i saw this ALL the time at past employers. Employers higher all kinds of interns who eagerly get truck loads of work done and build great connections. and 2 years later the company is getting sold off, out of business, or mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

Interns getting “truck loads” of work done has not been my experience. Potted plant is a better metaphor.

> 99% of these software startups are basic software that can be handled by a single dev; see Reddit apps and such.

This sounds like specious reasoning, similar to the tired old interview question "how would you design Twitter".

Twitter is just a table in a RDBMS, isn't it right? Any fool implements that in an afternoon.

Except it isn't, and the actual complexity of real world software often lies in festures you are completely oblivious.

> you are completely oblivious.

Sounds like specious reasoning similar to the tired trope of "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".

Twitter is in the 1% not the "99% of these..." but don't let reading comprehension get in the way.

I was a phonics kid not a 3-cuing student. Reading scores have nose dived since phonics was phased out. So I understand it's not entirely your fault.

Twitter is not even in the 1%. In reality, Twitter scale problems are more like 1 in a million.

All of these companies feed their workers in their posh corporate cafeterias while the restaurants around their offices remain mostly empty

Big tech, sure, but not all the startups. I can assure you having freelanced and mentored many a SWE at 5-20 person startups the last 6 years they are not all hiring pro chefs.

Have you not been reading the headlines about urban offices empty? Low taxes to create foot traffic for other businesses?

The trickle down of the ZIRP era was about spreading all the dollars they could print as quickly as possible to maintain dominance of the dollar.

SaaS apps are meaningless to future generations. We were never creating pyramids of Egypt like wonders. We were missionaries for contemporary American propaganda.

>mass lay offs all over the place. what's the point of highering all those interns in the first place?? geez.

If you don't hire them, someone else can hire them. Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

Initially, you’ve got to starve out the market of talent to stop competition from growing by nipping the threat in the bud.

Future can pay for all of this if you succeed.

> Out of 1,000 you hire, one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

I have worked with people of this caliber. The company did nothing to retain them, and the company did not retain them.

Every time. Without fail.

I am part of Management in my company. We explicitly maintain a list of key people in the company we don’t want to lose. The truth is that just a few people are what makes a company. Lose them and you are in trouble. Some companies don’t seem to understand that, but perhaps after a certain size, it doesn’t matter anymore! The machinery just keeps turning.

Well how can they have the time or resources to invest in retaining talent? They're busy hiring more interns, where one could be an "attention all you need" research paper writer, who could set up the next stage of innovation which you'll completely miss if you do not get anyone.

I met a guy this happened to. He got a special award within the company, asked for a bit of equity, didn't get it, in fact got blacklisted and booted out.

Luckily for him it worked out very very nicely.

Yes. The intent is not to retain them or keep them happy, it's just to prevent them from doing inventive work for anyone else.

but we haven't even proven that AI will destroy vast amounts of jobs. Some, sure, junior software engineers are in trouble. but other then that, do we really have any quantified evidence as to how many jobs have been displaced by AI? i've been looking for numbers on this but it all seems murky and wishy washy. i'm open to be convinced, if anyone's got numbers.

also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.

>> Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them?

Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.

>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?

You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.

>[if] most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.

This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.

examples include: Great depression, third world countries like ghana, south africa, etc (and countries that have collapsed like syria), also the hazda tribe and other native tribes untouched by technology, as well as other similar to human mammalian species that share our planet like monkeys, apes, chenobos, all are able to survive without money albeit with more favorable climate/physiology.

I might not really understand this response - are you trying to justify a dystopia by describing how it can be literally survived? I.e. imminent physical death is your bar for where revolting is "allowed"? I'm reeling trying to understand how this can be what you're doing.

Because the parent accused you of acquiescence and you just replied with a list of examples to follow, I don't think you understood what they meant.

In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.

I quite like the websequencediagram. looks like a cool product!

He's mainly talking about the tech implementation which is the easy part.

the hard part of creating a business is finding a problem valuable enough to solve and reaching the users who need that problem solved. that's where the real value is.

This is the most frustrating problem I have. I do my 40 hours per week, play with my kids, relax with the wife, and play some video games. I don't really have any other problems besides not enough time in the day. And yet when I learn about some domain specific problem, it is blindingly obvious.

Yeah also pretty sure this product has tons of competitors like exaclidraw.

not just eventually. Its coming back to bite you now and for the last 10 years and the next 10 years. if you sell a house (and you're past the 500K exemption), or any kind of equities or gold, you're going to be a world of pain. Most of the "capital gains" aren't gains at all, it's just devaluation of the dollar. Let's say dollar devaluation is roughly 7% per year, that means you're paying 2% to 2.5% of your houses value every year in "capital gains" tax. sure, you don't pay it until you sell, but rest assured, it's accumulating. so 2M house means 40K to 50K per year! and if you think i'm overstating the 7%, just look at the case shiller housing index for the last 10 to 15 years!

and if you're holding cash or bonds, you're even worse off. even if the dollar is devaluing at just 7% per year, that's a 50% loss in just 10 years and that compounds to 75% loss after 20 years.

This! >> I'd assume this is largely because in the current information ecosystem, people don't understand what's in their economic interests.

It's wild that even renter's aren't voting for more housing. I think it's because basic economics isn't taught in k-12 or even college anymore and this is causing a lot of problems.

Of course, there are other solutions too, like starting new cities and incentivizing companies to move there in the beginning. People follow jobs, they have to, now more than ever. if companies move there, people will follow. How is that we used to be able to create new cities and yet now, we all the sudden can't. has our material wealth really dropped so low that we can't afford to build new cities?

and what about down-sizing? in hong kong, you could create bed sized units at a fraction of the cost of a full sized apartment. microapartments? etc? all NOT legal. i think it's wrong of the city to decide that for people. individuals should be able to decide whether they want that or not, rather than being forced onto the streets.

Many people are not driven entirely by their economic interests, thus you can see people wearing clothes not from the Walmart bargain bin, driving cars with electric windows, and eating out instead of cooking rice and beans at home. Renters, just like home owners, want to live in the most comfortable home they can afford in general.

People who lament the lack of rentable pods and don't understand why anyone would pay more for a bigger house in a quitter neighborhood or just for a nice view exist, but you are in the minority. Thus renters are not going to vote to live in a ghetto so they could save a few hundred on rent.

> It's wild that even renter's aren't voting for more housing. I think it's because basic economics isn't taught in k-12...

Teaching economics is not the solution (see papers on financial literacy). Rationality is hard and even highly educated people have terrible models of cause and effect. Even your own dependency analysis implies that voting for X helps to get Y (which hasn't been my personal experience).

for this reason i've moved away from google docs but still, if you ever loose access to gmail, you'll loose all your account verifications that go through that email. Sure, you could use another email provider but they also have their issues as well.

Is there any solution to that?

For accounts I really care about, I use my own domain. Granted it costs money, and is temporary only as long as I pay, but the “ownership” is a bit better defined by law from what I understand than most email accounts.

but once you finish that cabin, those property taxes will probably go up a huge amount, right?

i'm jealous. This is such a great idea, I wish i could do it.

Late to your comment but, yes, it will. I love telling people about it because it’s so crazy to me. I keep the bill on my desk when I need a smile haha.

One interesting thing about SE Oklahoma is the way people make deals with each other that don’t involve money. Idk if it comes from the majority of the state being Native American but there are handshake/barter deals all over the place. People seem reluctant to bring money to the deal, it’s always “I’ll do this for you if you can do that for me” type setups.