Well it is hypocritical. Hypocrisy is an action or statement that is contrary to a stated value or principle. Just because your values or principles changed doesn’t make you a suddenly no longer a hypocrite, it just admits that your former opinions are no longer tenable.
I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.
How to do it? Focus on writing specs for code / identifying needs.
I expect there are a lot of hypocrites in the mix, scared for their job. But this isn't a fundamentally hypocritical position - agents are changing the game for how software gets produced and the things that were important as recently as a year ago might reasonably be said to be irrelevant now. Ironically, we might yet see a great software engineer who has never written a program in their entire life. The odds are slim but it is possible now.
This is shifting the principle/value discussion up to a level where it's meaningless. Let's use a different example.
Old value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like family and don't be evil.
New value: Returning value to shareholders.
How to do it? Treat your employees like human resources and get away with what you can get away with.
Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.
Agents may be changing the game for how software gets produced, but all it's really done is switch software developers from being managed to being managers. And software developers trying to square their historic value/principle that management tasks are useless, easy, and ceremonial (to borrow GP's word) tasks that should take a back seat to ~flow state coding~ with their new view that management is an integral, difficult, and requisite part of writing code reeks of hypocrisy.
> Is this hypocritical? Most people would say yes, but in your framing it's not because we've backed up to the least specific articulation of an underlying principle. It's a species of the motte and bailey fallacy.
I'm happy to defend that one too, for the reasons you outline. It is completely normal behaviour from a company, everyone understands it [0] and most managers I've worked with would be happy to talk about it openly. It isn't hypocritical. It'd be hypocritical to pretend that there was some sort of long-term commitment in an employment relation, but that isn't implied in your example.
Changing your behaviour when the situation changes isn't hypocrisy. That is just being aware of the conditions around you. Hypocrisy is pretending your behaviour is principles based, then clearly not following the principles. To show hypocrisy, you have to do two things (1) show people claimed to be following a principles and (2) show that they are not following it. In your scenario, you haven't identified a principle that people are being inconsistent with.
I note you threw in a "don't be evil", so maybe you're thinking of Google. Google is hypocritical, because it claimed to be acting on principles ("don't be evil") and then didn't follow them when it became inconvenient. But if it'd just been honest up front that it was a normal business and would act responsibly to maximise profit it could have undertaken exactly the same actions and not been hypocritical. It was the professing of principle in advance that made the hypocrisy, not the action. Claiming to "not be evil" is unusual for companies, because while they are immoral they usually only lie when it is detectable that it is to their benefit and they're usually just cynical, not hypocritical.
[0] "should" understand it, I suppose. One born every minute.
Sorry, did people not identify needs when developing "high value software" before? That doesn't seem true to me at all. I took a "Needs Assessment" course in my class of '09 undergrad...
I've noticed on hackernews in the past year, a certain type of comment. A deep suspicion to first call out a surface behavior, then psychoanalyze strangers with whatever the flavor of the month "deep observation" is.
You can't be a dick on this platform without fancy prose I guess.
Abduhl, the nature of the job has changed; before it was coding, now it is managing the AI coding. What was and remains valuable is delivering value. This principle has not changed.
If your job was only coding then you are the most replaceable of the bunch. Traditional software engineering is a broader domain that, as rightly pointed out, will require you to actually *sit and talk* with the worst communicators you'll meet in your life.
Looking at a slice of most folks' workday and calling it their whole job is in my opinion, incorrect.
Bottom line is the people described as hypocritical in the comment have no principles, but rather feign passion in anything they think other people consider valuable. When devs thought coding skill was valuable, that's what they claimed to be passionate about, when the game changed and communication became key, they suddenly changed their passion. Either the timing is a coincidence, or they are hypocrites.
I don't think switching one's passion on a dime is a valid escape hatch from hypocrisy.
This is a bit hyperbolic and the exaggerations really undermine what I think is your broader point (that there is rarely recourse when you're held for short to moderate amounts of time). It is hard for me to believe that someone was held for 16 years on civil contempt without due process or that someone was held for half a year without due process after being deemed dangerous. The reason that is hard for me to believe is that the due process is implicit in the action you describe. Civil contempt is from a judge which implies that you're already in court - that's due process. Someone being labeled "dangerous" implies that a finding was made by a neutral party - that's due process.
Just because you disagree with the outcome doesn't mean that due process wasn't given.
Yeah it's "due process." In civil contempt the judge is a witness and prosecutor in the very "process" they're judging. That's the most perverted form of due process imaginable.
A judge should have to recuse themselves if they are acting as witness to the supposed infraction.
Civil contempt isn't some roving criminal charge that jumps out of the jury box randomly. It's meant to make somebody comply with a court order. Anybody in civil contempt holds the keys to the jailhouse door in their own hands, all they have to do is comply.
This statement should make you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it is a pure expression of the power of the state. But it's still due process.
In Criminal Contempt max duration of imprisonment is limited. In civil it is not until somebody decides that one never complies. You may call it due process. I call it for what it is - A torture and fucking crime against humanity. Judge that holds person for years for being stubborn deserves nothing more than walk the plank
Any power that could force a judge to actually walk the plank for what they see as an abuse of power, is itself something like a state, that could just as easily wield that power against the stubborn defendant.
Judges are not above the law. They could be and are being made to "walk a plank". Problem is that we have many laws that are very shitty and allow abuse and are heavily distorted to benefit anyone but "we the people"
In its court filing, the US government admits that "In addition to refunding the IEEPA duties, CBP must also pay importers interest, as required by law." So one silver lining here is that we (because it is the taxpayers who ultimately pay) will actually pay more than was collected on tariffs once interest is considered.
The second silver lining is that, even if CBP does its job, there is another step where the Trump administration will certainly drag its feet again: "If it is determined upon liquidation or reliquidation that excess moneys have been
deposited, such that a refund with interest is due to the importer, CBP certifies the refund and interest amounts to the Department of the Treasury, which then employs its own processes to disburse the certified amounts to the importers of record."
I don’t think these are ad hominem attacks. The article seems to just state the (perhaps biased) facts: people are calling it a clown show, Prasad was ousted, Prasad did gain popularity on social media as a COVID-skeptic. It doesn’t become an ad hominem just because you don’t like the way the facts are stated or the inferences your own brain makes.
Not "people" -- a single, unnamed, VC. It's right there in the article. Read it.
> Prasad was ousted
No, he wasn't. He voluntarily resigned pre-emptively after the WSJ editorials, then he was re-hired almost immediately. You are just misinformed. You'd know this if you read a better source.
>> Instead of just reporting the facts of the case (as was done by the Stat piece, which they're ripping off) they spend multiple paragraphs making ad hominem attacks about the CDC, Prasad, etc. Almost unbelievably, they put those things first.
Touché. I shouldn't have said "ad hominem attacks", because, while these arguments are certainly specious, and completely unrelated to the subject of the article, they're not strictly ad hominem.
I agree with your comment that my criticism is (and was) biased reporting.
There is nowhere in America where $260k/year is “barely middle class.” 260k/yr is a top 10% income nationally. Calling it anything other than upper class is ludicrous, especially since the payment requires no geographic tie like a salaried job would.
$260k is absolutely middle class, nowhere near "upper class", by any reasonable consideration of lifestyle, freedom, power or day to day experience.
The median home price in SF is $1.3. Using the calculator at zillow (https://www.zillow.com/homeloans/buyability/) with an income of $260k, looking to buy a $1.3MM house, you'd need a down payment of over $300k.
So suppose you get your $260k payout and want to live in SF... you have to rent for what... 5 or 10 years to save up the $300k down payment (while living modestly to save tens of thousands per year). Then finally you can buy your average home, watch half your income disappear to taxes and another third to mortgage, and then you'll still have enough to live a comfortable, middle-class life.
You're not buying yachts, getting meetings with senators or buying your kids into elite schools. You're not flying private, hiring personal assistants or buying a vacation home in Aspen. You're not making dozens of angel investments or being courted as a limited partner by VCs or PE funds.
"Upper class" probably starts at around $10-15 million in liquid assets, to be able to really have the freedom, flexibility and power to live a life that's distinct from middle class existence. If you can't give your son a "small loan of $1 million" to start his business (and be able to shrug off a complete loss as a learning experience) then you're not upper class.
You are conflating upper class income with being wealthy in the Bay Area (and not just wealthy, uber wealthy; I know plenty of comfortable wealthy people who aren’t meeting congresscritters and making VC/PE calls). They’re different metrics. GP said $260k/yr was BARELY middle class. That statement is farcical: 260k/yr is a top 10% income in America. It is upper class income under all but the most ludicrous of definitions.
By the way, the solution to your “I want to buy a house in SF” problem isn’t to move to SF and pay an insane amount of rent for 5-10 years, it’s to keep living like you did and doing your normal job that you were doing before you won 260k/yr for 2 years while you save.
I won’t even bother digging into how warped your view of what it means to be upper class is, I’ll just say stay on that hamster wheel and keep chasing that dream dude.
260k/yr at an effective tax rate of about 50%, so actual spendable/saveable money is only $130k in free cash; people wildly overestimate their spending / saving risk decisions based on pre-tax gross salary versus what they actually receive and can use, and at 11k/mo it’s easy to fall into the trap of spending it every month because it’ll be there next month too. The Bay Area is especially egregious about using up that post-tax amount but I stand by my advice to save 10x annual income before playing margin investor with interest rates.
Great! They’ll be able to save a nest egg in as little as twelve years, then, if my brief mental napkin math works out — unless they make the mistake of buying a house whose payment triples that time.
This is just your gambling addiction showing itself. There may not be any potential gains in value after the transaction. In fact, most take privates result in massive up front losses for the new owners.
And anyways, shareholders are paid a premium on today’s stock price (which theoretically reflects the current value of future profits, or at least the market’s view on it) in order to compensate for the exact loss you mention.
Apple has a vested interest in maintaining a presence in the Chinese market because that is where a large portion of its supply chain exists. It isn’t appeasing the CCP because Chinese users, it is because of Chinese manufacturers.
Google flights actually has an option for Economy (exclude Basic) now. I’m not sure when this was rolled out. Previously, you could accomplish the same functionality by adding a single carryon bag in the drop down to force non-Basic.
Thanks! I didn't notice it because it's invisible when you initiate the search, you have to search first and then go back and change the cabin class. I wouldn't say this option is hidden exactly, but it certainly isn't made particularly easy for users to find.
I’ve noticed this push to try to clothe hypocrisy in made up virtues like intellectual curiosity and mental plasticity a lot lately. All I can think is that it’s some kind of ego satisfaction play people make when their place in the world is threatened.
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