In my experience, rewriting software doesn't work. You should replace the components iteratively in Homebrew itself if you want your ideas to succeed. I doubt your software will see any major adoption just because you wrote it in some other language. The word Homebrew is culturally significant in hacker groups as well and sapphire is not.
I remember having a conversation with my friend some 15 years ago when FB only allow .edu accounts. I argued that the incentives for the company cannot be to connect people because that in itself isn't profitable. I signed up maybe 10 years ago for 6 months or so and never tried again. I think this has isolated me in some ways, but I'm quite comfortable with the friends I currently have.
Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.
Google becoming irrelevant is the most naive take in technology. It's more if wishful thinking. Google is equally, if not more relevant today. Their AI models are currently one of the best in the world. They still have a commanding search market share. YouTube and Android rule in most countries in terms of number of users. Chrome is the leading browser. Google maps is omnipresent. Gmail is the biggest email service online. Their revenues are steady.
They are not doing well with certain areas like social, GCP, messaging, enterprise etc. But it's not an existential threat.
Wasn't Harvard's president a woman who wrote her PhD thesis on DEI? I vaguely remember the news about this (fraud or something). If this is what Harvard considers that the person for the job, I think the sense making apparatus of Harvard personnel is specifically tuned to not bend the knee in this case. The instrument would likely fail at the input validation step and not proceed to the sense making portion.
I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..
What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.
Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.
I think this is one important reason that marriage is not as common, since the society is aligned towards that is should be possible to manage on your own if you absolutely need to.
I can't find a proper number but anecdotally I think maybe 50% of first time parents are married in Sweden.
And yes obviously this is paid by higher taxes, but seen an an investment to keep the demography (reasonably) sane.
The birth rate in Sweden is low and falling. Whatever they're doing to keep demography sane doesn't seem to be working. Like most developed Western countries, their current approach relies more on high levels of immigration. Essentially they have outsourced the hassle and expense of having children.
Relatively to the rest of Europe is still on the upper echelons so some of the policies do work.
The issue is: without hope for the future there's not much the State can do to push people into having kids. We live in an age of hopelessness, I don't have my parents optimism from the 80s, I'm starting to approach 40 and every 5 years something happen to chip away on the little hope I still have.
It is true. But that also means that the cost will not be there.
I'd claim it did work for some time (from the 1970s to the 2000s) because it allowed the transition to a society where women did not have to choose between children and a career.
I am not sure what is the reason for lower birth rate now. Maybe that young people have gotten used to that you always have a choice.
> As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.
Obviously $100/month covers a tiny fraction of the total cost of running a childcare service in Sweden. I am curious how much does state pays to cover the rest.
The structure of the Swedish society is somewhat different in the sense that most families leave their children at daycare starting around 2 years old.
Unless you have more children, where you are allowed to leave the older child in daycare for a few days per week at that cost.
The economy behind this is rather obvious. It is better for the economy as a whole to leave children with professionals taking care of 4-6 children per teacher and let the (supposedly educated) mom work with what she is or will become specialized in.
Mentioning moms here, but the ambition is to have fathers stay as much home with the children as their mom, but this is comparing to e.g. USA.
And not mentioning the other reasons to want to raise your children full time, there are obvious and understandable reasons for that, and you are obviously free to do that and many do. But there are also good reasons for letting them meet other children in a well run daycare too.
The ~$21/hr minimum wage, 1:2 staffing ratio, etc required by law in Seattle puts a very high floor on the cheapest possible daycare. Just being a bare minimum legal daycare business has a cost floor of at least $2k/month per infant.
It sounds crazy, but it only applies in one case: a home-based childcare where the license holder has less two-years of experience and all the children are under 2 years of age and none of them are walking independently. For more experienced primary licensees, and older children, the ratios are higher. [0]
For childcare centers, the ratios are also higher: [1]
For infants (under 1 year) the required ratio is 1:4 with a group size of up to 8, or 1:3 with a group size of 9
For toddlers (under 30 months) the required ratio is 1:7 with a group size of up to 14, or 1:5 with a group size of 15
For preschoolers (under 5 years) the arequired ratio is 1:10 with a group size of up to 20
For school age children the required ratio is 1:15 with a group size of up to 30.
Also not accurate. I have a 2 year old in daycare in Seattle and the ratio is 8:1. I believe it’s 6:1 or maybe 4:1 for infants. I’ve never heard of 2:1 that would be absurd
Seattle is crazy expensive. It's why I moved to Tacoma half a decade ago. I was already working remotely anyways. Less money to own a 3k sqft home in a nice neighborhood (under $600k), and I can do a 45min or so reverse commute to Seattle for entertainment on weekdays.
And Tacoma has a lot of great restaurants, bars, and entertainment itself too.
I'm guessing there are lots of similar choices around Seattle. Or were - it feels like people got wise in the pandemic and started to take advantage.
I also suspect these are reasons people give because they feel more concrete and defensible.
I suspect a more significant but harder to concretize cause is that certain social changes have lead to the majority of young people being unable to form healthy attachments and pair bond.
The causes ranging from a high percentage of kids growing up in single parent households and forming avoidant personality styles, social media leading to higher rates of narcissism, dating apps setting unrealistic standards and a perception that there’s always a better option etc
I met my now-wife after smartphones existed but before dating apps were really a thing. I am sympathetic to how hard it is to date nowadays - it seems very weird.
Tacoma has gotten much much nicer over the past 20ish years and the aroma jokes are mostly vestigial at this point.
My best friend moved down there a few years ago (a family member sold them their house under-market and the price was too good to pass up). We all made our jokes but I’ve been down a lot and I actually really like it. It’s not that much harder to get to than west Seattle
> I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning)
What makes you feel uncomfortable with this? Is Seattle particularly dangerous, moreso than a few decades ago?
There's hardly any place which is really "friendly" towards professional families with infants. For safety reasons, daycare centers have to maintain staffing ratios so it's always going to be extremely expensive (unless you're poor enough to qualify for subsidies).
As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?
1. Seattle is quite safe. Friendliness is different than safety
2. It all comes back to housing density/supply. As you say, daycare costs are dominated by staffing ratios/wages - which are a function of cost of living. The surge of high income earners + housing supply deficit = pricing out daycare workers (and daycares).
Seattle has a higher homicide rate than New York or LA and it is running well above its own historical rate; in 2014, the entirety of King County had fewer homicides than the city of Seattle did in 2024. It is safer than many other US cities, but US cities are quite dangerous by first world standards which is why many people opt to raise kids in suburbia.
The required staffing at daycare isn't driven by "crime safety" but an overprotective sense of protecting kids from themselves and each other. These are the required ratios. As low as 1:4 for < 1.
A 4:1 ratio for infants seems quite reasonable and not overprotective. Children that age require a lot of attention. By the time you've fed and changed diapers for 4 babies it's about time to start the cycle again.
Having had kids and cared for them as infants myself, and previously worked in a (very much unlicensed) home-based daycare, the 1:4 ratio for childcare centers and 1:2-1:4 (depending on primary licensee's experience) ratio for home-based daycares for infants are not at all unreasonable.
Yes, most of time that's going to seem excessive -- but it is not a cloud system with on-demand autoscaling, you have to set your capacity by peak demand, not average demand.
Really? Most countries? Do you have a list of those?
Some countries do manage to keep daycare somewhat affordable through huge subsidies (as well as lower wages for the daycare workers). I'm not opposed to increasing subsidies but that has to be balanced against other priorities. Elder care facilities face the same basic economic issue.
People are such predictably complainers. When Google provided lots of benefits including daycare it was because “they want you to live there and have no life outside” and “the next step is company scrip”.
Now, it’s because they want you to give up everything.
Man, you can make millions working for big tech. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own self.
Palantir's goal is to make a data monopoly. This is laid out quite plainly in Peter Thiel's book 0 to 1. As he said: "Competition is for suckers.". This is also pushed internally (I worked for Palantir as an FDE or "delta").
The financial purpose is to create a J curve with income. Lose a bit or money first, then charge monopoly prices.
I don't like Palantir at all. Anecdote: I got drugged without consent _twice_ while employed there. The first time was minor but the second time hurt me and I'm still hurt from it. I can only guess but I think I got dosed with a large amount of Adderal or meth. I quit after that. I wanted to get authorities involved, but Palantir contracted for them, so I didn't out of fear.
This being said, if you're a UK employee and think this is a good idea: you're about to get screwed out of a lot of money long term. And you won't be able to leave because Palantir's tactic is to be as sticky as possible.
I've been issued a five year bar for visiting someone in the US while unemployed. My immigration lawyer told me it's the weakest case he had ever seen. It took two years for the appeal to be approved. I had worked in the US on TN visas twice before, and never overstayed. It felt like they were just trying to meet a quota.
Edit: I had applied for a GC years before this happened, so I think the officer thought I didn't want to leave. This was not the case however. The case had been approved but not processed.
The officers were "dirty". They brought me in a room to do an interrogation where one officer asked questions and the other took notes on an old computer. I literally told them: "I am not going to stay past my return date" and the officer asking questions told the officer taking notes to not write that down. They asked who my parents were, how much money I had, my employment history, what I did in the US while working on my previous TN, if I was in danger, etc.. They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
For those of you who go through that, don't agree to the statement if they modified it, like mine. There's no cameras or recording devices so they can be dirty, and they abuse that fact. You have no rights at all at the border, and your assumptions on decency and honesty are not correct.
My assumption to this day is that they thought I was trying to work illegally, but this is not the case.
>They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
So you told them that you were there for visiting/tourism, and they alleged you were coming to the US to work, on the basis that you're applying to jobs in the US?
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