I’m so sick of “10x” everything. It’s almost always grossly overstated marketing bullshit. There are a lot more precise x’s, but everyone just rounds up and snaps to 10x. And the numbers aren’t even really ever truly measured. Thumb in the wind.
> Researchers have found between a low of 5 to 1 to a high of 100 to 1 ratios in programmer performance. This means
that programmers at the same level, with similar backgrounds and comparable salaries, might take 1 to 100 weeks to complete the same tasks. [21, p. 8]
> The ratio of programmer performance that repeatedly appeared in the studies investigated by Bill Curtis in the July/August 1990 issue of American Programmer was 22 to 1. This was both for source lines of code produced and for debugging times - which includes both defect detection rate and defect removal efficiency. [5, pp. 4 - 6] The NNPP also produces a higher instance of defects in the work product. Figure 1 shows the consequences of the NNPPs.
The reference to 21 is Shneiderman, Ben Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1980) and 5 is Curtis, Bill, "Managing the Real Leverage in Software Productivity and Quality", American Programmer July/August
1990
There's also mention of DeMarco and Lister in some literature... which means Peopleware.
From there:
> While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
> H. D. Mills, Software Productivity (New York: Dorset House Publishing, 1988), p. 266.
> Our study found that there were huge differences between the 92 competing organizations. Over the whole sample, the best organization (the one with the best average performance of its representatives) worked more than ten times faster than the worst organization. In addition to their speed, all competitors from the fastest organization developed code that passed the major acceptance test.
> This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences. They reasoned that the differences were innate, so you couldn’t do much about them. It’s harder to be fatalistic about the clustering effect. Some companies are doing a lot worse than others. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively.
In one of the book on "10x myth", the author bluntly states that there is no objective way to measure "productivity". So any such report is purely subjective. Its a fascinating argument. I don't remember the book, but this author had actually read the papers while researching and based his conclusion of the research papers
As far is reality is concerned, the differences between average and skilled can be as much as 100x or more. It can be even more if you consider that some people add negative productivity
This might have been “The Leprechauns of Software Development,” by Laurent Bossavit, which is one of my favorites. He digs into the sources behind a bunch of the popular sayings and determines that they’ve all been greatly exaggerated and/or misquoted.
I think the sad thing is its already massively overvalued and the only thing propping up the market is the ability to get more mortgages for longer creating servitude and debt bondage like you have never seen.
Do we think news outlets owned by the government or the “warm collective” would be any better at unbiased reporting or not disseminating fake news or unjust influence? Is there any organization or entity structure today that is trustworthy enough to even handle those sorts of organizations. It appears fraud is rampant in our government, so why trust them any more than some random dude? Frankly it seems the odds might be better with one random guy not being on the take.
I think the odds are better if it's not a random guy who also already has a bunch of power (e.g. Bezos with his considerable influence buying up and weaponizing WaPo). I personally think that consolidation of power is a reasonable thing to prevent. I'm not sure how you could block someone like Zuckerberg who started his own new media, other than the government, which as you pointed out has its own issues.
Historically news outlet run as public service (with sufficient guardrails for autonomy) such as the BBC, PBS, France Television, Arte (naming only those I know well) have produce much better news coverage than the privately owned ones.
OTOH the concept of independent public institution and general checks and balances seems to have been entirely forgotten, so maybe that's not a solution for 21st century.
An alternative would be communally owned media (50/50 by readership and journalists), with simple direct tax incentive to fund them (equal amounts of $ per person)
Having first hand experience of all of the named public services, I beg to differ heavily.
These corporations tend to be heavily left-leaning, with no real guardrails preventing this. The consequence is pretty biased coverage, under the guise of a "trust-us, we are here for the greater good".
Look at the handling of Middle-East by BBC, the Zucman tax at France Television, or the current allegations of fraud in some communities in the US.
My current take is that it is really hard to get a fair unbiased coverage, unless you actually state that you will strive to hire and promote both sides. If these corporations had to publish the composition/promotion/pay of their newsroom across the political spectrum (as they do for example by gender), you may start to have fair unbiased coverage. But many journalists working there see it as their job to describe "not the reality as it happens, but rather as it ought to be" (to quote the CEO of France Television). We should acknowledge that people are biased, and measure the balance of biases rather than assert there is no bias because they serve the greater good.
Public interest stories are left-leaning only in that they tend to oppose the wielders of centralized power, and centralized power is generally a right-leaning construct.
That's objectively true. They're center-left or center-right. They're certainly not democratic socialists (who are the barest left of the left). The parent is complaining that there is some objectivity at all in liberal/center-right media, that it isn't calling for pure repression by force of middle eastern people and recognizes they sometimes suffer from aggression in ways that are understandable to human beings.
None of these outlets object to this repression being meted out, they only care that it is done in a way that is respectable. A left wing take would criticize the imperialist nature of these wars of aggression and genocide and examine the economic, class, and other social dimensions that cause these events to occur and call for a social revolution via means that are electoral or otherwise. A left-leaning liberal take would say something like "man it's crazy they don't respect the UN charter or even US laws". This should give some objective sense for how rightward our discourse has been drawn.
I'll be honest, I'm not an expert on this, and I don't have a perfect solution. I just think we should try to do something, even if it's not perfect.
There are some professions with codes of conduct. Some are internal, some ar legislated (i.e. fiduciary duty for lawyers, financial advisors, etc). We also have some concepts like public utility and public interest. Maybe we should look there (again, ask the experts I'm sure there are people who study this for a living). Maybe slowly bring in duties for "public interest" related fields. Maybe at the management level. Maybe come up with ownership structures that decouple power from financial incentives (a la voting shares vs. normal shares) and impose them for such businesses.
I fully agree with you that gov ownership of media would be a disaster. I'm not proposing that in any way. Just ... better ways to do it than we do today.
What about all the AI meeting recording bots that are constantly joining meetings (sometimes even privileged communications in legal matters) or those where two party consent isn’t given? It seems like just nobody cares that this is an issue and it’s becoming acceptable to just violate confidentiality, privilege, and recording laws because “convenience.”
I can’t even use Paramount+ at home. Have network wide ad and tracking filters on (simple NextDNS presets, nothing crazy), and while others work, Paramount+ doesn’t. Makes me wonder what they are doing to get blocked. Kind of wish neither were getting WB.
I've had the same issue and go so far as to remove the streaming stuff from my Pihole to make sure it wasn't a DNS filtering issue. Paramount+ app still is sketchy as hell sometimes. Usually won't work on my AppleTV, but works on phones and stuff.
Do you think they currently exist to prioritize AI safety? That shit won’t pay the bills, will it? Then they don’t exist. Goals are nice, OKRs yay, but at the end of the day, we all know the dollar drives everything.
It's simple, they will redefine the term (just like OpenAI redefined "AGI" into "just makes a lot of money) into "doesn't leak user data" and then claim success
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