Oh, Kokalos was the king in Sicily who gave Daidalos refuge after he and Ikaros fled from Minos. The Romans like to spell his name "Cocalus", but the Romans can go fuck themselves.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> One of the keys to a successful revolution is not purging all your allies by means of purity tests.
> We can cheer someone on when they strike back at the establishment, regardless of how recently they may have joined the cause.
I’m with you on that, I understand I may have come across as bitter in my earlier comment.
What worries me still is the push to more AI as a response even while AI is a main driver for jobs being cut, and it taking a more and more central place in both the establishment (expected) and the revolution (unexpected and unwanted).
I, for one, do not welcome our new AI/SI overlords.
Not that I think this particular instance is particularly high-effort, but almost all revolutionary acts appear performative. That's kind of the point?
You don't bring publicity to your cause by keeping your head down and staying quiet (and as they say, any publicity is good publicity).
> It upsets me somewhat that they’re protesting things like lock-in only after being laid off <
This is the nature of people. It is a good thing to realize the leopards are bad, even if it takes getting your own face eaten to notice. Look at the positive a little!
While I do recognize the truth behind your words, I genuinely have to ask: if they were stupid and/or selfish enough to have thought the Leopards Eating Faces group would not in fact eat their faces, do we want their help? If they betrayed or were duped before, who's to say they won't in the future?
> It upsets me somewhat that they’re protesting things like lock-in only after being laid off
I would say it is even more ironic. Many years before, SaaS companies and IT in general were the ones making people fired. New software reduces the need for manual labour, hence less people are hired and somebody is fired as well. Accounting, marketing, retail managers, taxi drivers - list goes on. Now SW devs joined the club of those receiving their own medicine.
I am not sure this is true with regards to SaaS and IT.
For example I know at least one country (but I suspect many more are just I did not checked) where the IT creates a big enough chunk of GDP and hires a lot of people. Much more than it disrupted initially.
But more than this IT allowed so far for much more people to get a very good job and have a very decent life. Up until the promises of AI the IT industry was an industry that was hiring a lot of people and producing a lot of money in their economies. Not only by sales tax or sales but also by circulating money via paying their employees and thus along with IT a lot of other businesses where created.
My point is not necessarily to say that IT is bad in general, but rather that it used to displace people. I think workplace mobility for those who were displaced due to systems, is relatively low. The ageism in workplace I would say is highly related to abilities of using new tech. Older, less educated have high difficulty to use these systems. Therefore the benefits of rise of the IT is unevenly distributed. Same with AI just with the higher degree. On the other hand, AI is creating work for blue collar worker ( at least for now). So it goes in circles
I don't understand this expectation to never be laid off.
Any other kind of a project - construction, hardware design, media production - has an end. Once it's done people have to switch to another project.
But with software there's an expectation that it's never done, it's always subtly broken, and I can't help but think that this expectation gets baked into methodologies which produce software.
The expectation isn't that nobody will ever be laid off, it's that THESE layoffs are not only unnecessary but downright hypocritical when you look at the companies bottom line, executive compensation and previous hiring sprees.
Also these are SAAS products, the kind that have predictable patterns of development, not one off software consultancies, so you're not actually making a good comparison.
The purpose of the company is to make money for shareholders, not to employ people. By definition. If laying off employees can increase profits, it is necessary.
Lay-offs only look hypocritical to people who are confusing for-profit companies with cooperatives. FWIW, personally, I like the idea of cooperative, but it seems otherwise rather unpopular.
Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done". E.g. if you're a manager and you know that you already implemented all reasonable features and only need minor maintenance, would you report that to executives, risking your job? Or would you try (perhaps subconsciously) make some bullshit excuse: "we need such and such features to boost our revenue, also we need to migrate to <new-framework> to increase performance to be competitive, so yeah, we need more people"? It might not even seem an excuse because it's what everyone does -- all managers are like that.
No, the purpose of the company is to employ people. That's _why_ it has a definition; people like the efficiency of specialized roles that let them buy more stuff for cheaper via wages _from their job_. They're a legal fiction we all engage in because of the benefits. They can choose not to provide jobs, just as we can all choose to stop believing that "Amazon" is a real entity that can own things.
There's a give and take here that your analysis refuses to acknowledge. "Meta" is not a physical entity that can protect its property, it relies on humans engaging in the ruse (for money to be clear, ie a job).
> Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done".
This is an abject failure of the executive levels then, given that managing that sort of thing is their role. More or less brings us back to the same point of "why do we all have to suffer because the C-suite can't do their jobs?".
Feels to me that things would be much healthier if SaaS products did look more like old style one off software products. Build something that does the job, then stop rather than endlessly throwing more bells and whistles in, acquiring all your competitors, and slowly diluting software people love into a mess of half baked features that mostly exist so there's something to mention in the next quarterly earnings call.
That's why all these projects are bound to fail after a short run, they have no guarantees, no skin in the game.
In the hyper NIH, not-invented-here world we live in now, 3rd party software, if any is to be trusted, is about the trust in the humans, and the humans behind this project are not selling it well by declaring war on their employers. We're talking about replacing million-dollar software deals here.
yeah it's weird seeing Salesforce on that site, where if you previously worked for Salesforce, you were definitely part of the problem. This is ridiculous.
This whole thing is incredibly cringe. To think someone would rely on a piece of software built on this kind of faux activism and anger about being laid off is laughable.
In the AI age, no one buys software because it's "worth it". You pay a premium because you expect reasonable thought and care about the about the product and support. Sure we can switch over to ICQ or Microsoft Teams or Google chat, which is all essentially free for most corporate customers. But people pay for Slack because it's a known entity, slightly nicer to work with and frankly I just don't want to think about the decision so I pay $8 or whatever per user to not have to think about it.
That last sentence reads very AI, very common sentence structure for AI. Pangram does give it a high confidence 100% generated, and Pangram is tuned for a low false positive rate.
It's very possible GP used AI to translate to English. In my experience llms love to change sentences to match their own preferred ways of speaking when translating.
The phrase is "that would be good for the economy".
It’s still the notion of trickle down economics at play.
But they did get a 3.5% return on their investment (but not comparable to the equivalent return in the market or even in bonds for the same duration).
That return was in turn used to justify the bailout, but the global macro effects weren’t accounted for: the banks’ fuckup caused misery all over the world for the best part of a decade.
They were. Or rather they were all friends/family/the same people. Iceland is one of the most corrupt countries in Northern Europe. What happened is due to how small the economy is, the country simply could not afford to bail out the banks. The money required to do so simply did not exist, so they had exactly one option.
Note also that since then, all the nationalized banks are back on the public market with the state only holding plurality or even minority shares. Investment/retirement funds and private investors together hold bigger share then the state. These shares were more often then not released on a steep discount allowing investors (many of whom responsible for the 2008 crash) essentially free money from the state.
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