>>That is to reduce their populations through sanctions, blockades, starvation and outright war.
Speaking as Indian, Our population growth happened when we were poor, and masses were uneducated/illiterate.
I have one more theory that- Population growth happens when poor people have access to lots of carbohydrates. Plus having lots of children is somewhat akin to having meat robot automatons whom you can send for physical work and make money.
If you want to use sanctions to do reduce population it doesn't work in the modern era. Poor people eat well and make babies.
>>If top is bunch of sloppy clowns, whole company is going to be the same.
This happens so often at big companies as well. Management is always assumed to be correct, and the pay grade argument always kicks in(They are paid more because you are beneath them). And this starts to show up everywhere. You can't take any initiative without sanction from the top, and they are often clueless as to what the ask is. Most of the times its rejected just to assert authority, and not on the grounds of merit.
Top bosses are also very envious and proactively trying to kill rising talent out of fear- people better than them, will replace them. To that end no good thing ever happens, if you push too hard you will be eliminated in interest of self preservation.
So by and large no good thing is ever suggested, or tried or happens. Eventually until whole business(es) die out. This happens in every company, no matter what companies claim about hiring, retaining and promoting talent. This is just how every place works.
I was casually chatting with my uncle who is a doctor, he says something along the lines that if a chemical can kill a rat or a mosquito, to assume it won't do any damage to humans is kind of hilarious.
Of course humans who inhale this thing in small quantities won't die, but you can be sure they will kill some tissues that they go into. Now comes another problem of regular exposure, and these chemicals having an entry, but no exit path. That just means there are tissues, that are likely dying out every time there is a exposure.
Again none of this might kill you at the first exposure, but if there are enough dead tissues, there sure is likely to be things like Parkinson's or may be even diabetes.
Im guessing combined with this, if you already some bad genetics it could cause issues like these.
>>lots of quality (to me) content that I find educational (history, science) and entertaining.
This seems to be a tug of war- that is- information vs distraction
I remember in the 1990s India it was quite common to view kids from homes that had TV/Cable TV as kids who were bad at academics, and distracted without focus.
OTOH, as time passed people realised those kids had better english speaking skills, vocabulary and general awareness of the world. So extreme focus didn't quite work out as well as people though it would.
In the modern context I know quite a few people with laser sharp productivity and get lots of work done. But here's what 'wasting' time on Twitter has led me down rabbit holes in the Stock market that has opened up newer earning opportunities. So its not as simple as saying social media is distracting.
Extreme focus does work when your work is individually measured and judged. And the pay off is immense. Other wise you are better off doing something to keep the wheels spinning while finding more things that can be rewarding.
Pretty much.
People seem to think progress is linear and need razor-sharp focus on a single thing at once.
I don't think it's the case at all; in fact, most good things seem to have come from mistakes or luck.
>>I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards.
Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks.
Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
I remember managers asking Java programmers how much time it would take to get something done, and get timelines on months and years. They would come to us Perl programmers and get it done in a week.
The era didn't last long. I would joke around our team saying, ideally a Java programmer with 10 years experience was somewhat like like a Perl programmer with 1 year experience. This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone.
> Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
Do you not? The pace of anthropic/Claude tool development is pretty bonkers, AI hype reminds me of the 90s a lot.
>This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone
I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :
My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.
There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.
The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.
So, your comment rang a bell.
Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.
Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned
>>In tech a customer with an annual contact value of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars will get a dedicated team of sales reps
In many Indian outsourcing firms, they permanently place a 'program manager' at big client's offices. Like for eg- Bank of America.
These managers also get a unlimited American express card, to spend on lunches, outings etc. You are expected to build 'relationships' so that when a project is needed to be won, you are just a call away from making it happen.
This is because a good percentage of the sales, projects, staffing, profits come from these big clients.
Looks like the complaining and protesting on Twitter helped, even if was serious, and some just memes. Somethings to note-
1. Most Indian bureaucracy is clueless about tech things, and just goes by whatever somebody who sounds like techy enough is selling them. Which in this case I'm guessing is a data mining company/lobby.
2. The information derived can be used for various purposes. Plotting election trends, economics, spotting general trends pro/against politics and other nefarious causes. etc.
3. Spying.
4. Using information to go after political opponents.
5. Demographic targeting, which in Indian context almost always means a pogrom against groups, which other groups don't like.
6. Selling data to commercial entities for better targeting, or even social engineering buying choices etc.
There could be many others. But its kind of nice that it was taken back. Having said this, it will be pushed again at some point when people are busy with a crisis and this will be sold as a fix.
That and of course- If you are using a tool to solve a problem. Your focus should be on the problem. If you are spending more time fixing or inventing the tool, than spending time solving the problem, then you are better off using a paid tool which takes care of all that helping you focus on the problem.
Google offers so many things free out of the box. And for serious spreadsheet sort of work, I use numpy.
Google pretty much won the Office software war.
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