An AI-generated article which summaries a pre-print release which surveyed 15 people at 15 companies about their thoughts on whether the arrangement was working for them. Of those 15, a grand total of 6 (unidentified) people at 6 (unidentified) companies (all in the same country), said they "thought" productivity had increased. Not a single data point was taken about whether it actually increased. The questions that these 15 people were asked was not disclosed.
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.
It's 15 companies that adopted a technique and it's part of a broader constellation of experiments in this area which have been confounding the traditional logic that productivity would decrease. https://www.4dayweek.com/research
The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice.
Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention.
So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that.
I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.
Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.
Intelligent people in general have a better understanding of their knowledge, the limits of it, and uncertainty in that knowledge. If you ask them something and they don't have an answer that they know is objectively true, they'll often respond by telling you they don't know, or they "think" something is "probably" true.
On the other hand, people that aren't intelligent have very little self-awareness in that way and will just tell you whatever they "believe" is true, even though that belief could have extremely little connection to objective reality. They believe it because "other people believe it", or because that's just what they heard, etc.
I'm sure if you combined the study's findings with an assessment of the intelligence of those same people, you'd find an extreme correlation between intelligence and the conceptual map they fall under.
I'm not so sure there's a correlation to intelligence on this. I suspect it has more to do with whether or not people have learned how to, and are willing to, engage in critical thinking.
The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.
I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this.
ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.
For a deeper dive on just how that funding is meant to circumvent constitutional protections that normally exist around law enforcement, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw
> ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight.
ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.
On both points, sure, trivially, if I do not value property or the rule of law, I will not care about destroying it. But obviously we're talking about the moral value of the implications more than the direct value of the camera. Do keep up.
On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, the conflict of the law with morality _devalues_ the rule of law. Valuing rule of law does not imply only some sort of legalistic value of laws unto themselves, but of the value of a society with good laws, enforced well. This incentivizes analysis and evolution _of the law_ and, to some degree, forcing conflict to bring about those changes.
Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.
Just curious, but what's the basis for this claim? I've heard it a lot. But I feel like this in itself is a political statement more than one rooted in sound facts.
Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".
"Forced to ban adult content by payment processors"
If you go through and click all the links and hunt down the source, the final source underlying it all is a comic author who says, without quoting anything, or any proof, that that's the reason why. Just a random guy saying that Stripe made them ban it, without any evidence.
I'm the King of England. There, I guess I "am" the King of England, because all it takes is for a random person to make a statement and it becomes true.
The details sure are light, but it tracks with how banks and processors work. There's lots of indirect language and polite pressure involved, and famously, opaqueness behind decisions.
When I saw this headline my mind automatically interpreted Nextpad++ as Notepad++, I had to stop and fully parse through the headline before realizing there was actually an 'e' in there instead of an 'o'. They really chose the least indistinguishable new name that they possibly could have. In reality there's only a couple pixels of difference between the two names.
I agree but it's at least it's not infringing with Notepad++ name. This is an unofficial port of Notepad++ to Mac without permission from the original project.
Of course your claim of 5-50x velocity is not born out in any metrics which track industry software velocity and you need to bend yourself backwards to come up with reasons to explain why they aren't.
> tinygrad I picked on purpose. geohot narrates rejections in public, and a narrated rejection is data; a silent close is noise. Thirteen PRs, one merged, twelve closed. His comments tell the escalation story:
>> be careful with AI usage, we never trade complexity for speed
>> You need to stop with AI PRs, you will be banned.
>> Last warning about low quality PRs before I ban you from our GitHub.
>> I don’t even understand what this does. I’m not reading anything written by AI
> Each line a little more done with my shit than the last.
> Some of those PRs had real bugs with real fixes. The MATVEC pattern rejected equal-range elementwise reduces, a genuine correctness issue. But by that point the maintainer had stopped reading code and started reading provenance. “We never trade complexity for speed” is a valid engineering principle. “I’m not reading anything written by AI” is not.
> I went there for maximum surprise and got it. He had a review queue and a quality bar to protect; I had a clanker and a question. The price was his afternoon, three warnings, an account ban, and real bugs left unfixed.
Because this is Facebook-level "let's make people angry on the internet and see what happens" levels of treating people as if they were means to an end rather than an end in themselves. And you should stop.
No, of course not? I don't even disagree with your main premise but obviously "raw number of merged PRs" is not a high signal metric, even more so in the age of agentic/vibe coding.
It's really rare that you get someone claiming 10-50x productivity gains who posts some proof. It's not surprising that the person posting it has "contributed" nothing remotely of value except for a huge number of PRs that were closed as AI-generated spam and has been banned from contributing to multiple projects. These are the people telling you that you should be 50 times more productive and if you're not then you're "doing it wrong." You are crypto bro 2.0.
Yet, another day, yet another article hyping up AI tooling. 99.999% chance the author works for a company selling AI products. Let's see ..
Click through to their blog's main page. Click their LinkedIn link, google their current employer ...... "{Company} is a company that provides a platform for real-time search, observability, security, and generative AI"
Aaaaaand there it is. A person whose livelihood is tied to selling AI products writing blog posts hyping up how amazing AI products are. Who could have ever guessed?
Author makes a living by working for a company that sells an AI coding product. Their livelihood is dependent on people buying AI coding products. The author just happens to write an article about how amazing AI is for coding and how software engineers will no longer be needed. Wow, I'm so shocked, every single time it's the same exact pattern.
Almost like we learned nothing from the bitcoin period where all the people that would make money if people invest in bitcoin constantly posted stories to HN about how amazing bitcoin is.
Ah, a commenter claiming something is propaganda .. let's go look through their submissions to HN and see their posting pattern .. Let's see ..
- Trump-related political posts
- China-related political posts
- Iran-related political posts
- DOGE-related political posts
- RFK-Jr-related political posts
- Covid-19 related posts
- Economy-related political posts
- Election-related political posts
- Anti-Russia/anti-"nazi" political posts
My oh my, with that post history, I surely trust you to decide for us what's "propaganda' and what's not. Surely you yourself aren't a huge propaganda account.
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.
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