Kind of stupid, but I decided to make one final search through my huge bookmark list after posting and just came across the story. The bookmark was to a list, not the story itself, and I missed it in the first couple passes.
Isn't it a little absurd to be guessing what the business model might be or should be for the company with the largest ever IPO, which got a free pass on (lack of) profitability? It's a little late.
Checks out. I could barely make it past the first paragraphs.
"Like very few Americans of my generation, I come from the physical world. ...earning a living from things I could touch and smell."
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff, the people working at the grocery store and gas station, people that stay at home and take care of their children? All of them are demoted from reality? Can't touch or smell any of that? Poor struggles in the city don't count?
I forced myself through several more paragraphs before I let myself post, but could barely keep my rolling eyes on the text. "We, we, we..." We were the toughest, the hardest, the roughest. The unstated implication being that the rest of us soft, inner-city, fake Americans could never relate to the realness. Blah, blah, blah. How about some humility, things have been pretty tough and unfair and extreme and real for a lot of people in a lot of places. People have real relationships and peculiarities wherever they might live.
I don't know, maybe the article goes further than that, but I couldn't force any more of it down.
What is the majority of the workforce doing, then? People working in fast food, welders, plumbers, carpenters, laborers, people working in slaughterhouses, janitors, cooks, waitstaff...
While I think he's pretty obviously speaking to an audience of office workers, I'll point out that there's a significant difference between cooking or building something a thousand times per day and shipping it out versus seeing the ongoing function of something you made with your own hands.
I've worked in food service, and I've done metal fabrication as a hobby. I can say that I get ongoing satisfaction from using something that I've invented and built with my own hands, versus all those sandwiches and fried foods that I passed to customers.
I've occasionally lamented that I didn't pursue civil engineering instead of software. Most or all of the software that I wrote for companies has disappeared from the world. I believe that I would've taken great satisfaction from seeing a bridge or other infrastructure that I might've had a hand in creating.
No true Scotsman fallacy. Just because a cook does something multiple times a day doesn’t mean he or she can’t find pleasure in making each meal as high quality as possible.
Sounds like your company has bad or missing business analysts and/or product owners. Someone's supposed to be working between the stakeholders and engineering to develop those requirements and commit resources for testing. These "important people" are re-inventing the wheel and will be mired just as bad or worse until they figure this out.
I agree with you in general. And have a good chuckle when the vibe coders get derailed by some roadblock that would've been obvious to a professional engineer. But it's a bit one-sided to say that we have bad or missing analysts and product. Even good product can't keep up with how fast AI allows you to go. At an established company, maybe you shouldn't go as fast as AI allows you to go, but try telling that to the "important people."
Stephen LaBerge's book explains, in detail, how they would communicate with lucid dreamers during their research. I don't remember how the researchers signaled the subjects, but if I remember correctly, the subjects would communicate with researchers primarily through eye movements. I can't say if the methods are related at all, but the book is worth a read.
I think this is the first time I've seen a cookies pop-up that only offered an "Allow All" option and nothing else. Accept our cookies or go away, I guess.
Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!".
Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.
Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.
I find it amusing that the crypto crowd has yet to recognize their echo chamber and decided to bring it with them during their big pivot to ai. Their culture is offputting
Kind of stupid, but I decided to make one final search through my huge bookmark list after posting and just came across the story. The bookmark was to a list, not the story itself, and I missed it in the first couple passes.
That Shape Had None by Henry Weikel. https://starlightconvenience.net/posts/that-shape-had-none/
Doesn't seem like I can remove my post at this point, but hey, at least I can recommend it to you.