Play it at 0.25x and notice the app opening animation.
In iOS 6, the status bar is never unreadable for a single frame.
In iOS 7, the status bar is first obstructed by home screen icons animating under it, then obstructed by the dock animating over it, and finally it fades away while a new status bar is drawn on the app that is being opened.
It irks me to no end that iOS handles the status bar this way to this day. In the app switcher, every app card is drawn with a blank area at the top [1] where the status bar would go, when really the status bar should be permanently at the top and the app card should not include space for the status bar (webOS figured it out before iOS 7 [2]).
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
The market may not have ever priced in a rebalancing of the S&P 500, but the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable.
> the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable
Yup. Which is why it was always a long shot. I personally thought they'd adopt some of the seasoning rules, but they were more conservative than even that.
> but the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable
I suspect this will be revisited if all these companies are still 1T+ market cap 12 months from now. At some point the S&P will have to say the market itself has spoken and likely capitulate.
They can certainly say they no longer track the 500 leading large-cap companies on the US exchanges.
The S&P 500® is widely regarded as the best single gauge of large-cap U.S. equities. The index includes 500 leading companies and covers approximately 80% of available market capitalization.
If you are somewhat of a public figure and working in a leadership role at a company, I think it's more sensible to put out a widely-seen public announcement about where you are going next, than to just disappear.
Immense power and profits attracts certain behaviors. This has happened throughout history. Finance is a lot more efficient, flexible, and powerful than other mechanisms, and has become the modern choice.
Dude just leave the bay area, the literal most expensive place in the world, and you'll be fine. You'd rather actually kill yourself than move to, like, Boulder?
It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.
> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:
U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned
August 11, 1998 98-672
The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.
Although intelligence agencies cannot have foreknowledge of every significant development in world affairs, many observers (and senior intelligence officials) believe that, in view of the election of an Indian government committed to "inducting" nuclear weapons, much greater attention should have been given to indications of impending nuclear tests
I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.
The company hires people who match the company’s desired culture.
If the people in the CIA who do hiring want the talent who are excellent at lying and compartmentalizing their ethics, then that’s what the organization becomes over a generation.
Ha, this was explored in some credible article here on HN some months ago, wasn't it? It made complete sense.
You can't be a nice balanced guy doing work which often dips in shady stuff, sometimes being responsible for killing innocents, or in extreme cases one's failed actions can send some region into death spiral of some small or larger conflict. No, you need (relatively) smart folks for whom emotions are just a tool to use on others to achieve your goals.
And this obviously has various side effects, some quite negative.
the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.
think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.
also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.
A lot of the really sketchy stuff the CIA used to do has been folded under special ops parts of the military. After the church committee, the CIA has to report to the senate intelligence committee. The military only really answers to the Commander in Chief(POTUS), and gets away with a lot more.
Check out the book "The Fort Bragg Cartel". Tl;Dr, the US military and special ops were holding up the poppy industry in Afghanistan, something like 80% of the world's supply of Heroin came out of US occupied Afghanistan. The DEA would look the other way on shipments intercepted over a certain size.
The special ops guys brought the drug trafficking home, now i95 through the southern states is a major drug trafficking route.
Got it, thanks. The CIA's cocaine was still ending up on the streets of America during Iran-Contra, though, so I (in my very uninformed opinion!) don't feel like the CIA cared that much.
It’s likely the cocaine originating from Colombia was going to end up in the US with or without the CIA’s help.
Also, it’s worth reading about the journalist who broke the story about Contra-sourced cocaine making it to LA. That journalist is very often misquoted and when he was still alive he tried to fix the missing several times.
All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.
When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained that his job at the CIA was to exploit that appearance to ruin people's lives. He said his approach was to gain the trust of a mark, and then provide him with what ever was required to get him to betray things he loved. The presentations were effective, enlightening and spooky.
Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.
Like most people, unfortunately. But most people aren't entrusted with so much power and duty, and done so ostensibly for service to the people of this country.
If he's truly a "senior" CIA official, he probably actually was a reservist for much of his career, and continued to claim leave for reserve duties after he was discharged. And payroll eventually did pick up on this, which sparked an HR investigation of his credentials, which turned out to be inflated, and only then did they start to look at what this guy was doing with all the money he was taking home. Payroll is probably the only entity in this story that was actually doing their damn job.
When I had to have a TS/SCI with a SAP for a specific mission in the military, they weren't going to wait for the investigation, poly, etc. so a general just waved his hand and signed a hand written note (to be formally typed up later... which never happened) and, ta-da, I had clearance.
It's just like security in any system... sometimes it needs adjusted for expediency. The key is to be eventually consistent at the very least.
the CIA told him to make that part of his identity and then burned him with it
isn’t it obvious?
not being charged for the forty million dollars in gold and foreign currency missing, no explanation on why they are even looking for something that was rightly paid out as expenses, no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be to begin with to incur this much, no explanation on why the government wasn't using US dollars to pay a government employee expenses. Its a complete red herring because some client state is paying off a debt, CIA just needs this guy burned
> no explanation on what kind of expenses those could be
I think it's pretty obvious the gold was to pay a bribe. The only thing I'm surprised about is the value. That's A LOT of money for a single pay-off or bribe. It seems more than what would conceivably be paid to an individual at once because spy agencies tend to prefer to pay-as-you-go with individuals. Each round of documents, actions or whatever gets a payment.
So I suspect this was intended to either buy a one-time, career-ending action from someone very senior or, more likely, the ongoing cooperation of a company, gang or small nation-state. It's hard to guess but looking over major events in that time frame, Venezuela might be a good bet. The odd part is that the gold was in his house. Aside from the dumb trade craft of keeping it in the very first place anyone would look, why is the gold even in CONUS?
And why gold? Bulk gold is one of the worse ways to transfer that much money. It's big, heavy, and easy to trace until melted down (which is hardly trivial for most people). But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold, much less over 300 of them, is extremely limited - and half of them will be under some form of "Know Your Customer" reporting, especially in North America, and the other half might prefer to "Kill Your Customer" and keep the gold. Diamonds, bearer bonds, offshore numbered account, even good old Benjamins seem far better. I think the amount and medium both narrow down the sort of person or entity the intended recipient must be.
One imagines the sort of folks who'd actually prefer to receive payment in that much gold bar all reside overseas where they might control a national bank or have their own precious metals smelting operation. That's why I'm struggling to picture the fake scenario this senior executive used to plausibly convince anyone at the CIA he personally needed to take possession of more gold than several people can comfortably carry and do so in the vicinity of rural Langley, VA. I mean, he can't carry it on any commercial flight and It's not like he's going to schlepp it himself in his family sedan to put it on a secret CIA cargo flight. The CIA has people for that. Also, someone that senior isn't generally doing any direct case officer work. They manage case officers who manage field assets.
So many interesting questions we'll never get answers to.
Even more tantalizing is that it was probably a domestic bribe he was tasked with. Traveling internationally with hundreds of kg of gold is not very reasonable and I'd assume they have access to resources in other countries as needed.
And we'll get all the answer, it'll just take 50 years, and then everything will probably make a lot more sense. Maybe even sooner if an administration finally gets the courage and brains to get rid of the CIA. So incompetently destructive to US interests, and an overall abhorrent organization.
I don't think it'd be difficult for the CIA to charter a cargo plane from somewhere in the USA without any questions being asked. They used to be very involved in the air freight trade. Guns don't move themselves!
Yes, I agree. CIA cargo flights out of U.S. military bases and private airfields probably happen all the time. My point was that if the guy's scheme to get the gold issued involved a cover story of flying the gold on such a cargo flight to some general or warlord somewhere, I can't imagine the normal process is "Ok, we'll deliver a pallet of >600 pounds of gold bars to your office desk."
The CIA must have people who securely transport illicit things like pallets of gold, RPGs, explosives, etc from a wherever they are warehoused to airfields for secret cargo flights. So, I was puzzled by how the culprit circumvented what I assume would be the normal delivery channel and took direct possession himself.
The reality may be more depressingly banal than clever clandestine deception. The guy was probably just the senior person in charge of approving dispersal of the CIA's slush fund 'petty cash' for illicit bribes and payoffs. And, incomprehensibly, there was no process for reviewing the approver's approvals, so he just wrote up his own paperwork and approved delivering it to himself in whatever way he found convenient. Hell, maybe he just had them deliver it to his house.
I guess that's the kind of stupid stuff that can happen when you combine "need to know" compartmentalized secrecy with massive bureaucracy. People just do what the paperwork says and don't ask questions or care.
I did consider that for a minute but if it really was the CIA acting in any domestic capacity, I think they would have taken him down on some other pretext. Not that the CIA doesn't quietly do domestic spying, they just wouldn't let anything get to the media that might lead in that direction.
Traveling internationally with hundreds of pounds of gold wouldn't be that hard for a CIA senior official on "official" business. A diplomatic passport and access to the State Department or War Department's fleet of aircraft would get you pretty far.
> But the thing I'm stuck on is the places you can walk into and get cash for even one kilo of gold
My sister had been hoarding our mother's & grandmothers' jewelry for decades. I finally got her to sell off the gold before another of her bad choices in boyfriends stole the rest (last guy took her for about $40k). We took a check for it, but the guy had most of the $70k in cash at hand. No KYC at all. Here in the US.
Sure, selling the sorts of gold grandmothers and crazy uncles horde like rolls of Krugerrand coins, etc and even raw flake amateur prospectors mine out in Nevada is common and probably pretty easy to convert into cash amounts up to a few hundred thousand dollars. But these seem to have been minted gold bars, very likely stamped and serialized.
Admittedly, I don't know that industry, but wouldn't trying to cash even a dozen 1kg minted gold bars with Federal Reserve serial numbers trigger some... questions? Or alternatively, require finding a vendor who explicitly asks no questions (basically a fence for probable stolen or illicit goods). And, even moving the gold a dozen bricks at a time is 25 separate transactions of over $1.7 million each. Are there a lot of places that just keep a couple million in $100 bills on hand for transactions? The largest branch of a national bank in our suburban area of 200K people gets pissy when we go to get $10,000 cash without calling ahead because "we might run out and need to schedule extra cash delivery."
If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised. As someone who leans moderate libertarian, I don't have a problem with it. I do kind of resent having to fill out a government form (and the implied presumption I'm a criminal) anytime I get $10K of cash at the bank.
> If it's really possible to walk into a "We Buy Gold" place with 12 1kg gold bars and walk out with $1.7M in cash, no questions asked I'm just surprised
the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles
> the spreads are horrible in most places, outright swindles
Most of those retail locations will pay 60% of spot. My sister did a lot of research looking for better deals within about 200 miles of us. We negotiated 90% of spot with the guy we sold to. The smelter (who only dealt with the wholesale trade like the guy we sold to) would pay 95% of spot.
It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions
and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering
the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
One idea I haven't seen much discussion on is "provably beneficial surveillance" [1], which builds off of Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It seems like the best path forward.
>We can turn that conventional wisdom on its head, by reframing it as a question: is it possible to do surveillance and consequent policing in a way that is (a) compatible with or enhances liberal values, i.e., improving the welfare of all, except those undermining the common good; and also (b) sufficient to prevent catastrophic threats to society? I call this possibility Provably Beneficial Surveillance. It's a concept expanding on an old tradition of ideas, including search warrants, due process, habeas corpus, and Madisonian separation of powers, all of which help improve the balance of power between institutions and individuals. In particular, all those ideas help enable surveillance in service of safety, while also taking steps to prevent abuses of that power.
Salt Typhoon is the refutation to this. Building and enforcing a "lawful intercept" system formally codifies an exploit chain for your adversaries to use. If you don't want your politicians and dignitaries being blackmailed by foreign opposition, don't even consider this type of system for widespread development.
Let America be the canary in this particularly toxic coal mine, and refuse similar systems wherever you are locally.
"Provably beneficial surveillance" is the wrong framing.
What you're trying to say is that the harms of surveillance are diminished when the underlying power is distributed enough that cops have to justify themselves in order to access the surveillance powers. That's why we have a 4th Amendment that demands cops get warrants before doing searches and seizures. Think of the difference between a store with a security camera that records to a local network DVR, and the same store but they bought some Ring cameras and send it to Amazon's servers. The former is the necessary amount of surveillance to prove a crime happened, the latter is just enabling abuse.
I think it is a new framing that merits discussion.
Example case is the school shooter in Canada that OpenAI knew about but chose not to warn authorities of (presumably because OpenAI wants to balance safety and privacy).
OpenAI (or any other big tech) has extreme concentration of power and knows more about its users than any government authority.
At what point should OpenAI alert authorities?
I would much rather have "provably beneficial surveillance" than OpenAI having an arbitrary black box policy or for government authority to have direct backdoor to all OpenAI data.
Nope. That's not how any of this is trending at all. Being optimistic is good for getting through tough times. Albeit sometimes. It might help people sleep at night but sleeping our way into technofacism won't make it any better for us or our children.
I point to Michael Nielsen's commentary on Vulnerable World Hypothesis [1] again:
>do you think inexpensive, easy-to-follow recipes for building catastrophic technologies will one day be found, given sufficient understanding of science and technology?
With every increase in technology and science, the probability increases, and as a result, society will necessitate ever more surveillance. The reason provably beneficial surveillance is important to discuss is that we need a careful middle path between totalitarianism and outright catastrophe. It is the opposite of "sleeping our way" into technofascism.
I disagree on a fundamental level. Crime is down. It's been trending down since the 90s. The 90s to the early 2000s ushered in more technological change than the century prior as far as the common person is concerned.
There's no need for mass surveillance and there never will be.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.", spoken by someone who knew better and just so happened to help found this country.
Additionally, you say there is no need for mass surveillance, but we already have mass surveillance. Every big tech company knows a lot more about the average user than any government has known about a citizen prior to the 1980s. We should consider how to deal with mass surveillance, not to pretend like it will go away.
I disagree. We should write laws to protect ourselves and our children instead of continuing down this path. Other countries have. They are so relieved each time tech companies get high on their own supply.
If car companies had no laws around safety we wouldn't just accept it right? No we would be pissed off and make our representatives represent us.
If you zoom out more, we are incredibly fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult to build. There is no guarantee that future discoveries won't uncover things that are both easy to build and incredibly destructive.
Examples listed in the article [1]:
>easily constructed nuclear weapons, perhaps inspired by one of the Taylor-Zimmerman-Phillips designs; easily-constructed antimatter bombs; destructive self-replicating nanobots – while the notion of "grey goo" is sometimes ridiculed, something like grey goo has happened at least twice on earth (the origin of life, and the great oxygenation event); large-scale computer security compromise, leading to failures or takeover of crucial systems (electric grid, banking, the supply chain, the nuclear strike capability, and so on). And then there's the risk many see as most imminent: biorisk, small groups deliberately or accidentally creating or discovering pathogens far more devastating than COVID-19. Unfortunately, this gets easier every year.
Most threats on this scale ex grey goo or inviting aliens to come destroy the planet are going to happen if they can happen. No amount of cameras or monitoring will fix it. Not without unlawful and indefinite detainment if pretty much every person anyways.
Now let's say someone is doing something less apocalyptic. Same problem. We have had school shooters be investigated by the FBI before they did what they did. Guess what! Nothing changed. Why? Because you can't predict the future.
All the known history of humans is evidence against the possibility of existence of "beneficial surveillance".
This is a utopian idea of the same kind as the idea of theoretical communism.
The communist theory argued that because the owners of assets can use their power in nefarious ways against the others this can be easily solved by dispossessing them of their assets and transforming all such private assets into assets that belong to the common property owned by all people. Then all assets will be used for the welfare of the entire society.
The fallacy of this theory was that when something belongs to all people it is impossible for all people to manage it directly. So there must be a layer of relatively few middlemen who manage the assets directly.
In all the communist societies, instead of managing the assets for the common good, those middlemen have succeeded to become the de facto owners of the assets, despite not being de jure their owners. And then they managed the assets according to their personal interests, like any capitalist billionaire.
The only difference was that the communist elite was much less secure in their positions than rich capitalists, because not being the legal owners of a company or of other such valuable assets meant that they could lose their privileges at any time if their boss in the communist party hierarchy no longer liked them and sent them to an inferior position.
This hierarchical dependence ensured that the communist elite had to obey more or less whatever the supreme leader ordered. Except for this obedience, there was no real difference between a communist economy and the extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, despite what the naive theory of communism hoped to achieve by nationalizing everything of value.
Similarly, I see no hope for a theory of "beneficial surveillance". Such beneficial surveillance could exist only if it were controlled by good-willing people. But this will never happen, like in practical communism, some of the worst people will be those who would succeed to control it.
I'm intrigued by Michael Nielsen's thoughts on cryptography applied to synthetic biology risk.
I'll quote his notes on using cryptography to maintain a balance of privacy and safety:
>To help address such concerns, it's been proposed that synthesis screening should use cryptographic ideas to help preserve customer privacy, while still ensuring safety. Let me mention three such ideas, some of which have already been implemented in a prototype system built by the SecureDNA collaboration. The first idea is that the screening itself should be done with an encrypted version of the sequence data, to help preserve customer privacy. The synthesis step would still require the raw sequence data, but such encryption would at least prevent centralized screening services from learning the sequence being synthesized. Second, as mentioned above, screening for exact matches and homologous sequences won't catch everything, especially as de novo design becomes possible. So it's also been proposed that an encrypted form of the sequence data should be logged and kept after synthesis. That data could not routinely be read by the synthesis company or screening service. However, suppose some later event occurs – say, some new pandemic agent is found in the wild. Then it should be possible to check whether that agent matches anything in the encrypted synthesis records. In the event such a check was needed, a third party authority could provide a kind of "search warrant" (a private key of some sort) to decrypt the data, and identify the responsible party. The third idea is to use cryptography to ensure the screening list remains private, and can even be updated privately by trusted third parties, without anyone else learning the contents of the update. Taken together, these three ideas would help preserve the balance of power between customers and the synthesis companies, while contributing to public safety and enabling imaginative new synthesis work to be done.
>Indeed, cryptographers are so clever that they've devised many techniques you might a priori deem impossible, or not even consider at all. Ideas like zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and secret sharing are remarkable. As software (and AI) eats the world, cryptography will increasingly define the boundaries of law.
You mentioned communism, and I'll add to that since I've lived under communism. It's a great idea in theory that doesn't work in practice because of human limitations.
It doesn't work, because A) the reason you said: government officials favor themselves, and B) the knowledge problem: the economy is far too complex for a small group of officials to plan what everyone else should be doing.
An interesting idea that emerges now is an AI-moderated socialism. If A) AI can be trusted to not favor itself, and B) AI has perfect knowledge of each human (our needs, what we're good at, etc.), I can imagine an AI-moderated socialism to work.
An ideal future I can imagine is a world with many AI-moderated polities, and humans have freedom to move between them. AI-moderated polities share some global standards on safety, trade, and conflict resolution but otherwise have differing policies so humans have the freedom to find the one that they most prefer.
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
we've seen that most of the people who are only in it for the money don't actually bring much value to the company. a lot of middling software engineers are actually a liability. unlike operational work, engineering needs to have a higher bar than just a beating heart and hands
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.
FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".
Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]
It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.
The move away from skeuomorphism made it acceptable for UI elements to do things that make no sense.
Examples:
1. https://photos5.appleinsider.com/archive/13.06.15-Homescreen...
The status bar is unreadable on in-between frames, whereas in iOS 6 there was no such problem.
2. https://youtu.be/XawiZc8qmWA?si=vqT-JEYf0NDp8I9o&t=461
Play it at 0.25x and notice the app opening animation.
In iOS 6, the status bar is never unreadable for a single frame.
In iOS 7, the status bar is first obstructed by home screen icons animating under it, then obstructed by the dock animating over it, and finally it fades away while a new status bar is drawn on the app that is being opened.
It irks me to no end that iOS handles the status bar this way to this day. In the app switcher, every app card is drawn with a blank area at the top [1] where the status bar would go, when really the status bar should be permanently at the top and the app card should not include space for the status bar (webOS figured it out before iOS 7 [2]).
1. https://imgur.com/a/Qj6DGus
2. https://imgur.com/a/bM8OWZc
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