331–340 of 428 posts
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It cracks me up that on the new LG TVs (I have a C9), it has “AI preview”. Which means: when I hover the Netflix icon in the dashboard it presents a list of the most recently played shows. I think the “Open Recent” menu debuted in 1980s? But now it is AI!
I thought AI in C9 tvs was about improving upscaling quality?
I'll share a disturbing anecdote about one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world, based in the Bay Area, and I'll leave it to you to guess which one. I know of several people who work there who are ranked very highly and are paid extremely well, who have told me personally that the work they do there is terrible for the users (i.e. it's exploitative) and terrible for the internet (it int…
"Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to accept as true that which is clearly false, or to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality." [1]
What do you call it when one doublethinker absolves a different doublethinker for doublethinking? Doubleplus-doublethink?
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I know a guy that works at a company where the CEO will sell something to customers not knowing anything about the technical details, and then come back to the business and "make them do it".
Isn’t this the norm? I complained that sales were “demoing new features” to customers before the back-end dev team had even heard of these features. I was basically told to stay in my lane. A property developer making design mockups of new highrises doesn’t run it past the bricklayers first, so why should product/sales talk to us digital bricklayers... In one sense, great, I don’t want to bother about what a customer…
It was a nice company. Bosses had very limited direct power over the developers and designers, and rightfully so -- it's supposed to be a team of experts, after all.
A small team in a company I worked for got into machine learning a few years back. They had some success with some toy examples and were now looking for applications. They tried to use it for optimizing some specific engineering procesess. Two people (one was me) were warning them that this is a waste of time and will cost the company a fortune and then no one will want it because the quality will be so much poorer.…
It's hard to take a lesson from this without hearing why you think that happened. Do you think the product got so big because the team applied AI usefully and your initial evaluation was wrong? Or do you think they gained customers because there is not much competition in that niche and customers were drawn to the sales team's claims of AI despite the AI not being very good?
Or to say it another way, the lesson is that business people have jobs for a reason too.
Or: if your job is computers, focus on the computers. For me, I don’t go around my company telling everyone whether their projects are going to take off or not. I assume the research a team did prior to starting gives them a familiarity with the problem space that I lack. Crazy thought, I know.
The amount of “told ya so” in this thread is really something, so I appreciate GP’s post. Humility is good.
For a couple of years now, I've been developing features for a product that hasn't found product-market fit. Features that nobody _really_ gives a shit about. I can talk directly to one of the cofounders, bring them evidence based on analytics or the past failings of the giants upon whose shoulders we're standing on. His response is, majority of the time, "yeah, I get that. We promised this to a few customers and I r…
You need to ask him to define success and failure for the feature. Under what conditions will he accept it has not worked
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Jobs where this kind of attitude prevails suck to work at. Frustration waits around every corner. And the more pointless projects and dysfunction permeates a company the more chance the other shoe will come crashing down any moment and the company will fall apart and people will lose their jobs.
Some people are busy raising a family and just need a paycheck. It's not me either but I get it.
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There's loads written on re-writes.
I may be misreading them, but GP seems to be doing the re-write in the recommended way, small chunks at a time. I think the advice cautioning against wholesale replacement re-writes is sound, but piecemeal transition is much more achievable. I think it took about 5 years to transition Wayfair from asp to PHP one page/system/scheduled task at a time, but the result was a working system at all times that improved with…
Asp.net Core is cross platform, has a self hosted https server called Kestrel that is insanely fast, has a really sensible composition of middleware, built in DI, and a strong community. Hangfire is a great job runner, signalr is available with real-time push over web sockets, identity server 4 can handle all your Authn/Authz and Entity Framework Core + Linq is very powerful and a lot faster than the full framework version.
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Previous employer did something similar. Hired a crazy expensive data scientist, spent truckloads of money on a data swamp, er, lake, and then didn’t really have any goals for what to do with all that capacity. The new hire got lucky, as there was some low hanging fruit (optimizations we all knew about). The obvious solution was implemented and then he ex post facto claimed 100% credit for the revenue enhancement. Si…
So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them? Actually good that the company hired him then.
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Some people are busy raising a family and just need a paycheck. It's not me either but I get it.
Highly anecdotal, but 100% of the software devs I know in this position (living paycheck to paycheck) are living above their means, in a city. If they moved to the countryside (in another country if need be), they would have to work 2 months a year with the same pay with a larger house, garden, savings etc. After covid it is actually easy to do, but before as well if you are not completely horrible at your job. Howev…
My home insurance, my heating, my Internet, my electricity, all cost more than if I was urban. I own and maintain my own water supply and sewer system (septic). I have power lines coming up from the road, over a hedge of cedars that cost me $2000 to trim every few years or they'll impede the power lines. On my property, so mine to deal with.
I had to buy a little diesel tractor ($15,000), I had to buy a zero turn mower ($5000) because mowing 2.5acres (out of the 6 acres I have) would take forever otherwise. We need two cars because of where we are.
And property taxes are super high for me. They'd be cheaper if this was an active farm business making over $7000 CAD a year, but it's not. Because how could I do that while also working a full time job?
And yeah, the commute. Not fun. No gas costs really because I drive electric and plug in at work (and home), but still.
But I have chickens and an orchard and a woodworking shop, and make wine from my own vineyard, and have room in the garage for a Saab 900 SPG that I will restore...someday... and my kids have lots of yard to look out at while they sit inside instead and watch videos of people playing video games ...
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> So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them? Sadly, most engineers aren't allowed to pursue that kind of stuff. Normal dev jobs can be stifling.
If you walk into your CEOs office today and say "I can increase revenue from our site by 1 million dollars" (#) you will get a hearing. If three devs on that site do it, with a poc they will get the chance to do it 95% of the time. But the CEO who hires a data scientist is explicitly asking that person to walk into their office and say "I can increase revenue by X" - that is their job. The website dev does not have t…