My point was a little more subtle. Does the human at the end of the process that presses 'submit'/'publish'/'do this thing' bear a responsibility for verbiage, claims and everything in the paper that bears his name regardless of whether or not he wrote it.
Maybe your literacy is not as great as you think it is and unfamiliar written tones are difficult for you. The result is personal discomfort and it's easier to blame external reality rather than your own ignorance and inexperience.
Can I just say, I'm getting really sick of these LLM-generated posts clogging up this site?
GPTZero gives this a 95% chance of being entirely AI-generated. (5% human-AI mix, and 0% completely original.)
But I could tell you that just by using my eyes, the tells are so obvious. "The myth / The reality, etc."
If I wanted to know what ChatGPT had to say about something, I would ask ChatGPT. That's not what I come here for, and I think the same applies to most others.
Here's an idea for all you entrepreneur types: devise a privacy-preserving, local-running browser extension for scanning all content that a user encounters in their browser - and changing the browser extension icon to warn of an AI generated article or social media post or whatever. So that I do not have to waste a further second interacting with it. I would genuinely pay a hefty subscription fee for such a service at this point, provided it worked well.
Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing.
Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work.
What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made.
You can't run a bridge building company without knowing how to build a bridge. You can't run a law firm without knowing law.
You don't need to know all the nitty gritty - big picture is important - but understanding the product _in depth_ is a requirement in any business.
Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant. Don't even get me started on the (non)education of some politicians.
Understanding the product is often important, but equally often it is something you can delegate to others. It's only the younglings that think intimate knowledge of the product is the hallmark of a great leader, because that is the only thing they themselves bring to the table.
I agree fully with your comment, but I wish to point out that Larry Ellison's was a programmer at the time that the company that became Oracle was founded by him and his co-founders.
I get the point of his comment but it’s just nonsense… plenty of good CEOs aren’t SMEs in the field and plenty of bad ones are. the CEO of Boeing is absolutely an engineer - and so was the CEO during most of the years people consider the worst in Boeing’s quality history with the 737 Max (Muilenburg).
> Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant.
Specifically the CEO is more like the figurehead of the company; this role is to present and "sell the value" of the company to investors, important customers and partners. So often it is not too worrysome if the CEO has a different background; sometimes this can even make sense.
What should worry one much more is if the leadership layers below come from a very different background than what the company's industry is.
It's not always consciously slacking off. For example when I was at Google most of the team was simply incompetent. They thought they were smart (PhDs!) and working hard. But they refused to work together. They estimated tasks in weeks and months and at the end of my time there after I'd done very little due to obstruction by other teams I was praised for my high productivity.
I never saw anyone just sitting around or really slacking. But they couldn't execute anything. It was depressing.
Spot on. There are disproportionately few people who care for the product. Most people care for making that fat promotion package so they can move up. Both eng and non eng.
I think this is akin to x% of the worker ants doing all the work. Once you get to a big enough scale and have to delegate I'm sure every company hits this.
I just wish we didn't have to rely on hiring 100 on paper workers for 5 excellent people committed to the company...
I read it as saying that even if you solved the incentive misalignments, you would still have very similar annoying symptoms to what people complain about today. So you have to be careful in looking at any particular annoyance to disentangle which aspects of it are inherent complexity to a large company and which are BS. But I already believed that, so I may be steelmanning the article too much.
For both ideological and practical reasons, I'd love to switch. If I were a desktop computing person, I'd already have done so years ago.
Alas, I exclusively use laptops - as I work a great deal while travelling.
I do not wish to have to carry around a mouse with me wherever I go with my portable computer.
If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch. I have yet to find one, however (and yes, I've tried all the Asahi variants - they don't come close).
Agreed. Trackpads on Windows are very good (approaching Mac quality) but on Linux it's hit and (mostly) miss. Gnome gestures are borderline unusable. Sometimes Gnome forgets how many fingers I'm using and every single finger mouse movement is suddenly a gesture, have to retry gestures to switch workspaces because the first two times it fails, etc. It becomes worse with more windows open. No back swipe gesture in Chrome, etc. Basic stuff that is annoying in every day use. Flawless mouse/touchpad support is not too much to ask.
Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.
Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.
Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.
idk, the two finger "rolling" pixel-by-pixel scroll seems to work for me - Firefox (also foot terminal, Slack (xwayland), and Signal) on Scroll (a Sway fork) on Debian (testing) on a ~year old Thinkpad X11. I don't think I've done anything to configure or customize it either.
I got a Thinkpad (after a few years on a Macbook) largely because in the past the track point was a lot better than trackpads. But in those years, it seems hardware and/or software have improved enough that I barely use it.
> If any Linux distro manages to replicate even 80% of the smoothness and functionality of a Mac trackpad experience, I'll switch
I find Niri to be a great WM for trackpad use if you are amenable to a scrollable-tiling workflow. All gestures are inertial like MacOS and to my fingers they often feel snappier and more natural than their macOS equivalents. Scrolling is consistent and natural, though which apps have inertial scrolling is definitely hit-or-miss. It perfectly recognizes three and four finger gestures. PikaOS (debian-based) and CachyOS (arch-based) both offer Niri as an option if you want to give it a try.
For context, my experience is on a 4 year old thinkpad which admittedly is probably best case for driver support but is definitely not the best touchpad hardware on the market.
Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux
Take this with a grain of salt, it's impossible for me to tell what you are and aren't comfortable with, but there is an alternative to using trackpads or mice at all and that's tiling window managers. You drive the OS with your keyboard. Combining this with plugins like Vimium for Chromium based browsers (or Tridactyl for Firefox) you can drive your entire OS and browser with keybindings.
As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.
But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
People can have different preferred input devices to others. It doesn't make them amateurs.
My gripes with the trackpad are less to do with window management and are more to do with the graphical components of my job.
Please explain to me how I'm supposed to design graphics in Inkscape using only the keyboard? Or create presentations in LibreOffice Impress using only the keyboard? I don't spend the entirety of my time in a text editor.
Consider these "amateur" tasks all you like, most organisations value them and I need to be able to undertake them without frustration. MacOS won't fight me in these contexts. Linux will.
iPadOS 26 is an even bigger F-up than macOS 26, though
It's hugely embarrassing how they've had to perform a screeching U-turn in bringing back Slide Over and dock-launchable Split View with the .1 and .2 updates - lest graphic artists and others who depended upon these features left their platform in droves. This is essentially an admission that iPadOS 26's touch-based UX had precisely zero thought put into it. They do not have a clue what they're doing
There are still many, many more nonsensical UX degradations and bugs that need ironing out
For years I was begging to get better multitasking and more powerful apps, especially after they introduced the magic keyboard. They can take it all back now. I'd rather they stick with 0 multitasking, if this is the best they can do.
Opening with a made-up quote (that is very simple to Google, which quickly confirms its apocryphal nature) doesn't inspire confidence in the factual accuracy of the remainder of the book...
> And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil?
Oh, these people know it's evil - from the second they suggest it. The personality types associated with SV leadership are simply wired for rationalising evil as a means to any business end. It's just implicitly accepted that it's an appropriate tool to be wielded.
You're the weird one who "just doesn't get it" if you push back. Push back hard enough and you'll quickly find yourself on the receiving end.
If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.
*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)
