I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
In reading the article, it did feel somewhat wrong in a way that I couldn't quite describe. But after reading this comment, maybe it just seems old and maybe obsolete.
Taking the example provided in the article, I don't feel like the new code is meaningfully less complex. In fact, since it added some additional indirection, I could argue it's slightly more complex.
The core code with the nested if statements is something that I would probably refactor in some other way entirely. Maybe by taking advantage of other language features. It is a toy example so it's hard to say but that's part that feels like it needs simplification and untouched in this example.
Agreed. I also don’t really agree that the refactored code is any easier to test. ProcessOrder’s behavior hasn’t changed, only its implementation details, so the minimal test surface is the same for both: just test ProcessOrder.
You could additionally test the three helper functions. But the original tests against ProcessOrder would still be needed for completeness, so they wouldn’t necessarily add much except in an Uncle Bob style, “He who dies with the largest burden of gratuitous micro-tests wins,” sort of way.
Now if I really wanted to make that code easier to test, I’d instead be looking into ways to make the whole thing less stateful. Temporal coupling is much more confusing than if statements.
> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
100% agree. I understand the argument around the "fun" of programming and learning. But my joy from coding (especially when working 9-5, on a team of 5-500 people) always came from the value creation for other people and for society.
AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.
My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.
However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.
I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.
> my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
You need both. You really need both. A salesman to keep the craftsman from getting too bogged down in details to ever finish, and the craftsman to keep the salesman from ever lowering quality too much that customers start seeing the company as money grubbing misers trying to make a quick buck.
It only works with both. Too much of one and you sink.
This can be seen time and again in successful endeavours. (Apple, Microsoft, Google, star wars, honestly so many movies, moon landings, the list could go on)
I don't think you really are struggling to understand, you just don't agree.
Some people genuinely enjoy the process of thinking hard about a problem and writing the code that solves it.
Literally the entire "flow" of coding has changed. It's now about parallel agent management and testing, less about any actual writing of code. Even thinking hard about problems has been reduced due to how insanely good AI has gotten.
The other side of this equation is the people who now pump out socks for pennies. You can get what you’re advocating for but it means software development becoming something closer to sweat shops.
I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.
I'm, like, 99% sure I am dyslexic. So, I might be the worst example of spoken and written language usage possible.
Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.
I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.
That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.
The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things.
In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship.
The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.
I made this point earlier in the comments, but I think the main difference between Minecraft and No Man's Sky is that Minecraft does not push the players towards specific gameplay systems, while No Man's Sky does, making No Man's Sky feel much less like a box of legos and more like a collection of specific tasks/activities.
I think biggest issue is that you are not constrained to single world. But instead directed to be mostly directionless... Some players just feel no reason to comeback. Where as with Minecraft being in single world you are more forced to comeback to various locations you build things in.
I'm not sure where that "again" comes from. IBM has never been good a product and everybody is looking at OS/2 through glasses so rose tinted that they're essentially blind. The PC itself was a skunk-works project that was removed from their influence as soon as the rest of company got involved.
Not so much rose-colored glasses, but in comparison to MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows, 32-bit OS/2 was a dream.
Native application support was limited, and it was even less of a pure 32-bit OS than Windows 95, but for about a year it was the only game in town if you wanted to run 16-bit Windows applications with preemptive multitasking and memory protection, and still had some advantages over NT when it shipped.
I don't remember all the details, but I recall not switching to NT full-time until 3.5, and even then the UI wasn't as nice.
That's true, and it's also one of those factoids that everybody already knows but certain people can't help themselves from bringing up every time it's even tenuously relevant.
The fact that it was the top comment only shows that people agreed or liked it, not that it was actually valuable, accurate, or useful. Popularity and value aren't the same thing, correlation is not causation, etc, etc...
Most observational studies do in fact account for the first thing a random HN poster can come up with 5 seconds after reading the title. So there is very little value in such a comment.
This was published in Nature, I'm pretty sure the reviewers understand and account for that. HN and reasonably educated people always think this is some huge gotcha, second only to "CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!!"
Nature isn't an arbiter of truth, it's a publisher of papers. It's also meant to be read critically by people who see a paper like this and and think "interesting, but this is just an observational study, I'd like to see more research, maybe something with more controls before I believe this".
Say what you want about the "correlation doesn't imply causation", but many people do not understand why that is. As a shorthand for "hey, you don't know the statistics behind this, so don't take the pretty picture at face value", it's pretty good.
Regardless, it would be even more expensive without reductions in staffing. It's not like they could be hiring twice as many employees at half the cost each and are just choosing not to. Fast food is a highly competitive market.
May 'annual profit' continue to be the only measure that has mattered, does matter, or will ever matter to those that bask in the radiance of perpetual earning growth!
You may have no memory of it, but there was a time when many American corporations had different, broader values. The structure of the present is not necessary or inevitable.
Did they really have broader values or did they just not have the technical sophistication to optimize their operation to this level? Where "values" just a substitute for more limited information?
I think computers have made the structure of the present inevitable.
The founders [1] of mcdonalds probably did care about say cheaply providing people with enjoyable food. But I would bet soon after they sold [2] the company the actual values changed and definitely a bunch of CEOs down the road the guy put in charge is there for shareholder return.
I personally don't think it's computers. It's unfettered corperatization. Stop giving companies corporate charters to "do all business activities allowed by X state" and instead give them more narrow charters.
Richard and Maurice McDonald had a small business that almost certainly wouldn't even be around today if they didn't sell to Ray Kroc. The McDonald's we know is a corporation. Corporatization is the process of turning government agencies, public services, or non-business organization into corporations. A more broad interpretation would be applying corporate philosophy to non-corporate things.
McDonald's is already a corporation -- corporatization doesn't apply.
If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
>If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!
You don't need to tell me anything. Nor vic2 versa. You don't fight a corporation with reasoned debate, you need more broad tools. Customer demand. Regulations. Competition.
The big mistake here is trying to desensitize the people into thinking they have no power.
Incorporation was a special privilege the government granted, not a right, so anyone who wanted to form a corporation had to convince the government to pass a law just for them allowing them to do it. Saying "I want to make as much money as possible, to hell with everyone and everything that stands in my way" wasn't going to cut it. Basically every corporation was doing some kind of public service. Maybe they didn't have any values beyond stuffing their pockets with cash, but they had to at least convincingly portray themselves as having broader goals and keep up that act well enough that the government didn't take their charter from them.
Many early corporations were ordinary profit-seeking businesses. Manufacturing, in particular, were increasingly incorporated simply to conduct private enterprise, and states began passing general incorporation statutes for manufacturers quite early in the 19th century.
The special-charter system wasn't some golden age of corporations being held accountable to society. One of the reasons states abandoned special chartering was because it became associated with favouritism, lobbying, monopoly privileges and corruption. Legislators had something valuable to hand out, so connected businesses could seek preferential charters. General incorporation laws were partly an anti-corruption reform.
Thank goodness it's no longer at the whim of the ruler of the moment. Trump can only threaten FCC licenses of broadcast companies, not corporate charters of every industry.
Arguably, there were different values in effect in the past.
There was more emphasis on values like: God-as-god. Country. Family. Courage. Integrity.
The newer values are more like: Money-as-god. Survival. Cats. Dopamine maxxing.
I may get downvoted for mentioning religion in the context of a question about values. But to bring data into it, it's reportedly a fact that "None" [0] as a dominant religious self-identity is indeed a newer/increased phenomenon. It would be hard to argue thats that's not a clear measure of shift in values.
Its called social shaming and its still a thing in other countries. Even for a CEO. This very much is a cultural issue and not an unhalting inevitability of capitalism.
Yes. The people that make up that corporation should care about their fellow man (family, friends) and should take pride in making good things (personal fulfillment).
Their workers, customers, and probably some local governments. They might even say it themselves at times.
> How does this compare to what you do for a living?
I make video games. There's always some sausage but I like to think I'm helping to bring joy and spark creativity, not simply make a billionaire richer.
Given my lack of full time work, I'm at least sure these last few years I'm not doing the latter directly.
Really think about it for a second; $8.5 billion in profit. That's an insane amount of money. How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way? Not that the government would spend the extra tax revenue wisely. Instead, what if they took $1 billion of that to increase the pay of the lowest earning employees significantly while not increase the highest earners at all, or paying 100% of health care (medical, dental, vision, and mental), or any of the other things to help improve employee relationships. Then, start focusing on the external things that could be directly improved by taking less profit to improve things for those so much is taken. That's still $7.5 billion in profit.
> How many companies with that kind of profit are actively dodging taxes from aggressive accounting, getting deals with local governments, or any other way?
I don't think it's fair to imply that McDonald's is doing anything shady. They have over 2 million workers (although not directly, it's a franchise model). They make a lot of profit but, proportional to the total workforce, it's about average. Hardly something to be outraged about.
If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
The underlying implication here is whether companies should make any profit at all. If the amount of profit allowed is non-zero, what is the correct number? And if there is a correct number, what do you propose to do about it?
I’m sorry, was your problem with the implementation of a theoretical lowering of profits for McDonald’s that would result in $500 per employee or your original argument I responded to implying that $500 per employee was immaterial?
I want to make sure I’m kicking my field goal at the right goal post before you move them.
I never stated I had a problem. The original poster seemed almost offended that McDonald's made a "large" profit. So my question is, what is the correct amount of profit that company should make? And, conversely, what happens if a company has losses?
As for whether employees should make more money, I'm definitely not against that. Seems to me, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation would be a good start.
I replied to this paragraph that was a subset from your original post
> If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.
I responded by saying this, which was the entirety of my post
> The average American, which McDonald’s workers are on the low end side, can’t handle a 500 dollar emergency.
500 dollars a year to every worker would make a material difference in most of their lives.
You responded with this entire post
> Ok. Lets do it. Tell me how?
Was I misunderstanding something? I am fully guilty of responding to a misconceived strawman, or mistaking one poster for another on this site so I have no problem if that’s what occurred.
If what I laid out as the state of responses is however the state of reality than I want to know what specifically you are asking so we can stick to one argument and not weave past each other.
I'm not offended. I'm just thinking of how large $8.5 billion is and what could be done with some of that profit while still keeping a shit ton of profit. It's not like I suggested spending $8.25 billion, I just suggested a measly $1 billion, maybe $2b
Call your representative and push for such legislatio. join a labor coalition in your area, Be it a union, a special interests group, etc. If they can get a local bill to petition, help get signature gathered and donations raised.
Do this for some 3-10 years and there will start to be national movements and pressure for federal bills addressing this. Assuming we don't just kowtow to fascism as we are now in my country.
I probably do not live in your region, so you'll need to look up your relevant organizations. Which would include existing bills and proposal that can already save a lot of legwork.
My main thesis here is that this isn't something you have to (nor can) do alone. And there are others who probably already have the ball rolling. Joining a larger cause can create a better effect than creating a narrative in your head that corporations are all powerful and paid off your representatives.
This is meaningless because it's entirely hypothetical. If McDonald's is only looking at quantitative data the "bad outcome" hasn't come for them. It seems quite successful in fact (especially in these tough economic times). Maybe if leads to a massive failure we can come back and revisit this but for now, based on facts, it's working just fine for them.
People like to believe that enshitifying everything will eventually lead to failure because sucks for us. It does suck for us. But I'm not convinced that karma is coming for them.
So if I make $0.10 of profit, all my decisions are validated?
What if we knew that Maccas could have made $20 billion, but ignoring qualitative data reduced their profits to $8.563 billion. Do those decisions still look smart?
Still doesn't look like it is hurting them, but to put it in perspective that's a 4% increase in profit, while 2025 inflation was around 2.5%. Closer to a 1.5% gain in real terms.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
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