Is Tailscale really a serious company?

So far the studies point to study authors having a profound misunderstanding of what’s happening. Which isn’t surprising, since any study right now requires speculating about what’s important and impactful in a new and fast-moving field. Very few people are good at that, and most of the ones who are are not running studies.

There's another perspective on this, which is that the entire function of mature corporations is to codify what's needed to perform certain functions mechanistically, eliminating the need for expertise. Sure, you might have product development or R&D but they're not part of the daily customer-facing function of the corporation.

That's why when private equity buys a company, the first thing they often do is shut down any new product development or R&D. They want to run the machine and extract profit from what it does now - a cash cow - without taking risks on changing a working model. In this model, new product development is for startup ventures, not mature companies whose DNA doesn't tend to be a good fit for it anyway.

tl;dr: What you're describing is the system working as designed and intended. For better or worse.

This company and product line launched nearly 20 years ago (2007) and doesn’t seem to have changed much since. That’s quite a long time for something like this. If the owners had wanted the business to continue (perhaps they didn’t), some diversification could have achieved that relatively easily.

Your assumption here is that they wanted it to continue making money, rather than (for example) reacting to the influx of new orders from HA’s announcement by shutting it down. Perhaps a working source of revenue is being voluntarily terminated rather than having starved to death?

Contracts are negotiable at most companies once you get to a certain level. I negotiated my last contract, and I’m an IC, not an exec. In fact I made the non-disparaging clause mutual, among other things.

That’d be direct democracy, which is not such a bad idea.

E.g. in Switzerland, citizens can propose constitutional changes, challenge parliamentary laws, and some decisions automatically go to vote.

Citizens of California can pass laws directly, amend the constitution, and recall elected officials.

Probably the biggest reason we don’t have more of that is that people in power typically see it as a threat.

> superfluous to the goals of the contract.

How so? The goal of these companies is generally to exercise the maximum possible control over what employees do and say.

Fair, the primary goal. An exchange of labor and expertise for pay.

Agreed. The article bemoans the fact that AIs don’t need to work in the inefficient way that most humans prefer, getting micro-level feedback from IDEs and REPLs to reduce our mistake count as we go.

If you take a hard look at that workflow, it implies a high degree of incompetence on the part of humans: the reason we generally don’t write thousands of lines without any automated feedback is because our mistake rate is too high.

Perhaps, but only because it implies that hanging out at the pub was a less attractive option.

Bit like introducing crack and commenting how great it is nobody is sat at home sober and bored

“Ruckus” is an inspired name.

Someone finally brought it.