first learnt Django I sometimes felt like that, but I actually found the source code for it and DRF to be very readable, to the point that it's very obvious where they expect you to step outside the guardrails.
As a personal anecdote,I have not at all found this for drf. I personally dread every time something goes wrong in our api code, it's a sea of overcomplicated inheritance trees (some of this is our fault, but it's at drfs direction imo) and factors that eventually just end up with me never being able to find where anything actually happens, other than via a mountain of print statements.
Django by contrast, I agree, it's perfectly clear. (Though some of the meta magic does get spooky, but that's the nature of meta magic, and I generally find the tradeoffs are worth it)
You basically have either a property or a function with the name get_property for a certain number of things (queryset, serialiser, pagination class, etc.) in any case. I tend to recommend in our projects style guides that once you want to override the behaviour of a mixin, you don’t inherit from the mixin anymore.
The two biggest issues I came across with teams in DRF were people coupling the serialised directly to a single database model (i.e. using ModelSerializer everywhere, even when that didn’t make sense), and trying to put too much stuff into a single class based view or viewset.
I find DRF has a lot of places where someone can alter the behavior of handling the request, which can make it really hard to track down where some field or behavior is coming from. You can define methods on the view, serializer, model, or filter (or some superclass of these) to totally change how some response is formed. It is very flexible, and can save a lot of typing if you have all the conventions in your head (and everybody working on a project strictly follows the same conventions). But I find plain Django or something like Flask much easier to grok.
What’s an example of a feature for a Laravel site where not fully understanding the mechanisms of Laravel under the hood would make that existing code get in the way of building the new feature? Genuine question.
Luckily I have a real life example from a customer project I was involved as a consultant: Integrating a custom identity provider with multi-factor authentication. This was from many years ago though. They also used to have some performance problems in some naively implemented middleware and needed to deep-dive into how things actually work before being able to optimize. And commands - I was doing the integration with our software and their command queue was always causing problems with stuck jobs until they read the implementation. The specific problem with Laravel as a product is (was?) that the docs are too beginner oriented and perhaps "you don't need to know what's under the hood" mindset is exactly what's causing this. I got to know many experienced PHP developers who got really frustrated because of the ELI5 style docs.
You can't always rely on the docs too, however excellent they may be - some game developers read code from game engines to optimize, some web developers read code from their web frameworks. But, some change their whole stack when they get frustrated, and I argue that it makes little to no business sense to do so. Just understand what you are working with and deeply.
I can't speak for the other frameworks, but with Django this would have not been a problem at all. In Django, most "batteries included" features really just are 1st party plugins, i.e. you can choose to not use the builtin authentication stack and bring your own. All of this is officially supported and well documented, e.g. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/topics/auth/customizin...
I do not agree. Rails is absolutely great in terms of features and productivity, but will fail you elsewhere i.e. it is not the silver bullet for webdev. Do not take my opinion, look at data - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp9SOOtgmS4
If you are using Rails for anything where you are not absolutely sure of how many users or RPS you will have, you are just saving money in launch time but spending more on servers.
Everything can scale if you throw enough servers at it. Of-course Shopify scales, they even spent time and money to build a JIT on top of Ruby. As a smaller company, does everyone have the time and money to spend on servers or optimising the language to this extent?
That's the nice thing! You don't need to optimise the language and build a JIT as a smaller company, Shopify already did that for you. Just like Google did for Javascript, which lead to Javascript having any performance at all (which lead to node being a thing).
Also remember that Shopify didn't start out making billions. They started as a small side project on a far, far slower version of Ruby and Rails.
Same with GitHub, same with many others that are either still on Rails or started there.
You can optimise things later once you actually have customers, know the shape of your problem and where the actual pain points are/what needs to be scaled.
To me, I care a ton about performance (it's an area I work in), but there's not a lot of sense in sacrificing development agility for request speed on things that may not matter or be things people will pay for. Especially when you're small.
Smaller companies have less traffic, need less expensive servers, and have no need to spend money optimising the language. They can focus on that when they make billions of dollars, like Shopify does.
>On Rails, the most heavy page has a P95 duration of 338 ms. There is of course room for improvement but it's plenty snappy.
I guess everyone will have different opinion on P95 at 338ms. The great thing is that we are getting cheaper CPU Core price and YJIT. As long as this trend continues, the definition of Fast Enough will cover more grounds for more people.
There's lots of tricks you can do, such as preloading pages when the users hovers over the link. This makes even a "slow" page load of 400ms feel pretty much instant to a human.
These kinds of tests are useless (to me at least) for three reasons.
First, these kinds of tests don't do anything useful and just show that some frameworks have more overhead than others. Once you have an app that was developed over years rather than hours and actually does a lot of stuff on every request, it's a whole different game.
Second, the kinds of applications I write rarely get more than 10-20 requests per second. If Rails would peak at 2500 rps as that YouTube video tests it at, that would be plenty. If I were writing some kind of IoT platform rather than a business app, I'd probably not start with Rails for that reason.
Third, for an actual web application, you want to consider what the user experiences, not just how fast the server responds. You can make an application feel much faster than the server response times by preloading on hover, (http) caching, async loading of things that are not visible yet, etc.
I'd go as far as saying it's a selling point, not just a compromise. Flexibility now can come at the cost of vertical scaling when it's EASIER to get funding and when you will probably have cash flow? Hell yeah. Compared to preemptively hyperscaling at an initial high cost, or using a possibly non-existent mythical framework that is somehow hyper performant, low cost, and as flexible as Rails etc... I know what I'd go with.
I’m pretty sure the decision to use Ruby On Rails instead of another platform for building my web applications is not in fact the reason why there is climate change.
the "rails doesn't scale" myth has been debunked for a decade now and anyone with the slightest clue about performance can scale a rails app using the same techniques that you'd use to scale any other language and framework
yjit and fibers have made things even better, and plenty more is coming I'm sure
If RPS become a problem you can probably switch to JRuby. I did exactly this 15 years ago for EUs biggest software company and it worked out quite well.
Have you seen the latest state of JRuby development or seen the posts of its development team. If you are comfortable with the idea of your main runtime being dependent on the time / finances / availability of around 5 (or less) core developers I would say you are ok with JRuby.
As someone that used AOLServer, was in a startup doing something like Rails but in 1999 with Tcl, I don't really agree.
The Rails demo wasn't that appealing to me, other than showing the difference on how lucky one might get regarding adoption and spotlight being in the right place.
Nowadays I still don't see a value, and rather go for Spring or ASP.NET.
By the way, the founders of that Tcl based startup, went on to create OutSystems, which is one of the few successful RAD tools for Web development at enterprise scale, and Portuguese success stories in IT world.
I came through to note that most of this applies to Django, too.
I've historically preferred RoR but with the tremendous growth of Python in the last 10+ years, Django has become a more practical choice. ML and data science devs are already familiar with Python and, with the Django docs being as excellent as they are, these folks can be productive in a very short amount of time -- should they need to be. I've seen this firsthand on multiple projects.
Also, along with the author's case for the path of least resistance, the Django framework results in fewer "decisions" (arguments) about application structure than using a less opinionated library or micro-framework.
The Django/FLOSS community is also much more active than I was expecting it to be (Rails bias, probably) and has been very pleasant to interact with.
I only wish Django had Rails-like generators and in-built data seeding (e.g. rake db:seed).
Django has been an absolute pleasure to work with. Contrast it to flask, which is a complete footgun factory. I agree 100% on there being (honestly, massive) value in reducing decision points in the project. Very few devs truly have the experience needed to see around the corners in their designs and architecture, and Django represents the culmination of decades of learnings on what works, and works well.
Overall, I’ve been very impressed with the product and maintainers. There are so few OSS projects that rise or the level of quality that Django has managed to achieve. Now if only they could sort out type hints ;).
You can seed with JSON files as "fixtures" and run `python manage.py loaddata fixturename`.
The thing I wish Django had better OOTB support for is background tasks, I've not used it but I understand this is very well done in Rails and Laravel.
Interesting! I will give fixtures a look. I've shied away because -- unless you introduce a manual step to generate them, my understanding is that they're static.
You're spot on about background jobs. Rails added support 2-3 major versions ago and there's no shortage of back-ends. With Django, it seems to be Celery-or-bust and there's no Django API that I'm aware of. I actually recently rolled my own solution using SQS and a dedicated compose service which runs a management script (in the Django context). It works but ... it's klunky, the API is ad hoc and there's no monitoring/retries/etc.
I picked up Django as my web server of choice this year and found the same delightful to work with. Given I generate content outside of the django app I had to roll my own data seeder.
It’s actually quite straightforward using CSVs and models to load each row in.
Can see it getting complex once I need to seed a large dataset or with loads of relationships. Look forward to seeing an official 3rd party app that takes away the complexity from my code base for seeding.
I've been using django-seed and it's fine. The API is a little confusing, it hasn't been updated in years and there are some sharp edges (e.g. auto-M2M2M).
Yes, to your point, it would be great to see the jazzband project adopt/anoint it or another solution.
Unfortunately every team I’ve worked in hasn’t seen the light and prefers FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/Pydantic (before FastAPI it was Flask).
My theory is that the initial learning curves are different: with FastAPI it’s quick and easy. You barely have to read anything. Django has a steeper learning curve. There’s a lot of reading involved. Type hints aren’t a big thing in Django, but they are in FastAPI, and the average full stack dev seems to like them.
Later on it’s totally different of course. With FastAPI you’re building it all from scratch, and it’ll be much worse than the Django solution.
Type hints are were the whole Python ecosystem is going, so using them is more integration at a deeper level than using an integrated framework, which is not relying on them.
SQLAlchemy was historically a much better ORM than Django's. It's layered architecture combined with Alembic does make a difference.
I still agree that using the integrated thing anyway is probably the right way to do it if you are working in a team. I also think Django should just adopt these components and we would not have the discussion in the first place.
While it is not Django's responsibility to unite the Python ecosystem, continuing to rely on a tool a sizeable share of the community deems inferior to a popular alternative will keep these discussions open and results in the fragmentation OP is talking about.
Now of course it is not Django's responsibility to unite the Python ecosystem in the first place and they can value other factors and arguments as they see fit.
Although this very thread shows that there might have been something to it.
A corollary is the debate itself leads to a waste of effort that multiplies across all users. I use Rails only in anger, but to see literally nobody bike shed on the ORM is pretty amazing. Seems like you use Active Record or you write SQL and either way move on with life.
In ruby, the sequel database toolkit is vastly superior to activerecord, and that is a subject of discussion here and there. The difference is that rails is what most rubyists use at work, unlike in python, where choices are more diverse.
Why would Django move away from an ORM that works, at scale, in millions of deployed websites? They'd have to support both for many years in any case.
> a sizeable share of the community deems inferior
Well, yeah, SQLAlchemy is standalone, you can use it in a lot more situations than Django's ORM in practice, because you're not tied to using it in a Django site. But that doesn't mean it's "better"
I've had this debate with someone recently, as soon as you actually want to use FastAPI/Flask in something that's not an internal only microservice, you end up building Django on top of it anyway ad-hoc way. It also ends up in more of a mess, because while Django doesn't enforce a code structure as such, the default way of doing things is fairly good.
The main thing I miss about Django is always the DB migrations in any case. I found that pattern to be very flexible and very powerful.
This forum leans backend heavy and there's definitely a bias against using javascript on the backend. But many top websites use it for their infrastructure. It's not all hype driven development.
I disagree. Rails is fine but just a differential approach. I prefer a standalone fronted that talks to an api layer. Web Frontend for me is remix. Mobile is react native and api layer could be any language you're productive in, eg. Java,.net or javascript.
I like the rails dev experience, but it feels like they haven’t come up with nice new front end solutions that an integrated framework like nextjs has done.
One specific example is images and srcset. If you are doing a react front end anywhere in your app (not even an SPA) interfacing with the asset pipeline doesn’t have a canonical solution.
This just makes it feel behind the times, since what I always liked about rails was the “one right way” that was always reasonably sane.
So it feels like nowadays you need to trade user functional front end app things, like load time and LCP for dev experience in rails. Sad.
I've been working on a Rails codebase for a few years now. The biggest downside coming from TypeScript codebases is that lack of static typing and the immature static typing ecosystem in Ruby. I know DHH publicly denounced strong typing, but if you're coming from a language with it, Ruby & Rails is a hard sell.
I just spent two weeks wasting my time trying to code my pet project in various flavours of Next.js plus Prisma/Drizzle etc and gave up at having to constantly reinvent the wheel or work around some incomplete/naive implementation. And then went back to Rails where everything just works. Etc etc etc
It always sounds mean to say it, but there are definitely some things in JS land that feel way more amateur hour by comparison to more established ecosystems.
Somewhat unfair comparison but I expect authors to at least learn from the mistakes of the past.
Why bunch Node w/ Express together with the others and dismiss it? (genuinely curious).
Rails has a high learning curve. Perhaps people working with it for years don't notice it. Node + Express seems faster to learn and ship, but my experience with Rails is limited.
Cant stand the infantilization of software tools. People can choose for themselves what features to use or not use. Doesnt need to be determined by our keepers. Also do Python maintainers just hate backwards compat as some sort of religion?
“Shut up old man” yes yes okay.