> develop new technology, research culture solutions.
The technology and culture solutions have existed and been evolving for 20 years. It really sounds like your experience with remote work is not representative.
Almost 100% of companies are stupid and make bad, bad software that their customer's begrudgingly put up with, so I'm not surprised.
Seriously, how much software have you used that was genuinely good? For me, almost none. All the software I use, I tolerate.
Look, companies are made up of people and have all the downsides of humanity. That means the people making the decisions are egotistical, emotionally-driven, irrational, and a bit narcissistic. They still do okay enough, and that's all they need to achieve.
If you want my perspective, I think WFH ended just because executives did not like it. That's it. They didn't like how much autonomy it gave their workers, it didn't feel fair to them, so they said no, because they can. All the other analysis is mostly bullshit.
I mean, Jesus Christ, do you think my company makes just about any decisions because of data or economics? No! That's not to say they don't have data behind it. Of course they do, it's just very obviously bullshit. Everyone knows what's going on. People want things done a certain way, so they do that and then just make up a justification later to tell their dumbass investors who couldn't tell a hole in the ground from their asshole. Nobody has the balls or humility to say "look, I just want it this way". So, everyone has to lie and make up numbers and reasoning.
Sounds like you don't have a lot of remote work experience.
The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).
I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.
Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.
Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.
Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.
> The use of the word agents is interesting is mostly a coincidence, it is used today in a sense that didn't quite exist 2 years ago
I'm sorry but it's wild to me that you could write so much about "agents" without recognizing their long, established history in computer science (especially in AI) outside of OOP. Agents are basically the entire framing of Norvig and Russel's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" [0] (originally published in 1995, but drawing from much earlier work).
Not specifically AI, but not unrelated either, Agents play a major role in how we understand concurrency and mobile communication. The author of this paper, Robin Milner, is responsible, among many other things, for establishing the π-calculus (1992), which defines a formal language to describe agent communication.
If you want to go closer to the source you can take a look at Hewett's "Actor Model" [2] 1973. Which is when the field first started to formalize the idea of software agents.
The current use of the word "agent" is basically a marketing buzz-word that largely ignores the decades of research in the field of computer science around how to design intelligent interacting agents to accomplish tasks. Which is a bit of a tragedy because I personally think current LLMs could gain a lot of value if thought about in the traditional agent sense.
Many of the comments here are expressing disbelief that this could have been created by a 12 year old, but people fail to recognize that, not only did Michelangelo have tremendous natural talent, but grow up in a world where, as a child, he was allowed to spend enormous amounts of his time and energy studying with professional artists.
He wasn't being dropped off a school at 7am, squirming in a chair until 3pm, playing video games before dinner and then doing homework until bed all while squeezing in a bit of time for sketching.
The vast majority of people probably benefit more from our current structure, but it does make it much less likely to have "genius" of the type we see in Michelangelo, Mozart, etc.
> at the age of 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was rare for someone that young
He was literally getting education in art. It is not like there was no structure.
The apprenticeship was after this was painted. Prior to engaging in formal training he largely ignored school and spend his time painting and seeking out other painters to learn from:
> As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to the city of Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. Michelangelo showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters. [0]
You can search other sources and you'll find the same: prior to apprenticeship he was not formally enrolled in any form of art education.
> The apprenticeship was after this was painted. Prior to engaging in formal training he largely ignored school and spend his time painting and seeking out other painters to learn from:
He WAS in schooling and parents sent him to that city literally for education. And then he got into apprenticeship for a vocation that was well paid and supported back then.
He was very much dropped to school and squirmed there to the forced extend. And very much, boys of his age could slack on school work in variety of ways - they did not played videogames, but they did played games in little gangs of theirs, hanging around and generally wasting time to the extend adults allowed it.
Boys and girls who draw well, have talents and spend some freetime doing that exist. They usually learn from youtube (today equivalent of him meddling with artists). They may be put into extracurricular classes, but no one sane will put them into apprenticeship for art - because art is unlikely to feed you.
Thankfully social media is getting so much worse so fast it's making this easier and easier. HN is the last social media platform I still participate in... and I suspect that might not be for too much longer.
I recently logged onto Facebook and Instagram to update my 2-factor auth settings after having too many notifications of malicious login attempts. It was incredible to see what a transformation has happened there, it's like going to a decaying suburban shopping mall with only a few stores left open (and sort of sad to see the remaining users so continually desperate for a drop of approval from some imagined community).
Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.
Twitter used to be my strongest addiction, but it's almost unbelievable how big a transformation has occurred since it became X. It's almost a parody of everyone's dystopian social media fears.
HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.
> Reddit is mostly bots, astro-turfers and people so brainwashed it's hard to tell the difference. I remember disagreeing with people on there (this in the pre-Digg migration era) you would get interesting divergent points of view. Now it's like people are reading from a script.
It's hard to classify Reddit as one thing, the communities are all so different.
The subreddit for my town has led to several new friends that I meet with in person. Most of that came from coming together to advocate for something at a city council meeting or similar, where there was a directed meat space purpose. Getting together for hobbies like hiking or other things happens once in a while too.
On other, technical subreddits dedicated to digging deep into details, there are few bots. It's all real people with shared interests. Reddit is far better than most forums that I frequent for finding those communities.
The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest, then the subreddit would get tons of new commentators from other subreddits, which was the indication of bots. Fortunately the mods took swift action when this happened, becuase my god the discourse is awful when bots flood the zone with their babble.
> The few times I have been swarmed by bots on Reddit was when I touched on a topic where, say, Russia had a strategic interest
The thing is, bot operators know they can’t just post on Russia-related topics - they need a smokescreen of other ‘normal human’ activity, to avoid getting detected and banned.
If the bots that swarmed you want to appear as only 5% pro-russian, for every response you got they had to make 19 other posts. Predictable advice in advice subs, lukewarm takes in entertainment subs, reposts in image subs, repetitive worn out jokes everywhere.
Yes I feel the same way too. This exactly captures what I am feeling right now. I wish there was a way to upvote this twice, thank you so much for writing this!
The only place I am usually active is on Hackernews and on bluesky as wel
> HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.
I am not kidding, this is so true. I don't know if I can get flagged again but oh well, The amount of manipulation happening in HN is insane and flagging and just about everything
People called me bots twice on Hackernews for no apparent reason which really hurt and then I created a post about it which got flagged again as well and the responses were.. well not so sympathetic
I feel like I would be better off being an robot than a human in hackernews at this point smh. You get called bots for simply existing and showing your viewpoint or having a viewpoint (different?) or just no apparent reason and I genuinely don't know.
Bluesky has some faults as well but It's (I must admit) more focused on politics. i like the weeds of things in coding. I found some coding spaces in bluesky but they are just not there yet. I ended up spending 2 hours or something trying to build an extension which can automatically create threads for large posts because (you can see) i love writing large posts and bluesky has 300 characters limit and that annoyed me
I don't know what to do as well. I am thinking of still using Hackernews and bluesky but to an degree of moderation. I have tried discord and that doesn't work as well.
Honestly I just don't know as well but right now I atleast feel that I am not alone in this. I am not feeling lonely about feeling like this so once again massive thank you man, these are the comments which lure me into entering hackernews. Not people accusing me of being bots for no apparent reason and this happened on both bluesky and hackernews where pople called me bot and I actually try to be respectful and uh in bluesky someone went on 10 thread comment saying silence AI or silence bot when I was trying to be reasonable for the most part until I trolled them back
And in all of this questioning myself what did I do wrong, did I have a stance and they wanted to deny it and said something, the HN instance just mentioned my name as the reason I am a clanker. All of these things genuinely made me feel like people just wont trust me in being part of this community if someone (even after being a year in) trying to respond nicely and following the rules mostly can call me clanker
Like I just don't know what to do with either bots or people who accuse (you) of being bots. Both just feel the worst in social media and are actively rotting both HN and many other communties to the point that I dont even know what are some good alternatives
I think the biggest negative impact of AI is the fact that we aren't able to trust each other online in my opinion or trust art and other issues as well.
Once again thank you man for writing this. Your comment gets what I am talking about as well and I didn't know how to summarize what I wanted to say!
I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment or not, but all of that is shipped off to 3rd party "recyclers" who pinky promise that they will dispose of it properly. Very often those 3rd parties rely on other 3rd parties until the it ends up in a waste pile in a developing country, but with a long enough chain of differed responsibility that nobody can be held accountable.
The fundamental problem with "recycling" is precisely the fact that we just hand it off and don't ask questions about where it ends up, all while feeling great about ourselves afterwards. Bestbuy and Staples are offering accountability laundering so that you don't have to feel bad and in exchange are more likely to become a customer. The 3rd parties working for them do the same thing, but they usually want cash for it.
This sentiment is the case because very often that's where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when it happens.
Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one of the US largest exports to China was cardboard boxes sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net environmental impact would likely have been less had we just kept the boxes at home.
It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.
I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough room in my trash bin sometimes.
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