Enshittification happened but look at how life changed since 1999 (25 years as you mentioned). Songs in your palm, search in your palm, maps in your palm or car dashboard, live traffic rerouting, track your kids plane from home before leaving for airport, book tickets without calling someone. WhatsApp connected more people than anything.
Of course there are scams and online indoctrination not denying that.
Maybe each service degraded from its original nice view but there is an overall enhancement of our ability to do things.
Hopefully the same happens over next 25 years. A few bad things but a lot of good things.
absurd, the claim that Google search was better 25 years ago than today. that's vastly trivializing the amount of volume and scale that Google needs to process
Polling has fundamental issues that can't be solved with statistics. The biggest one is the unknown difference between who responds to the poll and who votes. And poll response areas are very low these days - I've heard well under 1% is common (that is, less than 1 out of 100 individuals contacted by the pollster answer the questions).
Nate Silver nailed this in the 2016 election. He said Trump's victory there was consistent with historically normal polling errors.
What may have been less widely appreciated is these errors are not related to causes like limited sample size that are straightforwardly amenable to statistical analysis. They come from the deeper problems with polling and the way those problems shift under our feet a little bit with each election.
Why would we assume that the health of a country is mainly determined by its healthcare system?
I think the big drivers of worse American health outcomes are things like obesity, car-based lifestyles, and long working hours, all of which have nothing to do with our healthcare system.
The healthiest countries succeed by rarely needing their healthcare system because people behave in healthy ways. Needing the system a lot means you've already failed.
I don't think lifestyle explains our problem with infant mortality rates. That's something where you, first thing in life, depend on the health care system before you even have a lifestyle.
In addition, yes, I think we can blame obesity on (the lack of) healthcare. If people routinely met with a physician and got advice, they might be able to turn things around before merely being overweight becomes obesity.
We're effectively in a shortage situation, and by design. If you don't get preventative care, that's considered a good thing by the healthcare system because they would honestly collapse if everyone got the recommended doctor visits. So we have people not getting preventative treatment and dying of preventable causes at depressingly high rates. This is generally considered fine, because the health care system is bursting at the seams with more money than it can count, so it's considered successful.
> If people routinely met with a physician and got advice, they might be able to turn things around before merely being overweight becomes obesity.
Anecdotally, two stories:
- A while back, I had dinner with two friends who do pharma research. At the time they were working on treatment for T2 diabetes. Naive me asked, "Why not just focus on prevention?" They said it's doesn't happen. Too few people are willing to change.
- More recently I had a conversation with a doctor at a social event. A similar topic came up, again I suggest prevention. And again I was told the same, it just doesn't happen.
I'm sure these anecdotes are true. But is it true because this behaviour is immutable or is it because there has been no serious attempt to change it? For instance why not teach how to be healthy in primary school and in society generally? The US and other countries have a high incidence of Type 2 diabetes largely because of over consumption of sugar. This is a social issue. I saw this very clearly when I took my family to the US for three months many years ago and we visited one om my colleagues for Thanksgiving. Our host's wife was astonished when my children asked for a drink of water, she asked them several times if they would not prefer a sweet fizzy drink. But my children were thirsty and knew that water was the best remedy.
> But is it true because this behaviour is immutable or is it because there has been no serious attempt to change it?
Humans conform to the norms around them. This was an evolutionary advantage. That is, "Look at them, they're still alive. I'll do that as well."
That's detrimental in modern times. Doc says, "You're overweight. Drop 20 lbs." You might says "yes" and then you leave, walk thru the waiting area, and see everyone is 40+ lbs too heavy. Consciously and sub-consciously you think "Nah. I'm good look at *them*." This is further exasperated by broader cultural norms. Fat shaming might be bad, agreed. But out-of-shapeness has been normalized, championed, and celebrated. There's also a lack of transparency (read: honesty). The extra weight is said to be perfectly fine. It's not. It comes with plenty of implications and complications.
A great positive example of socialized behavior is smoking. It was marginalized and slowly became less and less "popular". In theory that could work with "fitness" but suggesting obesity is bad will get you canceled. There's no socially acceptable way to stop the cycle. And Big Pharma is happy for this.
P.s. Kudos for teaching your children well. Sadly, you're the minority.
I'm not sure the infant mortality has much of an impact on longevity, and while there may be things the US could do about obesity within the healthcare system, I doubt that the reason for the US-world gap is that the rest of the world does these things and the US doesn't.
You can name things that are bad about US healthcare and could be improved but that's a different topic than why Americans are in relatively poor health compared to other developed countries.
There's still the same problem of disentangling the population health from the efficacy of the system. Maybe mothers are less healthy in the US and that affects infant mortality.
Not an expert by any means, just confused by the complexity of it all.
There's no end of unpopular experiments in double pane formats where one pane holds text and the other holds comments, footnotes, etc.
They're unpopular because they're confusing and brittle. How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation? No answer is given, because there is none.
There's also the issue of screen real estate. I often have other windows (terminal, browser, the build application), and panels within the editor (git, file explorer, console, etc.). It's already a hassle to maintain all this. It would be even more annoying if when I am comparing two code blocks side-by-side, there's another view for each of those that I'd have to either manually handle, or mentally keep in mind to look for something.
Which is why I like vim and Emacs where everything is a buffer that can be displayed in tiled windows. You choose your configuration depending on the current task. Jetbrains' IDEs are ok too, at least in the old UI. You can collpase everything to the fringe with nice shortcuts (XCode does too, but the default shortcut are horrendeous).
It's technically doable, the text in the right pane would be stored as comments in the source. The editor would parse the comments and collapse them into UI elements in the code, so that they could still be copy and pasted e.g. how the little blue capsules in Xcode work.
It's a bad idea because it's wasteful of space while achieving very little over a conventional setup.
>How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation?
The text editor or IDE can provide a feature to show(pop up) or hide(collapse) the side comment section when needed while formatting the comments to make them look bold or italic.
This will become a quality of life improvement if the implementation is done right. If not, it will be very confusing as you mentioned. I think writing API documentation can become very easy and since the function and its comment/description align on the same line, generating API documentation will become easy as well.
> For EMs, wartime means leading low-morale teams through ambiguity, hard constraints, frequently changing goals, and intense pressure to perform.
Why the assumption that goals are frequently changing? If you're making something that's actually valuable and not just looking good by surfing trends, I would think that the virtue would lie in having a clear vision and sticking to it.
There's a lot of virtue in that, and managers prefer that just as much as engineers do. But sometimes it's as the article says: "Your organization might not have the luxury of years of runway, and the environment you're operating in is rapidly changing". If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.
Either your product is at its core useful, or its not. If the environment is rapidly changing, either your product is still relevant, and you should be focusing on stability, or it's no longer useful and it's too late to change that.
> If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.
But that's one new requirement (or set of), not a changing environment. If that customer is changing their requirements as they go, so that you're constantly shifting focus, you need to either pin them down to one goal, or cut them loose and deal with the fallout. They don't see or care about the "war mode" they've created, and placating them will just invite more demands, and you can't keep it up forever.
The one time I've seen a "war mode" succeed was making a change that was a precondition for acquisition, when a set of requirements was laid out in the acquisition offer. It couldn't be altered once it was accepted, so the "war mode" had a fixed goal and deadline. Apart from something like that, it's just going to result in a spiral.
I carefully reviewed all three of these articles. While it's possible that I still missed something, I did not find any material that aligns with the unique point of Paul's post. Nothing that says leaders may have to directly engage with employees underneath their direct reports to understand what is actually going on in the company.
It is perhaps possible to interpret these articles as saying anything whatsoever, but they don't seem to specifically say what Paul's article says.
But even PG goes back on that by saying "Obviously founders can't keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20. There's going to have to be some amount of delegation." So what he is saying is managers should talk to their reports.
He writes like this is some groundbreaking realization, but to me I'm not even sure what he's getting at. For example he pushes back against the idea of hiring and letting them do work, but then says don't micromanage them, so which is it?
When he says "That would be micromanaging them, which is bad" he is describing the traditional view. He continues, "Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice..."
There is a balance between letting people run free, and controlling every tiny decisions. You have to keep the direction and vision, and you have to make sure everyone is going toward that. But you shouldn't trust they will do it by themselves (they may not have internalized it as much as you do either) and you shouldn't trust your ability to deal with every detail of the complex system you are trying to build. If you hired specialists that's also because you were lacking some abilities, not just because you want extensions of yourself by lack of time. And if you hired generalists that's because you needed glue to make the whole operation work with a level of understanding that you can't allocate your time to, and because you may lack the variety of skills that allow for efficient communication with the specialists.
As with any complex system, you have to be careful about degrees of freedom, too many and it can break down and too little and it can get seized.
Maybe I misinterpreted Pauls blog post, but what i got was: Mangers != Leaders, Leaders != Managers. Management and Leadership need to be well understood in any organization. Good Mangers can be good leaders. The CEO is often the manager of the leadership. This is effectively what they teach in the Harvard MBA.
Yeah I think you did. You can't just switch founder for leader. A great leader would inspire the organization to work productively and effectively, but that's not what distinguishes the founder. The founder would make sure the organization is actually working on the most effective thing, and I think what Paul tries to convey is that one of the tools the founder uses to accomplish this is crossing the organizational tree (i.e. skip-level meetings).
I think the founder not only motivates people to work on the correct thing by doing this, but the founder also directly experiences feedback from working with people lower on the org chart, enabling them to steer the company with more accurate information.
But what scale are we talking about? I've scaled from zero to IPO a couple of times, I've never seen past a few k people, airbnb is at 38,000. The only real world stuff I know to get about leadership and management at 38,000 people is learnings from harvard. I thought Brian was saying he manages his leadership team tightly, not that he spends a lot of time with ICs? I think that's conventional advice, manage your leadership team well? What is skip level at this scale? CEO going to sr. director level? I don't mind having lunch with a VP but I can't imagine doing work with them from the C level?
To my mind the CEO job at scale is 4 things - Keeping the fight fair-- The leadership and executive management should argue viciously, The CEO should make sure these conflicts remain constructive and aligned with company goals
Holding the vision true-- There's a risk of mission drift, continually reinforce and refine the company's vision, make sure all leaders remain aligned with longterm goals
Enforcing strategic adherence-- A strategy is only as good as its execution. ensure the leadership team not only understands the strategy but implements it across all levels of the organization. Manager of Leaders
Deal with the real world-- Q-calls, investor relations, supply chains/vendors/etc.
This is often the problem I have with business advice, it's general but not generally applicable. Scale matters probably most in the context, followed by the type of business.
Okay, I've only scaled to 30 people so far, so anything I say is just me interpreting things I read.
I imagine from what I read about Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang is that all three of them have/had unconventional management style in the sense that they're often amongst the IC's. Obviously you can't do that with all of your 30.000 employees, but I think they're just picking the teams that are most crucial at a certain point.
For example if Steve Jobs is managing Apple while launching the iPhone, I imagine he's talking to the VP of Sales in the management meetings, but he's not on the sales floor, nor is he sitting with MacOS dev teams or making sure motivations are high in the customer service department. But I bet you could find him in weekly iPhone design team meetings, and maybe he'd be shown progress on iOS every month and have a 3-hour brainstorm with a core team of senior devs on that team. Maybe they'd pull him into procurement meetings to make sure the capacitative touch screens would be made in the quantity they needed.
You'd have your VP's, directors and senior management making sure the ship sails, but you'd have the founder CEO present where they can have most impact, which just isn't in those top level meetings.
"Their partnership began when Jobs appointed Ive as Apple's senior vice president of industrial design in 1997. Ive described their daily routine, saying, "We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio."
This is a great talk by Brian on why he is CEO, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about designers not being CEOs from what I gathered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6h_EDcj12k
No, PG knows what a "leader" is and knows how to choose his words. He is identifying the difference between professional managers and founders in the context of running an org
There’s been many news stories, business articles, and studies suggesting that. I don’t know how popular they are in management literature. I just know many stayed promoting this with high resistance from big business, management people, etc.
At the least, they said you need to hear directly from the people on the ground to know what they’re experiencing. The people on top could talk to them about what they learned.
Additionally, companies like IBM and FedEx used to give rewards to employees for ideas to improve the company. It was often a percentage of what those ideas made or saved up to a certain cap. A bunch of people would usually collect the max reward whenever this way implemented.
Those are a few examples that I saw show up in many places.
What, ultimately, did Wolfram do in these five most productive years? Can it be said in a sentence, or a paragraph?
I always find it interesting when someone claims to have something to say, but can't seem to say it at a short enough length to be held entirely in the human mind.
It's like Bob says he has a beautiful sculpture to show me, but when I ask to see it, he sends me truckload after truckload of modeling clay. The sculpture is constituted from this material, Bob tells me.
Okay, I say, but it seems like you're asking me to do an awful lot of work here, and I don't know you enough to be confident that the effort would be well-spent. So could you maybe show me a complete, smaller scale model, with a bit less detail, that gives me the general idea of what's so special and new about what you've made?
No. "I published XX books and YYY articles" doesn't tell me anything about the actual value. Some authors I heard publish a 3-digit-number articles per year...
Seems to be more when the low end isn't getting enough to live on. The element that gets violent just because someone else is doing well doesn't seem that large.
There are people in the SF Bay Area who have full time service jobs and can only afford to live in their cars. It should worry everybody when there is a large - and growing - segment of society that follows the rules and can’t scrape by. That doesn’t last for long.
You don’t need to worry about the crack heads, worry about the people who can hold a 9-5 and aren’t getting a living wage. All they need is a charismatic leader to organize them, and they’ll actually get shit done.
This has very little to do with income or wealth inequality, and everything to do with bad local government policy leading to insanely expensive housing. Anyone on a full time service job in the Bay Area is very rich on a global standard!
What's a "living wage"? Its easy to shift the goalpost! I'd bet even those service workers who can't afford absurd Bay Area housing still have a living wage by the standards of 1900!
Does it not? The entire developed world seems extremely destabilized right now. Old-line Conservative, Labour, and Liberal parties have either been defeated by, or are under serious threat from, populist-nationalist and leftist parties throughout the West [1]. The only thing these latter groups have in common is populist rhetoric and a sense of "I'm not getting my fair piece of the pie".
The existence of the modern welfare state owes its genesis to this idea, courtesy of (amazingly) Otto von Bismarck of all people, probably the most consummate and effective conservative of his time. Bismarck was not at all subtle about his reasoning:
> Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old. If you do that, and do not fear the sacrifice, or cry out at State Socialism directly the words “provision for old age” are uttered,—if the State will show a little more Christian solicitude for the working-man, then I believe that the gentlemen of the Wyden (Social-Democratic) programme will sound their bird-call in vain, and that the thronging to them will cease as soon as working-men see that the Government and legislative bodies are earnestly concerned for their welfare.
I might not think this is the right reason to be concerned about inequality, but he's right about the realpolitik: a state whose subjects feel the state does not act in their interest have little reason to defend or support the state and all the reason in the world to attack it, or at least that is going to be their perception.
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[1] Yes, even the recent UK and French elections are an example. Labour's vote share was not very high - but the Conservatives, in the process of being supplanted by the more-nationalist Reform, split the right-wing vote such that Labour could win a share of seats far exceeding what you'd expect for its minimal vote share. In France, Macron's centrists still lost to a left-wing party, and that was after an extraordinary alliance of parties to block Le Pen's RN, which would likely have been the largest party without such maneuvering.
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