There seems to be a difference in capabilities here. Israel actually appears to be capable of eradicating Palestinians. The reverse does not appear to be true.
They have always been capable of doing that and yet there are 20% Arabic citizen in Israel and roughly 2 million in Gaza. Before Hamas' mass murdering, there were no signs that Israel intends to mass murder Palestinians (they do of course obviously try to strategically reduce the population in Westbank with their settlements).
How many Jews would be allowed to live in the southern levante if Hamas could choose?
So yes, there has always been a difference in capability and in intend. Under the criminal Netanjahu and the current extremist Government the difference has started to blur, though and Oct 7 worked as a catalyst. It feels like Hamas' mass murdering and kidnapping was a full success regarding their goals.
> It's like if people in Wales were constantly firing rockets at London because they wanted to destroy all English people, and England doing nothing about it for years until there was a huge slaughter, and then finally retaliating.
Or just like the IRA… asymmetric warfare/terrorism is a natural response to violent oppression
Discarded proportionalty calculations is in response to asymmetric warfare/terrorism which is in response to violent oppression is in response to ethnic conflict, which is in response to migration which is in response to persecution.
Everyone has factors influencing their decisions but everyone still has their own agency and responsibility.
> Or just like the IRA… asymmetric warfare/terrorism is a natural response to violent oppression
In neither case was oppression happening. The IRA wanted a separate Ireland, and would kill other Irish people and English people to get it.
You'd be far more oppressed (read: killed) if you were a Jew in Palestine, or a gay man in Palestine, or any number of other things in Palestine. Israel was the place where you could be those things. The controls were in place to stop the people coming in that would bring Palestinian "morality" into Israel.
>asymmetric warfare/terrorism is a natural response to violent oppression
it always sounds more high-minded to adopt universal/philosophical wording, but it's highly effective, your point is well made. October 7th was violent oppression, your explanation is sound.
People are appropriately scouring your position because there was exactly what you are imagining: a population, living West of the rest of the UK, lobbing terrorist attacks at London. It's just that it was the Irish, not the Welsh, doing the attacks. History has given reason to the IRA's despicable methods; once the British got tired of the unionists' intransigeance, they sat down at the negotiation table and hammered a real deal to really end the violence.
The Palestinians engaged in violent warfare against the Israelis studiously study the IRA and the results they got. So your example is actually an example that proves that the Palestinians' methods could lead to success for them. You'll have to try again.
If the IRA's demands were that the British had to accept enough Irish migration to become a minority in their country (the right of return) somehow I don't think their despicable methods would have paid off.
The difference between the Irish and the Palestinians is the Irish took a real compromise and peace deal. They didn't demand the instant return of Northern Ireland and refuse all compromise to that issue, committing multiple generations to fruitless violence and high death rates.
Edit/clarification: I forgot about British multiculturalism. You would have to imagine Britain had similar 'national and ethnic trauma' to Israel for first IRA example to really work.
The IRA's goal was to unite Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland. That goal, while not as hard to attain as the right of return, was still unacceptable to the UK. The IRA achieved some of its goals, and clearly decided to bide their time in peace. The Palestinians could hope for the same sort of partial victory, with a negotiated peace with the Israelis.
I totally recognize what you’re saying. We have to be able to encourage risk-taking if we want to have innovation. I get it.
But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
In contrast, every startup I’ve worked at has offered equity in the form of options where I had to stake my personal finances just to own company equity. None of them granted shares to me as a reward for my labor. I was taking more of a financial risk than the founder of the company just to own a stake!
VC-backed Startups are much different than small businesses where founders take personal financial risks. The VC itself is also not taking any kind of outsized risk as it has mitigated that risk by betting on dozens of companies. They expect most of their companies to fail and leave their employees high and dry, but that’s not their problem and is baked into the formula.
Essentially VCs have plenty of capital and no ideas, so they pay outsized equity compensation to founders for ideas. But the early employees are just interchangeable implementers and get basically nothing by comparison.
If I started a cupcake truck with my friends, they wouldn’t be my friends anymore if I decided I get 50x their equity stake just because it was my idea.
In my opinion, our business systems have been allowed to get away with much more inequality than should be legal. Each caste is orders of magnitude away from each other rather than being linear steps above each other.
Every day, there are trillions of prices that are set by sellers, and either accepted or rejected or counter-offered by buyers. Of course, sellers want higher prices, and buyers want lower prices. There is no one person who can determine what a fair price is. A fair price is one that both buyers and sellers agree on, that creates a successful transaction.
Importantly, people are free to walk away from a bad deal. If you don't like a store's wares, you can go to another store. If you don't like a job offer, you can apply to a different job. Freedom of choice creates competition, which puts pressure on buyers and sellers alike to actually come to terms.
Your post comes across as someone who is consistently in the seller position (selling your labor for compensation), and who's simply advocating for his own personal interests in wanting higher wages. But for some reason, you think your own personal opinion about exactly how much you should be paid is what the bar is for "fair", rather than the prices set by the market, that is, the repeated agreements by tens of thousands of people day after day for years.
And that perplexes me. Why are you so special? Why is your opinion or anybody else's opinion supposed to be the basis of what's fair? I've never met someone who's not just going to argue for their own interests here, exactly as you're doing.
If you don't think it's a good deal to work at a startup and get the equity that you're offered, then you can negotiate or you can just walk away from the deal and work somewhere else. There are many tens of thousands of jobs that I personally don't think are a good deal, or I wouldn't work there. But for other people, they are a good deal. I don't really understand where this belief comes from that, because you personally don't find it to be a good deal, that it's objectively unfair for everyone else, even as they're accepting it willingly.
> But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily. Instead, I spent a ton of time and effort trying to create something new in the world and take it from zero to one. That was a lot of personal sacrifice, giving up my nights and weekends and living off Ramen noodles and almost no money. Just that I could get something successful and useful enough to be in a position to realistically even apply to YC and hopefully get accepted. And I was still rejected twice before finally getting in.
If you think being a founder is so risk-free, so easy, and such a good deal because of how much equity you get to keep, then presumably what should happen is many more people should find the prospect attractive and become founders, relative to becoming early-stage employees, and that should drive up the prices that early-stage employees are able to charge.
I think the way we can summarize exactly what you said as:
Selling labor on the labor market, well, you can just go find whatever offer is on the labor market (e.g., your first five paragraphs)
You had to beat out a bunch of other people and get rejected twice in order to go the startup route. However, I think you are mistaking hard work and low pay for risk in this transaction.
There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
You aren't risking any personal property or savings. A college student is also living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends, but they are actually taking a bigger risk than a VC founder by paying tuition to the school.
What is happening here is that VCs/incubators are using scarcity as a quality filter since they're trying to buy good ideas/stake in early stage companies and dangle the founders' lottery ticket/casino jackpot to buy those ideas.
I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs in the worst case and being unfairly over-compensated by them in the best case. I'm sure many of your early employees also worked nights and weekends just like you did, but they have less of an ownership stake than founders do.
Maybe the founder's scenario is similar to an NFL player, where average players have short careers and are left with broken bodies and dreams, while the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires. This is why the NFL has a players union.
> There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
The risk is the opportunity cost. Going and getting a job at Google pays a lot of money. Repeatedly starting and failing at startups, or getting rejected by YC, doesn't pay you anything. I was a student and then a recent grad with lots of debt, so I had all the normal risk of a college student living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends.
> I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs
What makes an agreement between two parties exploitation, exactly?
> the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires.
I think it sucks that the NFL destroys people's brains and bodies. But why is it so bad that the star quarterbacks command such high pay?
unfortunately all the agent cli makers have decided that simply giving it access to bash is not enough. instead we need to jam every possible functionality we can imagine into a javascript “TUI”.
If all you want is a program that calls the model in a loop and offers a bash tool, then ask Claude Code to build that. You won't like it though!
For a preview of what it'd be like, just tell your AI chat app that you'll run bash commands for it, and please change the app in your "current directory" to "sort the output before printing it", or some such request.
Claude Code with Opus 4.6 regularly uses sed for multi-line edits, in my experience. On top of it, Pi is famously only exposing 4 tools, which is not just Bash, but far more constrained than CCs 57 or so tools.
I think the problem/limitation would be as much due to context management as tools. Obviously bash plus a few utilities is sufficient to explore/edit the code base, but I can't imagine this working reliably without the models being specifically trained to use specific tools, and recognize/adapt to different versions of them etc.
Context management, both within and across sessions, seems the bigger issue. Without the agent supporting this, you are at the mercy of the model compacting/purging the context as needed, in some generic fashion, as well as being smart enough to decide to create notes for itself tracking what it is doing, etc.
Apparently CC is 512K LOC, which seems massively bloated, but I do think that things like tools, skills, context management and subagents are all needed to effectively manage context and avoid the issues that might be anticipated by just telling the model it's got a bash tool, and go figure.
I thought CC only supports it's find/replace edit tool (implemented by CC itself, using Node.js for file access), and is platform agnostic. Are you saying that on linux CC offers "sed" as a tool too? I can't imagine it offers "bash" since that's way too dangerous.
Yes, Claude Code has a Bash tool, and Claude in some cases uses the CLI sed utility (via the Bash tool) for file changes (although it has built-in file update), at least on my Linux machine.
I just asked Claude, and apparently CC makes it's bash tool available on all platforms it runs on (Linux, macOS, Windows WSL, Git for Windows), and doesn't do platform-specifc filtering of bash commands, which would seem to make for some interesting incompatibilities - GNU utils (sed, grep, find) on Linux and Windows, but BSD variants on macOS.
> If all you want is a program that calls the model in a loop and offers a bash tool, then ask Claude Code to build that. You won't like it though!
Okay sure it’s technically more than just bash, but my own for-fun coding agent and pi-coding-agent work this way. The latter is quite useful. You can get surprisingly far with it.
i did.. and thats what i use. obviously its a little more than just a tool that calls bash but it is considerably less than whatever they are doing in coding agents now.
Agreed. I came in the comments to say something similar. I think the author raises some interesting points worth consideration but their perspective is so incredibly cynical. He mentioned a small team that made the Apollo computer program. Well it took an awful lot more than a computer program to get to the moon. I don’t think anybody would argue that there are people who don’t pull their weight out there but there is so much evidence that people working together actually works that it makes you wonder who hurt the author so much.
I fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?
There's also a lot of evidence it doesn't work. It's not either/or.
This piece is more of a whine about a certain kind of office culture, which the author - unreasonably - generalises to collaboration as a whole.
There's likely a lot of money to be made by identifying and defining good vs bad collaborative cultures.
Both are real. But a lot of "good" practices are more cargo culty than genuinely productive, and the managers who really do make it work seem to get there more by talent and innate skill than learned effort.
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