I thought you were implying that the mental health framework is an oversimplification, but then you oversimplify the issue yourself by saying that the world is bad. Neither is the truth. It may also still be worth invetigating data related to mental health issues and mobile phone usage.
Thanks for this. A lot of challenges for sure. I still don't think it's a bad business model per se and that these challenges can't be addressed; I am sure they've thought of most of these challenges if not all. All business models are plagued with such challenges, but I think the worst thing about this one is simply that it is a departure from an old business model.
This only makes sense. Unity is a very big part of what makes a game work and building and maintaining the Unity engine costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer, which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don't want to pay any money?
Yup. Most of the stink in companies start at the top, but there are suprisingly few people who are actually good at leadership. There are so many ego trips in management.
Culture where you're scared to criticize stuff, because people get angry when you're telling them the truth or even just the elephant in the room. Echo chamber instead of idea lab.
Management constantly making decisions such that no one decision made ever gets totally implemented, but the loose ends just stack up.
Management not involving engineers in the and assuming that engineers are incapable of understanding how the business works, let alone contribute valuable ideas to how it might work better.
Too many layers of hierarchy, competitive, macho male-dominated, title-driven, ego-driven culture where people are fighting they're way up the totem pole instead of working cooperatively together to create a great experience for their users.
Companies where silly little things that should be doable in hours costs weeks or months or where nothing gets done quickly, because too many people need to sign off on it.
Mission statement that is bogus and you know that it really is all about money, growth and status. I like companies that are truly trying to adding value to the world, however small that change may be. I am just not interested in your algorithmic trading, crypto non-sense, optimizing ad revenue or getting people to waste more of their time or money with endless bull crap.
Having to constantly fight to get the time to refactor, test, rethink, work on build/development/observability tooling instead of working on feature after feature endlessly. If I say something needs work I have good reasons for it that I am willing to explain, but do not assume that I like to waste time gold plating code because I am a autistic perfectionist with OCD with no sense for what the business is trying to do.
Constant bogus deadlines that seem to come from nowhere and are only meant to keep the pressure on the engineers. I work hard and this kind of pressure only means we're going to go fast in the short run and extremely slow in the long run, because nothing gets finished properly.
Running the server side on Windows. I want to be able to debug issues in depth when they arise.
Using the Go programming language. I am not going back to 80's programming and checking for nil all day long, just to see my program segment fault in production anyway. (and yes, I am talking from experience here)
Only remote companies. I get too lonely at some point and all the best cooperative ideas I've ever had in my career where born at the whiteboard with colleagues. This is just me though.
but it’s not entirely clear that either side isn’t inherently motivated by selfishness
That could also be explained by us just not being entirely pre-disposed to be selfish. At least some part of us has evolved to be a social and empathetic, which forever pushes us to be altruistic and moralistic. History is full of stories of the brave, unselfish and compassionate. Plenty of people have died for causes they truly believe in. It also seems we're never done evolving our ethics and that makes sense, since we're brainy herd animals.
It also seems to me that evolution likes game theory and that therefore the angelic side and the dark side of our human souls are forever locked in battle. The good news is that when there are enough resources to go around, societies can become quite nice to live in. The bad news is on the other hand is that when those sea levels indeed will rise we'll be back to killing each other quite quickly.
is counter-culture as popular culture counterproductive?
Counter culture becomes popular and then it is not counter culture anymore. This cycle repeats itself endlessly. I remember the gabber scene of the 90s that very much started as a counter culture, but then became mainstream through commercial success. The oldskool gabbers hated that, but after a few years the commercial success died off and it slowly evolved and re-emerged as a new counter culture. I don't think it is by design, but it is just that social dynamics are just most predictable than we tend to think.
It seems to me though that through the diversification of culture, which I would ascribe in large part to the internet, counter culture movements have a lot less steam to them. Before the internet people (but mostly youngsters) could pick from a handful of sub-cultures to be part of: rocker, skater, punker, alto, hippie, goth, gabber, raver. Those movements were large and powerful. Now there are uncountably many sub-cultures, so counter culture isn't such a force to be reckoned with either. No more parents on radio talk shows who are concerned that their children may be possessed by the devil.
Just found this:
Throughout the mid to late 2010s, subcultures splintered and merged due to the widespread accessibility of the internet and social media platforms. Many 2010s subcultures drew from previously existing groups - the popular 'e-girl' subculture is seen as a modern spin on mid-2000s scene fashion.[7] As part of their retrospective series on the 2010s, Dazed magazine described the impact of technology on subcultures; "But [the internet] also gave us more; it gave us dozens upon dozens of scenes and movements, only recognisable to the highly trained eye. And the rules became less rigid: you could dress one way, and listen to totally different music."
I'm old enough to remember the pre-internet age in detail and I thoroughly disagree. I am sure there have been studies on this topic, but I'll defer to my own experience for now.
Before the internet everybody got their information via the same set of channels, TV, radio, news papers. If you really wanted to know something you had to go to the library to usuaully get disappointed. People were much less likely to disagree with you back then, because most people got their information from the same set of sources. Nowadays you've got such an explosion of opinions on basically everything. You might meet a pro-life, climate change denying flat earther one day and meet an non binary vegan activist the next. People are much harder to control now and governments are taking longer and longer to try and please anyone, which anyway fails pretty much every time too.
Sure there are still plenty of places on the internet that brainwash whole populations with information bubbles, but the fact that there are so many more sources of information makes it so much harder to catch large crowds.
I am guessing you might be American, because that is one place where the brainwash of republics vs democrats is still working pretty well. From my European vantage point its mostly the republicans that are still very much in control of the minds of their voters.
I would say that you were right. The internet is bringing us all those things. And it is doing that pretty fast if you look at the entire timeline of humanity thus far. Unfortunately it is just not fast enough to truly help us with climate change.
Nix! And then you can also auto-create your CI/CD environment from Nix. They share a common source, which eliminates whole classes of problems. It's supsr fast and very awesome when it works, but it has a learning curve. Worth the effort though.
Why can't it be both?