mfitton (u/mfitton) - Readit News

mfitton commented on Redis is open source again antirez.com/news/151... · Posted by u/antirez

scargrillo · 4 months ago

This breakdown hits hard because it’s not just about business models — it’s about trust.

Open source succeeded because it created shared public infrastructure. But hyperscalers turned it into extraction infrastructure: mine the code, skip the stewardship.

The result? We’ve confused “open” with “free-for-the-powerful.”

It’s time to stop pretending licenses are enough. This is about incentives, governance, and resilience. The next generation of “open” has to bake in counterpower — or it’s just a feeding trough for monopolies.

mfitton · 4 months ago

Testing my LLM-detection abilities. Did you write this yourself? Or is this LLM produced?

The phrasings stick out to me as super GPT-like.

mfitton commented on Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists theregister.com/2025/04/2... · Posted by u/pseudolus

catlikesshrimp · 4 months ago

Won't doing the same job in half the time lead to having to pay half the salary? Indirectly, I mean. You can now hire half the people or pay the same number of people half.

Unless twice the work is suddenly required, which I doubt.

mfitton · 4 months ago

I think it's quite common that a company has way too many things that it could work on compared to what the amount of people they should reasonably hire can get done. And working on more things actually generates more work itself. The more products you have, or the more infrastructure capabilities you build out, the more possible work you can do.

So you could work on more things with the same number of employees, make more money as a result, and either further increase the number of things you do, or if not, increase your revenue and hopefully profits per-employee.

mfitton commented on Strengths Are Your Weaknesses terriblesoftware.org/2025... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

w10-1 · 5 months ago

Yes, and more importantly...

Strengths are weaknesses because they create a bias to use the strength rather than developing a weak alternate, and you only get better at what you do - creating a virtuous cycle that can quickly turn vicious.

This will happen whenever growth is mediated mainly by feedback loops. (Think hard about that!)

The solution is instead to have a model of what you're trying to grow, whether it's a company or a positive presence in the world, and be willing to sacrifice to make that happen.

mfitton · 5 months ago

I'm not sure that follows from this article. In fact, I think the logical conclusion of the article is that, by trying to grow (address weaknesses and turn them into strengths) you're actually creating strengths, which in turn creates a weakness.

I think it's possible to grow in positive outcomes of behaviors, but I also think this article is trying to get at something intrinsic within each one of us. Identifying where our personality quirks lead to strengths and weaknesses, and accepting that, is related but not quite the same as identifying concrete positive and negative outcomes of behavior, and trying to change our behaviors to align more to the positive outcomes.

Not sure if the link I'm trying to make here will be clear, but... I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other day. She conceives of who she is largely through the behaviors she expresses, a kind of de facto self-definition. I tend to have a self-conception that's a little bit more abstract and rooted as much in my feelings, thoughts, with some aspirational quality, that my behaviors sometimes live up to, and other times don't.

mfitton commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

snarf21 · 5 months ago

Maybe, just maybe, this is all about a secret wealth transfer.

mfitton · 5 months ago

Do you think normal people (think, your average investing American) are trading based on this news? They probably shouldn't be... I would think that by far most of the trading these past few days has been institutions, so, a big transfer from some financial institutions to others?

mfitton commented on Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump... · Posted by u/bhouston

magicloop · 5 months ago

"It’s the T-bills wot dun it."

That’s my read on why the U.S. just paused the global tariff hike to 10%.

From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why? Because Uncle Sam has to refinance a mountain of debt this year, and the cost of that depends heavily on Treasury yields — especially the 10-year. That’s the rate that sets the tone for everything from mortgages to corporate borrowing.

So they tried to spook markets. Introduce global tariffs. Stir up uncertainty. And it worked—at first. Yields dipped. Traders moved to Treasuries as a typical flight-to-safety.

But then something flipped.

Instead of being seen as a safe haven, U.S. debt itself started to look shaky. Maybe it was the deficit outlook, maybe the global response to tariffs — but whatever it was, yields started climbing. Fast.

At that point, the strategy backfired. The executive branch had no choice but to walk it back. So they paused the tariffs.

Because when your national budget depends on cheap debt, you can't afford a crisis of confidence in your bonds.

mfitton · 5 months ago

I think this would be expected though, no? Sure, there's flight to safety, but you're also reducing exports to the US, reducing the number of dollars flowing to foreign nationals, which reduces the demand for treasury bills, which an excess of dollars would often be used to buy to have an inflation-"proof" store for your dollars without currency risk. You would also expect devaluation of the dollar from tariffs / trade-war, which I would also expect to cause selling of t-bills in favor of local currencies

mfitton commented on AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink leaddev.com/culture/ai-co... · Posted by u/bluefirebrand

tmpz22 · 5 months ago

[flagged]

mfitton · 5 months ago

You're answering a question that wasn't asked so you can bring your view on unionization into the conversation. The implicit question is whether management should, not whether they can.

mfitton commented on Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/simula67

nine_k · 2 years ago

BTW this is where commute by public transport shines. My 30 minutes to the office are my dedicated reading time, an hour a day. If instead I had to drive, that would be lost time, because paying enough attention to the book distracts enough from driving to add unnecessary risk.

mfitton · 2 years ago

I have a public transit commute, but at the end of the day it's 8 minutes of walking to the train, a transfer after 7 minutes, and then a 7 minute walk to the office from the train. Never enough unbroken time to get into a book :(. I've learned something new about public transit commuting--look for a commute with as long a single stint on the train as possible, while still trying to minimize total time.

mfitton commented on 93% of U.S. households' stock market wealth is held by the top 10% axios.com/2024/01/10/weal... · Posted by u/Vaslo

SkyBelow · 2 years ago

Are they allowed to take out loans without paying them back? If they have to pay them back, eventually they have to use that collateral which will be a taxable event. They might be able to delay, but they'll eventually have to pay.

mfitton · 2 years ago

Could they not make sure that enough of their assets are in cash-flowing assets (think, rent-yielding assets, or treasuries, or dividend-yielding stock, etc.) that need not be sold and whose cash-flow can be utilized?

mfitton commented on U.S. GDP grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter, better than expected cnbc.com/2023/10/26/us-gd... · Posted by u/apsec112

throwawaydizjsj · 2 years ago

But it's not the case, it sounds good on paper but it has been a long time since the USA was a good place to lift yourself up by your bootstraps, there are so many things that hold you down on the way up that do not exist in other countries (really just the medical situation alone). That said I'm very glad you're happy and it has worked out well for you.

However, my only regret was that I did not leave sooner, it did not work out for well for me on the balance, IE I did make money, but my quality of life was less than middle class people have where I live now.

Edit : loving the battle with the down and upvotes but seriously I'd rather have more back and forth with actual data.

Sources:

0. Growing up very poor in the USA, immigrating somewhere else.

1. The change over time https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-decline-of-upward-mobil...

2. Comparisons globally https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/social-mo...

mfitton · 2 years ago

As far as the change over time goes, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you that social mobility used to be higher. I think part of the reasoning for that was an incredibly strong domestic economy compared to the rest of the world, as well as a lower baseline (strides in standard of living and pay get harder and harder to increase the further you increase them).

As far as the comparisons globally, they're ranking countries based on "education, access to technology, healthcare, social protection and employment opportunities" which has the implicit assumption baked in that those 5 metrics are proxies for social mobility. They might be, but why not actually measure the thing you care about? Social mobility to me means changing social classes based on income. Something like moving from a 25k/yr household to a 75k/yr household, or moving from a 75k/yr household to a 200k/yr household, maybe another jump up to 500k or a million/yr.

It seems to me that there is a much more equal distribution of incomes and outcomes in the countries you linked. That makes me think it would be much harder to go from being middle class to upper class in those countries than in the US, simply because almost everybody is part of the middle class. Thus, I think if you measured what most immigrants (and what I) actually care about when we hear about "social mobility," then the countries you mentioned would have great social mobility into the middle class, and basically no other social mobility.

mfitton commented on Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples? · Posted by u/nicgrev103

mattmaroon · 2 years ago

Apple would be a notable exception. As would Amazon.

I think you’re referring specifically to Google and Facebook, and you’re right. I think the big difference is the amount of profit per customer.

Google and Facebook make a small amount from a large number of people so it makes sense that they could not profitably scale customer support. In the instances where they make a large amount of money off of a small number of people, mainly ad sales, their support is much better.

mfitton · 2 years ago

I've had consistently bad experiences with Apple support.