toebert

I’m excited for the next once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis as it’ll hopefully mean the AI bubble will have burst.

I worked for a reasonably successful startup in IT, and quit around the time when investors started calling for their returns. It went from the focus being providing good service to selling something, anything, whether we have it or not to boost the books before the end of next quarter. Every quarter. Our sales team who used to be part of the product design process and knew more about our product than some engineers were getting replaced with people who didn’t even know the name of features. They just made up things to potential customers and straight up lied, once the paper was signed they were done.

It was demoralising to see and go through this, I was a tech team lead for one of our core products and the requirements were mad. Every customer started becoming their own product because of all the overpromising, and it was all the absolute bare minimum. Anyhow, I was on good terms with the remaining few old sales people as we had worked together a lot prior to this mess.

I remember sitting in a meeting with some higher management and one of these older sales guys where he was saying he does not know what to do anymore and needs help or we need to change something as it’s impossible to do his job well anymore with these expectations that we just abandon customers as soon as they’re signed and chase new business. He broke down crying during the call while he was explaining how soul crushing it was to have to do this to people - build up a relationship, convince them to pay us and then ignore them immediately. There was an awkward quiet in the room when he finished and the “top dog” in the room just said “try to detach yourself, it’s just business” and then we moved on.

I saw myself becoming that man in a year, maybe 2 tops. I started interviewing the next day and found a new job in about 2 weeks (luckily this was when IT was booming and recruiters were lining up for anyone with engineer in their title). The company has since been sold multiple times and completely exhausted to a husk. The last sale I’m pretty sure was just a large enterprise acquiring staff and some tech.

I can’t say I know the answer but a few ideas:

• did you access it with a browser? Maybe it snitches on you or some extension does?
• did you try to resolve it with a public DNS server at any point (are you sure nothing forwarded the request to one)?

You could try it again, create the domain in the config and then do absolutely nothing. Don’t try to confirm it works in any way. If you don’t see the same behaviour you can do one of the above and then the other and see when it kicks in. If it gets picked up without you doing anything…then pass!

I think your example is great for how the messaging of “pick a job you love and you’ll never work a day”/“you can be whatever you want to be” can be quite harmful, I know several people in similar situations with various art/creative degrees.

The only thing I’d add is to consider what a degree will do for you if you can’t work in the field it’s for. E.g if you get a degree in marine biology it may be used to re-train as a teacher or similar, but not much else. Meanwhile a degree in some business subject will probably allow you to apply for most office jobs in general. You may not love it, but it’s a lot easier to have a decent salary and find a hobby than to starve trying to get paid for your hobby.

I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:

He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).

The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused… Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic… at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.