- >Whatever they do, they simply cannot win. I'm personally starting to suspect the main issue with Mozilla is its users.
A lot of people remember the Mozilla of old, and are just completely depressed at the state of where it has ended up over the last 10 years. They were once a non-profit founded to promote the web and put users first. Now it's just this weird zombie company monetizing the work and good will of a prior generation of engineers that cared about that mission.
- >If you think eastern philosophical traditions have resulted in comparatively less consumerist desire in Asia, you’re in for a disappointment.
I'm actually saying that Western philosophy won, even in eastern cultures today. Eastern thought worked well for penniless peasant societies that could never hope to improve their condition, and likewise pre-enlightenment Western thought was very much the same. But it evolved, and we got Rosseau and Nietzche and others who unveiled the true driving force of modern man. We all want, and if we can satisfy those wants, we will.
- This is the single biggest rub between eastern and western philosophical traditions. Of course we could all sit quietly on a pillow in zazen pose, minds blank, freeing ourselves of want and desire, living happily and peacefully with nothing. But that sounds boring. Give me all of the things. I will only live once, and I want them. If I die still desiring them, it will have been better spent than convincing myself I didn't.
- >Has he made billions? He's obviously done well but I'm not sure he has been able to capture any value from openai except for publicity, and what else does he have?
Forbes has him at $2.2bn, mostly from Reddit and Stripe https://www.forbes.com/profile/sam-altman/
- Burnout and disagreeing with leadership are something we all deal with. But don't quit your job folks. It's a real rookie move. Unless you have something rock solid lined up, you will become radioactive to any potential employers, and idealism doesn't pay the mortgage.
- It really is remarkable compared to any other consumer good. My 2002 Corolla has cost $20 to fill up since it was brand new. The benefits of empire I guess.
- It's depressing the state of modern (6/7) Civ given its lineage. Really it's a microcosm of the software industry in general. Half baked ideas poorly implemented and shipped with the intent of patching later on. To this day, 5 remains the reference version, as evidenced by Steam numbers. It seems there was some magic from that era of early pioneers that has become impossible to recreate.
- >I say this with no snark or disdain: Sam has mastered the art of the flywheel.
It's been his entire career. Guy has made billions of dollars from talking.
- Now open source Claude Code. It's silly to have it in this semi-closed obfuscated state, that does absolutely nothing to stop a motivated reverse engineering effort, but does everything to slow down innovation.
- >This is missing a "if variable equals" imho.
This is exactly what it does not need. SASS style conditional CSS is a complete nightmare to maintain. The declarative nature is one of its greatest strengths.
- >"I hope more people choose the same until the working age tranch of purchasing power isn't as available as they'd like and prices have to drop."
You just have to remember and keep in mind that the game is rigged. Housing is far from being a completely free market in this country. The structural political forces entrenched in maintaining home prices is second to none, from the top federal level all the way down to city councils, in a completely bipartisan way. The crisis of '08 was a generational event that we're not likely to see again in our lifetimes. Flattening and dips for sure, but a crash will not be allowed to happen; they'll just print enough to fix it, and leave the burden of inflation to anyone not owning assets.
- >it's tough to imagine buying and then being on the hook for a mortgage without a job even with some savings
Key thing to remember here is that you always have to live somewhere, even if you're laid off. Unless you're ready to head out to BFE to save a few hundred bucks on rent, it doesn't get much better than owning in that situation. Plus you could potentially have equity to tap, get a hardship forbearance, or worst case scenario foreclosures take much longer than evictions. This was the lesson COVID era taught me; if you're losing your home it's considered a tragedy, and there are tons of resources to help you. But if you're being evicted from an apartment it's considered a personal moral failure, and you're treated like a criminal.
- >"allowing employers to intercept and archive RCS chats on work-managed devices."
Key phrase there. You should already be treating any employer provided device as completely compromised. Never do anything on those that you wouldn't be perfectly comfortable having projected on a screen in front of your entire company at a meeting.
- >"if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall"
But that "10-20 years" is your life, and there's no getting it back. Millennials (the largest generation in US history) have entered into our prime family starting age, and the fact that most are priced out of the housing market right now and stuck renting apartments is a complete tragedy. At a 90th percentile income, I can just barely be able to afford a home and provide for a family of 3-4 like our parents and grandparents did on a highschool education with no higher skills.
- >Even then I question max 401k - time works for the young and so a maxed 401k makes for too much money in retirement and not enough to enjoy now.
Except the 401k is so tax advantaged that you are foolish to not use it as your basis for financial security. Pre-tax money + employer contributions mean 401k is far and away the fastest method of building up a significant chunk of capital to protect yourself from hardship. Yes there are penalties for early withdraw, but they come out far less than what you would alternately be able to build up with just post-tax savings from your paycheck.
I did, for a very long time. Then I realized that it's just work, and I'd like to spend my life minimizing the amount of that I do and maximizing the things I do want to do. Code gen has completely changed the equation for workaday folks. Maybe that will make us obsolete, and fall out of practice. But I tend to think the best software engineers are the laziest ones who don't try to be clever. Maybe not the best programmers per se, but I know whose codebase I'd rather inherit.