> Approximately 95% of the engineering work was done by Lyapsus. Lyapsus improved an incomplete kernel driver, wrote new kernel codecs and side-codecs, and contributed much more. I want to emphasize his incredible kindness and dedication to solving this issue. He is the primary force behind this fix, and without him, it would never have been possible.
> I (Nadim Kobeissi) conducted the initial investigation that identified the missing components needed for audio to work on the 16IAX10H on Linux. Building on what I learned from Lyapsus's work, I helped debug and clean up his kernel code, tested it, and made minor improvements. I also contributed the solution to the volume control issue documented in Step 8, and wrote this guide.
I really enjoyed using CherryTree on top of Git with automatic commit and sync. Getting readable diffs (via using XML as an output format) is meaningful.
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.
Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.
So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.
The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
The more important thing it does though is remove culpability from the employee who doesn't have a job anymore. That person will be looking for a job (we assume, perhaps a few will just retire or something else). The companies they apply at will want to know why they no longer work at Amazon - there is a big difference between "I was sexually harassing my coworkers" (pick a crime, sexual harassment seems to be the big one these days), and "Amazon decided they didn't need my job done any more".
The owner of the employer company just experienced a vacation in space, renting an entire European country for a wedding, etc.
Some employees are going to experience losing their housing. Losing their health benefits while sick. Children will be moved from their friends/schools. Some will lose their careers as they won't find new related work quick enough and will have to take whatever they can get for their next job.
Those are unrelated, the same would happen regardless if it was owned by millions via their pension plans or a few billionaires, both are equally greedy and immediately move their investments for 1% higher returns, the CEO's at these companies are servants to that inhuman level of greed that comes from dissociated masses of people being owners.
Funny, every company prior to around 2010 the owners felt the pain of the employees and were seen as at least partially human. Sure post 2010 an anti-societal cohesion element of 'maximum extraction now' has taken over the ownership and political classes trying to speedrun societal breakdown/collapse, but that was not the norm or acceptable (you would have even be ostracized from the ownership/capital class) for all of my life prior to 2010.
And said greed (by both founder and shareholders) produced a company that so enriched them BY BEING FAVORED BY BILLIONS(!) of customers worldwide to provide access to range goods with a convenience, price, and speed experienced only by the wealthy just a few years earlier :).
Yes the wealthy, famous for their love of cheap 'from China to the landfill' goods and life risking fake fuses, counterfeit Calvin Klein underwear, and supplements spiked with hidden drugs or that are just plain toxic.
I am confuse. I don't know how much Amazon cares about what's sold on their site (probably more than eBay?), but they have most liberal return policy on the internet, and from the one seller I've personally met, they're hard on vendors.
Bad products and services exists in all markets, choice is the cure.
Is it Amazon branded products your upset with? I guess don't buy them? I genuinely do not understand your argument.
Most all will answer whether or not it was "with cause" if someone calls them up, though? Specifically because they have to if the caller is about unemployment, no?
Most employers won't confirm the reason for termination with random callers who are verifying employment history.
Unemployment insurance is a bit different. When a former employee files for unemployment benefits then the state will notify the last employer, and that employer can dispute the claim if the termination was for cause. In practice many employers don't dispute unemployment claims even for employees whom they terminated for performance reasons because it's not worth the hassle.
The rate that employers pay for unemployment insurance is tied to the number of claims. While they wouldn't dispute in bulk for layoffs, it is worth the hassle when it's for cause.
I confess this surprises me. I didn't think they had to give specific details, but I thought they had to at least confirm whose decision it was for the termination.
In most cases when a company wants to fire someone they will first pull them into an office and tell them they are allowed to submit their resignation right now. If this happens it is normally best for you to accept that offer as then they will say you left in good standing. At least this way you can find a new job.
There is the possible exception that you already have enough evidence that you were going to sue them anyway, then you can take that you were fired to your lawyer (you should already have a lawyer and gotten their advice on the situation). However I don't think this has ever been the case for anyone.
The other exception is when the police are there and will arrest you as part of firing you. I'm not aware of this happening, but it seems like it probably has at some point (like once per decade across all jobs in the world)
No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
It’s in old company best interest for you to get a new job because jobless people start talking to lawyers when they get desperate.
>No, don’t resign instead of getting terminated. The reason they offer that is gets them off the hook for unemployment and makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
Depends on whether they're offering something, otherwise yeah it's worse for you unless you suspect they have evidence of you embezzling company funds or something.
> makes any lawsuit harder. It’s 100% upside to company.
That is why they do it. However you still should accept the offer unless you are going to sue them which most are not. Just find a new job and move on. Try to do better.
> No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
The good standing is not something you want to risk. They have the ability to say not in good standing and might even have the obligation to say that to some people (depending on local laws, but if it wasn't in good standing it is at least unethical to say it was). By resigning first everyone agrees that it was in good standing and you all move on (even though you are clearly cutting the line).
Again, this assumes that like most people you won't be suing. Likely you know you screwed up (though perhaps you don't agree it is bad enough to be fired). For most it just isn't worth trying to fight it out. If you are an exception than by all means refuse - but be prepared for the consequences.
Companies rarely answer "Eligible for rehire" or "Departed in Good Standing" because that's lawsuit bait, at least in the United States. Companies don't answer questions about your employment because companies have gotten sued and lost unless they have clear evidence.
Worrying about company asking "Good standing" is like when Elementary Teacher talking about your permanent record. It does not exist.
I'm fine with the idea that they won't share specifically that they fired someone for a specific reason. The surprising part, to me, is that they can't share if it was company's decision to end the relationship. My understanding was that if you just up and quit, then you don't qualify for unemployment benefits.
And I hasten to add that I'm fine being wrong on this point. Surprise can last a bit, though. :D
What they tell unemployment can be different from random "companies". Large companies have a policy of only given dates worked and "left in good standing" (or rarely not - but not is something they can be sued for and so rarely given because best case it will cost them half a million in lawyers fees if they win in court)
Companies don't have to answer any questions about your employment, they are just nice about it.
Whose decision could reveal something about employee and if employee thinks it's bullshit, that's defamation lawsuit possibility. I even know companies who bosses talk good about people they have fired because having ex-employee stew is not good. Get them a new job and move on.
Ehh I got fired once, the new hiring manager would have to know the manager I reported to be able to find out. I actually had a different manager at the same company ask me if I was interested in coming back becasue he didn't know a different manager fired me.
You need to be memorable enough too.
Backchanel is not really a real concern unless you did something really fucked up.
When employers do a reference check, the reference has a choice of:
1) Sticking to the legally safe answer of only confirming dates
OR
2) Confirm dates and share a few anecdotes about how the person was good to work with
If a previous employer chooses only to confirm dates, and refuses to answer any other questions, it's often a way of signaling something bad went down but you can't talk about it.
"culpability" is also purposefully loaded. It's not wrong for a company to decide that certain jobs are no longer needed. How they handle that could be more or less considerate of the human impact, but there's really no way to do it that won't cause some some upset to the terminated employee.
>It's also a total gut-punch to employees. "We had a great quarter!... not a good enough though, so GTFO"
If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? If a textile mill is making record profits because of new textile machinery, would you consider it reasonable for the business to keep the old workers around, even though they're not needed anymore? Yes, it always sucks to lose a job, but I don't see how Amazon did them dirty or even broke some sort of informal contract.
They absolutely didn't. It's within Amazon's legal rights to cut as many employees as they like for any reason (besides a protected one).
With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
In my opinion, chasing ever increasing profitability as a tech company is cannibalizing future earnings. By cutting over and over in pursuit of more profit, you are trading compound earnings (ie: create new products) for money today by injecting fear into your 'innovation centers'.
>With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
So going back to the textile mill example above, what should the owner do? Keep the workers around even though they're not needed until the next recession, and only then fire them? If it's a particularly profitable industry, it might even still be profitable even with a recession, so is amazon on the hook for decades, until there's some sort of industry-wide crisis (think the one that hit the American auto industry in 2008), and by then it's too late because upstarts without the burden of older employees have already overtaken them?
They should cut people when they have a down quarter, a project fails and there is no where for those people to transfer to, or poor performance.
Tossing people out as a giant tech company after a profitable quarter is non-sense. They have money to be innovative, why are they choosing not to push that back into more attempts at products.
People expect bad news if the company gets bad news. If a company cuts after good news, people are going to lose faith in either their truthfulness (ie: are they cooking the books), their loyalty to employees, or both.
>If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect?
Sure.
Too bad I don't take it at face value and know this is just more outsourcing that's smokescreened under AI. Just check their hiring in earnings calls and see if that's actually going down. Amazon did them dirty and lied about why they aren't needed.
I dunno, I got used to the weekly beatings. You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays.
I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands.
If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
If you truly believe the best people are not layed off from corporations, you must be extremely young and just starting out. Corporations are a lot less rational than you imply
>You could arque that if you understand what brings the most business value and deliver that repeatedly, you're pretty safe from being fired and arguably you'd know how to run your own business if needed.
It's not the 2010's anymore. You're not fired because you did a bad job or even because you weren't productive enough. You're fired in a larger cultural wave to try and remove American labor from the American economy as they push everything overseas and pretend it's about "efficiency with AI". Nothing is hiring outside of hospitality right now.
>you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
Hope you have generational wealth. Otherwise that "capitalist" position is you delivering doordash just to survive.
> purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs.
Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."
And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
There is enough people who don’t read articles just headlines whose world view can be changed with this.
In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.
Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
If a person fails to understand they are essentially working for a feudal lord when they sign up to work for Amazon, the educational system has failed.
In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.
Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?
Whenever there are layoffs of a major company, like half the comments here always bemoan the particular wording the article or company uses to describe the layoffs. It's a pointless exercise IMO (though I agree with you, ironically "firing" is less accurate than "let go").
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).
> Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations.
AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.
Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
That’s what I was thinking but I looked it up in the dictionary and appears that firing is already pretty neutral yet picked up the negative connotation, presumably because most people consider firings to be with cause. Even ‘layoffs’ has picked up a negative connotation. I’m not sure if it’s possible for language to to continuously outrun the associations, I guess we either police the language more fervently or continue inventing new words.
Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.
In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor performance, so I suspect "misconduct" is a higher percentage of overall firings here.
Yeah for sure. Unfortunately in the US it’s not uncommon for companies to find “a pattern of behavior” or “less than stellar work” that is enough to justify not giving you your severance, but also not too severe that they can’t be blamed for never bringing it up and putting you on a PIP (performance improvement plan, not sure if that’s a term in other countries).
In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.
> In the US, if your employment is terminated for cause, i.e. due to your underperformance at work, then you are not eligible to receive unemployment benefits from the government.
You meant i.e. or e.g.?
Under performance may be considered termination for cause in your state. It is not generally.
I was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.
Still puts them in a weak position to critique others on their use of words. We might like to hold the BBC to a higher standard but none of the big news sites are good at details like this.
True, I did make a mistake, but in my defense I’m but one person making a passing comment in an internet forum. Even then, if I had noticed my error before the edit window (which I do not control) expired, I would have issued a correction.
The BBC, on the other hand, is a major organisation employing professional writers and editors. It’s their job to inform clearly, not throw mud in people’s faces with the kind of indirect wording used to conceal intentions.
The situations are not in the same category. I made a mistake in word usage; the article’s title is manipulating meaning, using public relations-style words carefully chosen for the goal of minimising backlash.
Furthermore, I don’t think you need to be perfect to point out imperfection. It is perfectly valid to go to a restaurant and say “this pizza tastes bad” even if you don’t know how to cook.
Grammatically correct, but missing the narrative subtext.
"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.
People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.
This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.
"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.
Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.
The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
This also stuck out to me, but in defense of Amazon (yuck), I don't see that language directly from anyone at Amazon. They use the regular "reduction in corporate workforce" BS that every big company on earth uses. It just seems like an editorial choice unless I'm missing something.
Doublespeak? Try to speak in such a legalese way that although things are technically true, yet still those words are crafted in such a way to influence others...
So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price.
Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.
I sincerely suspect the BBC would only ever use "fired"/"firings" if the employees were being dismissed for conduct reasons, since that's the common usage in British English. I've been let go -- indeed, I've lost my job (it's the employees who suffer job losses, not the employer) -- but I've never been fired.
Which, at least in American English, comes across like corporate jargon/weasel words. Lost their job is literally true and would probably take a bunch more words to describe the precise reasons.
Both things can be literally true. I've lost my job by being made redundant, twice. In Britain redundancy is a very specific thing, where your role no longer exists and you must be let go in a fair way according to employment law. It's quite the opposite of jargon or weasel words here: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
I think we may be hitting an issue in translation between English and American; in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy". "Job losses" is a perfectly reasonable neutral phrase here. Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.
People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
> Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.
This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years
I think American English is the same colloquially. “I got fired” means I didn’t perform or did something wrong. “I got laid off” is our “I was made redundant”.
“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.
> in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy"
OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)
And by applying these organizational changes, each person can become more load bearing and have so much more scope and impact. This is not a loss, it's a great win for everyone! /s
> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
"Letting go" belongs in the same HR phrasebook. They didn't ask permission to quit and the company were so generous to let them, the initiative was from the other side.
I thought the modern lingo was "impacted". So and so was impacted. Ten thousand employees were impacted. It avoids let go, but detaches as much as possible from the personal crisis.
That reads differently to me. The company is doing the letting go. Like letting loose. Or letting fly. It's agency on the part of the company. Letting them see. All of these will have euphemistic overtones as no company will want to say that they axed 10,000 people.
There is so much stupidity to unpack here. They say they need to use the opportunity provided by AI. However, what kind of opportunity is that requiring them to fire people in order to use it? Is AI making them more efficient or less efficient? If it's making more efficient, why they need to lay off all these people who are getting more efficient? So that other companies will pick up the workers they spend so much time to train on their systems, and replicate the same technologies elsewhere?
I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Companies have no incentive to employ as many people as possible. Really it’s the opposite, make as much money as possible, while paying as few employees as possible.
That is the incentive to employee more people - they can do more with those people. There is a balance between the two though. More people means less focus.
The incentive many times is to create a scarcity of talent for other tech companies by hiring as many experts as you can. Facebook, Amazon, and many others have been employing this strategy for over a decade, but now that the era of cheap money is over we're seeing a pivot away.
Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
Their addition of AI into Quicksight (their BI tool) really cemented for me how much they're willing to bluff to look relevant. They launched the AI addition at least a year ago, but recently rebranded the whole thing as "Quick Suite", promoting new AI capabilities. It really just seems like a new skin, with more purple. So far, out of 4 people at my org who tried it, all were disappointed after upgrading. I get much better results from sending a CSV to ChatGPT and asking for a graph.
It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.
Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.
Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
Most boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits.
Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
I think it depends on the company. I don't know how bad of a problem it is for big businesses like Amazon. Sure there's some lost profits and a write-down with the layoff, but it's not like Amazon hasn't been successful and profitable in the meantime. The overhiring may be justifiable as a defensive strategy.
I was at a smaller public company that overhired during COVID then struggled with profits (among other things). CEO and leadership lost a ton of money due to the share price drops from COVID peaks and CEO was ultimately pushed out.
They will. But by the time it happens, Jassy already made millions in cash + much more in stocks and will retire comfortably while others will slave away for new AI overlords.
in the uk job losses and firings are different things, with different meanings, so the criticism here is a bit off.
job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone
firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job
(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
We didn't fail to secure things because we spent our security budget on security theatre - we were just kindly offering those poor hackers money to support their families.
It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”
They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.
> It’s the same language used when taking about “car accidents”
See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:
> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
[…]
> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
Michigan.gov website references Merriam-Webster dictionary definition "an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance".
Then it says no one is at fault, but the definition specifically included carelessness and ignorance which does imply fault.
> Calling a crash an “accident” suggests no one is at fault. In reality, crashes result from preventable actions like distraction, inattention, or risky driving.
But all of these go under carelessness / ignorance.
And there is always a party that's at fault traffic accidents.
But from my experience few nations are so dependent on the car as the US.
It so very similar in Germany where I’m from but mostly because it’s such an important part of the economy. But in a big city you can easily live without a car. I found this almost impossible in the US.
My favourite is during terrorist attacks in Europe, it's always like "car attacks crowd". Like the car's wife had left it and it had decided to go out with a bang.
The problem is, there isn't much initial facts to base on, other than that a vehicle has plowed into a crowd. In the early 30-60 minutes, you often don't even know how many people died and how many are injured because emergency services are still working on rescue (alive people) and recovery (dead people).
Maybe it's political or religious terrorism, maybe it's suicide-by-cop, maybe it's a generic mental health issue (think schizophrenics whose head voice tells them to commit violence), maybe it's a health issue (heart attack, driver floors the gas pedal), maybe it's a streetrace gone wrong, maybe it's a DUI, maybe it's a mechanical issue (loss of brake/steering), maybe it's a geriatric driver who just doesn't have any idea where he even is, maybe it's a driver blindly following Maps and ignoring the policeman winking at him, thus not noticing he's heading right for a rally.
You see, the list of issues why a car plows into a crowd is very very long, and often it takes the police hours to determine what's going on. They gotta interview bystanders and victims, they gotta obtain and review camera footage, possibly search the driver's home and digital devices - because unlike Twitter pseudo-journalists and click/ragebait "news" media, police can normally be held accountable if they claim something in public that doesn't turn out to be true.
I think usually the vehicle has not, say, been flung unoccupied into a crowd by an oversized slingshot experiment gone wrong.
So it'd be nice if they'd say like "a man has ploughed into a crowd" - we'll safely assume he didn't use an actual plough since I hear those are fairly slow.
It does make a difference regarding people viewing news outlets as informers rather than an arm of some kind of agenda.
If you say "a man has ploughed into a crowd", you'll get the usual suspects shouting "why don't you state THE RELIGION/THE ETHNICITY of the man". We've been through this in Germany too often, the racists immediately come out of the sewer spouting their garbage.
That seems a less important bother than say that a man has ploughed into a crowd.
Well, not in Europe because that's the culture, but it objectively is.
And I mean, it's not like the racists hear "a car" and think "oh it was just a car on its lonesome, not like driven by a person from [group that I hate]", do they...
Maybe it's an effort to be more polite than "by some prick who can't drive".
I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though
Passive vs. active voice. "Job losses" is chickenshit language.
If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
The conspiracist view would be that the media-industrial complex would want to prevent the stock price of a given company from dipping, as well as help them skirt around legal issues that may arise for the company in question if everyone reports the "layoff" as such, which is not always done according to practices (there are sometimes reports in the media about such, not specifically about Amazon though).
Mass layoffs tend to make stock prices go higher, not lower... so nothing to worry about there. If the news stories were even more brutal, accusing Amazon of axing tens of thousands and then laughing when those people begged and pleaded that they wouldn't be able to afford baby formula, I think I suspect that this would be even better at closing time than some less offensive journalism.
You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.
Narcissistic processes/systems/people always externalize the consequences of their own actions by pushing those consequences off on others while keeping the benefits they pillaged for themselves.
Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?
You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you.
All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.
And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return. With Amazon obviously the risk of that is low. But for many new companies the risk is very high. Therefore the payoffs are also high, to attract people to take the risk. Where I sympathize with your view is that sometimes an investment risk is taken, and the payout far exceeds the risk by any reasonable and sane margin. So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures, on the hope that the one successful one is so successful that it pays the losses of the failed ones. But yea, this system is not really working for the vast majority of people and that is a tragedy.
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
> As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
> I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
This is extremely unusual in general, not at all typical.
Here, on Hacker News, we have an unusually high proportion of high earners, and I'd guess a lot of FIRE people like me (and I infer, you), but the median US person has $8k, about 3 months, of savings: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...
I could not guess either the income nor the savings distribution of those 14k Amazon departures. Also, reports suggest most of these people will have a chance to find a different role within Amazon.
As a former Amazon employee who lurked in the “anonymous” internal #pay-equity and the #pay-equity-discussion Slack channels, I can tell you that the typical return offer for an L4 who was a former intern was around $150K - $165K cash and stock and the average L5 was around $230K - $260K+ cash and stock per year (check my numbers on levels.fyi I might be off that was a couple of years ago).
But I have that amount in liquid cash because I’m an empty nest boomer with my wife who had a house built in 2016 in the burbs of Atlanta that I sold for twice the amount I paid for it in 2024 and downsized to a condo in Florida.
Before 2020, my only security was my ability to get a job fast.
But honestly anyone who expected loyalty from Amazon was like the old woman who took care of the snake. They should have been saving.
And I’m not at all FIRE, I’ll be realistically working until 65. Don’t cry for me. I work remotely and my wife and I travel all of the time including doing the digital nomad thing off an on where we are gone for months at a time.
Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.
I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.
I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.
It’s already happening. The pay I am seeing offered now in second tier tech cities like Atlanta where I use to live are the same as they were in 2016 and haven’t kept up with inflation.
I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.
> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...
Oh I agree with you. I don't live in the US, but in a country that has a very high progressive tax rate. I am taxed about 50% of my income currently. But I gladly pay it because I like to live in a safe country with strong government programs and a great healthcare system. It is also very difficult to fire an employee here. Companies generally have to pay people to leave, and this can be a year salary upwards. But I do sympathize with people in the US, even if the "average" lifestyle experience is higher, because a lot of people seem to be struggling there.
Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.
If the choice is between propping up the economy which is built atop a delicate house of cards and is about to implode on us anyways thanks to the AI bros, or knowing that the psychotic C-suite can't fire me because he needs an extra 0.2% of profit margin to look good to investors, I'll take the latter.
Having experienced both worlds here, it's about roughly the same difficulty getting hired, except over here in NL at the end of my 1 month in which they can fire me for any reason, I get a nice little ironclad contract that provides me rights as a worker. Anyone claiming getting laid off unceremoniously is better is just coping
Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
> under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal".
Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.
Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.
Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?
- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.
- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.
- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.
These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.
> the complexity is in the implementation
No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.
With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.
> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.
> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.
The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.
> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?
The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.
A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.
Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.
>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
Then don’t do that? In 2020, when I had the “opportunity” to work at Amazon in a role that would eventually require relocating after COVID, there was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life to work for Amazon and that was after my youngest had graduated. I instead interviewed for a “permanently remote role” [sic]. If that hadn’t been available, I would have kept working local jobs for less money.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
If your a billionaire and you invest in index funds, the risk of becoming homeless is really low, sure. The system works in such a way that the more money you have the easier it is to make more money. So if your stuck at the bottom, your really stuck.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.
Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!
So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.
Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.
Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.
The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?
Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.
It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.
This is unfortunately true.
Accusing a company for maximizing profit is naive. There is a structural problem on taxation Vs how much the company contributes back to society.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time.
Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
>Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
Well you do get that weird "ownership" concept, pushed on everyone by that bozo Bezos, where you are supposed to "act as owner" of the business, but get no benefits out of it, only the risks :)
Cash comp at Amazon is extremely limited, with at least half of your comp coming from RSUs (or cash equivalent during the first year). So if Amazon is wildly successful, you do get a huge benefit out of it (my grants resulted in a salary that was ~ $100K more than the band I was assigned at review).
Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.
"getting paid" is the operative word. Employees get paid, that is their compensation. If you want to be an owner, you need to either invest, or have that clearly included in your employment agreement.
Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.
Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
What’s the actual hazard there? I get that a company going bankrupt causes money to evaporate into wages and capital. But are the owners actually facing any real risk? You have to be an accredited investor to buy in in any real way and one of the tests is that your investment is below a certain percentage of your means.
This is called "consensual exchange" and it is by far the most ethical way to run society. You don't have to agree to these terms. You can go start your own company. It's a free country. The alternative always seems to boil down to various bureaucrats dictating terms to people. What gives them the right to do so?
You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
The same can be said in the relationship of the company towards the employee. Any employee can leave any moment they want and all the investments the company has done on them will be lost.
The business the person I was responding to was referring to?
I’m aware of the difficulties of running a business. I’d still always prefer to own the business rather than work within it despite that risk, which is why I do.
You forgot to mention the part where they also invest millions in lobbying and buying off politicians to control policy, and hundreds of millions or billions acquiring media companies to control the public narrative, all so that ordinary workers - who vastly outnumber the billionaires - do not get out the pitchforks and demand a more equitable distribution of wealth.
> Assuming it was somehow classified as a failure, the next bigger issue to identify whom to blame.
Accountability is to gain introspection about the past and intermediate states of an (interpersonal) system to figure out what decisions were made by whom, when, how, and in which context, so that they be analyzed and similar failures or whole failure mores can be avoided in the future.
It isn't the ability to properly find a scapegoat. You don't make people accountable to be able to fire them. You can fire them regardless. You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time.
> Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?
No, please re-read what I said. I said that it's not about finding a scapegoat to fire, but about understanding what, where, and why happened. If you don't have an account of a problem, then you don't know where the problem is located; even if it should be solved by firing someone, then you don't have the tools to figure out who and why needs to be fired.
The person you are replying to describes something akin to retrospective but even in Agile we still have people who need to be accountable and that includes the engineers too.
Assuming you’re earnestly not seeing how this works rather than seeking an argument:
I work in an industry where accountability is the norm. Individual people perform well-known, but difficult-to-execute steps of various processes; strict metrics define success and failure; close calls are not ideal; and the distance between success and failure is usually not revealed without precisely calibrated equipment. The ways to measure the outcomes are legally codified. Everything can be checked and double-checked, and people can, and often do, check those checks. Even then, sometimes the person that determined the metrics got them wrong. Sometimes it was measured wrong. Sometimes the person that said it was wrong turns out to be wrong. My primary professional function is to determine adherence to those standards. Potentially thousands of lives are at stake if we get the wrong thing wrong enough.
With a sane commit history and code reviews, this is a lot easier in software than it is in most realms. It’s definitely easier than mine.
Accountability isn’t just about failure— it’s about owning outcomes and giving an account of what you did to contribute to that outcome, good or bad.
> answerability, culpability, liability
You left off the end of the sentence.
> equated with answerability, culpability, liability, and the expectation of account-giving.
Account-giving is the key, here.
Since we’re focusing on problems: mistakes have different causes: being careless, having outdated knowledge, having the wrong requirements, physical or mental problems, equipment malfunctioning, bad processes… to identify the root problem, you need an account of what happened. To get that, you need to identify the person or people involved, and figure out what went wrong. That’s the only way you’re going to mature enough organizationally to have any semblance of quality. As the saying goes: if everybody’s responsible for something, then nobody’s responsible for it. The distinction is accountability.
So you don’t need to fire someone to hold them accountable— even being ‘in trouble’ every time someone does something wrong is counterproductive if it makes people hide or shirk responsibility for their mistakes. If someone fucks up badly or frequently enough, then maybe they are in trouble, and maybe they do get fired? But there’s a whole hell of a lot accountability that happens before that.
People make mistakes, and any organization that does not tolerate mistakes is run by people without the emotional maturity required to properly run an organization. The same is true of people unwilling to identify those mistakes and figure out either how they can be avoided in the future, or if they can’t be reliably avoided, mitigate their effects. Some of the leadership’s primary responsibilities involve defining the desired outcome, measuring the difference between it and the actual outcome, determining if/how it matters, and figuring out why it’s different. Those that refuse to address, or even acknowledge problems (and again, it doesn’t have to be punitive,) are masking their own laziness or incompetence.
The whole magic about CL's condition system is to keep on executing code in the context of a given condition instead of immediately unwinding the stack, and this can be done if you control code generation.
Everything else necessary, including dynamic variables, can be implemented on top of a sane enough language with dynamic memory management - see https://github.com/phoe/cafe-latte for a whole condition system implemented in Java. You could probably reimplement a lot of this in WASM, which now has a unwind-to-this-location primitive.
"Version control systems", in case of AI, mean that their knowledge will stay frozen in time, and so their usefulness will diminish. You need fresh data to train AI systems on, and since contemporary data is contaminated with generative AI, it will inevitably lead to inbreeding and eventual model collapse.
The existence of common slang which isn't used in the sort of formal writing that grammar linting tools are typically designed to promote is more of a weakness of learning grammar by a weighted model of the internet vs formal grammatical rules than a strength.
Not an insurmountable problem, ChatGPT will use "aight fam" only in context-sensitive ways and will remove it if you ask to rephrase to sound more like a professor, but RHLFing slang into predictable use is likely a bigger potential challenge than simply ensuring the word list of an open source program is sufficiently up to date to include slang whose etymology dates back to the noughties or nineties, if phrasing things in that particular vernacular is even a target for your grammar linting tool...
Huh, this is the first time I've seen "noughties" used to describe the first decade of the 2000s. Slightly amusing that it's surely pronounced like "naughties". I wonder if it'll catch on and spread.
aight, trippin, fr (at least the spoken version), and fam were all very common in the 1990s (which was the last decade I was able to speak like that without getting jeered at by peers).
I don't think anyone has the need to check such a message for grammar or spelling mistakes.
Even then, I would not rely on a LLM to accurately track this "evolution of language".
Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point.
Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checking system, compared to millions and more that need to learn a given piece of "evolved" language as it becomes impossible to avoid learning it. It's not only fast enough to do this manually, it also takes much less work-intensive and more scalable.
Not exactly. It takes time for those words to become mainstream for a generation. While you'd have to manually add those words in dictionaries, LLMs can learn these words on the fly, based on frequency of usage.
At this point we're already using different definitions of grammar and vocabulary - are they discrete (as in a rule system, vide Harper) or continuous (as in a probability, vide LLMs). LLMs, like humans, can learn them on the fly, and, like humans, they'll have problems and disagreements judging whether something should be highlighted as an error or not.
Or, in other words: if you "just" want a utility that can learn speech on the fly, you don't need a rigid grammar checker, just a good enough approximator. If you want to check if a document contains errors, you need to define what an error is, and then if you want to define it in a strict manner, at that point you need a rule engine of some sort instead of something probabilistic.
I’m glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had they only been consulted first on the problem.
Which effort? Learning a language is something that can't be eliminated. Everyone needs to do it on their own. Writing grammar checking software, though, can be done few times and then copied.
Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly".
You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?
> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly".
Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of the current short-lived meme and fad nouns/adjectives like "skibidi ohio gyatt rizz".
It takes time for a language feature to become widespread and de-facto standardized among a population. This is because people need to asynchronously learn it, start using it themselves, and gain critical mass so that even people who do not like using that feature need to start respecting its presence. This inertia is the main source of slowness that I mention, and also and a requirement for any kind of grammar-checking software. From the point of such software, a language feature that (almost) nobody understands is not a language feature, but an error.
> You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?
Yes, that set of patterns is called a language grammar. Even dialects and slangs have grammars of their own, even if they're different, less popular, have less formal materials describing them, and/or aren't taught in schools.
Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do, perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of comments.
I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also tends to be the source of false positives and frustration that lead me to disable such features altogether.
When you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to be bent or broken; it's useful to have the ability to explicitly write new ones and make new forms of the language legal, rather than wrestle with hallucinating LLMs.
When writing for utility and communication, though, English grammar is simple and standard enough. Browsing Harper sources, https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93... seems to have a lot of the basics already nailed down. Natural language grammar can often be represented as "what is allowed to, should, or should not, appear where, when, and in which context" - IIUC, Harper seems to tackle the problem the same way.
I'm certainly not disputing the existence of grammar nor do I think an LLM is a good way to implement/check/enforce one. And now I realise how my first comment landed. Thanks again!
Your first point would be more fitting if a language checker would need a complete, computable grammar that can be parsed and understood. That would be problematic for natural languages.
Just because the rules aren’t set fully in stone, or can be bent or broken, doesn’t mean they don’t “exist” - perhaps not the way mathematical truths exist, but there’s something there.
Even these few posts follow innumerable “rules” which make it easier to (try) to communicate.
Perhaps what you’re angling against is where rules of language get set it stone and fossilized until the “Official” language is so diverged from the “vulgar tongue” that it’s incomprehensibly different.
Like church/legal Latin compared to Italian, perhaps. (Fun fact - the Vulgate translation of the Bible was INTO the vulgar tongue at the time: Latin).
> Approximately 95% of the engineering work was done by Lyapsus. Lyapsus improved an incomplete kernel driver, wrote new kernel codecs and side-codecs, and contributed much more. I want to emphasize his incredible kindness and dedication to solving this issue. He is the primary force behind this fix, and without him, it would never have been possible.
> I (Nadim Kobeissi) conducted the initial investigation that identified the missing components needed for audio to work on the 16IAX10H on Linux. Building on what I learned from Lyapsus's work, I helped debug and clean up his kernel code, tested it, and made minor improvements. I also contributed the solution to the volume control issue documented in Step 8, and wrote this guide.
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