Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang. A really enjoyable story about people on Mars and Earth after their societies and cultures diverge. Definitely felt like a new perspective to me.
I worked with ROS1 professionally for a few years. My big takeaway was that the middleware got a lot more attention than it deserved. There are tons of hard research problems to work on in robotics: reliable navigation, object recognition, planning, manipulation, etc. I felt like a better contribution to open source robotics would be some great class libraries for those things. But let your users wire them up however they want, rather than requiring them to fit into a predefined architecture.
Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off.
There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.
Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.
In my experience, the biggest impediment to this goal of always hiring the best people is what I call "good talkers". People who are good at talking, good at convincing, but not good at technical work. The bigger an org gets, the more likely some interviewer will be fooled by a good talker. Once there's one, they like to hire other good talkers. Good talkers don't know as much about tech, so they are more easily convinced by other good talkers. Good talkers strive for positions of power where talking is more important than the technical work they don't know how to do. Before long, your company is run by professional managers who don't know how to do anything but talk. Once those people are in charge, any kind of technical meritocracy is impossible. Like they say, "the turds always float to the top".
Remoovit.com does this exactly. They pick up your stuff, then either sell, donate, or dispose of it. If they sell it, you get 50%, or if they have to pay to dispose, they charge you for it. Works great.
I asked for "Mario vs alien" and it gave a copyright error. Then I asked for "Italian plumber vs alien" and it did a nice image of Mario fighting aliens.