The assumption everyone seems to have is that the customer is the average consumer purchasing items and services on Amazon’s website. That hasn’t been true in more than a decade.

The real customer are the third party sellers and those using Amazon platforms.

IMO, Isaacson isn't the most objective biographer and his sourcing tends to be pretty awful. I don't trust anything he's written about contemporary people and I'm still disappointed that the access Steve Jobs gave him was seemingly squandered.

Steve Jobs was certainly flawed and his personal relationships extremely complicated, but I would recommend reading the memoir his daughter wrote, Small Fry as it provides a more firsthand, nuanced perspective into Jobs as a father and partner. Compared to Elon, Steve would be father of the year.

I have a lot of criticisms on The Verge and stopped reading it a long time ago, but one of my favorite moments from them was when Jean-Louis Gassée trolled Nilay Patel and showed just how hypocritical he is and how fragile his ego was.

My experience was sadly quite the opposite. When I moved to my current city two decades ago, I started attending a run club because I wanted to train for my first marathon and figured it would be a great opportunity to meet new people. Unfortunately, the group was extremely insular and eventually realized I was wasting my time expecting the group to engage with me in any meaningful way.

Imagine Sisyphus happy seems like the appropriate response.

I don't think it's a matter of setting goals based on what you can do alone, life is lonely enough as it it. I think it's more a matter of accepting that life is a sequence of unpredictable events, and you have to just embrace the absurdity of it all.

I did not said anything about loneliness. IF you are working because you are lonely you really need to change your life right now.

Also where I hinted that pointless grind is something that should be a way to happiness?

Agreed. Tariffs should be used like a scalpel, precise and targeting very specific things to encourage development or even the playing field. The tariffs that have been implemented so far are more like a sledge hammer, used to extort and intimidate.

Where is collectivism being tried again?

Sure there are a number of Democratic Socialists and other progressives winning elections and driving changes but everything I’ve seen policy-wise has been directly targeted areas where unchecked capitalism has clearly failed their constituents. Even in those cases, there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership.

> there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership

Interesting that you mention this. It's not exactly the same thing, but someone in another thread here on HN pointed out that the feds have been acquiring non-trivial stakes in a number of companies. More than just the one or two that I had seen in headlines.

It's funny, because it's a bigger overt push in the direction of actual socialism than the dems have ever tried, by the group of people who most love to use socialism as a boogeyman.

But the argument in favor of it seemed compelling on it's face, at least worthy of debate.

Unchecked capitalism?

The new NY city mayor wants to convert parks into low income housing.

https://abc7ny.com/post/mayor-adams-makes-elizabeth-street-g...

I usually just add a sticker to two so I can help make it easier to identify.

I like to view it as living authentically and seizing every opportunity to add a little color or whimsy to the mundan, but to each their own.

Yeah, OP's username seems pretty appropriate

Authenticity is in your heart. Putting stickers onto your laptop, which is the least authentic thing for a software developer to do, makes you just look ridiculous.

Authenticity is behaving in a way that is true to yourself. In this case, putting stickers on a laptop or otherwise decorating it is a form of art and self expression. It’s not complicated or controversial.

I do it because it can be creative and fun. It adds color to an otherwise gray and boring surface and provides a practical way of identifying my laptop from everyone else’s.

When I was in school, we used to cover out textbooks with brown paper bags and then drawn on them. How is this any different?

You seem to have you entire identity tied to the notion of what you think a software developer is and that everyone should conform to that idea. I’d rather have people be creative, embrace fun, and add color and self expression to the world. We could all use more color in our lives.

I'll be honest I think that dying on the hill of "putting stickers on your laptop [...] is the least authentic thing for a software developer to do" makes you look pretty ridiculous.

Doing something, which is so extremely commonplace does not make you unique in any way.

Do you really think something, which is so extremely common among software developers, has the potential to showing your uniqueness.

The hill I will die on is that I despise outward signaling, especially outward signaling of something like "uniqueness".

And yet here you are, signaling to others your uniqueness by saying how much you hate the way that they signal theirs. It's not that deep, man. This sounds like a really tough way to live and I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your vendetta against *checks notes* people expressing themselves with stickers on their laptops.

>And yet here you are, signaling to others your uniqueness by saying how much you hate the way that they signal theirs. It's not that deep, man.

I don't think my opinion is particularly unique and certainly I do it to appear unique.

>This sounds like a really tough way to live

It is much easier, because I do not have to be worried whether people see me as unique.

>I genuinely wish you the best of luck with your vendetta against checks notes people expressing themselves with stickers on their laptops.

Thank you.