An illustration of AI disrupting society in indirect ways. If this comment were in fact written by human hands, your perception of it is lessened by the mere possibility it wasn't.
This is interesting. I’m from the UK, in the car trade, and setting up in Louisiana. Is there a market for European panel vans (like the sprinter, crafter, ford transit) in Louisiana?
It took a while but people are a lot more warmed up to the European or world vans now. IMO you still see a lot more tradesmen using pickup trucks just because its the culture here. For personal use you mostly see the large religious family types with 12 kids driving 15 passenger vans or RV/camper types using panel vans.
I'm sad that the city van is a dying breed now. Had a Nissan NV200 I used for a daily driver and weekend camper van. Unfortunately the NV200, Metris, Promaster City, and Transit Connect are all killed off and out of production. By 2024 If I want another brand new cargo van I'm stuck buying a $40k+ fullsize.
Putting in a chat window turns it into crowd sourced peer programming. You could get people who do nothing all day as a profession but this. Like github copilot but with real developers on the other end.
Yes, this is consulting but commodified and made more efficient on an open market. The legacy "consulting" business model probably includes lots of costs and inefficiency priced in such as time wasted getting set up with a new team, time wasted in meetings, cost of sales, insurance etc.
How much value can really be added though in the question-answer format that you can't already get for free on StackOverflow?
The answer probably lands somewhere on a sliding scale between "quick answer to an easy coding or api question" at 0 and "team of programmers speccing out and working on a project with delivery by a deadline" at 100.
StackOverflow currently sits at 0 to 10. Gig sites like fiverr at 50, and legacy consulting at 80-90. Maybe the value here is at 25 or 30 on that scale?
> How much value can really be added though in the question-answer format that you can't already get for free on StackOverflow?
Or a tier higher - for SO points. Whenever a question is not answered, throwing a few hundred/thousand points at a bounty gives you so much attention, I don't think you'd be able to get a better answer for money.
If average pay for a dev is x per hour, I wonder if you could work out how much one SO point is worth based on how much time invested to get the bounty
Say you're a decision-maker at Google (or Any Large Corp). You have a KPI to increase revenue by 5% this year. If you hit this KPI, then you get a bonus. If you get the bonus, then you can afford the thing that your partner has been wanting forever (or that will make your neighbours jealous, or whatever), and you get a happy life.
You know that doing X will harm the company in the long term (defined as anything past your likely tenure in this role, so usually 2 years max). But doing X will bump revenue in the short term, and get you your bonus and your happy life.
WDYD? Given that to get to a level where you have the power to make this decision, you had to have a particular personality type and set of priorities, it's extremely likely that you decide to do the thing that helps you and hurts everyone else.
I know people that do this very thing but none of them admit to themselves that they "know that doing X will harm the company in the long term". Instead they create a narrative that says "This time it will be different" so they don't have to be bothered by any kind of pesky conscience. I don't even know if they do this consciously, it just seems to happen.
How do we fix this loop in companies? It is a very serious problem for humanity’s future. It exists in government too. How do we reward long-term thinking and decisions?
A lot of the most egregious, society-warping behavior by monstrous-sized companies is due to paying execs with stock. It was a salary tax avoidance maneuver that started in the 80's, and has led to 1) absolute fixation on short-term stock price, and 2) (also to that end) stock buybacks. Many of our largest corporations have used recent stimulus moneys to fund buybacks like it was sex or something. All it has been is a transfer of tax dollars to the oligarchy, and has "stimulated" nothing. We need some laws that do away with the loophole somehow, either by not allowing companies to pay people in stock, or by taxing the stock on its nominal value when given, making it much less attractive as a shell game.
This has also completely messed with startup stock options. Because large companies used options to award execs with tax-free incentives, and the tax authorities didn't like that, we now have to pay tax on the options when we get them rather than on the capital gains we actually make. And it doesn't solve the problem - execs get paid some other way and options are still fubar'd
RSUs are taxed as income according to their value on the day they vest. Companies can offer employees below-market grants, but the difference is recognized as a cost and (eventually) has to be approved by shareholders.
Stock options with a strike price below market also have tax implications for both the company and the employee.
Equity based compensation essentially comes out of the hides of shareholders: As long as they are happy (and people aren’t playing Thiel-type games), it’s not as terrible as you make it out to be. There’s a limit to what buybacks can do to juice prices and equity generally puts people into a long term mindset.
Nature solved it for us: obsolete things die and are replaced by better, new things. Google dying is not a bad thing, it's how it's supposed to work. Same for countries, religions, and so on. On a different scale.
The problem, ultimately, cannot be solved without disassembling neoliberal capitalism. It is more or less endemic to the system. To a large extent that short termist, get returns and move on before the cost is due, mode of being is how we managed to run an economy that requires constant growth (rather than stability) to function. It's also why we won't solve any of our climate or many social issues.
There's no way to change this without drastically restructuring the utility function people apply to decisions, and that just won't happen until the aftermath of whatever collapse is inevitably going to happen when the planet floods.
Yeah. It's wild to see sibling comments thinking that it's an exec incentive "problem." No, exec incentives align to GOOGL shareholder incentives and GOOGL shareholders are pursuing returns at your expense, as is their right under capitalism. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but we either need to get much more serious about encouraging competition or we need to figure out a different way to organize control.
Personally I'm a bigger fan of "encourage competition" than "reorganize control," at least in the search engine market, but I fully agree with you that what we see here is the system working exactly as designed.
Short term rewards would need to be less enticing than the long term ones. Doing so would involve restricting many rights and privileges and people would hate that.
This is essentially what corruption is. Fixing corruption is extremely hard, especially when it is less overt like this. The main thing you can do is to teach people how to spot bad apples and push them out, fire them or in other ways punish them and reduce the damage they can do. It shouldn't be culturally acceptable to be a bad apple, but that requires a cultural change and those are really hard to do.
You have to align the long term growth and wellbeing of the company with the long term prosperity of the employee. This is why stock options with a long term vesting period have become an attractive choice.
Easier said than done, but the basic idea would be something like what the Founding Fathers of the US did with the Constitution - make a system where incentives are set up in such a way as to align success for the individual and the group.
If you start a company, you can experiment with alternatives to the current "increase da KPI" style of organization that is so prevalent nowadays.
I think Steve Jobs was a good example of someone who governed by pointing people to a beautiful vision, rather than mindless "ya, numbers go up" type thinking prevalent amongst investors nowadays.
And it's turtles all the way down. Every single incentive and system is optimized for some goal like periodic revenue increase. It's not one personality type and the desire to buy a new car, it's the intentional structure of a public corporation. We have high minded ideas about sustainability and corporate citizenship, but those views don't drive decisions in the bear market.
Yes that's true. I just think it's particularly easy to forget how your company actually works--e.g. what puts the bread on the table--when the markets are high. Therefore we see more monetization strategy in this type of financial cycle.
Why do you care if you harm the company long term? It’s not like you are tied to it’s performance forever. When equity and labor markets are liquid, why wouldn’t you make decisions that help you now, and cause long term hurt something you have no long term stake in? If you don’t, your peers will.
Corporations are meant to improve our lives sustainably. If all these people can do is extract short term value for themselves instead of providing long term value to the world, then there's no reason to allow this corrupt system to continue. It's pretty screwed up that executives can go around chasing infinite short term growth and awarding themselves golden parachutes so they can jump ship when the problems inevitably start to surface. How much destruction can they cause before society stops them?
Long term, systemic damage to both product and company reputation.
Google Stadia case in point. Nobody serious backed Stadia because almost everyone expected Google to kill it off so nobody jumped to it and then it was inevitably killed off because it didn't bring in the cash Google was expecting. Even when the stars had aligned for them with the pandemic and supply shortages that should have given them tons of players Google just couldn't convince enough people to go for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are high level talks going on about the sustainability of some of this exact lines of thinking. Chasing growth organically is fine. Artificially generating it by shifting costs or cutting corners elsewhere to maintain the illusion of growth eventually sinks the whole ship.
Nobody cares though. Investors only care about short term. When it stops making money they will just move their money somewhere else. When you can get out of the game at any time there is no incentive to think long term for those at the top. The Executives are told to make money today. And why not? They will leave soon too. To run another company for a few years doing the same thing. The only people who are interested in long term viability are customers and low level employees. And their opinions don't matter.
I agree with this statement, but it's pretty academic. At this stage of the game (metastatic capitalism), people aren't generally allowed to have interests that don't serve capital. Like, there may be some philosophical "best self interest" which is beyond the capture of capital markets, but it's not part of our culture.
Besides, look at context. We are talking about what a company does and the agents of the company. Of course it all collapses to serving capital. I read GP as "why would company take short money over long?"
The someones at Google are compensated significantly by shares of the company, traded on Wall Street, and some of them are compensated with even more shares if those shares do well.
Pretending the two are at arms length is a bit silly.
They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content will be prioritised on search results, it is going to be released in America first this month I believe
They are also seeing the results will be far more varied and scrolling down will likely give you a result that you are looking for, and the traditional way of looking with the top result, being the one that you wanted may not be the case anymore
I think they are maybe trying to replicate the TikTok experience when looking for a result, you will end up scrolling different content relative to your search keyword
All of this will benefit content creators. If you have an ability to create video content, this will give you a competitive edge.
Here's a reminder to everyone in the thread that Google owns YouTube. Content creators are, literally, the product. YouTube would not exist without them. They are not equals.
> They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content
I’ve been unfortunate enough to see this, it’s absolute hot garbage and made it way harder to find what I wanted.
Is this a knee jerk response to TikTok kids using TikTok as their generations google?
I don’t think many understand how much Google land is up for grabs right now. Google Images is right there for the taking if you just supply the same experience as 10 years ago Google Images.
Why is it malignant? Monarchy is the foundation of the whole system. It goes from the top all the way from the bottom. That's like saying blood is a malignant influence on the body.
Please don't take HN threads further into predictable, generic flamewar. It's tedious, and therefore off topic. The site guidelines ask commenters in several different ways not to do this.
The monarchy has utterly usurped UK's "democracy" and continues to use its powers to oppress innocent human beings across the world. The crown regularly interferes in the democratic machinations of the UK.
The fact that the UK doesn't have the social capital to prosecute their known, actual war criminals - because they are factually protected by the crown - should be a clue of the malignant effect of the monarchy, in itself.
