It's really common in any industry that isn't the tech industry, because as the article clearly states the root cause is that "business people" i.e. the non-programmers don't understand programming work and (more importantly) don't want to understand it, not even a little bit. In fact they may take open pride in not understanding it. Note that although the title is "I've been employed in tech" his examples are not tech firms.
People in that environment quickly realize that their bosses can't tell the difference between someone who is hard working, motivated and skilled, and someone else who is a lazy incompetent bullshitter. Indeed they'll probably prefer the latter, especially if that person is the Right Sort Of Person. Nor will they listen to the right people, and often they have no idea even why they employ developers at all except that they are expected to be innovative in some abstract way. At some point this realization dawns and the devs discover that they can just ... not work ... and nothing happens. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The salary keeps rolling in. At first they may think, OK, I'll use the extra time for something work related, like taking online courses. The article mentions Coursera. They first take courses that seem maybe relevant, then they move on to skills their employer doesn't need but might look good on their resume. Then they exhaust the potential for using work time for learning and if they can get work-from-home, may start to just spend time taking care of the house, watching TV or sleeping.
I've seen this happen to a friend. His motivation is gone years ago. His project is nearly a sham that loses money hand over fist and likely and always will, his bosses don't care because he's there to tick the box labelled "we are innovative", decisions get made based on ideology first and what makes sense second, and yet he is very well paid. So, he just enjoys it, whilst dreaming about maybe leaving and doing his own company.
Note that chargebacks are mostly a US thing. In Europe you basically can't charge back and last time I enquired about even blocking a company from making new charges I was told that doing this required me to block the entire card and get a new one issued.
It'd really very odd to see Americans insist that they should have the right to take a service, get the money back for it from the business i.e. get the service for free, and then go back and get service again! That's pretty unfair towards the business.
Maybe, but I've never heard anyone I know in Europe ever refer to making a chargeback or even raising the possibility of doing one. It certainly isn't common. Perhaps it depends on what country you're in.
Chargebacks are mandated by law on credit-cards in Europe, and they have saved the ass of many people, and stopped a lot of fraud.
When covid hapepned, many airplane companies were not refunding cancelled flights, everyone who bought tickets with a credit card could do a chargeback, and buy another ticket. Everyone else was stuck in disputes for months, some for years, some never got money back.
When you pay with a debit card, you are paying with your money. So you could lose all the money you have, that's bad.
But the credit-card is the Bank's money. You could loose all the money you don't have. You could lose unlimited amount of money - after all, the bank decides if to accept a transaction. That's Much Much Worse.
So let's say you bought something for $500 on the credit card, then the bank has to collect this money from you.
So the Chargeback is really you telling the bank that someone stole from them, it was the bank's money after all, and that they cannot collect from you. It is then between the bank and the merchant to fight it out.
Basically the bank is providing you credit, they decide how much credit to provide, and they are also in charge of security -> making sure it was you and not someone stealing your credit card. So they hold the buck.
> I don't know what your last paragraph is supposed to imply.
It's pointing out that the left hates libertarianism and Peter Thiel, leftism is literally the opposite of libertarianism, and so you would expect a left wing news outlet to try and trash Thiel and libertarians whether or not the argument makes any sense or whether it's actually their fault. It's a bias warning.
Yes, the only way someone could possibly disagree with the holy Word of Peter Thiel (swt) is because they're whatever caricature of a rabid communist you have in your mind.
> It's pointing out that the left hates libertarianism
It's worth pointing out that the word "libertarian" was coined for its namesake left-wing movement, what you might also call "anarcho-syndicalism", "mutualism", or similarly aligned ideologies. It's only since the 1960s that the word has been used as a synonym for ancap, and then mostly in the USA.
Not really though. It's worth pointing out that the original Liberartianism in the Sarte/French sense IS a left wing movement and closer to anarchism and would view the companies that American Libertarians love as another extension of authoritarian control that should be reduced or eliminated.
Corporate Libertarianism which seems to be the predominant modern one is very right wing though.
> since you imply that a publication somehow automatically loses credibility on this topic by leaning left
Funny how so many of the replies are shocked by this idea when virtually every single story posted to HN from a right leaning outlet is flooded with comments of the form "you can't trust this story, it comes from a right leaning outlet" and the post itself will often be quickly flagged to death. What goes around comes around.
Paint me ultra skeptical about all such claims. It might be true or it might not. The error bars on these metrics should be enormous but none are given. In reality the British government has absolutely no idea about even far more basic stats like the size of the population, and calculation of things like GDP/capita and productivity are all heavily influenced by errors in that sort of base figure. Official population estimates are massive under-estimates and there's now lots of evidence that this is true.
Until about 2020/2021 a lot of the case for this had to be built on things like mismatches between expected electricity/water consumption and population claims, but since Brexit and the vaccine rollouts there is now far clearer evidence.
For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.
COVID made the problem even clearer. In some age groups more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed in the country at all. The government claims 9% of the population is unvaccinated but an opinion poll run by the BBC yielded 25%, a likely more accurate figure. The ONS recently had to admit in writing that their vaccine effectiveness numbers were meaningless garbage (and always have been) because if you take them at face value, vaccines are magical elixirs of invulnerability that make you much less likely to die for any reason at all including things that aren't health related, like workplace accidents. The ONS pretends it must be because they missed some confounding factor despite adjusting for some crazy number of them, in reality the explanation is simpler: because the population estimate is far too low, they think there are far fewer unvaccinated people than there really are, and thus the calculated death rate is far higher than it really is. The size of the vaccinated population is known to a higher degree of accuracy and thus the death rate in that group is actually accurate, creating this apparently nonsensical effect.
After 10 years they tried to do a new census, but did it in the middle of lockdowns and the resulting figures were massively out of line with other known figures:
"CLF, a group of 12 local authorities, stressed that the figures were “skewed”, with Westminster missing 30,000 residents (15 per cent of the population.)"
So the chance to repair the data was flunked. Although the ONS is in denial, in the past the government has taken some steps towards admitting this. The official population size was downgraded to "experimental" (lol) and could no longer be classified as "national statistics".
A government that can't even count how many people exist on an island is in no position to accurately measure the output or productivity of those people, a far more subjective and complex set of statistics to compute. In reality nobody knows how the British economy is doing. At best they can measure a subset of it.
> For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.
In the opinion of the ONS, who are the ones who were publishing the bad figures originally? They're the people being criticized for generating garbage statistics in the first place, of course they're going to claim there's no real problem, so you'd have to test their reasoning.
Their attempt at justifying this bizarre claim is that maybe 2 million people applied to live permanently in the UK but don't actually live there. Literally the first criteria for applying to the scheme is that you live in the UK and the purpose of applying is that you want to continue living there. This reasoning is idiotic on its face and just makes the ONS look even worse, even if we didn't already know that their population statistics were hugely inaccurate from other sources.
Not exactly. The membership are only given a choice between two candidates. If the membership actually got to choose who ran the party then we'd most likely have had the first female black PM of the country (Kemi Badenoch), who would also have had computer science training. The MPs unfortunately had other ideas and so members got a choice between Sunak and Truss.
> If the membership actually got to choose who ran the party then we'd most likely have had the first female black PM of the country (Kemi Badenoch)
Doubtful. Colour me very very sceptical, for the simple reason that her political positions are quite extreme, even in the party that she finds herself in. I'm not saying that there's no "base" for that in that party, just 1) not a majority and 2) these are also mostly people who are ... shall we say, not "progressive" enough to be enthused by the thought of a "female black PM".
She was easily winning polls of the members. The idea that conservatives are racist is a left wing slur, not reality. She lost because she is too conservative for the Tory MPs, who are well to the left of the party membership.
"Brexit means Brexit" was clearly meaningless. However "Get Brexit Done", "Take Back Control" and "Stop The Boats" are all pretty clear as far as three word political slogans are. They're certainly more specific than "Make America Great Again".
They aren't really getting their act together, they aren't doing much different to what they were doing before that poll lead. That lead is the result of the Conservatives having constant leadership turmoil and appointing unpopular people to the Cabinet. It's a consequence of ruling party dysfunction rather than Labour suddenly improving.
That's apples and oranges. With RAID the server is never retired and you don't need to set up auto-scaling and all the scale-out complexity that comes with it. It just keeps running. The replace/resilver cycle may degrade performance whilst the data is re-replicated, but bringing up a new VM will also degrade performance for a while whilst it replicates data from some other node onto itself.
Your entire career hinging on the ToS of a single AI company is not a good position to be in.
Not to mention, the ToS forbids it due to the experimental nature of the tool. In a few years, I doubt the restrictions will be as tight as they are now.
People in that environment quickly realize that their bosses can't tell the difference between someone who is hard working, motivated and skilled, and someone else who is a lazy incompetent bullshitter. Indeed they'll probably prefer the latter, especially if that person is the Right Sort Of Person. Nor will they listen to the right people, and often they have no idea even why they employ developers at all except that they are expected to be innovative in some abstract way. At some point this realization dawns and the devs discover that they can just ... not work ... and nothing happens. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The salary keeps rolling in. At first they may think, OK, I'll use the extra time for something work related, like taking online courses. The article mentions Coursera. They first take courses that seem maybe relevant, then they move on to skills their employer doesn't need but might look good on their resume. Then they exhaust the potential for using work time for learning and if they can get work-from-home, may start to just spend time taking care of the house, watching TV or sleeping.
I've seen this happen to a friend. His motivation is gone years ago. His project is nearly a sham that loses money hand over fist and likely and always will, his bosses don't care because he's there to tick the box labelled "we are innovative", decisions get made based on ideology first and what makes sense second, and yet he is very well paid. So, he just enjoys it, whilst dreaming about maybe leaving and doing his own company.