It's not a binary between "we are family" and "we are resources", it's a spectrum.
In your case, yes, you were absolutely a resource. This is exactly why companies of that size simply shouldn't exist - because they cannot not treat their employees as resources, with all the inhumanity this implies.
Yes because a small company could deliver a national same day shipping infrastructure and worldwide network of cloud servers including its own undersead cables.
And again, work is a transaction. I’m perfectly fine with being treated as a resource when I was getting a quarter million a year and working remotely…
I'm okay with not having same day shipping if this means that companies don't have to treat their employees like dirt.
But, more importantly, a company that large is simply too much concentrated economic power (which then translates to political power). Even if it was all just robots, I'd still say no. Our political system is in shambles in large part because of these kinds of entities.
So exactly what “power” does Amazon have over your life?
Our politics is in shambles because of religious nutcases, anti science, anti intellectuals, who are afraid of the country becoming majority-minority and straight out racism and bitterness.
It's older than 20 years, but not needing to collect sales tax was definitely a big benefit for Amazon (and other ecommerce providers) and presumably involved lobbying to keep it for as long as possible.
That wasn’t based on lobbying, it was the law at first and Amazon took advantage of it.
Amazon didn’t have any significant lobbying 20 years ago and it definitely was the behemoth it is today. That being said, even today it isn’t as large as Walmart and was definitely not a large retailer back then.
It was seriously in doubt 20 years ago whether Amazon would ever survive and definitely wasn’t consistently profitable.
In some countries, eBay or craigslist was never a thing. In NZ we have our local version of eBay but the success fees have gotten so ridiculously high that FB marketplace is slowly becoming the only option.
In Poland Allegro takes the most dominant role. It started as a simple auctions site 26 years ago and now it's a big e-commerce platform with additional classifieds, price comparison engine and consumer credit, tickets marketplace services. In last years they enter Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary - mostly by acquisition of existing sites and services.
The last attempt of slice out what Allegro managed to grab by the largest IT company have failed. Comarch which exists since '93 and has branches in 32 countries couldn't withstand Allegro dominance at home and their wszystko.pl service closed after only 7 months.
So amazon is not that much popular here - the force of habit for buying on Allegro works against Bezos' company. They enter too late, offered not much at the start and often products descriptions were poorly machine translated. There was even a picture that ran for a while around our part of the Internet where some Nigerian economy book title due to this translation mishap become really offensive.
I came here to say this. TradeMe, New Zealand’s homegrown eBay, charges ridiculous amounts to sell items. And essentially zero customer service.
They have cornered the market in auto and housing (including rentals) but are losing out on general goods. I know a lot of people who don’t even bother looking at TradeMe anymore to buy, let alone sell.
I can’t remember when I last logged into my TradeMe account.
I encourage you to listen to the 4 part series Elon Musk Unmasked [1] from Tech won't save us.
His motivations are definitely not for the betterment of the average person.
But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.
Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.
I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)
My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.
Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.
One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."
I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).
But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.
> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.
Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?
If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?
Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?
> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.
> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.
I use Firefox sync between all my devices including mobiles Android and iPhone, plus EndeavourOS, popOS and MacOs.
In addition to that I use the tabs stash extension which also syncs all stashes between devices, though I only use that on the desktops/laptops
Your claims here are inaccurate. You can pass flags or define environment variables to get the behavior you want. Please spend some more time hitting the man pages and the guide.
> It indeed does not enforce (or even permit) robust isolation between the containers and the host, leaving large portions exposed. … More in detail, directories as the /home folder, /tmp, /proc, /sys, and /dev are all shared with the host, environment variables are exported as they are set on host, the PID namespace is not created from scratch, and the network and sockets are as well shared with the host. Moreover, Singularity maps the user outside the container as the same user inside it, meaning that every time a container is run the user UID (and name) can change inside it, making it very hard to handle permissions.
I actually went into every single line of the manuals and even discussed the matter on the official Singularity Slack.
In that blog post I wrote that it does not enforce. It is true that you can achieve some level of isolation by setting certain flags and environment variables explicitly, but this is (was?) quite hard to get working, moreover the user mapping inside the container is always host-dependant and there is just no network isolation.
To achieve something close to the behaviour "I wanted", I had to use a combination of the command line flags you mentioned (and in particular -cleanenv, -containall and -pid) together with custom-made, ad-hoc runtime sandboxing for directories which required write access (as /tmp and /home).
However, this is not the default behaviour and it is not how Singularity is used in practice by its users. But yes, I was able to achieve something close to the behaviour I wanted [1].
This said, if I am missing something, or if the project has evolved to allow for a better level of isolation by default, please let me know. That blog post is dated 2022 after all.
I agree to a certain level. However, it's hard to ensure dependencies to work in the right way without isolation. These two support tickets are a showcase of the essence of the problem: "Same container, different results" [1] and "python3 script fails in singularity container on one machine, but works in same container on another" [2]. In my experience with Singularity, there were many issues like these.
I am not sure why they had to call it a "containerization" solution. It gets a bit philosophical, but IMO containers are meant to "contain", not to just package. To me, Singularity is more a "virtual environment on steroids", and it works great in that sense. But it doesn't "contain".
The hard truth is that Singularity was designed more to address a cultural problem in the HPC space (adoption friction and push back of new, "foreign" technologies) rather than to engineer a proper solution the the dependency hell problem.
HPC clusters still use Linux users and shell access, meaning that it is up to the user to run the container: there is just no container orchestration. This means that the user has to issue a command like "singularity run" or "docker run". And since not long time ago, to let users do a "docker run" it meant to have them part of the docker group, which is a near-root access group. Just not doable.
Singularity also works more or less out of the box with MPI in order to run parallel workloads, either locally on multi-nodes. However, this has a huge price as it relies on doing an "mpi singularity run", and it requires to have the same MPI version inside and outside the container. To me, this is this is more a hacky shortcut than a reliable solution.
I believe that the definitive solution in the HPC word will be to let HPC queuing systems to run and orchestrate containers on behalf of the users (including to run MPI workloads), thus allowing to make use of any container engine or runtime, including Docker. I did some trials and it works well, almost completely solving the dependency hell problem and greatly improving scientific reproducibility. A solution like the one presented in the OP contributes in the discussion towards this goal, and I personally welcome it.
With respect to Singularity, I think they just had to name the project "singularity environments" rather than "singularity containers" and everything would have been much more clear.
At the risk of showcasing my bubble: Lack of exposure; how many people even know what singularity is or how to use it? I know it's used in scientific HPC, but I don't see evidence of wider adoption.
I think it is a few things together. The rootless and daemonless design leads to UX differences with Docker. Because of the differences, it isn't just a drop in replacement; porting applications can be a pain if they do anything weird (no network isolation, --containall isn't default and still is a bit different when on, etc). And Docker has a ton of momentum and usage.
Since no one mentioned it yet, I quite like Endeavour OS the i3 flavour. You get all the Arch goodies with a straightforward installer. And I use nix + yay for package management.
I'm surprised no one mentioned it, but smooshing up a soft avocado mixing it with a small amount of Marmite then spreading it on toast is godlike. Top it with a poached egg and it's perfection.
As an American I was baffled by marmite/vegemite until an Englishman finally explained to me your not supposed to eat it like peanut butter. A small amount mixed with anything savory is delicious. It’s basically msg, salt, and B vitamins.
