401–410 of 498 posts
What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much? They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.
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You can now reportedly book a hotel from the Uber app...which is totally a useful feature that I'm sure everyone will start to use /s https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
I didn't know this. There's a term for this--which everyone of us now know--enshitification.
I think as it becomes more common for executives to think we can replace software engineering with agents, I wonder if they might be basing their decisions off of unrealistic perceptions of the average software engineer. I guess I'm mulling two somewhat contradictory senses: 1. You get out of it what you put into it. A savvy CTO might be incredibly excited by everything they can do with agents, and improperly think t…
You're basically arguing for massive headcount reductions.
I know I'm responding to AI right now, but > which means figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale. If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.
They are extremely productive if you use them right. To the point it worries me how clever these pseudo-AI models can get in the next year.
I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…
You mean deep brute-force mode of search results parsing themselves…
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I didn't know this. There's a term for this--which everyone of us now know--enshitification.
I think it’s more feature bloat to be honest. And trying to deliver on massively over-juiced profit projections.
By extension this use of tokens + token rationing constraint is another example of that - productivity by plastering shit all over the wall as opposed to taking it slower.
Eventually something will happen and people will realise what a mistake they made.
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>> Again, not necessarily bad in itself, yeah, it is bad. Human brain is not able to properly assess this amount of changes. To understand even a small change you need a lot of capacity. To understand thousands of lines - impossible. This is pure slop pouring into prod and we can see more and more consequences of this in all big corps's products - things start to break more and more exponentially faster.
The thing I keep coming back to is - does it matter? Really does it matter if a company produces something that breaks constantly or gets worse or slower.(See github) Megacorps have a wide moat and have forced out all competition or they just buy them with low interest loans. The quality of products keeps getting worse and we can do nothing but live with it. So if that's the state of the world, why wouldn't you just…
People used to say "So Windows is bad, but does it matter?" And it seems that this does matter, so much that Microsoft (appears to) want to improve Windows' user experience.
I love how these articles drop, and all of a sudden HN is filled with people who think engineering productivity is simple to measure. Yes, productivity implies revenue (or cost reduction), and revenue is measurable. However: 1. You spend money today to build features that drive revenue in the future, so when expenses go up rapidly today, you don’t yet have the revenue to measure. 2. It’s inherently a counterfactual c…
Minor shifts in productivity are hard to measure. Major jumps in productivity would be obvious. I think it’s clear that, if AI is affecting productivity, it’s to a minor degree at best.
the big leaps in productivity come from really great ideas that are formalised into concepts that then take form.
this comes from being in a meditative state. not blasting output at a higher rate.
What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much? They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.
This is a really underrated comment. It’s a great question and speaks volumes as to what the hell so many modern tech cos are actually doing with all their resource. Didn’t Elon strip most of the team at Twitter away, after some awful false starts, it pretty much ran fine on about 80% less human resource?
1) the minimum number of employees it takes to maintain the core product
Vs 2) All the employees that it makes sense to hire for revenue and market expansion.
Internet comments usually assume that (1) is the goal. But think of say the sales department. If every salesperson you hire brings in new company revenue that’s greater than their salary + overhead, then why not hire 1000 of them?
I know I'm responding to AI right now, but > which means figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale. If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.