All 1049 posts were peaceful? The pdf mentions this was mostly after October 7th, a terrorist (as in, meant to induce fear by targeting civilians) attack which was live streamed on Facebook and posted repeatedly during that day.

I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?

I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.

EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.

In this case it's being alleged that sending a thousand false takedown requests which were then acted on would not be a bungling, but rather a success.

My car hit the breaks for me last week on a highway. I’m quite happy with the computerization of cars for this reason. It could be better as the link shows the downsides, but it probably has saved (tens of?) thousands of lives overall.

My car hit the brakes for me last week on a highway as well, except there was no reason to, there was nothing there. I'm not as happy.

I intentionally opted out of these sort of driver assist features because I don't trust the firmware going into them. If a safety misfeature can be disabled manually you also run the risk of an insurer denying a claim if they find out it wasn't engaged. Better to not have it in the first place and use the mark I eyeball for safety.

Yeah, I'm not happy I have them, but I'm happy other drivers have them. I guess they help overall, since I need to be careful to keep a safe distance from the guy in front of me anyway.

A couple months ago I was driving a rental and I coasted up on slow exit traffic with the intent of dodging right after the person to my right passed me. Well I got that far but I got close enough to the slowing traffic in front of me in the process it decided to brake. And of course because electronic throttle they lock you out of the gas. And it takes a couple seconds for it to decide that no, I really did want to go fast, so it lets me do that but of course the CVT needs to incrementally wind its way there at a leisurely pace.

So instead of cleanly pulling off my merge into a lane going 10mph faster than me I look like a goddamn moron for zipping over and then hard braking away 20mph of speed. All because some programmers buried in Toyota HQ somewhere spent too much time on the HN or Reddit or whatever circle jerking it in the comments with the "you can never go wrong by braking" crowd. Could have been way worse had it been a spicer situation, like merging into traffic with a disabled vehicle at the end of the merge ramp or just about any other case with equal or great speed differential and equal or lesser margin.

A car should do what I say. I can understand doing something when I have provided no input or perhaps ignore a 0-100% press to prevent wrong pedal accidents but this is just horrible systems design. If I'm traveling at speed and mash the gas it stands to reason I did that on purpose.

Even the structures of cars have improved. The crumple zones and structural rigidity is constantly evolving.

I also like sensors and crash avoidance tech.

Generally, all problems used for crypto are in NP. Since given the secret, you need to be able to compute it efficiently.

It’s just that being NP hard or complete is not enough.

The theoretical definition of one way functions is used to define cryptography. So reading on that my clarify this some more.

Ok, but then what is a way to do it?

The text gives an example to the core problem, and to argue differently requires thinking around it.

In practice. I’ve seen many attempts at measuring productivity, but once you dig into them, you see they are just abstraction mechanisms above something that is similar to lines of code.

I have yet to see an idea that sidesteps the core issue described in this post. Also, it applies to many types of work, and software is not unique in any way.

Happy Customers.

All other measures are a proxy for happy customers.

Actually, happy customers is also a proxy (the real measure is profits) but measuring profits directly (in the short term) can lead to decisions that have adverse long term effects. It's too easy to increase profits in the short term by avoiding long-term expenses.

So, if you're in the business of software, the goal is happy customers. (And I use the word Customers carefully here. Not just Users who pay nothing, but Customers who spend money.)

In a business context, it's really the only thing that matters. But, of course, it can be hard to measure (are they Happy?) and relies on multiple disciplines. Production (coding), Marketing, Sales, Support, Documentation, Training- all need to be working well to make it work.

Ultimately if the big picture doesn't lead to Happy Customers (again, I stress, in a businesses context) then no-one is "being productive."

While customer satisfaction is a better (albeit murky) metric, value generated / profit is a better one ultimately. Of course, measuring developer productivity is a means to that end; how much did or will it cost to reach this value generated?

Anyway there's this adage that once a metric (like productivity) becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric. But this doesn't seem to apply for value / revenue much, so I suppose it's good to keep an eye on this vague productivity metric.

It’s demand. How much demand is there for your product

As the other commenter pointed out, happy customers means nothing if they aren’t actively paying you

Arguably the business is aiming for Paying Customers, not necessarily Happy ones :)

I chose happy for a reason :)

So the business is chasing profits. In the short term that means customers paying money - any will do (happy or unhappy).

But in the long term, happy is the key. Happy customers are the single biggest marketing tool you have. Happy customers promote and recommend you. Unhappy customers do the opposite (and are more effective at doing so.)

So, if the metric stops at Customers then you are greatly missing the long-term value. Since a good business is planning for the long term, not just right now, Happy customers I the correct metric.

Remember, you ultimately get what you measure (no more).

> Happy customers are the single biggest marketing tool you have. Happy customers promote and recommend you. Unhappy customers do the opposite (and are more effective at doing so.)

And yet, there's some irrational counter examples; there's video games that has huge detractors while having huge financial success. Negative reviews on Steam, "4000 hours played". The metrics say they aren't happy with the product... but they still play it, talk about it, may have pulled in friends to play it, and spend money on it.

People can be unhappy about a product but still pay and promote it, counter-intuitively. Of course, the unhappiness is what they say, their behaviour says otherwise so for the sake of the metrics they would be considered happy I suppose?

When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure.

Even if you could perfectly measure customer happiness (very hard, as you note) - it's relatively easy to make customers happy by giving them more value than what they pay for. Sure, that may cost your business more money than what it makes with said customers, but hey, who cares, "profit" was not the metric...

(and as you note, if you make "profit" the metric, that has its own set of challenges - e.g. the optimization towards short-term profit in detriment of the long-term sanity, which is what we observe in a lot of corporations).

>> When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure.

Yes and no in this case. Yes, you can naked customers happier with more value, more overhead (ie more support staff and do on.)

Yes, in the short term this might reduce profit. If you go too far down this road you might go bankrupt. No measure works if you dont use the "can we afford it" metric.

But nothing turbo-charges profits (in the short, and more importantly, long term) than happy customers. Ultimately they pay more, theny pay more often, they encourage others to pay.

If you optimize for happy customers, and stay solvent, you have the foundation for a solid long-term business.

I will add that starting with Happy Users (who get stuff for free) and turning them into Happy Customers later is really really hard. Simply giving the thing away (or charging so little it amounts to the same thing) is not what I'm suggesting. You can start with a lower price, yes, but regular price hikes are part of yhe process until uou find your natural price level.

I recommend measuring job satisfaction instead of developer productivity. It's the "least bad" proxy metric I know of. https://redfin.engineering/measure-job-satisfaction-instead-...

The interesting corollary to this approach seems to be that productivity barriers are largely external.

A potential riske seems to be feedback systems where job satisfaction is determined by high or low pay.

As already mentioned, people measure value return by revenue gain. It is irrelevant to attribute it to some construct like a line of code.

profit generated I think is the high level one, and then you want to dig from there into how much the software development contributed to this.

That's very tricky thing to quantify, especially with "unsung heroes". If my work is in preventing problems, the guy that fixes problems will be seen as the one that contributes more to profit, since impact is directly observed/measured.

This is something that one of the orgs I worked for eventually realized. The people f'ing up, and then fixing their mistakes, were the ones getting promotions/bonuses/raises, because they were the ones interacting with all the execs.

Credit cards provide kickbacks (ahem, cashback) to customers while virtually all products cost the same for debit or credit.

If you use debit, you might be leaving 2% of the deal on the table. (But you are helping the merchant, which could be a good reason)

Barring all the issues, if you did build a huge fleet of autonomous taxis - smaller, lighter cars with less moving pieces would save you a lot of money.

2 seater - smaller car

No wheels or stuff - saves money on the build and parts.

They are probably planning to reuse lots of parts from model 3 to save money

And people are creatures of habit and highly social so version 1 of robotaxis will 100% look like normal cars. Regardless of whatever benefits you can come up with on paper. Once it's normalized then you experiment.

This is the company that released the CyberTruck. V1 will probably look mostly like what was presented. Every single prototype they have ever unveiled eventually ended up looking very similar to the production model.

Yikes, I had assumed it was the usual concept car BS until you mentioned the cybertruck

Mark my words: the "final form" of robotaxis will seat 4 (up to 6 in a pinch) people on facing seats, will be able to drive in both directions and have all 4 wheels fully steerable for more flexibility.

The 4 fully steerable wheels on robottaxis is an interesting ones.

For human drivers were a little overkill with no real advange besides parking in small spaces) but they would be probably more usefull.

But the fact that they are a little too complex remains, maybe making them semi standardized and modular would help

Or god forbid you'd build a proper electric public transport network that can transport dozens, sometimes hundreds of people way more efficiently.

You can see Musk's vision of that in Las Vegas: in tunnels (so it doesn't disturb "regular" motorists), but still using cars (what else?).

Cars driven by a human driver.

He can't even to FSD in a 2.4 mile TUNNEL after years

A driver in the Vegas tunnel told me they self drive perfectly fine, it’s a regulation thing holding them back.

It seems certain they’ll correct that with their massive expansion coming

I don't understand how they can't get autonomous working in a tunnel. It sounds like the perfect controlled environment.

Consider the alternative: richer people, the few of them, but your game, other people pirate your game.

Now instead, you find a way to get the amount of dollars a person can pay extracting cents from the people who used to pirate a game, and hundreds from those who have money.

It’s bad for the game, but great for the developers’ pocket.

EDIT: for example, Nintendo made 3.7B in 2023, King made 2.7B or so it seems. Nintendo is one of a kind, companies like King are a dime a dozen.

If you get downvoted, it’s because you threw a trollish text without any arguments or explanations to back it up.

If you did, this could have been a good and useful discussion.

Well let me try and fix that. In my opinion, a child sitting in front of the screen for long hours and being occupied enough with a videogame that you want to watch additional media on it when you’re not playing belies a waste of potential and frankly social and mental (outside of a small band) development. It has created a generation of stunted individuals and there’s a pushback coming. Now it’s for social media but it will expand to all forms of screen time.

I'm an adult who doesn't have time to play Minecraft anymore because I'm too busy between a career and raising kids, but I did play a ton of it in its early days and I still watch a selection of Minecraft YouTube channels (mostly a few of the Hermits).

My early experiences with Minecraft absolutely helped get me to this point in my career. Minecraft is less a video game and more a sandbox and development platform. Redstone is a fabulous introduction to concepts that are applicable to programming, electrical engineering, and really any logic-oriented field. I first learned Forth through a Minecraft mod, and my first technical documentation experience came from writing docs for people to use that Forth system. I later picked up Lua through ComputerCraft, and my earliest real Java projects that I built were Minecraft mods.

All of which is to say: I'm totally going to introduce my kids to Minecraft when they're old enough! I wouldn't trade the hours I spent on that game and in its community for anything.

You're totally wrong. Apart from myopia and obesity, it's all nature, practically no nurture (without exceptionally negative environments, like abuse, drugs, or malnutrition). You're better off blaming social trends and microplastics.

It does mean that in the realm of logic.

But media, PR and politics don’t play by these rules. Mention two things together and the messages will go through.

A similar example would be Whataboutism, a logical fallacy, but it seems to work very well in politics.

While I understand your point about the optics of it, optics should play no role in determining whether somebody is guilty of war crimes. When optics are a primary factor, war crime laws are a tool the powerful use to punish the weak.

I have my issues with the ICC, but they are supposed to enforce international law impartially.

People in tech and the valley like judging things through the eyes of tech capitalism, and basically think that if “you’re good at something, never do it for free”.

The truth is that many people don’t view the world through these lens. They just enjoy a hobby and a community. Participating in a forum is a fun experience for many, and I’d guess the average Redditor would be less happy if they bought into the mindset that they must be paid for the writings.

True, but it is slightly galling when someone else is making handsome profits off your free labour. Like, I might happily give up a few hours to coach my child's football team at the weekend. But if someone is charging everyone to come watch the games and keeping the profits for themselves, that would be annoying.

Of course, Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known. But the fact that the mechanics of monetisation are deliberately obscured, together with the fact that (as I understand it) Reddit has actually been loss-making for most of its history makes it easy to overlook.

"Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known" is what I would say. Some people don't mind if their time is being profited from. I understand if some people do mind, but then they shouldn't be spending so much time on Reddit.