There's an inflection point where technology accrues too much power to a ruling class, such that no amount of unrest or revolution is able reset the social order.
I believe China has already passed this point. Their culture and individual behavior is tightly controlled (e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low).
"(e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low)"
do you have a source on this? i have used dozens of public bathrooms in china and i've never seen any of them gated off for specific people for any reason or anyone checking anything before you go inside
And then there's the Uighur minority who can't buy knives that don't have QR codes on them [0], that is if they haven't been imprisoned or forced into factory labour hundreds of miles from home.
> It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated
Is the claim that the frequency of revolutions scales inversely with internet penetration? Because this is trivially testable and obviously false. (Ukraine and Tunisia off the top of my head.)
even here some jobs you can't get if your credit score is too low.. a definite social ramification. it leaks a bit - but it will be a sieve eventually.
If anything I’m surprised to see the ruling class isn’t starting to lose this battle to the masses. Ukraine’s use of disposable drones plainly shows how easy it is to create smart weapons that could be piloted autonomously (or at least in the “terminal” phase).
Does it? Mass surveillance technology clearly only benefits the state who can run it. A random person or activist group doesn't have NSA like powers. Likewise advancements in tanks or nuclear weapons does not empower the individual.
By targeting the logistical chains that are necessary to deliver said JDAM to the point of actual use.
On the other hand, for the state to use JDAM against the individual, they need to know that said individual is there and is worth targeting, for starters.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the balance of power has shifted on the whole, but regular individuals definitely have access to way more destructive power than they ever had in history. At the same time, modern military technology, while very destructive, is also very demanding in terms of logistics. Even a single blown up railroad, fuel depot, large transformer etc can have a profound effect.
The destructiveness isn't always a positive, either. Any modern military can easily reduce even a very large city to rubble, but to what purpose? A city is only valuable in the grand scheme of things because of its infrastructure and its population that can utilize that infrastructure for some useful economic purpose.
honestly, i thought we settled on Adam Back as Satoshi:
- adam was extremely active during the early cypherpunk days, when
- he invented Hashcash, which bitcoin cites in its whitepaper and used as its PoW
- he was the first to take Wei Dai's b-money proposal seriously and discusses combining it with hashcash (the 2 core elements of bitcoin)
- he disappeared and reappeared professionally during the exact timeframe of bitcoin development
- his writing closely matches satoshi's (british english + style/punctuation)
- he had no public involvement with bitcoin until he joined Bitcointalk forums in 2013 and suddenly had intimate details of unknown bugs in bitcoin saying "I thought I'd fixed them".
- he started Blockstream with the mission to ensure the survival of bitcoin (funded lighting, paid core devs, etc)
- he recently helped nail the coffin on Craig Wright's case in court proving he was not satoshi, during which
- he revealed the earliest known email correspondence with satoshi
watch the interview were he uncomfortably describes himself
personal antidote - i've heard this too, but jumping in (after years of python/typescript), i'm blown away by how productive i can be. it's easily my favorite language.
the hiring pool may be smaller, but don't believe the fear.
A better approach is to have separate career tracks for 'people' managers and 'project' managers.
People managers do the performance evaluations and various HR administrative tasks (signing time cards, hiring, firing, etc.) but they rely on feedback from their group which are both individual contributors and project managers.
Project managers lead the projects and have to select/attract the right combination of individual contributors to their project if they want it to succeed.
A project that 'gets more management' will usually have to justify the addition of PMs from a cost-benefit perspective. And a project that is overburdened with management types will usually see the ICs migrate to other projects in order to improve their impact.
All this happens organically, so individual contributors are empowered instead of being disenfranchised through organizational changes.
That sounds like basically matrix management which has many well documented issues. The biggest one in my experience is that the people managers need to be themselves judged on some rubric. If that rubric is success of projects then it tangentially aligns with business goals. If it's something else or they don't have power over projects then they are encouraged to play constant politics.
> Why would they need to play constant politics if they don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated by the same things.
They do have power over the projects. Being able to PIP someone is power over everything that person does including which projects they work on. Including which projects no one works on. Except it's not their direct power which means to leverage it they need to play politics. Adding layers doesn't remove that power but simply increases the amount of politics they play to make up for it.
The goal with the matrix management is to distribute the risk. If your people manager puts you on a PIP then at least your project managers will have some ability to push back on that.
But there is no good reason for the People manager to care anything about what projects have people working on them. If they start to care about which projects are successful instead of all projects are successful then they're not a good fit for the job. And yes I have experienced that, as well as it's opposite.
and this leads to 4 engineers and 6 managers sitting in a meeting, and nobody actually being responsible for anything.
no, of course, there's a lot of value in providing escalation/descalation/rehoming processes, and dedicated ways for org-wide feedback on people's and projects' impact, but people are not just three orthonormal roles on top of each other in a trenchcoat, if there's not clear hierarchy then - as others pointed out - the informal chaos takes over (because it's the human default)
Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
> Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
I do not have experience running it at a company level, but at a team level (I have been an engineering lead in two companies for the last 6 years).
From all the books I've read (I read a lot), this is the one that was most "spot-on" about treating other humans and making them feel valued and therefore building a team with strong bonds.
> Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
Absolutely agree.
In my experience I resonate most with any books when I have already, unbeknownst to me, been applying what they preach (which has been the case with Setting the table that I'm currently in the process of finishing).
I believe that it requires a lot of introspection to be able to apply new knowledge (ie, if you haven't thought about it or experienced it before reading about it)
That's what I like about "agile roles" like Product Owner or Scrum Master, they take a slice of traditional manager's responsibilities, but they don't have any reporting authority over other workers. My EM has like 30 direct reports and it works fine because he doesn't really have anything to do with our day to day work.
Those semi-managerial roles are the biggest problem with that model, in my opinion. Sure, it works as long as everything is peachy. But as soon as there are any real conflicts of interest, it will show who is the real manager. And it's not the product owner or scrum master.
With authority comes responsibility for your actions. Without responsibility, no authority. The product manager is a manager in name only, and product owner even less so.
That doesn't mean you can't have several direct reports. The classic matrix organization for example. But it means semi-managers without real responsibility have no real mandate for doing a good job at the slightest hint of trouble.
> But as soon as there are any real conflicts of interest, it will show who is the real manager. And it's not the product owner or scrum master.
If there's a conflict of interest, it needs to be discussed based on merit, not based on who has the bigger authority.
If there's no agreement, it needs to be escalated to somebody who has the authority (manager). But IME this doesn't happen very often.
I like this model, because the default position is that none of the engineering, product, process is the "master", so you need to negotiate. If one of the roles also has reporting authority, that automatically skews the decision making towards yielding to them.
I'm not sure how you can evaluate 30 people you don't interact with closely.
NIMS, the National Incident Management System, talks of ICs having between 3-7 direct reports, when there is a need to be connected to what they are doing, because beyond that, you can't reconcile things easily.
That list of “skills” is spot on. I also especially like his use of the term “skunking” to describe how somebody’s personal opinions/problems/issues impact the rest of the team. “51%ers” are exactly the kind of people I want to work with.
I hope I'm not violating any copyrights – page 143 of Setting the Table from Danny Meyer [1]
> To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I’ve learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we’re to be champions at the team sport of hospitality.They are:
1. Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full)
2. Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
3. Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done)
4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
5. Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)
For future reference, you are certainly not violating US copyright law, because quoting a few sentences from a book falls under fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
I was curious why the author decided to call them "51 percenters." A google search of the term suggests that the skills of this group of employees are divided by 51% hospitality and 49% technical excellence. Please feel free to correct me if there is anything wrong in my interpretation.
Exactly! I’ve never been able to express a succinct list of why some teams and/or companies feel better than others, but “51%ers” explains it perfectly.
Someone "whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence" [1]. Seems quite bizarre to me to define it so precisely. Even if skills were measurable in such a way, how many people will be exactly 51% emotional hospitality, and why is 52% or 50% not suitable?
i think the implication is if a 51%'er has to decide between technical excellence and emotional hospitality then, all other things equal, they will use emotional hospitality since that's the majority of their skills (51%). It sounds like preferring to hold a hand vs rejecting incompetence. I don't really agree, i get not being jerk is important but i would flip it to 51% technical excellence 49% emotional hospitality.
> Sites that had some PWA information provided - such as an iOS icon - would be added as PWAs even though they weren’t. They have tightened up things so that only sites that are explicitly configured as PWAs will be added as such.
Users JamesRLandrum and "spense" are the same person. He even shared his own tweet above (so it is not random :)
He writes to create noise. He has no clue or experience about PWA. He shared his own tweet above :)
No: the real problem is people like you who would rather defend Apple's anticompetitive practices--leaving Apple (or, at best, an oligopoly formed by Apple/Google) their own world dominance which I guess you just want to ignore for a moment--than to also fight to stop Google's; the correct thing to do now is to first celebrate this win and then immediately begin working on similar (or even stronger) attacks on Google's monopoly with the momentum, not insist that no one should be allowed to make progress against Big Tech because any first battle one choose to fight might cause a different front elsewhere to destabilize :/. #GoogleIsNext
If that moment ever comes, the damage will already be done. All those dim-witted web developers will only support Chrome, and your data will belong to Google. People who supported this have been useful idiots.
Tone it down. Some people believe you can challenge the anti-competitive behavior of Google and Apple (in any order, including tackling the Apple problem first), and that you don't have to choose the lesser of two evils. It's a perfectly reasonable opinion. You're welcome to disagree, but it doesn't mean the people you're disagreeing with (including EU regulators) are a bunch of blithering "useful idiots". Regulators have taken down larger monopolies than Google before. See for instance the breakup of Bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
That's a poor take. The issue is that because there is no browser competition on iOS, Apple doesn't need to fear losing market share. That in turn ensures they have no reason to invest in Safari or web apps.
Apple has the staff and the budget to make a decent browser and to ensure web apps work, they don't because they don't want anyone competing with their AppStore or their 20b/year google search revenue.
Ok, let’s follow your line of reasoning a bit: Why will Apple bother to even continue shipping their own browser engine?
You claim they only do it protect the App Store monopoly… so if users will just download something else, what would be the point? The things you want them to add (what you claim makes them uncompetitive to Chrome) completely defeats the alleged purpose of supporting their own engine. So why would they pay engineers to work on that? It’s nonsensical, magical thinking.
I seriously hope you will reflect on the real negative consequences of what you are doing to the web. This isn’t one of those times when you can just stick your head in the sand and repeat the mantra “I’m just typing code”.
Once Safari is killed, Google can really start ramping up the war on Firefox because the collective market share of non-Chrome browsers will be too small to matter. You are killing the open web that you claim you want.
Apple has single-handedly killed off mobile web apps from being viable on both iOS and Android, have deprived Firefox billions of dollars of revenue and strangled every other browser out of the most valuable marketplace. They do this why taking 20b/year from Google.
Apple is the one that has cost Firefox. Otherwise they’d likely have a thriving mobile browser which would have taken off because of extensions years before the competition.
Apple is not the defender of the open web, they invested the bare minimum into Safari to the point it was full of bugs, completely unreliable to build anything but basic websites, and was lacking all the core features required to compete with native apps. They were not competing with chrome on any platform except for on MacOS.
The only reason they have increased investment recently is because of the threat of competition.
> Apple is the one that has cost Firefox. Otherwise they’d likely have a thriving mobile browser which would have taken off because of extensions years before the competition.
Firefox maintains an unimpressive ~3% market share according to this [0]. Why do you believe they'd have a thriving mobile browser if not for Apple? Is it not more likely that Chrome would just dominate iOS like it does everywhere else?
If Apple has to force WebKit on every iOS browser for it to stay afloat, then something is wrong with WebKit.
I do agree that Chromium overtaking the web is bad for the open web in general. I don’t agree that forcing Apple to allow third party browser engines is going to make that problem worse.
You completely sidestepped their criticism of Google’s Chromium dominance, which will only be exacerbated by Chromium engines being able to enter the last bastion Google needs to conquer: iOS.
I’ll leave in the middle any value judgment on whether that warrants blocking other engines. Still, it must be pointed out that you sidestepped it and then held up a shiny new topic before pulling a whataboutism.
> The issue is that because there is no browser competition on iOS, Apple doesn't need to fear losing market share. That in turn ensures they have no reason to invest in Safari or web apps.
And yet, they did invest in Safari and specifically in supporting web apps. So, what was the incentive? Or are you going to follow up your cynicism with something along the lines of “they want to evade regulation”?
> Apple has the staff and the budget to make a decent browser and to ensure web apps work, they don't because they don't want anyone competing with their AppStore or their 20b/year google search revenue.
Talk about a poor take.
This is not true. Since Jen Simmons joined Apple in 2020, Apple has made considerable strides in improving Safari and WebKit and added significant support for web apps.
They’ve consistently scored high on the annual Interop score, if not outright lead the pack at the top, and every update continues to add heaps of improvements.
Your choice to name-drop OWA to produce a fallacious argument from authority followed by poor takes ensures I won’t bother taking OWA seriously when it’s mentioned in the future.
Google managing to use their search monopoly to win a browser monopoly isn't a reason to let Apple continue its own anticompetitive practices as some kind of crazy check-and-balance: it is a reason to ALSO break apart Google.
If you want to disprove the claim, the tweet needs to say, "I live in the EU, have the update installed on my phone, and I just successfully installed this PWA."
This is thoughts and prayers, not a counterexample.
All of the PWAs on my iPhone running 17.4 will now open in Safari instead of in fullscreen, and iOS itself warned me the first time I opened a PWA from the home screen after installing 17.4 that iOS will now open all „linked websites“ in the „configured default browser“.
They’re obviously trying to prevent companies from bypassing their extortion proposal in response to DMA by simply offering a PWA to users that can work around the „core tech fee“..
