It's not really about the planets. It's about what other people believe about the planets.
You could work for a boss that's a Leo, and he/she believes only Leos deserve to get promoted, or that Leos and Scorpios should never be assigned together on a shared project. Your life and career trajectory under this boss could be totally different, depending on whether you were born a Leo or not.
Certainly "not all bosses" applies, but it's not really that farfetched or uncommon either. The point is that a correlation does exist, but it's a social one and not a physical or astronomical one (and it's also often a self-reinforcing/self-fulfilling one: Leos who read what astrology says Leos should do, may end up choosing to behave more like that).
So in the LLM example, it may not really matter much what physical markers of provenance or physical correlations there are, as social beliefs or perceptions about suspected provenance may be the strongest correlation anyways (in terms of impact and outcomes).
The risks are asymmetric in real world terms. For the PE side, the worst-case outcome is bankruptcy of the company they bought via LBO, but because it was an LBO their own exposure is relatively minimal (the lender is the one with the one most capital at risk). At the end of the day, it's a balance sheet item, a cost of doing business, a few digits on a spreadsheet.
But for the company that was bought? Those are people's jobs, their livelihood. A community that depended on those jobs to sustain a town's economy. And for company's providing essential services with inelastic demand (like fucking fire trucks), the downside is loss of those services, broken fire trucks, and ultimately loss of life.
When you hear "profits over people" as a complaint, it sounds abstract. It is not. Though this specific article is AI slop, the underlying phenomenon is very real (that other commenters have shared other links to better reporting). A very real dollar figure can be crystallized against very real human lives that have been harmed or sacrificed.
Most "regular people" (you know, the ones who just want firefighters to have working trucks and ladders, and to come quickly when there's a fire) don't care about the most hyper-efficient allocation of capital through some skewed financial engineering and legal wizardry (especially when the definition of "efficient" allocation is a biased one, that doesn't account for externalities properly, like people fucking dying due to broken or not-enough trucks). But regular people don't really get a "vote", when it comes to LBOs (and I am specifically focusing on the ones that affect essential services). They just get screwed with the increased tax bills that fund the increasing profit margins of the PE firms. That seems unfair to me, but fairness is a matter of politics and not finance.
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Personal disclosure: I made a post a few months back about a related topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307300), of PE buying up and consolidating the companies that used to provide software to emergency services, and jacking up the price and taking advantage of inelastic demand. This is a topic I am personally passionate about, and I am still exploring different options for fighting back in various ways.
I just wanted to say that you're absolutely correct on everything, but I wanted to add a point:
We have spent the last 50-ish years "legitimizing" things like PE buying up essential services and implementing cost cuts. When I say "legitimizing", I mean we keep removing the avenues for the "regular people" to legally and formally reduce the harms that this sort of business brings about. It becomes just a fact of life: people can come in and do this and you have to "deal with it".
When you have people dying, watching their streets crumble, have garbage piling up, etc., you can't just think that "regular people" (or maybe "the little people", as some businesspeople might view them) will "deal with it" forever, regardless of how much legal, financial, and political cover you provide yourself. At some point, there will be a reckoning. In that case, you'll prefer that it be through a regulation change, lawsuit, or lost election/ballot initiative.
In general, the company that was bought was likely being outcompeted or soon to become outcompeted. There's a reason the PE bought it: to turn it around into something that is better than the previous owner could achieve.
You can only make money in an LBO if you meaningfully improve margins or you grow massively such that the debt portion of enterprise value becomes smaller. In both cases, the company is better off than it was before.
I do think there are limits to the value that PE can bring and there are many bottom feeders going into businesses they shouldn't, like fire trucks. But not all of PE is bad.
The better solution is to tax PE capital gains as income so they pay their fair share of taxes, making good deals harder to find, drying up some appetite for that highly saturated part of finance, and returning more value to communities when they do succeed.
Ceteris paribus can be stretched to the point of absurdity though. A startup with $4.5b of qualified leads, vs one with zero? Come on now...
For the sake of argument, we're imagining both startups have equal levels of investing/funding secured, equally talented founders and employee, equal access to equal networks (i.e. I'm imagining something like defense or aerospace, to make it a little easier to imagine a startup getting $4.5b in qualified leads), equal technology or IP, equal EVERYTHING as per your hypothetical... and yet somehow one startup has $4.5b in qualified leads and the other does not.
I truthfully would rather buy into the one with zero leads, because presumably, under ceteris paribus conditions, that startup must be priced at a discount to the other one, since it has no leads... and yet, EVERYTHING ELSE is equal (equally strong team, equally good tech, equal networks, etc.), and so it seems to me, that I would be able to buy a larger equity stake for a discounted price, and have EQUAL odds of winning future business since this startup is EQUAL in all other respects expect for the odd qualified leads backlog.
Would you rather buy shares in NVIDIA, or buy shares in another company that is equal to NVIDIA in every way (same talent, same tech, same everything), but just happens to have no backlog of confirmed orders? I think I'd like to buy this shadow-clone of NVIDIA, because I would buy into the thesis that there is more room for growth, vs buying the incumbent... after all, ceteris paribus, right?
You don’t use ceteris paribus to launch into a deep retrospective or forecast. It’s used to exaggerate the effect of a single variable to make a point about that variable, reductio ad absurdum .
You say it’s ridiculous to compare two equal companies with different backlogs, well it’s ridiculous to presume that they could have just produced $4.5b worth of product perfectly efficiently if they wanted to.
It’s just used to make the point that all other things being equal, some backlog is better than no backlog. You can invent all kinds of reasons why having a backlog is bad, but in any of those situations, if everything in the backlog was canceled at once that would probably be bad, right?
Agree that this is interesting/impressive, and the demos are nice.
But I completely cracked up at the unexpected physical comedy of the woman in the "slouching" demo, haha omg that was comedy gold, no notes...
I do appreciate less of that flavor of demo that we get from OpenAI/Anthropic, and more of this "human"-feeling vibe. Dare I go as far as calling this an example of "human-centered design" even (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-centered_design)?
From a software quality or software engineering POV --> this is clearly not building durable value, not scalable, etc. So I'd agree with you there.
But from the POV of say, a young startup company looking for PMF and navigating the ambiguities involved with trying to figure out what is the "right thing" to build that will appeal/delight/convince-people-to-pay --> being 10X faster at shipping 80% done projects, is actually incredibly, unfathomably valuable of a superpower. And it is also rationally the "right thing" to do, to make lots of cheap bets and fail/learn fast.
I find that many folks on my team (I am a manager/leader of small-to-mid size eng org), struggle with accepting the nuances of knowing the difference between different projects (where same team may need to do both kinds of work, all the time and in parallel):
- "Hey, the company needs, and you and I both agree, that this situation calls for building/renovating a skyscraper --> please design a fucking strong/safe/reliable skyscraper and don't take any shortcuts, this requires 'real' engineering"
- Vs, "Hey, the company isn't sure what it needs, and neither you nor I know any better either, so let's try a bunch of different shacks/sheds/treehouses/whatever, until we find something that has traction / makes us money (and it's okay if the shed collapses -- so long as the business knows this too, that it wasn't meant to be a load-bearing, skyscraper-esque thing anyways)"
I won't get into the rabbit hole of talking about dealing with bad business leaders, who want a skyscraper but expect to pay the price of a shack/shed. Let's assume that we are talking about the type of companies (maybe the minority) that are reasonable enough to know and acknowledge the difference. Then what is the game-theoretic/rational thing for them to do, and how does this 10X idea express itself? That's where my argument is coming from.
Well, take any invention you like, and let's break it down.
Somebody at some point, "invented" the idea that the earth was round. Before that, the obvious "just look around you" answer would've been, duh of course the ground is flat. But we know the earth has always been round, even if humans couldn't appreciate it for hundreds of thousands of years (I don't count the pre-history before homo sapiens). So we "invented" some fields of science and the mental models / abstractions that allowed us to conceptualize what a round earth could mean and how to measure it, but we didn't invent the roundness itself -- that was always reality, and we just lacked both the thoughts and the tools to conceptualize it (until later).
Now you might say, well that is a category of "simple" physical observations. The earth is naturally round all the time and doesn't take any extra human effort to make it so (it took some effort to imagine that it could be and to find ways to measure/prove it). But what about say -- semiconductors, NVIDIA GPUs, that sort of thing? It's not like semiconductors grow on trees and we just need to find them and learn how to consume/use them... isn't that a better example of "true invention"?
Sure, I could see that. But I guess my POV would be that, the invention of the latest AI chip, or the first semiconductor, or the first vacuum tube, or whatever came before, all laddered largely incrementally on "discoveries" that were then cleverly tweaked or reapplied, so that what appears to be "true invention" is usually/more-often just another chain in a long chain of "discoveries" that led up to it. I grant you that some of what appears in hindsight to be continuous progress, really is built on small discontinuous "leaps", but I don't think that breaks the argument (strengthens it in fact, IMO). You wouldn't have semiconductors today, unless Faraday (or somebody like him) discovered that silver sulfide resistance decreases with heat, and that is more like one of those physical properties that reality has always had (much like, earth was always round, we just didn't know it at first).
So in that sense, I feel this becomes almost like an "evolution vs intelligent design" debate -- some people look at the complexity and miracle that is the human eye or the human brain, and they insist there must have been an intelligent designer, because surely no random chaotic biological process could have produced something so wonderful... And yet, I think the scientific evidence largely shows that, indeed that is what happened, just random chance + evolutionary-pressure was all you really need (plus billions of years). So if you can accept that analogical framing for a minute, then I would posit that "invention"-adherents are really making something like an intelligent design argument, vs "discovery"-adherents are saying that evolution (in an artificial sense, with the artificial selection pressures of scientific research, of capitalism, etc., and compressed into centuries or decades, not millions or billions of years) is sufficient to derive miraculous-seeming results. The little discontinuous leaps along the way, are kind of like the random mutations of genes that happen to confer an advantage -- maybe we can say that we are more intentional about seeking those leaps out, or maybe we are just right-place/right-time lucky (e.g. thinking about penicillin and the random petri dish left out).
Perhaps once (or if) there is the sort of leap that breaks us out from a Type I to a Type II+ Kardashev civilization, maybe then I would grant you something needed to be "invented" that couldn't be based on a line of "discoveries". Or maybe not, maybe it will just be another semi-random discovery.
There are often little bits of Neal Stephenson or Andy Weir novels which sound a little like this, describing a technical fault in a plot-driven way (often as a cascade), and I do find those to be uniquely enjoyable. I'm sure there are other authors who do similar things, though maybe "cloud/AI data center" stories should be its own micro-genre, given how crucial these things are to society.
For anyone who doesn't know what you mean, here's an archived copy of Steve Yegge's post about this directive + other musings comparing Amazon vs Google (which is how a lot of us came to find out about this, via Yegge's write-up): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102800
Copied the most relevant snippet below
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So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:
- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.
- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.
- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.
- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.
- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.
That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.
This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.
At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.
That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
> You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, we were making it a platform in small ways long before that edict from Bezos. But because it used to be only an online bookstore, the footprint was a lot smaller.
1. the external interface was ... HTTP
2. the pages were designed to be easily machine parsable
3. you could queue up search queries that amzn would run on its own hardware, and notify you of the results asynchronously.
Sure, this didn't look anything like the things Yegge is describing, but the idea that "it's a platform, dummies" was some new revelation is misleading.
I think you might be over-fixated on a very prediction-market-esque framing of this plot device... if you broaden it slightly, the idea of someone in a fictional world manipulating the news reporting of an act or set of acts, rather than caring so much about the root act itself, is as stated before, quite common.
> Pollyhop is a fictional, Google-esque search engine that according to Leann’s polling expert is being exploited by the Republican candidate Will Conway in ways that suggest Underwood can’t possibly beat him in the general election. The explanation of how Pollyhop works is convoluted at best, but the gist is that Conway and his people are manipulating search engine results so that only positive coverage of their side appears.
Or more recent examples of what essentially boils down to the plot device of "media manipulation" aka manipulating the "news reporting of the act":
- See the most recent season of Industry, which included several plot points about manipulating news coverage as a short-seller and the company being targeted fought back and forth (including specific focus on the individual journalists involved)
- See Andor, everything about how the Empire twists perception of what's happening on Ghorman, leading up the Ghorman massacre itself, and then culminating in Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate denouncing "the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil"
- See The Orville, a particular episode: https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule which includes the plot point of hacking that society's "master feed" to plant false manipulative stories to curry public favor and save a character from being punished
- See The Boys, how Vought manipulates the media to twist coverage of their "heroes" even when they commit atrocities
- See other House of Cards plotlines involving Zoe Barnes and being a direct mouthpiece for Frank Underwood
I think the only real difference if any, is that in the most common form of portrayal, maybe less attention is paid to the journalist as the point of leverage, and how they deal with threats or bribes or whatever. The fact that such manipulation occurs, is commonly accepted as a trope, without requiring too much of a deep dive. Whether a story choose to focus on the "reporter's perspective" is perhaps less common, but not uncommon IMO.
This is why (flawed though the process may be in other ways), a company like Amazon asks "customer obsession" questions in engineering interviews. To gather data about whether the candidate appreciates this point about needing to understand user problems, and also what steps the candidate takes to try and learn the users' POV or walk a mile in their shoes so to speak.
Of course interview processes can be gamed, and signal to noise ratio deserves skepticism, so nothing is perfect, but the core principle of WHY that exists as part of the interview process (at Amazon and many many other companies too) is exactly for the same reason you say it's your "favorite".
Also IIRC, there was some internal research done in the late 2010s or so, that out of the hiring assessment data gathered across thousands of interviews, the single best predictor of positive on-the-job performance for software engineers, was NOT how well candidates did on coding rounds or system design but rather how well they did at the Customer Obsession round.
You could work for a boss that's a Leo, and he/she believes only Leos deserve to get promoted, or that Leos and Scorpios should never be assigned together on a shared project. Your life and career trajectory under this boss could be totally different, depending on whether you were born a Leo or not.
Certainly "not all bosses" applies, but it's not really that farfetched or uncommon either. The point is that a correlation does exist, but it's a social one and not a physical or astronomical one (and it's also often a self-reinforcing/self-fulfilling one: Leos who read what astrology says Leos should do, may end up choosing to behave more like that).
So in the LLM example, it may not really matter much what physical markers of provenance or physical correlations there are, as social beliefs or perceptions about suspected provenance may be the strongest correlation anyways (in terms of impact and outcomes).