I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
These were expert office hours for API modeling. The company has certain requirements and standards - this team is supposed to live and breathe them. The question wasn't that advanced. Performing a basic AI prompt in the authoritative expert office hours is not the answer.
The right approach would be to say: I do not know. Let me discuss / research with my colleagues and get back to you.
And to be clear: I manually read and studied the official guiding documents without AI. Then I used a separate AI setup to more effectively research a larger array of additional internal sources, wikis, etc. I also reviewed the code from other teams / projects to infer any patterns that could apply to my project, so I came prepared with examples for discussion.
They were speechless. Kind of shocked. It was hilarious. They then agreed to reach out to some colleagues / other teams to research and find the answer. After 20 min they followed up with an acceptable answer.
Just yesterday I had to attend internal "office hours" of an expert team to get a question answered - I had done extensive research of my own, both manual and using AI leveraging internal resources. What did the "expert" do when they couldn't answer my question right away? They said "let me ask {insert AI tool}". I cut them off stating that this is an insult to my intelligence. I am in the office hours for expert advice not someone else performing the same AI prompts that I already performed.
They had a working PDP-10 at the Living Computers Museum (since shut down by Paul Allen's estate). Definitely a mainframe. That thing takes up an entire room.
Most of us never had the option for work to pay for Claude Code -- some internal orgs did this. That being said I had a personal Claude Code subscription for a bit.
Honestly I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent. I mostly use it with Opus 4.7, or rarely with GPT-5.5. The VSCode extension is ok, but CLI or app are the better experience IMO.
I was a GS-15 before (same level most CTOs in government have). Maybe senior executive service roles (SES) might not concern themselves with ethics violations.
In any case the vast majority of government employees are on the general schedule.
In theory as a government employee you already fear getting in trouble with OGE (Office of Government Ethics) and in normal times this is truly enough. Nobody wants to have a conflict of interest or fail to disclose investments etc. However nothing is normal under the current administration...
Agreed - I have been checking to verify whether this truly is a Google service or just something that links out to generic Google ToS and Support pages. It looks suspicious.
Due to lots of long distance running my rest heart rate is below 40. I am highly skeptical I would experience a 3bpm lower heart rate after sauna. Maybe this benefit applies after infrequent activity or less intense activity only.
Like Jensen Huang said the job of an engineer is to solve problems not writing code. The code is a means to an end. This is certainly true for me as an engineer and why I'm not worried about AI.
I am one of the people who uninstalled ChatGPT and closed their account and installed Claude in the last 24 hours. I know plenty of others who did the same. I wonder whether this trend can be sustained.
I have to defend the Googlers here (I work at a different hyperscaler). Teams / services need to optimize their COGS. That means optimizing infrastructure cost. A lot of pay as you go service may not have any base cost to customers but they require some infrastructure to be provisioned. Without quotas you can have a lot of provisioned infrastructure which does not produce any revenue to even collectively break even. Just yesterday this a decision we evaluated again in my team. As a team we cannot afford an unlimited quota - both because of what that would do to our bottom line and because we can't necessarily obtain all the quotas we need ourselves to provision enough capacity for our dependencies. It's a difficult trade off requiring manual intervention.