I agree with the author that Slack's network effects are not very relevant. In most organizations, a team leader can just chose to move everyone to a different platform. There is some worry about migrating the chat history, though.

I hope there is a feature that will let people export the artefacts to HTML5/JS.

The author mentions that they found Mamouras et al. (POPL 2024), but not the associated implementation. While the Rust implementation is not public, a Haskell implementation can be found here: https://github.com/Agnishom/lregex

What is the context? Were Zuckerberg's old emails made available to the public?

This looks like a compilation of emails made available through various court cases and leaks over the past 15+ years. Each conversation lists a source (look for small text after all the messages). There's a bunch of different sources.

As to why it's relevant now - I don't think it is. It's likely just a spin-off of similar renders that started popping out in relation to the Epstein files.

I recommend the book "The Fine Art of Small Talk".

TLDR: Small talk seems to be of trivial importance and to require minimal effort. Neither of this is true. Therefore, there is no shame in cultivating one's smalltalk muscle and being more prepared for it

Please excuse my finance illiteracy. What's pre-money valuation?

> i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now.

Sounds like a false dichotomy. The third option is that he could have kept them around. It would be financially feasible given that "our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving.".

If AI was that much more productive, then Block would be able to take on much bigger challenges and expand their revenue even faster. The AI explanation doesn't add up.

Indeed. If you suddenly have a workforce that can be 2x as productive (or whatever multiple), why would you cut them? You already have these people under your control, direct them towards profitable ventures.

It suggests that there is no more innovation, no compliments to the business and the management have identified no areas for R&D. In the tech (or tech adjacent) space that should really be a death knell.

A quick check of the share price tells the story, they should really pivot back from blocks to squares.

As someone who comes from a country where it's very hard to fire people, don't make that mistake.

Staying in a company where you're not wanted is a miserable experience. The company will do anything to make you leave. Plus, it weakens companies and makes for a poor general worker experience.

What should be done instead is mandate generous severance packages that increase with tenure. But give companies a clear path to fire people when they don't want to employ them anymore.

As someone who comes from a country where it’s very hard to fire people: fuck the companies.

This is the reason why we need the laws in the first place. Many people leave their countries, move their families, buy houses/flats, plan for stability just to be what? Laid off, because investors said so or tripping CEO woke up on the wrong side of the bed? We’re talking about people for fucks sake, workers aren’t Docker pods that are scaled up and down. If they are, they should be compensated for the constant risk they bear.

> If they are, they should be compensated for the constant risk they bear.

I suspect that they are. US tech workers likely make dramatically more than the country you are from with better worker protections.

it's a business, why he should keep people if company doesn't need them? A business is not a charity

I am not saying that he should. He is pretending that his hand was forced. I am saying that it wasn't. He made a choice. You may say that it is the rational choice, but that is a different debate.

On shareholder money? No thank you. If 1 person can do the job, why keep 2?

If there are growth opportunities for the company, selectively choosing the top 90% YoY, minimizing backfills (in theory...) will result in a company full of high achievers that can execute on that growth vision.

If the company is shifting into maintenance mode, cutting 40% of the staff is the right move, but definitely hurts shareholders b/c they valued the company as growth, not maintenance.

Sometimes I feel like “shareholder first” mentality has gone a bit too far. Most of the majority shareholders are a handful of people who have too much money, they don’t really put in any work, but are more than happy to put people out of work if it meant they’d get a bit more money.

Because in such adversarial environments, your best employees leave, and quickly. And those people worth way more than half of your workforce.

If you're a healthy company that is growing, you could do 2x as much stuff!

Shareholders didn’t complain when those workers inflated their obscene capitals.

I am just saying that the decision was not some kind of inevitable result of forces beyond their control. They just made a business decision to line their pockets better.

It's happening on April 1. Should we take it seriously?

The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.

Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.

I don't think standard economic indicators are tuned to detect these externalities in the short to medium term.

> The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.

This. I think generative AI will mostly generate destruction. Not in the nuking cities sense, but in hollowing out institutions and social bonds, especially the complicated and large-scale kind that have enabled advanced civilization. In many ways, things will revert to a more primitive state: only really knowing people in your local vicinity (no making friends online, because it'll be mostly dead-internet bots out there), only really knowing the news you see yourself, more reliance on rumor and hearsay, removal of the ability for the little guy to challenge and disprove institutional propaganda (e.g. can't start a blog and put up some photos and have people believe your story about what happened), etc.

> Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.

I think most people will retreat into smaller spaces where they can rely on people to not deceive them. Everyone is moving to discord/group chats now for any sort of trustworthy information. This might be a good thing honestly. It was probably never good that we all got our information from the same place.

Hell, yeah. Children's Literature is no joke. It is a branch of literature as old as time, and has seen no shortage of depth or variety.

tossing you a head nod: i stumbled upon this book at a children's toy store during xmas shopping https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-bad-seed/

made me cry. i bought the hard cover and im saving it for when my niece is a little older to understand the depth, just a little more. it's been a few years. she still needs to learn how to read!