> Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.
I’ve always wondered what the major industry players’ theoretical price would be for offering transferable licenses, and how many people who say they want to be able to resell would pay it. It’s also interesting to me that we got all the way to 2026 and one of them officially going all-digital and we never saw price differentiation for physical copies.
Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.
>grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.
Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.
> no one else seems to find this to be quite damning for the AI services being offered, preferring instanced to be wowed by the convenience and speed at which they can be delivered unreviewed and unproven information
"Be wowed by the convenience and speed", or merely "take advantage of the mere availability"? What most people find to be damning about expert advice is that they simply can't get it anywhere, at any cost that they can afford.
What if you label standing still as 0 mph and start moving 10 mph, gaining x energy, then call that zero and start moving 10 mph from there? It's just as intuitive to say that you would gain x energy in that case, but you don't.
> We know intuitively that a ball atop a 20ft ladder has twice the potential energy of a ball atop a 10ft ladder.
What makes this intuitive? The foundation of the asker’s question is that it seems intuitive that kinetic energy would increase linearly with speed, but that turns out to be wrong.
I feel like the whole point of all the experimentation with AI right now is determining whether any of these things actually matter to the end result, over various timeframes.
This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”
In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.
A) a newly-receptive audience - engineers who have discovered that they very much enjoy and appreciate the tradeoff of proximity to the code for amplified velocity and impact, now that it's possible to achieve without being a manager of messy human teams.
B) an ecosystem in which it's grown nearly impossible to connect a functional description of something to how much bespoke construction and effort was involved, partially because of marketing and partially because of how much software already exists to be built on top of. It's impossible to tell from a few paragraphs of functional description whether something was built in a weekend or took a team 4 years to ship, so volume of code is the natural fallback for describing complexity.
My concern is less about knowledge and more about the ability to communicate and make good decisions. I'm not sure how well it holds up against technology that can sometimes make a good showing at it, but is most importantly automated, cheap and subservient.
> It's profoundly facile to think that only first order effects matter. Yet this is an incredibly popular folk belief in software. Why?
> So I think partly it's an ego defence mechanism.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that it’s a folk belief, or that it has to do with ego.
I don’t think anyone truly believes “the user doesn’t care” is sufficient justification for anything. It’s about accountability. “The user doesn’t care” is shorthand for “On this team, we’re held accountable for not delivering, not for the results of decisions that only materialize a month or two down the road. We don’t pay attention to how we got to where we are, we fight fires as they pop up.”
Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.
I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.
It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.
Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.
I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.