Are you sure? Based on what? All I see is people desperately throwing money they don't have at AI like a gambling addict who just converted their child's college fund into chips.

Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.

I think you missed the point. The EU is "winning by doing nothing" whereas the US is liable for the huge failing investment it made. US economical growth is now entirely reliant on AI, so an AI crash guarantees immediate recession and out-of-control stagflation. The EU with its "less advanced" economy will keep growing just fine with or without AI, surviving the front-line bloodbath by staying behind.

As for defense, they are spending exactly as much as necessary at each point in time: just enough to keep credible US backing until 2025, and as much as they can without destroying their economy since. There is no good argument for an irresponsible spending spree, as the only powers that can realistically challenge the EU without triggering nuclear holocaust are the US and China anyways (Russia don't stand a chance).

Is that a moon? No, that's your survivorship bias!

Jokes aside, congratulations on slipping and falling up the summit, collecting not a single bruise to your ego or soul along the way. I am genuinely happy for you.

> If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company.

To me, this means that every traditionally run company (top-down) must be broken by construction. And indeed, I have never seen or heard of truly fact-based management.

The entire challenge with multi-level management is that you always play a long game of telephone with increasingly less technical people, which are unable (due to lack of time and understanding) to grasp the ground-truth facts without simplification. Thus, management based on hard facts is impossible in this setting, though it is a great theoretical ideal many aspire to.

In practice, doing so is very hard and people are lazy, so the "facts" can become so twisted as to be entirely unrecognizable.

> One of the reasons companies get dysfunctional is low- & mid-tier managers seem to be allergic to the idea of laying out what the priorities are and provide feedback on whether people are working on them or not.

Have you considered the possibility this is not a result of incompetence, but intentional? If these things are never clearly communicated and, more importantly, put in writing, management can just reframe what was agreed upon as best suits them later to deflect any blame if things go sideways. This is a perfectly rational move, since they hold all the power to do so.

I think a lot of what is wrong with this discussion is that people implicitly assume management is honest and communicates openly and sincerely. This is sadly only true in a small fraction of cases, likely because the incentives point squarely in the opposite direction: those who judge the game are always better off cheating.

exactly. my last job the project i was working on suddenly became "my project" where manager wanted to "give me a win" by shipping. it became my project when we discovered all the way in the end that what he had come up with isn't viable at all. thing i was telling from the get go but he didn't listen and adamant that it would be fine.

we even had it in writing the i had objected to his scheme and that he overrode it but that document was completely hidden from upper managment.

As with all forms of verbal abuse, the presence of a power imbalance is paramount. And since we abolished slavery, it is about as high as it gets here.

What an employee says about their boss generally has zero implications on their career and lives, so long as it does not outright accuse them of a crime. When's the last time someone called you to provide a reference on your boss? I thought so.

In turn, what a boss says about their employees can be entirely career-ending and therefore life-altering, even if said in jest or later retracted. A higher standard exists precisely because the stakes are so much higher.

> Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down. In other words, the worst outcome is that people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, which is arguably as good a solution as is possible.

In the corporate world, coordination mostly exists within companies through top-down decision-making, as you said. Between them, however, things look much grimmer. Legal action is often taken lightly, and more often than not, a core business goal is to not just dominate, but to annihilate the competition by driving them out of business.

Coordination between corporations, such as through consortia, is only ever found if everyone involved stands to profit significantly and risks are low. And ironically, when it does happen, it often takes the form of shared development of an open-source project, to eliminate the perceived risk of being shafted.

> Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down.

You also do a fork if you simply want to try out some rather experimental changes. In the end, this fork can get merged into the mainstream version, stay independent, or become abandoned. People wanting to try out new things has barely anything to do with all dialogue breaking down.

You may also fork from having different goals or ideas about some mutually incompatible requirements without an communication or coordination issues. Friendly forks happen all the time.

Right. In this case I am talking about a "hard" fork, where core contributors disagree on where a project is headed and split up with no intention of collaborating further. Of course, forking with the intent of merging back contributions does not apply here, as is a cooperative and coordinated process. In that case, the "fork" really only serves as a staging ground for contributions.

There is more to choosing a job than money. No engineer likes being managed by incompetent assholes, and the best engineers also get to choose the best managers. And the bar for those is, sadly, quite low.

Unlike IOS itself, most IOS jailbreak tools and package managers are open-source and auditable, as are many of the unsanctioned applications commonly used on jailbroken devices.

The fact you nevertheless refer to this software as "dodgy" really shows how well Apple's messaging works to deter people from using it, even when their main argument against it is security (from what?).

Funny, considering that without Apple's draconian restrictions on user freedoms, IOS security is basically nonexistent even when compared to the low standard set by Android. It is true that the inside of Apple's jail feels safe, but in truth, there is much less keeping attackers out than users in.

To be fair, the technology sigmoid curve rises fastest just before its inflection point, so it is hard to predict at what point innovation slows down due to its very nature.

The first Boeing 747 was rolled out in 1968, only 65 years after the first successful heavier-than-air flight. If you told people back then that not much will fundamentally change in civil aviation over the next 57 years, no one would have believed you.

And not just in aviation. Consider what aviation did to make the world smaller. Huge 2nd order changes. The COVID-19 pandemic would not have happened the way it did, if there were no Boeing or Airbus.

Big hard-to-predict changes ahead.