Not true (newer investors generally get seniority), but more importantly this is about common shareholders (generally employees and even founders) who never have the opportunity to get liq pref.

More importantly, employees with options are generally not sophisticated enough to realise liquidation preferences may exist and may dramatically devalue the common stock options they have, and even if they are sophisticated enough, they will often have no means to find out what liquidation preferences exist. (They theoretically have information rights that probably entitle them to that info, but companies simply find spurious excuses to refuse books and records requests, knowing no options holder is going to drop six figures on a lawsuit to exercise those information rights.)

All fair, but I think a different interpretation could be that AI allows you to vastly expand the scope of the possible, such to create a situation again where things are challenging and frustrating and fun.

This is the part that interests me most. The IKEA analogy from the parent comment assumes the carpenter's only option is to build the same furniture faster. But what if the carpenter uses the prefab stuff for the boring parts and spends their real energy on the joints and details that actually matter?

I've noticed this pattern in music too - the people who understand theory deeply use generative tools in ways that beginners literally can't, because they know which output to keep and which to throw away. The tool doesn't replace the taste, it just gives you more raw material to apply taste to.

But here's what I keep wondering: does expanding the scope of the possible eventually erode the deep understanding that makes the expansion valuable in the first place? Like, if you never have to debug a memory leak because the agent handles it, do you lose the intuition that would let you architect systems that don't leak in the first place?

> But here's what I keep wondering: does expanding the scope of the possible eventually erode the deep understanding that makes the expansion valuable in the first place? Like, if you never have to debug a memory leak because the agent handles it, do you lose the intuition that would let you architect systems that don't leak in the first place?

Maybe, but it feels very hard to predict. Neither I nor most engineers I know ~truly~ understands how a computer works at the deepest lowest level. And for those who do, they probably don't understand the deepest lowest levels of chips, and for those who understand that, they probably don't truly understand how those chips are made, and so and so on. Modern life is built on abstractions upon abstractions, and no one can understand it all from the ground up.

My question is whether AI will give us another abstraction on top of what we have, or if it'll just get so smart that it'll do everything, leaving us with no way to contribute (and most likely becoming extinct).

Most programmers don't like the fuzziness of AI, so things may be challenging and frustrating, but certainly not fun.

> But it's sad it does not ask the user more.

You can ask it to ask you about your task and it will ask you tons of questions.

Block isn't a jobs program, and employees cost money. Layoffs suck (I got laid off last year) but the reality is that it's a business and regardless of profitability, if you're not worth more than your salary you're a liability. The severance given is quite generous and fair. My biggest issue is that Block should never have grown so big in the first place.

I'd encourage anyone wondering where this perspective comes from to read "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher.

Mark Fisher is excellent. It will be interesting to see if his claim that the human face is required for capitalism's functioning will hold (does not look like it).

yea but layoffs aren't usually very performance based. i agree in general though.

Vishy's still a top player at 56

He does not play classical because it would immediately reduce his rating. Gelfand plunged. He would too.

Yes the stamina needed to play classical tournaments is not as there anymore, but he's still very very strong. He just came in second at Tata Steel Rapid, which although is not classical, is still an indication of strength, albeit without the emphasis on endurance.

In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".

A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior

You agree we had more shame before.

Certainly, you are aware we literally had more crime back then, right? Additionally, we heaped shame on people who did not deserve it, like women and black people and gay people.

So what the fuck good does that do?

You know what actually changed? White collar crime stopped being a thing.

That's why the right way to do it is to have a hard deadline given to engineers, then the engineers cut whatever scope is needed to actually wrap something up by the deadline

My most productive team did no time estimates at all (short of very very rough project estimates i.e. "yeah I'll work on this project for at least the next quarter then we'll see"), and instead of spending endless time in planning meetings determining how complex a task was, we instead spent that time just doing the thing.

How did you align with other teams?

I agree it's best if working in isolation, but if you need to synchronise then estimations make sense.

If you need 3 months to implement something, and another team 1 week, and both need to be ready at the same time; then if you actually know those estimations the second team can wait until then and do something immediately useful in between.

Yes, then you must have a rough estimate for that. Or in the other extreme example - in the case of an outage, estimates must be much more precise (i.e. "we should have a workaround in ~30 minutes").

But neither case requires too much thought or discussion. My point was more that estimation ends up overwhelming time and energy, when you can just do the thing instead. I've worked on teams where we've spent more time arguing about how complex a task than it would've been for someone to crank out a solution.

I also don't mean engineers shouldn't collaborate, just that it should be more ad-hoc and not manager/tpm/scrum-master driven.

> Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things

Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.

I hate how AI is being shoved in most things, but I do love AI in a few of those places (ai coding and google search replacement)

Have you noticed how Google search summaries have taken the shape of those annoying blogposts that take you through several “What is a computer program” explainers before answering the question?