Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.

I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.

In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:

1. Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.

2. Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.

THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.

Musk faces challenges attracting engineers

No shit. I have no idea who still works at Xitter. I think they must have whittled it down to workaholic Nazi pigs who personally share in Elon’s psychopathy. Because no self respecting tech workers would put up with his bullshit when there’s a whole industry they could go work in.

SpaceX is different. Aerospace is a narrower field and SpaceX is truly at the forefront of it. For a time, Tesla was also at the forefront, doing things that no one else was.

But Xitter and xAI or whatever the fuck it’s called… they have zero advantages with which to attract engineering talent. Elon doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing when it comes to software and never has. He tries to push tech workers around the same way, he’s going to find they can get other jobs at superior organizations and likely for more money.

Cory Booker, Ezra Klein, and Reid Hoffman aren’t people I generally consider evil. I wonder if we can get them to say something about this whole affair and what goes on there.

It’s an almost universal problem. Everything wants to grow so it starts doing things their existing users don’t like, because they’re trying to appeal to people they don’t already have.

There used to be significant differences in performance that drove browser choices. The top dog browser always had a way of getting fat and slow and then something else would come along. This is how Chrome got its start. But today’s much more powerful hardware hides a lot of poor performance, and most web bottlenecks are in the content (ads and shitty site design) where the browser can only make a small difference.

Their situation is: they’re a tired social media site that is traded on the stock exchange and it’s just all downhill for them unless they change something big. They do want to be Steve Jobs, the guy who created a trillion dollar platform ecosystem, and they think hey we can use our social media site as one big ad for it to get things going. What else are you going to do with a tired social media property? You can at least fool some shareholders by telling them no, we have a whole new chapter about to begin. It’s a stupid game, I think driven more by market capitalism than personal ego, though of course there’s also plenty of that.

They’re trying to create a new something. and there doesn’t seem to be another idea. The iPhone really only blew up the world because of the quality of its execution. The idea had been bouncing along for a long time. So every asshole thinks “we’ll just execute right and nail this thing.”

Yes we’ve begun to track “token use” all over my company so it doesn’t spiral out of control, as it easily can do when you have agents managing agents connecting to MCP servers that themselves use the models to generate responses. The engineers around me say that they basically have multiple agents cranking full time and just keep an eye on them every so often. They will even queue up things to run overnight to make use of the time. They never actually close their laptops. This is an insane amount of usage, well beyond what anyone can do in the ChatGPT application by typing with their fingers, and there’s no way it can continue like this.

Learning is good for the brain at any age. Picking up a new skill, traveling to a foreign land, starting a new job with new people…

Fiddling with an app on your phone…. Not so much.

I understand the suspicion but you might want to keep some daylight between “qualitative data” and “bullshit.”

I completely understand that quant data is always more certain to work with, but to totally discount qual data leaves you utterly blind in a lot of fields where quant measurements are impossible to standardize.

You have to hand it to NVidia. People only have two complaints about their products: that they cost too much and are constantly sold out.

Oh so you mean it’s an “artificial problem” as in they are “solving” a problem they created themselves. Not that there isn’t actually a problem.

I might support this point of view if the last 20 years of lifespan promises with new light bulb technology had actually been true.

I thought we all agreed there is a problem with headlights these days? Is it just not because of LEDs specifically?

There’s an active onwers forum for these on Reddit if you’d like to see what more people think.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BoltEV

Chevy Bolt - first American car I’ve ever owned and we absolutely love it.

I hope to never buy another. We have an ICE minivan as a second car and it compliments our compact EV well. But 10/10 I prefer driving and maintaining the EV. I always knew EVs were quick, but I didn’t expect how quiet they would be. I can actually hear my music.

that attracts garbage articles and clickbaits.

So it is clickbait. I understand that it’s our fault for being filthy numbskulls who want quick solutions. But we agree it is clickbait.

While you’re right that these things happen over time, there are often sudden watershed moments where the change becomes much more obvious than before, and those can precipitate more sudden actions to follow. Not everything is a slow forever burn with slovenly people like me yawning on the sidelines crying “borrring!”