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Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell, no one seems to think much of value was lost.
It turns out when you usher the dissenters out of the room, you hear a lot less dissent.
The only real question is if anyone deems them worth listening to.
Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases. But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases. I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. B…
I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture and easier for them to engage with… that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism.
I'm not at all saying this to demonize Kenton. We can make mistakes and reflect on them later, and that's laudable. But it is important to recognize these systems for what they are, so that we can notice them when they happen all around us every day.
My highlight are During his own Google interview, Jeff Dean was asked the implications if P=NP were true. He said "P = 0 or N = 1." Then, before the interviewer had even finished laughing, Jeff examined Google's public certificate and wrote the private key on the whiteboard. Jeff Dean wrote an O(n^2) algorithm once. It was for the Traveling Salesman Problem I read it more as a parody of The Most Interesting Man in th…
"Chuck Norris facts" was a text-only meme format from the mid '00s. Stuff like "Chuck Norris is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis" or "When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn't push himself up, he pushes the Earth down." The Jeff Dean Facts use the same format. It doesn't have anything to do with Chuck Norris himself.
> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. ... It's not clear whether this fact is really true, or whether this line is simply part of the joke, so I've omitted the usual (TRUE) identifier here. Interpret this as you see fit :) I think this one's true-ish. Back in the day when Google didn't have good cron services for the co…
At least one production service went down because it relied on a job running on Jeff Dean's personal computer that no longer had access. Unfortunately I forget what job it was.
It's nice that a company has senior engineers that are known by name and looked up to. It shows that engineers are valued, and a meritocracy exists.
He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine that ran for over a decade... numerous improvements to search and ads quality (back in the days when search and ads quality meant something)... and that was just the first few years.
can he beat llms ? don't think so.
Jeff Dean liquidated Google's entire AI ethics team because they wouldn't revise an academic publication to align with the corporate PR spin on AI.
And if we’re being brutally honest, I wonder how he would have faired at somewhere like Bell Labs ;)