Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

• Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
• No managers: There is no managerial oversight
• Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
• Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
• Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills

Not quite, this was made with a ControlNet. A hybrid image wouldn’t work as well as this does. But the underlying visual phenomena is the same.

This is done by combining a Diffusion model with ControlNet interface. As long as you have a decently modern Nvidia GPU and familiarity with Python and Pytorch it’s relatively simple to create your own model.

The ControlNet paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05543.pdf

I implemented this paper back in March. It’s as simple as it is brilliant. By using methods originally intended to adapt large pre-trained language models to a specific application, the author’s created a new model architecture that can better control the output of a diffusion model.

Nothing about that comment was pretentious. I’m surrounded at work by people with estimated IQ greater than 140, and undoubtedly a few north of 150 (think top academic institutions in the world). That estimation is based on GRE scores and the prestige of the institution.

If anything it makes me doubt those estimations. I can’t remember what Derek said his SATs were but I was also surprised because I felt they were low for someone like him. All this just further drives home the idea that IQ does not correlate with success, maybe even in science communication.

But apparently making an observation is seen as pretentious and boastful to you.

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Do you always reduce everything you read to a false dichotomy or do you simply like being abrasive?

Frankly, it was much lower than I expected. As a PhD Physicist who leads a very successful career in science education, I expected him to score at least 140, and would not have been surprised to see 150.

A lot of people in this situation have already tried everything, and they are complaining on the internet because they feel like there is nothing else they can do. Most people won’t even complain about it with their friends. I know I didn’t until one day I got drunk camping. That was the trigger for me to do something about it, because it was clearly eating away at me.

I had many conversations with my wife following that, and how much our sexless marriage really bothered me, but that I am still completely and totally in love with her. We don’t have kids, so there’s not anything keeping us together. We agreed to an open relationship with our rules, and each of us has a veto which could stop the arrangement at any time. We are still completely committed to one another and love spending time together. Things haven’t been better, now when I think about being with another woman, I don’t need to feel guilty about it.

And I think this is the natural state of humanity. Everyone needs a long-term partner for stability and to care for one another, but people always felt the need to cheat as well. Monogamy is as core to our DNA and survival as is Adultery. But because we’ve talked about it, there is no sneaking around necessary, no lying. We are completely honest with each other on everything.

I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.

2. You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn’t a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.

3. See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it’s the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.

4. Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it’s just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.

5. Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It’s either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it’s completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It’s faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!

I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.

It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It’s absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It’s too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it’s urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn’t even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it’s still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).

This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn’t every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.

All politicians, including Bernie must cater to the rich and wealthy. It’s our jobs as voters to discern the true reason why they do it. It’s a cruel reality that without the support of the wealthy, no one will make it to congress to effect change. Every successful politician knows this very well. They know not to bite the hand that feeds, so each one (*that works for progress and not personal gain) must walk a very thin line to effect that change while also making sure they aren’t removed from office for fear that whatever they did could quickly be undone.

Bernie is in it for the right reasons. Biden and Clinton were in it for the right reasons. Having personally interacted with a few politicians in private settings (no cameras or hidden recorders) I can say that even some Republicans are in it for the right reasons, but differ in ideology and how to effect that change. In the end they play a fictional role when tv cameras are around.

Personally, I was most impressed by my interactions with Marco Rubio of all people. He’s exceptionally bright, and cares very deeply about the protection of this country, and it’s a very good thing he is vice chairman (or chairman during Republican senates) of the Senate Intelligence Committee as it seems to be his calling. It’s just unfortunate that in front of the cameras, he needs to dumb himself down in order to get elected by Republican voters.

As an Alaskan voter, ranked choice is the only reason we have a female, Native American, Democrat congressional representative instead of Sarah Palin filling Don Young’s deep red legacy. RCV is equitable and works, but not in the way progressives hope. It allows for the most centrist candidate to be chosen that appeals to the most possible people. A two party system just becomes a battle of political extremes. And like it or not, being progressive is far left for a reason, especially in America. And I consider myself fairly progressive leaning.

The same argument could be said for an apartment building too. We need to collectively realize that Single Family Houses are a luxury that most of us will never see in our lifetimes. Our grandparents were able to enjoy them at low prices because the US had half the population it does today.

Restrictive building codes that only permit building SFH is the cause of our housing shortage and not short term rentals that consist of 0.2%-1% of all dwellings.

Many leading economist argue for land value tax only as a way to incentivize the most efficient use for our most valuable resource. If land tax was used instead of property tax, a multi-acre plot in a dense urban would be taxed just as much a multi-story apartment building that takes up the same amount of space.

See the Strongtowns article on the subject. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/8/if-the-land-tax-is-such-a-good-idea-why-isnt-it-being-implemented

At it’s core, this is the root cause of the housing crisis. We do not have enough supply. The amount of Airbnb’s that exist is extremely miniscule and the targeting of Airbnbs is an intentional distraction tactic.

Depending on the source, 1% to 0.2% of all dwellings are listed for short-term rental in the US. That’s crazy small and has very little impact on housing prices overall.

The fact of the matter is that Single Family Homes are an incredible luxury that our parents and grandparents were able to enjoy when the country had half as many people as it does now. It is no longer sustainable to expect a SFH in the US, and the American public continuing to cling to that dream and restrictive zoning practices are really what is driving up prices.

If you want an affordable house you will need to move to a rural area where land and labor are cheap. If you want to live near any reasonably sized city, you better be upper middle class to even think about buying a SFH.

We used to run an Airbnb out of the spare rooms in our house. It was very cheaply priced, and we were always booked out for months. Super host status and everything. It was clear most people just look at the price and never the description or rules. We rented two bedrooms with a shared bathroom, and the amount of complaints we received because they had to share a bathroom with someone else was obnoxious.

We closed up shop during the pandemic and just used those rooms as guest rooms instead. In hindsight it wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with self-centered people who expect an experience superior to that hotels at a quarter the price. We also had some fantastic guests that we loved having stay with us, but the few bad experiences dramatically overshadowed all the good decent people.

Airbnb’s are so shitty today because their customers are just as equally shitty on aggregate.

Cab prices tend to be more consistent across all times of day and location. In Boston an Uber 10 miles west from the airport can cost upwards of $120 depending on the time. A cab would be $60.

The same Uber to the airport is typically much cheaper always at $40.

You are absolutely correct! I just couldn’t think of a way to further dive into that nuance, but I also wanted the example to be relatable and tangible. Thank you!

You used the phrase correctly, and your English is great!

The above commenter was rudely stating that your observation is not correct as it’s has always been this way.

This is the only response required. I’m quickly becoming exhausted of reading everyone’s epiphany on “enshittification” as if it’s some natural eventuality. Yes the money must eventually come, but not always at the expense of platform quality. If anything the results we see from “enshittification” are due to the fact that most businesses fail eventually due to poor leadership.

Just to echo what you have already said, money today is simply more expensive than it used to be. We even see the impacts of macro monetary decisions on households.

Buying a house or a car on loan is far more expensive than it would have been a year and half ago. A $500,000 house in 2021 would cost $2,000 a month at 2.75% interest and 20% down. Today same that payment is $2,800 or 40% more expensive at 7.75% interest.

Modern companies live on revolving debt, so if their suddenly gets 40% more expensive and that same amount of money is also less valuable at the same time (inflation), then they need to make up the difference somehow.

Corporations are trying to find the balance between squeezing more revenue to pay their ever increasing debt bills while also not destroying the environment that attracted the users (their products) in the first place. Twitter and Reddit are just going about it horrifically because of poor business leadership and decision making. Netflix’s approach appears to be sustainable, and there is no doubt that YouTube will be fine in the long run.

This is not meant to be apologetic to the decisions made by Twitter and Reddit. They’ve made their bed through their own horrible decisions, and now they’ve got to sleep in it.

Just so you know, you can edit titles on Lemmy!