> I don't believe we had tech moguls who built enormous wealth and realized they could by the influence

Didn't this just describe the robber barons of the Gilded Age? Moguls and oligarchs of the day, yes. Amassed their fortunes on the emerging frontier technology of the time, I'd say so. Wielded enormous power over political discourse and essentially owned the law makers of the day. Rhymes, for sure.

It doesn't really matter whether you live in a democracy if the the very issues that are even allowed to be voted on are decided by an elite, wealthy and politically connected group.

Age gaps in relationships is not inherently negative. Being a cougar is not a bad thing. The issue here was that Sandberg was the author's manager. Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

> Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

I wouldn’t fully agree. All parties being adults doesn’t inherently remove the advantage very large age and experience gaps can give to one party over the other, especially when one is barely adult. 18 or 21 is just an arbitrary number, and one doesn’t suddenly become smart about these things just because the law says they are now legally full citizens, responsible for their acts and for themselves.

But I also agree it doesn’t make age gaps between adults inherently negative. It’s just… complicated.

Can we raise the age of adulthood from 18 to whatever acceptable age ends this discourse once and for all?

Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

It still strikes me that some places consider someone fully able to freely consent to enrol in the army, to the risk of getting permanently maimed or mentally scarred, and consider them fit to make life or death split-second decisions for both themselves and everyone around them under terror In highly stressful situations.

But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.

I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.

Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.

We seem perfectly fine splitting up some aspects of adulthood, like 21 for drinking.

Probably not, because there's inevitably a transition period.

Sure, raise it past the transition period.

I’m tired of the pearl clutchers. Decide an age you’ll actually accept. That’s an adult. No more infantilization.

You're not understanding my argument. Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people. Just picking a higher age doesn't work.

If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.

> Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people.

My point precisely. Many people only start experiencing life as adults once they’ve been declared adults. Which kind of makes sense.

Maybe something more progressive than a random date would be better. Some countries already do it for some things (both in rights, responsibilities, and legal consequences), many also have specific framework for people who simply can’t be held responsible for themselves (with, often, abuses).

But it’s what we have.

Nothing to do with infantilizing anyone.

I’m probably stating the obvious, but some things are complex and don’t have good universal solutions. Which is part of why we have judges and lawyers, not just laws.

There's some issues with someone that has very little experience being an adult. Once they have a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink (if relevant), it's basically all the same.

With how fast the world is moving (especially in non-US, recently-ish westernized countries that had a lot of catching up to do over the last twenty-forty years, think former eastern bloc), things aren't so clear-cut.

There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."

It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.

Sure there's a difference in the kind of things they're used to, but it's not giving anyone an advantage which is what the earlier posts were about. Maybe a small advantage to the younger one which is the opposite of the worry above.

People in the C Suite should not be asking any employee to join them in bed whether they're that person's manager or not.

I think you're just using a narrower definition of "manager" than the person you responded to.

Fine with that, as long as we agree that it goes both ways and is judged same, equality and all. Otherwise deeply sexist to use kind words

>Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

there's exceptions to every rule but as a general statement that's about as false as it gets. With increasing age gap between partners divorce and breakup rates go up significantly. Cultures with strong aversion to age gaps, East Asia for example, have both low divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.

The reason isn't extremely difficult to see, where someone is in life, what priorities they have and how responsible they are is significantly influenced by age, the rom-com industrial complex might have convinced people that relationships are about butterflies in the stomach, but in reality compatibility matters.

It's a cool thing if you're the younger man getting sexual attention from a hot older woman. Declaring by fiat that this is not okay doesn't change what peoples' desires actually are, or what behavior done by other people they feel compelled to punish.

Friendliness?

VSCode integration out of the box, that I can understand. But I have a really hard time calling Azure UI "friendly". Everything is behind layers of nested pointy-clicky chains with opaque or flat out misleading names.

To make things worse, their APIs also follow the same design. Everything you actually would want to do is behind a long sequence of pointer-chasing across objects and service/resource managers. Almost as if their APIs were built to directly reflect their planned UI action sequences.

Yes, some of us grew out of the 1970's approach to command line, unless there is no other way.

GCP is the worse some options are only available on the CLI, without any visual feedback on the dashboard.

Corporate inertia. Sibling comment uses the term "hostage situation" which I admit is pretty apt.

Microsoft is an approved vendor in every large enterprise. That they have been approved for desktop productivity, Sharepoint, email and on-prem systems does not enter the picture. That would be too nuanced.

Dealing with a Large Enterprise[tm] is an exercise in frustration. A particular client had to be deployed to Azure because their estimate was that getting a new cloud vendor approved for production deployments would be a gargantuan 18-to-24 month org-wide and politically fraught process.

If you are a large corp and have to move workloads to the cloud (because let's be honest: maintaining your own data centres and hardware procurement pipelines is a serious drag) then you go with whatever vendor your organisation has approved. And if the only pre-approved vendor with a cloud offering is Microsoft, you use Azure.

>wrote this piece myself on my phone while I was out for a walk

If you have a strategy for jotting down (or dictating) notes while walking about, I would be curious how you manage that. I spend plenty of time walking outside, and tend to get (at the time) ideas that I'd like to explore further, most of which have evaporated from my mind by the time I get back home. Or even before I can get my phone out to jot down the keywords to help me recall the details later.

Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

What I tried is to record my voice and then post-process the transcript. There are solutions which work without internet connection. I am non-native english and mix 3 languages, so transcript is shitty quality. Nevertheless the really good ideas stay with me and can be easily recalled by a few keywords. And you need to do the post-processing shortly after you reached home else it fades away…

> Cannot even imagine how someone would manage both walking and writing at the same time.

Some are just born with it.

And here I've been using Maybelline for nothing!

Have a look at the Pebble Index ring. Might be a good fit for you.

Hey there! I'm not sure I have a universally applicable answer, but I can do my best to map out some things about my process and flow that hopefully help a bit and answer your question.

- I've had an iPhone for half my life (I'm 36 and got one when I was 19), so I've gotten pretty acclimated to typing on the go. I try switching to dictation every couple of months but the iPhone's dictation trips up over enough words that I find it more frustrating than typing as I walk.

- I don't do this but if you're worried about the thoughts disappearing I would absolutely recommend recording a voice note. As I'll touch on in a moment — do not let those thoughts disappear! Even the act of codifying them into something tangible allows you to process them more deeply.

- I live in NYC but I start most mornings by taking a walk along a relatively quiet street, so I rarely end up having to worry about bumping into someone. That is definitely not universally applicable advice. (:

- I look up as I'm typing and let autocorrect take the wheel. That works at least 95% of the time, so if I make the occasional typo it doesn't really matter, I'll just fix it in post.

- It helps to have an app with a great text editing experience. I've found that there are very few out there that are fluid, many have incredibly subtle hitches that make it hard to quickly jot down thoughts onto a canvas. I really love Craft (https://craft.do) and have been using it for years, so at this point it feels more like an extension of me than an app.

- This is surely unique to everyone but my writing tends to start from a few keystone thoughts. Once I have one written down, I let myself almost free associate, writing down whatever comes to mind from that initial thought to make sure I do not forget. I can always edit after the fact, and often the editing process leads to more interesting insights as well. But the main thing I want to avoid is losing those sparks, in the same way that you're mention your thoughts evaporating. Don't let those go, just get 'em on paper and sort through 'em afterwards.

- That's all a lot easier to do on my phone than if I approached the problem as "type an essay on my phone", so I'll almost always edit a post on my computer before publishing. Yesterday was more of an exception than the rule though because I was bouncing around between doctors all day, so I wrote all of this on my phone [not expecting it to blow up or get a ton of scrutiny].

Not sure if anything's missing but I'm happy to share anything that may be helpful! Clearly this post wasn't perfect, but I've been much happier since I started letting myself write out long-form thoughts on my phone and sharing them as blog post rather than firing them off as pithy tweets that decay into the ether once the algorithm says it's time for them to go.

I always read the dark forest differently. Solution to the problem is not a game-theoretic "hide from the apex predators", but an even more nihilistic "remain hidden, expand and evolve into the apex predator".

Or in a more biblical sense: do unto others before they do unto you.

This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.

(Coarse location: outer SE London.)

While reductionist, I think yours is a legitimate "in a nutshell" take. It would be interesting to see the relevant statistics over time, ideally broken down by geographical regions, their median incomes and the respective employment / military recruitment success rates.

I admit that I am partial to your view of the world. A mate in university, about a quarter of a century ago, made a rather striking observation: "In the US, military is a national jobs program for a nation that is psychologically hostile to jobs programs."

We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.

I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."

The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.

I would have preferred to see a disclaimer at the top about how this story was Put Together[tm], but I also agree that it is a pretty fine piece of writing overall. Which brings me to my initial point...

> Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project [...] about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms.

The amount of work and walltime expended sounds about right. You have discovered / stumbled upon the relatively well known but little appreciated job of a publishing editor. It takes a lot of nitty-gritty work and built up domain knowledge ("world bibles") to direct a piece of writing - and its author - to a level where you confidently believe that you have captured the intent and desired tone of the piece, while keeping it sufficiently tight, engaging and interesting / non-patronising enough for its audience.

Disclosure: did ~decade of freelance writing around the turn of the millennium, and have had the privilege of being schooled by a small group of good old-school journalists. And then had a publishing editor assigned for a separate project, from whom I learned even more about writing.