danielrhodes

letzten Monatdiscuss

I've tried this before and I think this constraint is something that has to be kept top of mind for a designer not just the engineer. Most designs these days assume a single page app and there are interaction patterns that make plain HTML not suitable. But if you incorporate this in from the start and stick with it, there's no reason you can't do this.

danielrhodes

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Once again there seems to be this deep misunderstanding by engineers that all lawyers do is draft docs like an engineer writes code. And if you can automate the doc creation process, you have automated the attorney.

But this not true. It greatly depends on what type if lawyer it is. They can operate very differently.

When it comes to docs, lawyers try not to reinvent the wheel on every doc. It’s very risky. They want to use language that has stood up to the test of time. So they have templates and old contracts and they will piece together a contract from that - it takes no time at all. AI writing new stuff every time using new language doesn’t save much time and puts a client at risk because nobody knows how that language holds up in court.

Many attorneys have paralegals who do the actual work. Those paralegals are much cheaper. Efficiency arguments don’t often take them into account. Most legal tech companies don’t think about paralegals. But they are often the real workhorse in a legal firm. But automating them doesn’t really speed anything up: they do a lot of varied things and are not just mindlessly following some process like a factory worker.

So what do lawyers do? They advise clients, they project manage, they research, they talk with other lawyers, sometimes they go to court, they review work, they work on getting new clients, and yes sometimes they write legal docs. Then at the high end of things, they come up with legal strategies and solutions that AI has never seen before.

In corporate law, legal is often budgeted in. It’s expensive but it is often ROI positive. Legal mistakes are incredibly costly.

Having said this, are lawyers pretty slow to adopt new tech? 100%. Word processors replacing typewriters was seen with a lot of suspicion. Email too. The cloud too. I think AI will have a big impact on law - but it won’t be as simplistic as a little doc generator an engineer cooks up one night in his bedroom having never even met a lawyer. The law is quite gray and so even if you have found something impactful, attorneys manage risk by looking to see what others are doing. If there is social proof, they are more likely to accept it.

danielrhodes

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

The reason Facebook is where it is now is that when it was novel there was a lot of engagement. But as the novelty wore off, it became clear that your friends were not going to be able to produce the amount of interesting content you’d need to stay engaged. Most people probably don’t have enough friends on FB making the problem worse. In addition, Facebook’s privacy model requiring a double opt-in friendship makes it hard to add more friends.

So they started to loosen things: you can follow others, posts can be public, your feed becomes a mix of posts in your network and friends posts, etc. Now it is resembling Reddit. Numbers go up!

That is to say: these pure friend social networks start off with the right intentions. But with a similar product and incentives, you’ll end up right around where Facebook is now. If you want a different outcome, you must start from a different place.

danielrhodes

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.

Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.

danielrhodes

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Articles like this amount to a straw man.

People seem to think that just because it produces a bunch of code you therefore don’t need to read it or be responsible for the output. Sure you can do that, but then you are also justifying throwing away all the process and thinking that has gone into productive and safe software engineering over the last 50 years.

Have tests, do code reviews, get better at spec’ing so the agent doesn’t wing it, verify the output, actively curate your guardrails. Do this and your leverage will multiply.

danielrhodes

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It certainly looks like an Apple device. Ive's aesthetic is Apple's aesthetic, so if you hire Ive, that is what you are going to get.

I can see a car company who doesn't care about design stumbling into this outcome, but Ferrari doesn't seem like that kind of company. So the choice must have been intentional.

danielrhodes

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

This is no surprise. We are all learning together here.

There are any number of ways to foot gun yourself with programming languages. SQL injection attacks used to be a common gotcha, for example. But nowadays, you see it way less.

It’s similar here: there are ways to mitigate this and as we learn about other vectors we will learn how to patch them better as well. Before you know it, it will just become built into the models and libraries we use.

In the mean time, enjoy being the guinea pig.

danielrhodes

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

What a burn - but not surprising given MySQL's history and things like MariaDB or Percona which exist to fill the gaps. My impression is that many people will choose Postgres over MySQL when starting a new project as it progresses so quickly and has a far richer set of features.

danielrhodes

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

I have heard that a large chunk of the employable software engineers in the United States are located in the Bay Area. Because of this, it is almost a requirement that if you are a company in a hyper-growth phase, you need to be in the Bay Area, otherwise you will struggle to hire enough people. Maybe that will change post-COVID, but I doubt it. Certainly we can expect more companies to be supportive of remote work, and I think that's a good thing.

danielrhodes

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I think you are right that the government has showed a lot of restraint in dipping its toes into this problem, and that might be a good thing. However, Cloudflare in shutting off 8chan, has not violated anybody's free speech.

The constitution only applies to the government's relationship with its people. Only the government can violate a citizen's constitutional rights. Other individuals (or companies) cannot violate another person's constitutional rights. Cloudflare, in ceasing its relationship with 8chan, is not impeding on their first amendment rights.

Even so, the first amendment is not a blanket right to say whatever you want or incite violence. The first amendment is much narrower than you may realize, and in the narrowest (most protected) case, only applies to political speech. Hate speech is definitely not protected.

While 8chan, as an operator, is not directly responsible for what happens on their site, they start taking on liability when they are knowingly aware of and take no action against people who are using the site for criminal activity. The same goes for a landlord who knowingly lets his/her house be used for criminal activity, such as crack house.

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