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The Jeff Dean Facts

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Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#131

Post by jll29 »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #83
lookingdesk wrote: post #27

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.

That incident was the first time I ever heard of Jeff Dean and remains the main thing I associate him with.

Not sure if he was told to stop the paper and fire the team, or whether he decided that himself.

But in any case, it's a stain on an overwise exceptionally brilliant career with wonderful software engineering achievements.

I wonder if they ever wondered if they'd do it again?

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#132

Post by zhengyi13 »

sowbug wrote: post #110
bubblicious wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

readability grants a code reviewer the power to approve changes in a specific language

A bit more detail: long ago, before the time of the Great Brace War, people wrote code using all sorts of styles: tabs/spaces, short or long variable/function names, Hungarian notation or not, comments or not, long blocks or short, and so on. You could often tell which of your teammates wrote a block of code simply by newline usage. This made it hard to read and contribute code in a less familiar part of the codebase…

I left in 2023. From memory at that time:

1) go kinda eliminates a lot of the reasons for style guides to exist w/ `go fmt` and separately, I think the Go readability team made a conscious decision to approach readability differently anyway,

2) ... once you had a couple people on your local team w/ readability, if your team wanted to do things a certain way, well, style guides and formal readability wasn't really an issue anymore.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#133

Post by chrfrasco »

vessenes wrote: post #123
kentonv wrote: post #18

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…

Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.

It was Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#134

Post by kentonv »

refulgentis wrote: post #127
rayiner wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote what your thoughts were. I’m just weighing in on whether your thoughts are “racist.” To the extent you feel sensitive about the issue because someone has darker skin, where you probably wouldn’t have written that part of the post if the other guy were Polish, that’s racist. It’s racist to treat people differently based on skin color, even if you’re well intentioned about it.

You're conflating two different things: 1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand. 2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages s…

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it.

(Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#135

Post by kentonv »

ariwilson wrote: post #106
kentonv wrote: post #18

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…

Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :) This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEn…

Hi Ari,

Thanks so much for falling for my trick and taking it over, I was getting pretty sick of dealing with the same issues you describe. :)

One of the reasons Cloudflare Workers has a policy that we absolutely never break deployed code, ever. (Well... at least not intentionally...)

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#136

Post by yongjik »

shadowgovt wrote: post #43

I remember one that isn't in the list. Paraphrasing: "Jeff Dean has access to the priority above P1. He's only used it once. It's why February only has 28 days."

I also remember that but I think it was attributed to someone else. The site hosted several (internally famous person) facts, but none of them were as famous as Jeff Dean.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#138

Post by dekhn »

vessenes wrote: post #123
kentonv wrote: post #18

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…

Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.

The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one.

Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make things more difficult to maintain.

Jeff was also prone to dad jokes, Sanjay's humor was far more subtle. Both were awesome to talk to and one of my proudest moments was when Jeff read a document proposal I wrote ("Google should get involved in Genomics Research and Drug Discovery") and took it seriously.

Re: The Jeff Dean Facts

#139

Post by [deleted] »

kentonv wrote: post #134
refulgentis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two different things: 1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand. 2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages s…

Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. (Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.)

[deleted]
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