Viewing profile — the_snooze

Proper engineering requires observing and working with real-world constraints. Ignoring constraints is a form of magical thinking. One real-world constraint is that end-users won't…

>Decapitating the regime and degrading their military capabilities was the primary objective. Those are tactical objectives, not strategic aims. The US is very good at winning tact…

Bringing on new fabs takes many years and billions of dollars. You're exposing yourself to a lot of risk if you build now and find that the gold rush is over by the time your new c…

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serio…

We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.

>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much v…

I'm of the same mind. Money is simply a means to an end. The workplace is just somewhere to exchange your time and skills for money, which you use to pursue priorities outside of t…

You don't. You accept that social bandwidth is a real-world constraint that you work with, not magic away. That's real engineering.

This is why I asked: >And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? A botto…

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternat…

>I do agree that it is still a tool to keep in touch with some people, yes, but… Are there no alternatives that require a lower price to pay? The sustainable alternative I've arriv…

These benefits make sense up-front, but we have 15+ years of direct experience with "democratizing" technology that ultimately end up ensnaring people. Unless you get these benefit…

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.

altek has been given a number of off-ramps and alternatives to proceed. His continued resistance to take those isn't a sign of naivete, it's a sign of bad faith.

I gave up on Spotify when they did their push into podcasts and audiobooks. It became clear that they weren't really interested in serving their core customer base of people who ju…

This is really the heart of it. Understand what matters to you, and align your finances (and decisions as a whole) with that. If you optimize for some external metric without exami…

I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to…

They got way over their skis on this one. There's a difference between "impressive" tech vs. "operational" tech. That difference usually boils down to prioritizing engineering rigo…

Exactly, these are highly-paid professionals with very broadly applicable skills. They have the means to uphold professional values.

>It's restricted because it's genuinely good at finding vulnerabilities, and employees felt that it's not a good idea to give this capability to everyone without letting defenders …

>Even searching for specific topics is hard. It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-gr…

Yeah I'm of the same view. If you're driving, the least you can do is take the responsibility seriously and give your surroundings proper attention. An automated fine is the least …

> being able to be "present" without the time cost can mean (possibly significantly more) presence at the same cost. This is magical thinking. "Presence" and "time cost" are inextr…

That sounds like straight up scammer behavior. "Yes, this is Microsoft calling. We need to confirm your info with the local authorities."

>I stress test commercially deployed LLMs like Gemini and Claude with trivial tasks I did exactly what I said I did. I'm using these systems the way they're designed and advertised…