I had to sell my EV and go back to ICE for the same reason: my new apartment didn't have EV charging, and non-Tesla DC fast-chargers in my area (Seattle/Tacoma) were unreliable as someone would come along every few weeks and cut off the charging cables for the copper, and it would then take more weeks for them to be repaired. The infrastructure was simply too unstable, but it did only cost me $300 in electricity for the entire year previously that I owned it.
Agree with this. Regardless of the politics involved, this exchange seems pretty mundane in the grand scheme of corporate emails. Taking Bosworth at face value here, it sounds like both camps got the same advice, one acted on it in full, the other didn't, the party that did saw better results, and on top of that had a better ads/targeting strategy that maximized platform ROI. If we removed the political parties from this and made them two companies, I'm not sure HN would have much of an issue with its content.
I doubt the Clinton campaign could have had as much of an impact with the same strategy. The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:
- white
- Christian
- rural
- guns
- lower and upper class
The upper class votes on taxes, so that is an easy one.
The rest are relatively easy to target.
The Democratic Party tries to capture everyone else, which is more people but hugely diverse. There’s hardly a single message (or single digit number of them) that resonates universally.
Identifying someone as Republican gives your clear signal for targeting if you want to get out the base, as Trump did.
Identifying someone as Democratic means they could care about a huge range of things, but you don’t know what.
I can understand why you would think this - or rather, why you'd want to think this - because it lets you lean really hard into the "Republicans dumb lol" trope. But just to pick two of your examples, there are plenty of establishment Republicans who are quick to vote for increased gun control, and at least a few establishment Democrats who need quite a bit of convincing to do so. One side is better than the other (which is which depends on which side you're on, of course), but I'd say it's 80/20 when the media presents it more like 95/5.
And I don't know what "low class" means but if you're referring to socioeconomic status that doesn't match what you said either. According to Pew the bottom quintile (<36k/yr) is about 60/35 Democrat. The top quintile (215k/yr+) is about 53/46. Upper-middle ($144-215k/yr) is the only one with a Republican edge, and the other two (36-48, 48-144) are within the margin of error to 50/50.
I think of all your examples you probably have the strongest case to make with "rural" but I've met plenty of rural Dems in my life.
> The Republican Party is fortunate in that it has a limited number of constituents:
That's not at all true. The biggest contradiction is on trade. The "business" faction is against tariffs, but the worker base was for it. Same for immigration. Business is generally for it, the worker base is against it.
Yes, a cartel is a failure mode to be wary of, but it's quite tedious to call an attempt to negotiate an international agreement a cartel. Global agreements are necessary to solve global problems, and many people believe that "AI is moving too fast" is a global problem.
Also, all they've really said is that they think it would be a good idea. That's a long way from an actual agreement.
Many of the decisions Mozilla has made throughout the past decade have felt more like it’s a resting place for a professional-managerial class, post-capital set of leadership who want to perform tech-goodness from within the same playbook as a big tech company. It’s somehow rudderless and declining, but has plenty of time and connections to chase old-boys-club vanity projects like this. Next up they’ll be next to CrowdStrike on a Formula 1 car.
I’m not saying non-profits should necessarily give off the opposite vibe of being derelict and desperate, but even startups choose to run austerity measures when in decline.
For me, Opus 4.8's thinking traces for the chatbot will sometimes willingly ignore instructions, saying something along the lines of "I've noticed an instruction in the system instructions that states I shouldn't do this, but if I don't do this, I'll not provide the answer the user is looking for. I will ignore that instruction."
I’m not sure why this is interesting. Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft, you likely could have retired a very long time ago.
Most of the older devs I know aren't in the industry primarily for the money. Their wealth level may not be a large factor in their decision about whether or not to leave early. The ones I know who are leaving (including myself) are doing so because the industry has changed in ways they are not comfortable with.
> The ones I know who are leaving (including myself) are doing so because the industry has changed in ways they are not comfortable with.
The AI doom-trolling (h/t Cal Newport) of the big two firms is so utterly disreputable, shameful and absurd that everyone has lost their heads, and with long enough perspective it's possible to see that this is going to go on for another couple of years.
I am past my half-century and currently trying to get back into things after a period of devastating burnout, but figuring out all this stuff from the perspective of a freelancer, without falling into the traps being laid, is challenging.
I would like to get out of the industry but I don't really know to where, yet. The only reassuring thing is that outside of the IT world, people are proving more resilient to AI marketing than we are.
I think there's some level of interest in that tech jobs are fairly cushy (can work from home several days a week, benefits are good) and most older SWEs usually have more of a passion for the field. There's also maybe more of a culture nowadays of continuing to work at least part-time through typical retirement age to keep your mind active.
> Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft
Eh, it really depends on whether your wealth has creeped into your lifestyle, as well as if you have a family and have set roots into an expensive city.
I live a decently frugal life and would not mind much going back to eating beans+rice on even days and rice+beans on the odd ones, but a lot of people get into very expensive habits and interests as soon as they start earning a bit more.
The hedonic treadmill as well documented. If you can't help yourself by flying privates and having a yacht, I'm sorry, but that's on you. If you need to work more, you need to work more but with stock price appreciation, you may not need to go back quite to rice and beans level, just don't develop a habit for eating at Michelin star, restaurants.
“We don’t have good, unique data” is a pretty good out to keep Wang collecting extreme payouts and fleecing the leadership that has built trust in him, because it also plays to the one place where he’s demonstrated profitable expertise. It’s plausible enough to not be seen as a deflection.
I’m not sure the incentives are really aligned when you’re pouring that much cash and liquid RSUs at someone on normal vesting schedules. News stories of some of the acquisitions state that there are engineers in Meta’s AI organisation clearing 8 figures of compensation. If you didn’t think the strategy was successful, it’s rational (if not very principled) to continue to make excuses as to why until the gravy train stops and then use that to fund your retirement and the things you’d want to do instead.
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