Not sure if its a sufficient explanation, but I like what I've heard from Cal Newport about this. More and more self-service IT systems were able to replace a lot of jobs. But the result is that now you are responsible for doing things via IT systems that were previously outsourced to somebody else. E.g., you're booking your own travel instead of using a travel agent. In some sense, things are more efficient because we don't need travel agents. But also, things are less efficient because now you just have to do this task yourself. Do this across dozens or hundreds of discretely tasks and fields, and you end up with a society where everybody is doing everything themselves in a web browser instead of having some expert or professional to do it for them. So less individual time and focus is spent on your own area of expertise, and more is spent trying to figure out any number of confusing IT systems built to replace a "less efficient" human system.
I feel this even in my profession as software engineer. It used to be that I could focus on writing good software. Studying the domain, finding abstractions, picking the best language/approach for the problem at hand, designing domain models... Over time the expectations on developers have become greater. We're software builders, and testers. A lot of us have trained to become UNIX/windows/network/infrastructure engineers, often across multiple cloud environments. We're DBA's across multiple relational and NoSQL DB's. We're designers who need to understand the intricacies of accessibility. We're business experts too. And taking on all of these things has made us less focused. Less capable at our core jobs.
Yes. I reflect on this from time to time. While there are some benefits, and hence the existence of the paradox, I am somewhat uncomfortable with this.
On one hand, it seems ludicrous that (assuming some minimum threshold of personal expectations), "everyone" has to learn "everything" in order to even be competitive. This seems odd for a number of reasons IMO:
1) This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the specialization efficiency gains in economies of scale, etc. From the story about about automotive production, or making just about anything.
2) This has, for many, only recently been possible.
3) Even if "possible", it is still a WHOLE LOT to learn. Far beyond the (current, believed, practical, or desired) capabilities of many.
I think (1) is a reason why a lot of things can seen subjectively "worse" for those who have been around a while. A lot of things are "better", too, of course.
I conjecture a root cause might doing the cheapest thing for short term profit maximization instead of doing the thing most harmonious with the endeavor in the long run (which could be hard to impossible to stomach in a world of quarterly bonuses).
Personally, so far I have consciously chosen to not participate in being a full stack anything person. I have a niche, it is my sweet spot. I can report that this approach can be difficult. It is mildly successful but not greatly so. And given these trends, I think I'm going to figure something else. I frankly don't wish to know and manage everything about all systems (and I also don't think that's necessarily a great idea in many/most scenarios). That some people do is fine with me.
Another sad thought is that these "do anything" people are completely replaceable in the interchangeability sense, even if it costs a pretty penny. And market forces are pushing everyone (conceivably capable) to become "everything people", hence driving cost down and theoretical corporate (though not necessarily human) resilience high.
What are we to do about it? Just adopt this as beautiful, that one can do so much, and how limitless the mind is?
I had some extremely bad experiences with information architects early in my career and came to think that architecture is a responsibility not a job title. I feel like instead of replacing travel companies we should have condensed agency job titles into responsibilities where one person does the work of three, and instead of doing away with agencies, have people specialize in a region, so you’re booked near the activities you enjoy.
My ex was good at working airline ticket price periodicity and hotel bookings. We were at an age where all our younger friends were getting married and rather than buying them a wedding present, she would save them $500-1000 on their honeymoon instead. She probably should have been consulting for second-gen travel websites on how to systematize it. But now I think we should have kept the human.
Related: The WWW + globalization has made even the process of purchasing consumer goods more difficult and stressful.
It's not even a matter of having a paradox of choice. It's that you now often have to spend hours becoming a mini-subject-matter-expert in, e.g., USB-C chargers to make sure you purchase one that won't set the house on fire and is sufficient for your use-case.
Consumer publications & websites (e.g., WireCutter) are in the pocket of BigWidget, so they can't really be relied upon. RTINGS is one notable exception, but I suppose it's just a matter of time with them too.
People with too little leisure time are screwed by this.
With centralized IT there was a chance that technical support could be managed. If services are outsourced nobody really understnads the big pircture or what is going on.
It's been disappointing to see Khan's FTC focus so much on big tech—and frequently fail to make their case—when so many other anti-competitive behavior in other sectors has gone unchecked. The consolidation of medical firms and hospitals comes to mind. Feels like they are picking their fights based more on ideology than on trying to minimize harms to American consumers from anti-competitive practices.
> they are picking their fights based more on ideology
Khan is fighting the best fight she can. The problem is she's woefully inexperienced in so many domains critical to the job.
I'm increasingly convinced her hire was a deceitful compromise to placate the base, because she says the right things, as well as corporate interests, because she can't follow through on them. I've seen two big law firms tell companies to pursue risky mergers; while there is a higher chance they'll be challenged, there is a much higher chance those challenges will fail.
It's more about saying they tried to do something (virtue signalling) than actually accomplishing anything. Think about it - would going after a bunch of tiny firms no one ever heard of make any headlines? No. But if the FTC goes after FAANG, even if it loses each one, they can blame the judiciary ("bad people") and signal they are trying to the part of the elite class that cares about this.
Hospital and medical firm consolidation was a predicted (and likely intentional) affect of the ACA. The head of the FTC wouldn't interrupt something seen as desirable by the administration.
GCP doesn't operate the same way as Google consumer products. We are a paid customer for over 5 years and I also have only good things to say about GCP and their support
Really because I'm a GCP customer also and earlier this week they arbitrarily shut off Looker on us with no explanation leading to tons of pissed off customers. Our account executive responded with no help and a link to file a ticket. I expect a lot more from a service we're paying $10k+ a month for and my experience with Google has been so bad we're considering migrating everything to Microsoft.
I'm curious about how is the support these days. My last interaction with it was along the lines of "Uh, why are you contacting us for advice and not like, use the docs". This was for a new project and asking the same set of questions to AWS led them to send three guys to our office the next week for a round of demos and best-practices discussions.
There's some exceptions, like Google Cloud Debugger which is getting shut down at the end of the month (although to be fair there was a long notice period). My team is pretty sad about it going away: https://cloud.google.com/debugger/docs
But, in true Google fashion, the replacement story using Firebase is a "what is wrong with you people?!" I honestly suspect that the GCP team failed to tell the Firebase team about the rug pull, and now it's "welp, good luck"
It appears based on my playing around with it that the data is actually traveling into Firebase successfully, but there is not the slightest shred of UI nor onboarding docs for "hello, I would like one cloud debugger, please"
Using debugger for the first time was actually incredible. Having a debugger attached to a live service with zero impact was such an alien feeling. What a cool piece of tech.
Learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources on the individual level. As long as there's a fresh crop of college grads each year, companies can afford to burn out a few older people.
I've had this same experience. Every time I go to my local specialty beer shops, it's nothing but 4-packs that _start_ at $16. I've never even heard of most of them, and a large portion are just the really over-done trendy IPAs that every brand new brewery seems eager to produce. Maybe 20% or less of their offerings are what I'd call a solid mid-range 6-pack of beer.
For months now, emails with subjects like "MCAfeeconfirmati0n--#21845315" and "confirmation#4073301981" have been hitting my inbox. These are such obvious spam emails that I'm unsure how the spam filters aren't catching them. Reporting them as spam hasn't done anything to catch them.
I have this same problem with Outlook. Starting probably 2-3 months ago I began receiving somewhere from 5-10 spam emails with titles like this a day directly into my inbox. Reporting them as spam helped a little and brought it down to maybe 1-5. But they’re obviously spam with subjects like Norton Confirmation, OuOrtIBGGvGIO, Life Insurance Offer, etc. with weird fonts and other stuff.
As a side note, a lot of these spam emails I get are from Gmail.
Judging from my own spam label on gmail, those messages are part of the torrent of junk that is pouring out of Microsoft's "hybrid on-premises exchange" egress VIPs. Basically some clown who pays Microsoft for quasi-hosted Exchange has a virus that sends spam, and Microsoft blesses it with the reputation of the customer egress addresses. Eventually, this will stop working for Microsoft but at this time it's like waiting for Greenland to melt: inevitable, but takes a long time.
Also worth noting if you are trying to evaluate gmail's classification performance that the vast majority of what they think was spam is not in your spam label, it got stopped with a 4xx error code at SMTP time. So you don't really have a way to know the denominator.
And good luck getting off that list if you're on a hosted VPS... they're about impossible... I can get through to hotmail and o365, but not the outlook.com block. (shrug)
I'm relaying through SendGrid as I just don't have that many emails coming from/through my server that it's worth the lowest paid level (there is a free tier) to have to worry about it...
I've been considering setting up a higher end server (compared to the $20/mo vps I'd been using) at a data center and seeing what I can manage as a direct mail host without the relay. But 10x-ing my costs just doesn't feel right for something that will take more time and not generate revenue that I'm not that passionate about.
For those curious, been looking at WildDuck mail which seems like an interesting structure and the features are cool, just not sure I want to go through it all. I've been using Mailu via docker-compose on DigitalOcean for a couple years for all my lesser used domains/addresses, relaying through SendGrid. It works but kind of annoying going through setting up each domain added through the relay.
Ironically, SendGrid is the main source of spam passing through my spam filters; but I can't block it because about 1/4th of emails I get from them are not spam
Funny. I'm on Outlook and mine is (sort of) the opposite, most of the spam that comes through is @gmail.com these days. Seems like spammers are taking advantage of known trusted relationships between services to increase delivery rates to specific domains.
They're multi part which seems to trip up Gmail, it seems one part is scanned and another displayed. Base64 decode the source parts and add a keyword filter for the "non-spam" text as it's usually pretty static.
Yeah, it's been happening to me for about a year now. I went as far as to make another email just to avoid it. Made me sad. I had that email address since 2008 or so.
I had exactly this yesterday, only the email address was my own Gmail with a dot at the end so when I opened the email the name was "McAfeeSecurity" with my own email address and profile picture.
I reported it as spam and Gmail helpfully asked if I'm sure because I communicate with this person a lot and when confirmed said it will block the sender. Unsure if this will have any impact on the emails I send out myself now.
Rather worrying that Gmail addresses can be spoofed.
Is it highly unethical? You're hired to do a job, if you can successfully do that job and another one, I don't think there is anything unethical about doing that. It's very common in lower wage positions, not sure why it's suddenly unethical in higher wage positions. I would say it's unethical to force people to sign a contract saying you own all of their attention during the day, even if you don't use it.
I agree that would be ideal, but realistically there's usually a pretty big power imbalance between someone seeking a job and a potential employer. I'd say that how ethical it is varies depending on the company. For example, Jimmy Johns has non-compete agreements. Someone working at Jimmy Johns has 0 ability to negotiate that. Are they unethical if they quit after a year or so to go work at Subway? I would say obviously not, maybe you'd think they are.
I'm sure you're thinking "but we're talking about software jobs where people have a lot more choice and bargaining power", which is definitely the case, hence why I mentioned that it depends on the company. On the most unethical end of contract violation I'd put the small startup that treats its people right and on the other end I'd put Walmart.
No; this is simple, if difficult. If you want to be ethical, you cannot sign an agreement knowing what it says in full, and then violate that agreement when the counterparty has operated in good faith.
What the person in your Jimmy Johns example has is the ability to seek work elsewhere.
They are indeed acting unethically if they choose to work at Jimmy Johns, knowing what Jimmy Johns requires of its employees, then proceed to quit and then go work at Subway.
I'm concerned you're considering "acting unethically" as a kind of condemnation. It's not. Life happens, and nobody's being sent to the stockade for acting unethically, but that is what you're doing when you violate a contract.
I'm not worried about "acting unethically" being a condemnation, but IMO actions taken in a vacuum can't really be judged to be ethical or unethical, which is what it seems like you're trying to do when you state that violating any arbitrary agreement is unethical. In fact I'm not sure you really fully believe this, since you add the proviso "when the counterparty has operated in good faith".
I would add that ethics is an entire branch of philosophy, so you know, there's so ambiguity between different folks' definitions. IMO it is ethical to violate contracts that would cause undue harm to one of the parties without good cause and furthermore it is unethical for a party to ask another to sign such a contract. And working at another sandwich place is not good cause. Clearly in your opinion you think it is unethical to violate such a contract because you appear to believe that violating any agreement (almost irrespective of context) is unethical. I'd be curious if you think that Jimmy Johns is ethical, unethical, or neutral for inserting such language into a contract in the first place. I would strongly disagree with that being either neutral or ethical.
If you sign a contract, then it is breach of contract, which would be a kind of illegal.
I don't see the ethical quandaries though. So long as one is doing the work promised, and the company is satisfied with their output. It's not any more unethical than working on any other side project after hours.
I believe you. People that doubt these things are usually projecting some kind of insecurity. "It's impossible!"... no actually, not only is it possible but it happens all the time and yes it happens with FAANG workers too.
It's funny, when this topic comes up, the people that are juggling multiple jobs are usually stuck in this weird place where they want to convince people it's true but at the same time not draw too much attention to it (for obvious reasons).
> People that doubt these things are usually projecting some kind of insecurity. "It's impossible!"... no actually, not only is it possible but it happens all the time and yes it happens with FAANG workers too.
And a lot of this comes from people who are far less wordly than they think they are. Like there are people that genuinely believe that no one in security makes more than $200k except CISOs.
I doubt these claims because I know human nature pushes people to lie in order to contribute to conversations.
I understand it's entirely possible to juggle two remote jobs, I just don't think it's nearly as common as people claim or think, which is why it's an easy lie to make. It's got nothing to do with the total salaries involved, and everything to do with the exceedingly rare nature of the claim.
But that ignores my point; you said something, I said what you said isn't true, so when you restate what you already said without adding anything, you're not improving your position.
I personally know I person who works two remote PM jobs at the same time and in addition runs her own side gig. Sometimes she joins two meetings from the two laptops at the same time.
I know a guy who overlapped months of two different jobs.
So it exists and happens. And for IC-type positions should be even easier.
Well, you aren't supposed to destroy the fabric of society! /s
How do you think society would work if there was no restriction on the size of the group that is allowed to break the laws for their own benefit?! Imagine the horror if all plebs were allowed to do that! Could everyone live in Monaco or what?
These self-deprecating arguments can only come from people who lack the basic understanding of how good we have it especially in the western world and how fragile our societies really are. Seriously, just look at Ukraine or Syria.
It can very much be worse by orders of magnitude. Just imagine this benevolent AI screwing up the electric grid or food production. Not to mention getting access to weapons, especially nuclear.
The water you drink, the food you eat, the energy that keeps you warm and mobile was made available to you by other people and by complex systems you (probably) don’t full understand. It can all be easily be taken from you. And most people (incl. myself) will have a very hard time surviving. So, no, it can definitely get a lot worse.
The problem with that argument is, how would AI get to a position to control these things? That’s somehow always left out. There are brakes in our society that surely has faults, but most governments are more on the slow-moving side of things due to these very breaks. An AI won’t be suddenly replacing elected officials to make any sort of decision.
Surely, one might argue that a “smart enough singularity-level AI” can manipulate people to achieve its goals, but I don’t really see that feasible. Can intelligence really has all that much more “depth” to it? The most intelligent people on Earth are probably doing some obscure PHd research on some minimal government subsidies, people in control has very little intersection with them.
My point was we don't need an AI to make a mess of things, we already have the ability to do that ourselves - and with the way we're going with climate change, a very likely collapse of society and path to extinction, it seems pretty obvious to me that an AI couldn't do much worse (though it might do it much faster and more efficiently, which would probably be a net benefit for the earth).
Basically, everything you point out I agree with, except replace "benevolent AI" with "myopic human".
If you find the idea of climate change leading to societal collapse far fetched, you must surely find the concept of a rogue AI even more so - the science is much more solid and certain on the climate (and I don't think the science says the scenarios that lead to social collapse are as unlikely you think)
I also think it says more about our own human failings than the true risks of general AI, that we imagine it more likely to go rogue and kill us all instead of being more adept, more benevolent and capable at managing the complexity of society than our own feeble attempts.
Sure, if you believe the measure of success is global total mass of the organism. Also, I'm not talking about the peak we're at right now, I'm talking about the cliff we're running towards.
To be honest, that's the real danger of humans too. We now have numerous possible ways that we might just wipe ourselves out by mistake (climate change passing some feedback loop tipping point, forever chemicals making all mammals sterile, nukes, CFCs were a pretty good candidate back in the day too).
