631–640 of 655 posts
Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."
what's your point here considering you were wrong? in the last 16 years they've been one of the most profitable companies in the history of the earth
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They became big enough because they were free and had massive cash behind them to destroy all competition (Mapquest, Garmin and others) Now they are this big, they have become quasi public record for many other organizations who rely on this data. Since they want to keep costs low, if their data is wrong, it can have significant impacts on your life and getting someone to correct it is almost impossible.
And that's why you want to start paying for GMaps?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can someone explain to me the symptoms of AI psychosis that you have witnessed? Because I know several 2nd hand stories of people going through this but I haven't seen it myself up close. I am curious about it because this is gonna be the new widespread-social-ill of the next decade
I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he makes insinuations that they had better get with the times or AI is going to replace them. An AI native devel…
To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr eng more than agent related. Code isn't sacred — LLMs often easily generate absurdly overcomplicated garbage spaghetti code, but this appears to be getting better, and they are "steerable" towards better outputs with a few rounds of revisions, and some light process around a light spec, TDD, etc.
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?" Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer? It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs. The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it. That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
To be fair they’re doing it by increasingly immoral, unethical, and potentially illegal methods resulting in at this point over 300 lost lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny world wide, blowback over intentionally enabling scams and fraud for profit, enabling csam, trafficking, etc as long as they pay their ads bills. It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future. How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
AI "in the likeness of well-known actor" surely is enough for most of the slop-eating pigs Hollywood serves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem. There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a s…
Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate. Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, ev…
Having tech led teams at both high-profile and low-profile tech companies, that is _not_ my experience.
Most engineers worth their salt value quality. Product Management generally doesn't see quality as a feature, therefore doesn't take it into account. For short-lived code, quality is indeed over-rated. For long-lived code, quality is the thing that determines whether you can keep improving or tuning other features or whether you'll miss deadlines. Sadly, retrofitting quality in an existing codebase is awfully expensive.
There's also one important, but often undervalued, aspect. Overwhelmingly, today's tech world has been built by neurodivergent engineers. In my experience, neurodivergent engineers tend to value getting to the end of things, rather than letting them drop mid-way. This can absolutely be seen as over-engineering, but it's often a cognitive scaffolding that will ensure that the work can be resumed (by them or anyone else) even after context-switching to something entirely different.
Whether it actually _is_ over-engineering often depends on how well the engineer is aware of the actual needs, rather than being spoon-fed instructions without visibility. Or on the maturity and skill of the engineer, depending on the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate. Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, ev…
Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one want…
I don't know if bug tech was a typo or intentional but from now on I'm using it in place of big tech.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he makes insinuations that they had better get with the times or AI is going to replace them. An AI native devel…
> I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he ... To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr en…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem. There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a s…
Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate. Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, ev…