I’d be curious to hear an anecdote about a single software patent that benefited society at large.
For example, I agree it would be very interesting and arguably valuable to have a public document describing how Amazon built S3. Unfortunately, these patents don’t describe what AWS did. They describe how some random “inventor” thought a system like that could be built (more realistically, of course, that rando likely never dreamed of any valuable application like S3).
The suggestion (in both the article and the parent) is that the platforms themselves are submitting URLs. For example, if I send a link in Discord[0] DM, it might show the recipient a message like “warning: this link is malicious”. How does it know that? It submitted the url to one of these services without your explicit consent.
[0] Discord is a hypothetical example. I don’t know if they have this feature. But an increasing number of platforms do.
Where in the article does it suggest this? The two bullet points at the very top of TFA is what I cited to discredit this notion, I read it again and still haven't found anything suggesting the communication platforms are submitting this themselves.
I thought I read it in the article but I may have unconsciously extrapolated from and/or misread this part:
“I came across this wonderful analysis by Positive Security[0] who focused on urlscan.io and used canary tokens to detect potential automated sources (security tools scanning emails for potentially malicious [links])”
I don’t see any mention of messaging platforms generally. It only mentions email and does not suggest who might be operating the tooling (vendor or end users). So I seem to have miscredited that idea.
Oh, thanks. OSI has been around much longer than I expected.
This post[0] dives into who coined the term (spoiler: it predates OSI by a long, long time), but it’s reasonable that OSI popularized it alongside their specific definition.
I don’t know about California but that’s legal where I live. Vehicles on opposite sides of a 4-way stop can enter simultaneously if both are going straight.
From my reading of the statement, the truck and Waymo vehicle were both going straight, in opposite directions. The cyclist was traveling on the cross-street and entered the intersection directly behind the truck and into the path of the Waymo vehicle.
People should find company cultures that match their work styles. That's the best way to allow people with similar work styles to work together.
There can never be one true corporate policy to rule them all. That said, I agree with most of the comments here. Hybrid is just bad. A company needs to pick on-site or remote.
It feels like I can’t read a comment thread, Reddit post, etc. anymore without someone accusing someone else of posting ChatGPT content. The accusations are almost always baseless in my limited experience.
Reading this, I can’t help but wonder if the author is just one of those people interacting with the real world.
The author is Spanish. I've noticed lots of ESL people using CGPT to polish their English, or to write their thoughts in their native language and translate them, and it all ends up coming out with corporate-robotic accent.
Doesn't bother me too much though, just a side effect of the English lingua franca. I bet my ChatGPT-translated Chinese has a rigid formality to it as well.
I struggle to imagine a scenario where employees would unionize despite already feeling like they are treated fairly.
The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.
Choosing that path means the employees have already given up on cooperation based on goodwill. It must take a very sour relationship to reach that point.
This is wrong.
This is like saying that the whole relationship of employer/employee is inherently hostile because the employer can threaten wages/livelihood as negotiation leverage.
Unions are kind of like HR that serves the employees
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile.
Definitely not how it works in Europe. Unions make it easier for companies to have predictable relationships with their workers, and sector-wide unions mean that a company doesn't have to worry about a labor agreement putting it at a competitive disadvantage.
Right, Unions work differently in different countries. Unions in the US spread the management is always evil message, and treats all negations as a hostile encounter. As a result many of us in the US have a bad impression of unions. However in Europe they tend to be less hostile and so make more sense both for the company and the workers. Different contexts mean different results from what looks like the same thing.
The relationship you're describing is balanced, as opposed to non-unionized employment, where management can threaten employment and healthcare as negotiation leverage and employees can't threaten anything.
One more reason health care should not be employer subsidized. You want insurance (and you should), go buy it: same as you get car and house/apartment insurance.
I agree that healthcare should not be employer subsidized, but I don't think there is any country in the world where you just go out and buy it like car insurance. Almost everywhere in the world it is a baseline government service, and in some rare cases it is a private service but heavily subsidized by the government when necessary. If I could replace the US system with something I would choose one of those options.
You can just go out an buy health insurance in the US, but it is typically a horrible deal. If you have a job odds are your company is putting in thousands of dollars if you go with their plan, get any other plan and you lose all the money. Self employed people do this all the time (generally via the exchanges), as do people who don't work enough hours to get employer health care (the later often get low income subsidies not available to most people).
Yeah, me and my partner were both freelancing for a time, and shopping for health insurance was terrible. Health insurance wasn't the only reason I shifted from freelance to employee work, but it was definitely a very large reason. Now my whole family is covered under my employer's health insurance (and my partner still freelances).
It is wacky that my ability to see a doctor is depends on my job. Losing my job and experiencing a medical emergency is a scarier proposition than losing a month or two of pay for me, tbh.
The union/management relationship is maybe inherently adversarial in the sense that they represent different interests, but this doesn’t need to be hostile. The idea is that the unionized employees have the ability to threaten collective action, if they need to.
Maybe neither side is planning on doing anything hostile, and they are all happy to have things clearly defined.
It is hard for me to imagine a situation where I feel like I am being treated well at a company and then decide that I want to add another level of bureaucracy and additional fees by joining a union.
Edit: to add, I am not at all opposed to unions. They provide a valuable service in many industries.
Is it hard to imagine collective bargaining improving pay and working conditions above minimum satisfaction? Is it hard to imagine anyone purchasing any type of insurance?
It is hard to imagine those things if I feel like I'm being treated very well already, including above market pay, excellent working conditions, and 100% of insurance premiums being covered by the company.
I can absolutely see the benefits of a union if I felt I was being paid below my worth, if I was dealing with poor work conditions, or had no company provided insurance.
Which is the point of this conversation, when things are bad, you REALLY want a union. When things are good, it's hard to see the value of a union.
That’s a very US centric view. It’s quite common to join unions in most European countries. It does not indicate mistreatment at all. In the US, unionisation happens when all else has failed.
> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.
The boss/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that bosses can threaten employment/wages as negotiation leverage.
I'd bet a lot of money that it's around a new on-call requirement with no pay increase that no one will put their name on promoting but managers are seeing appear on their all-manager meeting agenda.
Where are you setting the bar for something to be commonly accessible?
Only about 60% of the world’s population has reliable access to clean drinking water. 18% of people own a car.
Compared to those numbers, 20% of people flying seems downright common - especially considering many people likely never fly simply because they have nowhere worth going (relative to cost).
No doubt it’s a loss leader to some degree but, in practice, very, very few customers will have sustained request rates of 60 requests per minute. Their actual usage averaged across all users will be a tiny fraction of that.
For users that get close to that sustained rate, they’re just as likely to exceed it and actually pay.
You’re thinking of a time when only “computer geeks” could install and run the software of their choice. When every office had fleets of IT admins to install the pre-approved applications people needed for their day-to-day.
Back then, learning how to manage your own PC and install software was tantamount to earning an IT certificate. Doing so for a few years in high school would be enough to qualify you for a career in IT.
So I politely disagree. The industry was never able to ship software that a non-technical person could install. Especially not B2B, but barely B2C as well.
"The industry" sold software in the 1980s that had use instructions like "Insert disk 1 and press the 'Reset' key to load".
In the very early 1990s, something like "Insert disk 1 and click the disk icon, then click <name of application>". Installation to the hard disk was optional, and might be one or two steps.
Later in the 1990s, installation was pressing "Next", "Next", "Next" after inserting the CD.
> You’re thinking of a time when only “computer geeks” could install and run the software of their choice.
Perhaps not thinking of a "time when", perhaps thinking of an OS that required an IT certificate.
Because even early Macintosh System Software (classic Mac OS before OS X) was bewildering to Windows users, since any user could "drag" a program from a floppy disk onto their hard disk, leave it anywhere, and it worked.
Arguably, OS X introduced the Applications folder in 2001 partly to give people a place to drag things to and feel more comfortable that's where they could find their "Program Files" (but mostly so multi-user system users would get to add and re-use apps in a common clear place they "should" be).
Installing software means clicking the button, waiting, clicking yes on some permission prompts, and logging in with Google.
The only thing about any other software I can think of, that would be inherently any harder, is if it involves domain names and certificates. Which is a problem we should be working to solve, and I'm still annoyed at Mozilla for cancelling FlyWeb.
Unless you're such a big company you can definitely afford IT staff, you're probably not doing anything that needs separate services or a database or anything beyond one executable with SQLite, same as consumer apps.
"But we want it to run on our chosen database product."
"But we want it to integrate with our single-sign on product."
"Our security team scanned it with our chosen tools and you have to fix these things before we will deploy it."
"We aren't willing to make those network changes to allow it to run."
"We won't allow it to connect to our <foobar> server but it is a requirement to connect to our <foobar> server if it is going to be hosted internally."
This is the stuff that makes "enterprise" deployments difficult. Oh and they want you to hold their hand through it but they aren't willing to pay for consulting.
I'm speaking from my experience selling both software and services to the Fortune 500. If they can cut a corner, slow pay you, try to do it themselves without paying you, etc - they will. Billions in profits but they will refuse to pay a $10K invoice just to spite you.
And in my experience you have to provide a lot of this up front BEFORE the contract is signed otherwise they won't even evaluate whether they will purchase it.
For example, I agree it would be very interesting and arguably valuable to have a public document describing how Amazon built S3. Unfortunately, these patents don’t describe what AWS did. They describe how some random “inventor” thought a system like that could be built (more realistically, of course, that rando likely never dreamed of any valuable application like S3).
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