> I vehemently disagree that people working at big companies are stupid, or making themselves stupid. There are VPs and SVPs at Adobe and Salesforce that are smarter, more knowledgable, and more productive than any startup employee.
In my experience the problem can be the lower level managers and ICs. If they cannot perform to the industry standard, technical debt will begin to compound, and it will be difficult to adapt.
It’s also difficult to improve your standards when the competent people keep leaving, or don’t feel like they can make changes.
I think Chinese Consumer preferences are driving a lot of this. They want things to be as high tech as possible, and don’t seem to care about longevity.
IMO the best practice is to leave dependencies unpinned, but use a lock file, and only update the lock file a few times a year.
Upgrade enough that you don’t get stuck, but not often enough to expose yourself to supply chain attacks every time CI runs.
If you are really into EVs, like the author clearly is, than what is happening to Tesla is just sad. Tesla is being run into the ground. It was, and could be, the great American EV success story. But now it's being destroyed by a guy who has clearly lost it.
And don't forget that taxpayers have foot the bill for Tesla to have this shot in the first place.
You are not responding to the content of the article. Did you read it? The FB feed has changed dramatically since the adoption of genAI and the experience of using it can be pretty unpleasant. Do you disagree?
Okla really seems like a meme stock. Their original design was rejected by the NRC, so they are very far from ever breaking ground.
I don’t understand why their valuation is so high. Why not just take all this money and build an existing, approved design?
Great post. I work on two large codebases. One is structured much like the example from the post, and the other is a mess. LLMs care much better at understanding the organized code.
> It is almost aways a failure of the technical infrastructure previously created in the company. An AI will solve the trivial aspects of the problem, not the real problem.
This is so true. Software that should be simple can become so gnarly because of bad infra. For example, our CI/CD team couldn't get updated versions of Python on the CI machines, and so suddenly we need to start using Docker for what should be a very simple software. That's just an example, but you get the idea, and it causes problems to compound over the years.
You really want good people with sharp elbows laying the foundations. At one time I resented people like that, but now I have seen what happens when you don't have anyone like that making technical decisions.
> what is definitely not inevitable is the monetization of human attention. It's only a matter of policy. Without it the incentives to make Tiktok would have been greatly reduced, if even economically possible at all.
This is not a new thing. TV monetizes human attention. Tiktok is just an evolution of TV. And Tiktok comes from China which has a very different society. If short-form algo slop video can thrive in both liberal democracies and a heavily censored society like China, than it's probably somewhat inevitable.
> The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
This is a great idea. I always thought that if there has to be online gambling, it should be a government monopoly, and it should be managed by the most incompetent employees.
> The other is "meh, just direct them to the call centre".
I worked at a large insurance company and this was definitely the approach. There was a website, but you had to call to realistically get almost anything done.
One product manager's big innovation was to completely remove passwords. Every time you wanted to log in, you had reset the password and be sent a link via email. Of course the didn't announce this, so you would be probably spend 20 minutes frantically looking for your password that didn't exist.
In my experience the problem can be the lower level managers and ICs. If they cannot perform to the industry standard, technical debt will begin to compound, and it will be difficult to adapt. It’s also difficult to improve your standards when the competent people keep leaving, or don’t feel like they can make changes.