Bad article title. It should be "Autism should be divided into more specific diagnoses, once we have reliable, evidence-based diagnostic criteria."
There's a reason Asperger Syndrome was abandoned as a separate condition and folded into ASD (in DSM-5) -- until then, anyone who wanted the diagnosis could get it, by displaying symptoms popularly associated with the condition. So we had clinical indicators, but no objective biological tests -- still true for most DSM-listed conditions. This led to widespread abuse and uncertainty.
The single label "autism" has many drawbacks, but one important advantage -- it reveals what we know in a scientific sense, which is next to nothing. Eventually neuroscience will change this and identify biological causes for many "mental" conditions. This will end diagnoses based on clinical interviews and replace them with objective biological tests.
I imagine this scene in a future neuroscience clinic:
Patient: "Let me tell you what I think is wrong with me."
Clinician: "Don't bother, we have objective biological tests now -- your narrative would only confuse the process. Remember psychology?"
1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.
I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
You can't fix a protocol that simply isn't designed for how modern graphics hardware works.
Both macOS and Windows have upgraded their display stacks over the decades, but it was seamless because unlike Linux, nearly all applications dynamically link the system library which they can upgrade. Linux is late to the party here because everyone wants to make their own toolkit.
X was designed for multiple remote terminals receiving drawing commands over a network, not locally hardware accelerated graphical interfaces and functions that rely on close coordination between the hardware and display server (e.g. hardware planes, vrr, hdr).
Fixing X would require a new protocol to the point that it isn't X anymore, aka Wayland. There are arguments that not having a reference display server has led to problems though.
Isn’t it cynicism (or idealism) just a survival strategy which happens because of your experiences? I know I tend to be more cynical than most of my peers but I always attributed that to growing up in poverty unlike them. Sometimes it seems a lot of people think others can apply their way of thinking or seeing the world and it will make their life instantly better. But I don’t think it can happen if they don’t live in the right context.
Almost across the board in western countries, people have less friends, weaker friendships, and there’s less dating, sex, and marriage happening.
IMO this is the biggest challenge ahead of us. What’s the point of all this amazing life enhancing technology if we’re lonely, sad, and severed from our tribes.
I run an IT consultancy and often work in both commercial buildings and private residences across the UK. When it comes to the latter—trust me, the elites (and even the upper-middle class) still have an extraordinary amount of money.
What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it.
Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight.
But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.
So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher.
It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.
The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.
I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
Many are jumbling things and coming to (wrong) conclusions.
1. Islam and Muslims are different things. Today's muslims are also different than muslims who lived 300 or 500 years ago. The political systems they lived under were completely different than the ones of today, as well as economic system. Judging a religion by its followers and by context of the time is a very misleading thing. Muslim rulers of Moorish Spain is very different than the Taliban of Afghanistan. Former lasted for 781 years and the latter lasted maybe just 30 years and there's a lot of controversy on the latter.
How would you compare Mexican and Danish people. Both overwhelmingly Christian, but is it fair to compare these two nations? Which one would "sample" Christian population best? How about Danish of 400 years ago vs. of today? Unfortunately when I hear Mexico the first thing comes to my minds is Cartel. Anyway you got the point.
2. There's nothing in Islam that prohibits scientific research, only those who interpret it interpret within their own level of understanding and especially according to their interest. In a society there are a lot of interest groups and they twist the reality and truth for their own benefit. For example it took very long for printing machine to be used in Ottoman territories and the people who objected those machines used arguments they fabricated abusing the religious understanding. However the reason behind it was purely economical. At that time there was a huge industry of "copiers" whose sole bread winner was duplicating documents by hand and they had good ties with the Court of Sultan. Of course they could not turn around and say we don't want this because it will take away our monopoly but they fabricated all kinds of excuses to have it banned.
3. For a country to have any progress there has to be (relatively good) rule of law in that country. Most of the Muslim countries of today lack rule of law, most are artificial governments (supported by big boys, take Saudis, a client state of USA). This is a long subject so I just want to give a link. Long story short, if you can not build a strong legitimate political system everything else fails, and this has been the case for Muslim countries for the last 300 years. If the laws for the ordinary citizen is different than the ruling class, don't expect cohesion in the society.)
4. Western people have been brainwashing themselves. For them the only credible source is only theirs. If you hear from FoxNews it must be true. This credibility bias blinds many and unfortunately deprives themselves and gives themselves this Eurocentric worldview. So I'll just give another link, a BBC documentary (to overcome that bias). Teaser: many think that Renaissance has started in Italy. It actually started in Muslim Spain.
> Remember Christianity used to be very hostile to religions in time past (Galileo)
Were the Christians or the Christianity or the Church of that time hostile to Galileo. Are all Christians in the same bucket? Who gives one the right to generalize this much?!
Final word, don't build your opinion on the news you hear on media.
Unfortunately. It is a shame that the human race tries to progress without the active help of a approximately a quarter of the world population.
One can only hope that islam will see the light like other religions did - yet I doubt that, for it seems even more opposed to science that the other religions were/are. There have been various sects trying to bring the enlightenment to islam, but they more or less have failed. (in fact, I believe Mustapha Kamal in Turkey is one of the only example of success - and even that one was not perfect, with religious persecution of the religious minorities)
There are signs that a united califate (islamist empire) might emerge again - the various revolutions could have been an opportunity for democracy to emerge, but the islamists did dominate. Some serious ideological division between islamists are blocking, but politics does wonder everywhere, and when you notice a peace agreement between sunnis and shias, be very worried.
Maybe it can't be like the pacific fall of communism - maybe it will take a war like the fall of fascism.
The way things are, the west will prevail and so will science - with strong collateral damages however.
It is just a shame to spend so many years and resources for such a pointless confrontation - and that's not even counting the human losses.
At least science and progress will prevail. Too bad it might seriously hurt the current leader of the free world - like it did for France and England in WW2.
BTW for those who will cry wolf and racism, here's a nice facebook page in french : https://www.facebook.com/Athes411 - algerians atheists. Yes, some people in countries dominated by islam do fight for their freedom of conscience and for science to prevail. Odds are against them however.
Science requires a "critical mass" to bear its fruits, or people end up burned or with their heads on sticks - like many did, in the middle ages or the other dark periods of humanity.
Society, in the countries where these people live, is fighting against them and their un-islamic beliefs, there are fewer and fewer of them to make a political difference, while we are offering very little opportunity to leave for greener pastures.
Odds are against them - just like they were against galileo, or the russians who did not believe in communism and saw it for what it was but couldn't manage to flee. Science, facts and all that will certainly win in the end- but meanwhile, it won't do any good for the people stuck in a fight against an angry mob of people, which includes some who sincerely believe they have 40 virgins waiting for them in heaven!
EDIT: Secularism and science do conflate. Just like fascist and communist suppressed research that was against their dogmas, and subsidized stupid theories that played well with their beliefs. In the catholic world there was that thing called "the middle ages" for a reason - and then enlightenment. We are currently in the islamic middle ages. Go read the atheist page - it's worth spending some time on. Their last post from only 2 hours ago even has a nice picture of science as a book/shield to protect against religious dogmas : https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=342402572541947&...
Downvotes ? Does not matter. True science holds no belief - just paradigms, which can be reversed with enough time, theories and matching evidence. Any form of political or religious belief is good and helpful - until it starts believing that dogmas are better than facts. Then it steers away from the truth. Science is not a body of knowledge, but more a process of thought.
One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.
Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.
That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.
Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.
______
† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.
‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.
There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young. What you do around that time matters. If you waste your time, you never get it back later.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
I'm an atheist and don't believe in spirits, but when I came across a viewpoint similar to this a few years ago it really changed how I empathize with people.
I really don't agree with how widely we apply the disease model when thinking of human behaviors. Some people are mentally ill, but the world we live in is more certainly ill. The expected arc of a life in the Western world is that you spend your healthy years working on other people's goals so you can spend the last few years of your life doing what you want with what resources you've amassed and what health you have remaining. We wage wars and torture, reward greed, deny each other healthcare, homes, food, our leaders are cartoon villains. If we manage to find love, it is discriminated against unless it fits into a narrow set of parameters. If we are unlucky, we are born, starve for a few years, and then die of preventable, curable disease.
Happy participation in this society is not rational. As Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society." I have been lucky in the opportunities that I have had available to me, but it's not hard for me to conceive of situations where the rational choice is to drink oneself to death. Life is unkind to many people.
The ideal solution is to fix all of the world's ills, but obviously that isn't realistic, at least not in our lifetimes. We can make progress, but help will arrive too late for many. I can empathize with those who choose to say that the individual is sick, rather than the world, because the individual is easier to change.
But it's simply not true in some cases. Instead of telling someone, "Something is wrong with you, let's fix it," we should often be telling them, "You're right, there's a lot wrong with your life and the world, and much of that can't be changed; let's see if we can find a way to find you some contentment despite that."
To be very clear: some people are mentally ill. Individuals can be ill AND the world's can be ill. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Integration of aboriginal culture into the Canadian education system. Not just offering an aboriginal studies class, but truly taking the native perspective into the education system. Most native people I've talked with don't take advantage of their free educational affordances because they don't want to continue to be whitewashed/don't feel comfortable in institutions that don't understand their culture/are understandably extremely scared of "education" in Canada given the residential school system.
Including traditional aboriginal health practises into the health care system, both mandating and expanding the services that are covered by our national insurance, but allowing a medicine man to charge OHIP for their time performing service. People don't die on reserves because they're lazy drunks(as is often portrayed), they die because they don't trust the Canadian health care system.
Adding Ojibway as an official language (either federally, or mandate the provinces provide services in the predominant native language of that territory).
Guaranteed seats in the Canadian parliament.
All of that on top of continuing the repreve on on taxation, and in my likely unpopular opinion, a reexamination of reparation.
What will it accomplish? It will only serve to minimally undo the damage that was inflicted upon these people by colonialists, my forefathers.
There's the academic philosophical postmodernism, which rejects metanarratives. Then there's a derived ideology taken up as the basis for a lot of Intersectional activism which can be termed "Social Constructionism." As is the case for many activist derivations of ideology, there is some straying away from the original academic version.
While postmodernism claims it rejects metanarratives, like the one in Marxism, the derived ideologies share a lot of parallels in effect. They both result in opposing groups which can't effectively talk to each other, so must coerce each other by force. (Doesn't this remind you of the Intersectional "Stack Ranking" and the "Oppression Olympics?") They both effectively result in a rejection of logic. They both effectively create their own forms of obscurantist alternative "logic." The ideological effect of both Marxism and Social Constructionism is to come up with a pretext for rejecting existing standards and tearing society apart -- one which is ideologically sealed against negotiation, logic, and adaptation to evidence.
Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android.
Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones.
Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires.
And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved.
That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete.
The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue.
Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard.
Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.
The ^community^ here are people like you - those who also have to pay bills but contribute anyways, in whatever way they can by using the software and occasionally contributing code.
While yes it would be great if a community could raise funds, that coordination job itself would have to become someone's not-paying-the-bills work.
As much as I love Open source/Free/Libre software and am grateful it exists (and contributing to it, when possible), I've a long held belief that it is the pursuit of the privileged. You need to have the privilege of free time and then the privilege of being able to choose to spend that free time on something that doesn't improve your standard of living and then the privilege of being able to do it consistently.
The 787 is not bad. Its a great aircraft and they have sold a shit-ton of them.
But it was also a program that went hilariously over budget. Nearly costing as much as the A380. It had a whole bunch of problems and still has problems today. Lots of production issues.
This had lead to a situation where they will need to sold literally 1500 or more planes to break even on the program. And 1500 is a gigantic amount of wide-bodies.
The 787 didn't really eat A380s lunch. Its more like 2 companies both thought about what the best investment would be for the future. Boeing picked the right plane. Airbus picked the wrong plane. The competitor to the A380 was the 747-8 and the 777.
Had Airbus not totally misread the market and invested in totally the wrong market. The Dreamliner could have backfired on Boeing. If Airbus had a 787 serious competitor out at the same time, the 787 might never have sold more then 1500 times. They already have total order of around 1800 and there are likely gone be many more because Airbus doesn't have a perfect competitor plane.
In the wide-body market, Boeing is still totally competitive with Airbus. Its the narrow body market where Airbus is kicking Boeing ass.
I have some skin in this game. I'd say that painting is not difficult at all. Depending on your preferred style it can be as easy as literally throwing random pigments on whatever surface you prefer to target.
Painting (or drawing) to some degree of visual similarity requires practice, so some effort is needed. You have to "rewire" some muscle-vision-brain coordination. It will be perceived as hard only because a) you will know how easy it is to snap a photo and apply filters/photoshop (or, propmt an AI), and b) because you will be your own worst critic. Others will see you progress quite fast if only you do the training part.
What is hard about it, really hard, is making a living from it. Or, even getting small change out of it. Most often, if you've not been to the right schools and intermingled with the right people in the right way at the right times (with an added very big portion of sheer luck) you are not going to make it, ever. Even then, it is unlikely. Regardless of your talent.
Talent does not bubble up like you would imagine. You can not just build a better mousetrap and they will come. This is a very controlled market, and also one where the different niches are working in very different ways. Even in very different ways from other markets you would know about.
It's not sour grapes, it's just a fact that for every art market niche there are only a very small amount of people able to gain a foothold while there are thousands or tens of thousands that may have an equal amount of skill/talent but these people just does not make it.
The business model of linkedIn is a bit messed up. It pretends to offer something to you, the individual. Yet you are not paying for the site, so you are part of the product not the customer. The real customers are companies (advertising) and recruiters (self-described raw meat to be had). However, linkedIn seems to have messed up with that business model as well. Because recruiters wants recruits - not just a mailing list of people who are not interested. This leaves only the advertisers, thus turning even more recruits from visiting the site, therefore making the site less interesting to recruiters. A downward spiral, really.
Recent offerings of linkedin Learning seems to be attempts to mitigate this but at the core of the problem really is that the site offers very little value to recruits. Maybe there are some smart business model people around that could fix that, who knows. The space is ready for dis-ruption.
Its enlightened centrism and a place of profound privilege to be comfortable in the world as it exists thinking all of those "extremists" advocating for change are just being too emotional and partisan.
Centrism is de-facto the status quo. Which, in current times, means support for the police as it exists, supports for business regulation as it exists, supports greenhouse gases and military conduct as it exists, supports the behavior and election processes of politicians as they exist, etc.
Its simply the privilege of the majority to be the "moderate" ones. To be radical is not to be good or bad, it just to be outside the norm. And it makes sense that those in the norm find those outside it dangerous and threatening, because... they want to be. Thats the whole point. Their time is wasted if the goal is not to become the new moderate, the new normal, the new center.
I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door.
I think it's caused by a number of factors:
(1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles.
(2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring.
(3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it.
I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.
This falls under the "curse of dimensionality"[0]. There are so many tasks/patterns/parts of life that humans can develop specialized skills in that most humans (nearly every human?) are exceptional at something. It might be "identifying the best cardboard scraps and arranging it to make a bed on the sidewalk which is optimally comfortable", or "knowing how to make one specific family member smile" but it'll be something.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6-12mo on new analytics systems (or, god forbid, not be an analyst at all!).
I think we don't really assess the amount of lock-in we allow when we learn something that supposedly makes our lives simpler. Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard! and the cost is that google gets your information too- which most webmasters don't care about individually.
However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned.
Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.
That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson.
Yuval Noah Harari had a good quote on wheat farming in Sapiens
Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.
It's become clear to me in my mid 30s that I was very emotionally neglected as a child. I had literally no idea because I had nothing to compare it to, and the behavior of my parents feels relatively normal for when I was growing up.
It's my belief that this neglect has had a big role in the insecurity, lack of vulnerability, lack of self-esteem, and lack of honesty throughout my entire life. I don't blame my parents and I own my mistakes. But it's freaking wild to me that it's only now in my 30s that I'm going through emotional development that I can look back on and see people I knew in high school who had already done this sort of growth. After having read Running on Empty I started asking people about the dynamics with their parents growing up, and it really solidified how uncaring my childhood was in many ways.
> I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules
Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.
For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.
When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.
I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.
Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.
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Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.
Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.
At least Github's status reporting is accurate and generally truthful. At my current job, engineers are totally allergic to reporting incidents, especially to the public status page, since doing so would put you in the spotlight of upper management and make you a prime candidate for a negative performance review in the next cycle. Happens time and time again. The result? Things break, no one takes responsibility, and customers complain while we lie and tell them everything's fine. Shrug.
There's a reason Asperger Syndrome was abandoned as a separate condition and folded into ASD (in DSM-5) -- until then, anyone who wanted the diagnosis could get it, by displaying symptoms popularly associated with the condition. So we had clinical indicators, but no objective biological tests -- still true for most DSM-listed conditions. This led to widespread abuse and uncertainty.
The single label "autism" has many drawbacks, but one important advantage -- it reveals what we know in a scientific sense, which is next to nothing. Eventually neuroscience will change this and identify biological causes for many "mental" conditions. This will end diagnoses based on clinical interviews and replace them with objective biological tests.
I imagine this scene in a future neuroscience clinic:
Patient: "Let me tell you what I think is wrong with me."
Clinician: "Don't bother, we have objective biological tests now -- your narrative would only confuse the process. Remember psychology?"