Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.
Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.
I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.
If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
The quote that I heard was "the purpose of a system is what it does", which was to a degree kind of revelatory.
The example I heard was McDonald's ice cream machines. What is the purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine? To make ice cream? No, they break down all the time, they're actually pretty bad at making ice cream.
The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts. The company making these machines isn't making bad machines because they're incapable of making good ones, they're making bad machines because bad machines are more profitable in the long term.
It doesn’t hold to reason that McDonalds would publicly and continuously put up with that from a supplier. Much more likely that they have control over the machines and use them for impromptu advertising, to keep calorie per dollar lower, and to starve out local ice cream shops as needed.
thank you, i believe this is closer to, if not exactly, the original wording.
>The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts
this is spin, but does have truth. i think people dramatize the quote too much towards conspiracy or alternative intent.
I think the best way to interpret the quote is to remove intent and purpose from the system entirely and keep it somewhere above the system. i think it is really meant to undermine any purpose you think a system intrinsically has. it is a collection of tools and processes that have inputs and outputs.
Responsibility for how a system is used and what it accomplishes stays with the people using it. When you know what the consequences of using a system are going to be and you use it anyway, then those consequences are what the purpose of your action is, regardless of what it might seem like the system was initially designed to do.
in a way, for sure - but the incentive exists outside the system so the system would not know what incentives people have for using it. but it usually has rules, input/outputs, delegated authorities for limited scopes, etc. so the system is just the result of those things which may be a greater or lesser scope than any given incentive. Systems are usually used to manage many different incentives as well, so perfect alignment with all of them is often impossible
For example, we might say the US postal systems intended purpose is to deliver mail legal packages. the unabomber had an incentive to use that system to deliver bombs through the mail and it worked. So it was more true to say the purpose of the us postal system (at that time) was to move any items at all from one location to another, at least with respect to the incentive of wanting stuff moved around.
but having a mailman potentially go to every home every day is also something the system does. exciting dogs is something the system does. Just like how blocking the street is something that the garbage collection system does in its current state, which might have an impact on the hours of the day chosen to send hte trucks to collect. There may not be an incentive for everything the system does, and when framed around purpose you might call them side effects, but it's all the same to the system.
when a person is operating as part of the system and something goes wrong, we try to shift blame to them - and it becomes a grey area. this is often why individuals are not held accountable for their actions on behalf of a system when they hurt someone. if you call the police on your neighbor falsely claiming he is violent, the police show up and are too aggressive, and your neighbor get injured - there is mixed responsibility. Using force is within the scope of the police system, you subjected your neighbor to that system knowing that, and the officers have discretion oso depending on the details may or may not have been acting as reasonable representatives of the police system. Taken to an extreme though, SWAT-ing your neighbor is now seen as a serious crime on your part, as we understand teh system that supports a SWAT team showing up to a location to include damages and a low bar for lethal force. we cant say the purpose of the 'SWAT system' is to attend to threats, its not. it is to act on behalf of information claiming a threat exists, because thats what it does.
In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.
Ray Dalio has been preaching this for awhile now. Mad respect for him spending an non-insignificant amount of time and money to educate the masses (and all the pushback that comes from it).
I read this a decade back. Lot of good ideas. Explains lot of different fields and how they operate. I recommend people to read it or use AI to get the gist.
I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.
There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.
Same recipe as the Mars colonization. There is absolutely zero chance of a self-sustaining colony on Mars in the next 50 years, but boy will he get rich if we try...
That whole foolishness will stop when we or the Chinese try to dig a hole in the moon to shield a moon station from radiation. Space is not for humans. Even super fit humans can't tolerate space for more than a few months.
I dunno, data centers in space seems even more outlandish than P2P space travel. The math on the orbital data center idea indicates that these things would need hundreds of thousands of square meters of radiative cooling. Absolutely bonkers that anyone is falling for this shit.
I don't doubt the Neo is a quality product, but I'm curious whether cheap MacBooks are going to sabotage Apple's cachet as a luxury brand. It's my personal experience that iOS users tend to look down on "green bubbles" in a way that can only be explained as some sort of brand superiority complex.
I'm sure millionaires wouldn't appreciate it if Lamborghini sold a $25K model...
Apple has never been a luxury brand. It’s a label lobbed at them by critics and fans of competing products. But it’s never been supported by their price points, volumes, marketing, or operations. The few times they have tried to play in the luxury market, like their gold $10k Apple Watch, it went pretty much nowhere and they quickly stopped.
They make not-crappy productivity tools at not-cheap price points, and aim for top-5 market share. That’s not a luxury product strategy. They are a lot more like Honda or Volkswagon than Lamborghini.
>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.
Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.
The monitor stand was always priced to avoid people buying it. I'm yet to see non-custom monitor stand at any of my workplaces, besides hyperspecific situations like a ultrawide monitor.
I don't think it'll dilute the brand at all. The neo still feels like a premium product. Other laptop OEMs are now starting to come out with their competitors, and they are putting 1080p crap display panels on them like they always do. A $599 laptop with a 1080p screen from Dell is going to feel like a cheap piece of junk next to a Neo.
I agree with your comment generally, but note that Dell's $699 competitor they announced this week has has a slightly larger screen than the Neo with similar resolution and brightness but better color coverage.
I haven't had the chance to touch one yet. But the reviews seem to suggest the hardware doesn't "feel" cheap in the way a lot of low priced computers can.
I can't vouch on whether it's true, but that's the brand question here in my opinion. If the hinge was crappy and it felt like it was going to break any second and the keyboard was a return to the butterfly and it was slow and so on, because they wanted to make it cheap, then yeah I think that'd hurt their brand overall.
It's not Lamborghini, but Lotus had the $40,000 Elise a while ago. I don't remember how it worked out in the end, but a lot of people were excited about them at the time.
Wild that the guy whose decisions are directly responsible for driving profitability into the ground is somehow the reason these companies have 300+ PE valuations.
Proves the point that skills don't matter results do, if a monkey manages to make better milkshake and you fire the chef, you didn't really improve the kitchen.
But that's what we do in stock and markets and well whatever we are living through, sometimes bad decisions can have good results because you were right place right time. if it happens more than once, that doesn't mean it was incredible it just means the bias works.
If 1% of the innovators had access to levels of cheap capital Musk has had, we might be living in a different reality.
SamAltman for all his faults brought trillion dollar NLP systems to reality by sheer ability to raise capital.
Everyone believes if things go south Musk can raise another Trillion somehow. And honestly I wouldn't bet against the guy.
This all assumes there was some skill involved. Instead, this along with gamestop and a few other meme stocks are showing that the stock market simply isn't as rational as finance experts have wanted to pretend.
This is a bitcoin stock market. Things are valued entirely based on what others are willing to buy for. They are not valued based on any attribute of the underlying asset. Exactly like bitcoin, it's whim and whimsy which is driving prices.
It's group gambling at this point. Everyone is betting that there won't be a run on the market.
It has always been gambling. The non-gambling version was grandma holding dividend stocks. Any stock that isn't one you buy for dividends is gambling. The whole point of index funds is spread out the odds.
Value is tied to how people assess value. They used to assess it on the performance or potential of the company whose ownership you were taking a part of. Now speculation plays a much bigger role. This seems predictably correlated with distance to last deep crash.
Skills do matter. It’s just a different type of skill. Merit doesn’t matter - but even that’s a bit arguable - if the merit is decided based on what someone is creating value for their shareholders and value is entirely defined by stock price, it seems to be working well too.
I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days. For simple problems (which most are) it works well enough and you are definitely shipping code faster - and with actual test coverage to boot. But it just doesn't feel the same - there's little craftsmanship and honestly it's boring as fuck. You spend a lot of time setting up guardrails and having it produce plans that you then have to refactor multiple times. It's impressive that LLMs can do this, but it's not particularly enjoyable. I guess I was a "writing code was the fun part" guy.
Semi-related, but I really want to see the long term maintenance outcomes of all code being produced by these software engineers that were apparently just closeted project managers. I feel like having 50% of the engineers in this industry just telling Claude Code, "yeah that looks good to me" 150 times a day is going to result in an incredible amount of software rewriting.
I wonder that too. I've been on the receiving end of "it's 90% done, we just need someone to get it over the line for us" way too many times to know that there's going to be a lot of pain trying to maintain or re-write parts of anything that is vibe-coded.
On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.
I've been pulled into these 90% done vibe-coded projects several times now to "get them over the line" and all I have to say is I wouldn't wish it on my greatest enemy.
AI made working for (an AI-pilled) company unbearable to me. Time will tell if there will be new approaches that new companies take, and lessons learned.
But immediately, I hate AI work in a company setting. Mandates intentionally want humans managing more “features”. When you get stuck owning someone else’s AI “feature”, it’s game over.
The new hope is that as a founder, the stimulating and creative parts of working with AI are persevered. Fingers crossed so far so good.
> I've definitely noticed a distinct lack of pride now that Claude Code is writing 90% of the code I'm delivering these days.
Well, yeah. There's nothing to be proud of. When an LLM is doing the work, human expertise is relevant. My employer has been trying to tell us that our skills still matter and are needed, but that is very obviously bullshit they are saying to keep people placated while they try to line up AI replacements for everyone. You have my sympathies, brother.
My feelings about front-end code are that I have a stronger feeling of craftsmanship, in the sense that I can ship a much more polished product because all the small nagging annoyances are things that I can eliminate (second-hand), where I’d previously have just lived with a lot of them as fixing them took too long to be worthwhile. I hate shipping some of the resulting working slop.
For me, part of craftsmanship is the quality of the shipped product. (I’m also willing to use CNC tools while doing hobby woodworking; others think that takes away the craftsmanship; I think it changes how the craftsmanship is experienced and applied.)
You're describing the same alienation of labor Marx identified 150+ years ago. It was only a matter of time before it caught up with our field. Someone who used to make their own clothes, from planting the cotton, to picking it to turning it into thread to weaving the thread into fabric to creating the piece of clothing felt a LOT less pride in their work when it was transferred to a factory line or automated loom.
LLMs didn't make me rewrite my understanding of intelligence. It made me wonder just how intelligent anybody is.
"It's not smart, it's just predicting the next most likely token."
It is not at all clear to me that perhaps that is exactly what I'm doing too. I have no idea where my sentences are going. Try to express one of your own thoughts backwards. It sure seems like we're all just predicting the next most likely token...
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