...but many people in positions where they can start a war or cause some other highly visible event of any sort probably will start turning to Polymarket to make money in the course of their work
Not really, for the same reason entrapment isn't usually seen as an accurate way to gather information for law enforcement. See also Goodhart's law and overfitting.
As a technology company scales up, making great software becomes one of a hundred things the company needs to do right in order to survive and grow. Doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely essential, but so is having a strong GTM machine, finance competency, operational rigor, HR, and a long list of other essential functions.
It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.
> It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary.
I'd be a little bit careful with this claim:
The fact that small companies can have such opinionated opinions without going bust is to me a sign that in particular for software development (but I don't claim that this is transferable to other industries) small teams/companies do have an efficiency advantage.
Many hypotheses can be formulated why this might be the case, like
- software industry is less regulated
- writing good software as the company's product requires a lot less collaboration between many stakeholders than what is necessary for producing other types of sellable products
- in software, "having a smart, though opinionated idea" is of a much bigger advantage (also for the company) than in other, more established industries
Tangential, but companies have been routinely writing and selling software since at least the 1980s, and longer depending on how you draw the line. That's roughly half a century.
At what point will being "less established" stop being an explanation for the way the software industry works?
There's so much content and so many opinions on "meetings" that are polarized and come from a very narrow viewpoint. This particular POV seems reasonably critical of meetings but also recognizing that they are often warranted and can be carried out effectively.
I was happy to see "rallying the troops" as an acceptable reason to have a big meeting, because in my opinion it can be a good reason for a big meeting to exist (even though I'm sure many people disagree.)
I’m ok with age being used as a partial proxy for experience when we’re talking about highly specialized roles with massive implications like the ones that DOGE staffers were dropped into.
> $191k USAGM broadcasting contract for “broadcast operations and maintenance in Ethiopia, Africa”
USAGM's mission is to promote the USA's diplomatic interests in parts of the world with little or no press freedom. Whole thing was cut by executive order of Trump to the maximum extent possible.
Because of that order, it's not even a "not specialised" role, it's not a role.
If USAGM should be cut or not, should have been the choice of congress rather than the executive, but that's a different question entirely.
> Botswana MI curriculum
What's "MI"? Mission-Influenced? That sounds like a plausible amount to spend on a curriculum about Botswana for the benefit of the State Department, let alone in Botswana on anything.
And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.
> And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.
Specialists in what? Asking whether something is in the interests of the taxpayer? Data analysis? If so, then such specialists would have to be found in an independent organization without conflicts of interest for any specific mission, aligned with the interests of the taxpayer, and they would need to be recruited from the part of the political spectrum that cares about waste in government. In other words, you'd need a group that looks like DOGE.
> Asking whether something is in the interests of the taxpayer?
Yes.
Because they need to:
(1) understand the answer, and not mistake terms of art for things they sound like to normal people. For example, to use Musk's ideology, this would be things like mistaking a study in "transgenic rats" or "trans fatty acids" to be anything about gender.
In the case of `$1.3M State Dept. education contract for “Botswana MI curriculum”`, you've still not said if you recon this is in or about Botswana, and you've still not said what "MI" is, you've taken something that you think "obviously" sounds bad (or why else would you have quoted it?) without having thought too hard. I tried searching, the sidebar was an AI summary of (and linking to) this thread that made claims not supported by anything anyone here has actually said, and only one of the four(!) real links even got me a page with the string "Botswana MI curriculum" on them, which linked to X.com which also didn't explain what that was.
What you've done here is treat it as an applause light, not considered anything about taxpayer interests. Applause lights can be done by an AI, taxpayer interests cannot.
(2) for all items including those that sound good when you do know what they mean, be able to tell if they actually did what they said they did rather than pocket the money.
(3) even when they did the thing, determine if they're any good at doing the thing or if they're a bunch of well-meaning idiots.
For (2) and (3), I'm mainly thinking of the UK with this, with PPE bought for the pandemic that wasn't fit for purpose.
(4) have security clearance to know about clandestine missions, so that you don't cut the expenses which are deliberately faked by the government on purpose with a bland an/or politically correct title so nobody complains about the clandestine mission, despite the money being spend on absolutely nothing at all like whatever the line-item says it was, once what is and isn't "politically correct" gets inverted.
> In other words, you'd need a group that looks like DOGE.
No, you'd get something a lot more competent. And boring.
If you look at those titles and assume that they could be cut, without any more information, you are not a serious person and do not deserve to have any budgetary authority anywhere.
At least bother to come up with some reason they should be cut. But you can't even seem to put that into words.
Apparently "not a serious person" is the new insult of choice with you guys, huh. What a ridiculous reply.
Of course they should be cut. The slogan of the winning party for the last decade was America First. They ran on that platform. Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.
The insistence on not understanding obvious stuff is such a tiresome attribute.
> Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.
You think advertising doesn't work?
$191k/year to promote American interests in Ethiopia may or may not be value for money to the American taxpayer (I honestly don't care because I'm not one), but to think it can't be value for money is to claim that the primary business model of half the American tech giants — and also the business model of X.com, which isn't a giant but is the property of DOGE's most famous figure-head — is fake.
The US diplomatic agencies, which include USAGM which ran this station, have the business of promoting American interests across the world.
It sells (advertises) the USA's preferences to Ethiopia. Preferences such as "do not interfere with shipping things up the Red Sea or we'll do to you what we did to the Houthis in Yemen". Or preferences like "open your markets to what our businesses want to sell to you". Or, historically, "human rights are in everyone's best interest, you should do more of that because it will make you rich and then you can afford more of our stuff".
Stuff like that.
But to repeat: As I neither know nor care about the national interests of the USA in Ethiopia, I do not say this should or should not be funded — all I say is that this kind of thing *must be considered when deciding if it is or isn't good value, you cannot possibly know a priori just from the title alone*.
The willingness to think you understand and can have an informed opinion on something neither you nor I nor a twentysomething engineer from Tesla know anything about is just as tiresome.
I’m only arguing that there are complex reasons why some of these programs exist and it requires experience and perspective to uncover that and make informed decisions.
I could see Sora having a significant negative impact on short form video products like TikTok if they don’t quickly and accurately find a way to categorize its use. A steady stream of AI generated video content hurts the value prop of short form video in more than one way… It quickly desensitizes you and takes the surprise out that drives consumption of a lot of content. It also of course leaves you feeling like you can’t trust anything you see.
Do people on the dopamine drip really care how real their content is? Tons and tons of it is staged or modified anyways. I'm not sure there's anything Real™ on TikTok anyways.
I think a lot of them actually do. It's easy to see TikTok users as mindless consumers, but the more you consume the more you develop a taste for unique content. Over the past few years the content that seems to truly do well at a global scale very often has markers of authenticity. Once something becomes easy to produce it becomes commonplace and you become sick of it quickly.
Thought the same. The human-generated content is just as brainless as the AI-generated slop. People who watched the first will also watch the latter. This will not change a lot, I think.
I mean, this is basically already status quo for YouTube Shorts. Tons and tons of shorts are AI-voice over either AI video or stock video covering some pithy thing in no actual depth, just piggybacking off of trending topics. And TikTok has had the same sort of content for even longer.
The "value" of short video content is already somewhat of a poor value proposition for this and other reasons. It lets you just obliterate time which can be handy in certain situations, but it also ruins your attention span.
As an Airbnb host I can just as quickly tell you stories of exploitative guests who are chronic abusers of the system, attempting to get refunds by threatening narratives like this that they know have the potential to get sympathy and traction with Airbnb or on social media. In almost all of these cases it ends up being one persons' word vs. another. An accusation is far from proof, but hosts most often stand to lose.
Of course, everyone comes from their own particular point of view and/or bias.
I'm a host. The POV I see this from is that of someone who pays close attention to the market and the changing perception of short term rentals. I've read far enough beyond the headlines to know that these accusations are very often not what they seem, and that this narrative is being blown way out of proportion considering how infrequently it actually happens.
The POV a sub-segment of NYT readers see this from is one of being righteous about short-term rentals (in theory at least.)
The POV of writers and editors at NYT is to respond to their readers' preferences.
It definitely depends on the nature of your work, but the notion of having a channel I need to check hourly makes me ill. If I’m needed I should get a notification, and if I’m involved in an active discussion, I’m there. Otherwise I’ll catch up on a daily basis.
