They're crazy outliers, and that's fine. The point of H1B is hiring talent outside of the United States, not hiring normal webdevs or commodity software engineers. A fee like that, where a large salary for an exceptional job would make the cost relatively small, brings the program back to its original goal.
If you just need a normal worker, there are plenty of CS grads and unemployed SWEs you can hire in the US right now. If you need a specialized foreign worker because he or she is not available in the US, then chances are you are going to pay a premium anyway; that's the point.
Anything that is funded by venture capital WILL become worse. You can complain all you want about things that don't have infinite funding having issues, but they'll probably just stay at the same level or get slightly better over time. VC-backend companies only get worse after their early peak.
I get where you're coming from, and I have largely the same sentiment, but it's obvious that you've never had any experience running a platform, or using one with no/few rules. You need baseline moderation, even if it isn't super ideological. You've got to keep pedophiles and misanthropes out at the very least.
Sounds like I really should be building one with the AI moderation I have in mind. I kind of have been to random deep ends. Most of them can't be that hard to filter out or steer them away from undesired content, especially in this age of AI...
I think the Twitter format sucks in both cases, but having central, algorithmically-curated feeds are just bad for people psychologically. They just created another Twitter clone with the same problems. The only difference is fewer "nazis".
It's so funny watching the UK try to threaten sites without any jurisdiction. I have American friends who got these letters and openly laughed at them. Sorry buddy, we aren't your colony anymore!
That's actually a very good way of putting it. One of the things I wanted to show in the article was that a lot of the promises of tech optimism were kept, but the other consequences were ignored. What you bring up is a very large consequence that was overlooked.
It's the enormous blind spot that Big Tech tends to have: it completely ignores the concept of a cost/benefit calculation and simply assumes that everything that it comes up with is all upside. In fact, a great deal of what it comes up with these days costs more than than the benefit can justify.
The one weird exception is with the genAI companies, who demonstrated their complete lack of ethics by being very clear that the cost they'll be imposing on society may be extreme (up to potentially extinction) but that they're willing to gamble all of our lives on it anyway.
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