> In what world is public opinion not universally against the cartels? It's hard to take you seriously after that.
I think you’re getting tripped up by some specific wording and managing to miss the point the poster was making. The point should be taken seriously even if imprecisely articulated. While most folks are against the cartels, there’s a much wider range of belief on how much they warrant government or military intervention and to what degree we should be spending various resources on them. The historical state of play was(is?) that cartels are criminal organizations which are generally a policing matter that has escalated to specialized policing agencies and multinational networks of policing agencies. The marked escalation of the military into this is a more recent piece that is somewhat more controversial. One doesn’t have to be “in favor of the cartel” to ask questions about whether our military should be bombing boats or invading countries to ostensibly neutralize organizations that historically have been subject to policing operations.
To go back to the parallel… the public wasn’t in favor of Al Qaeda before 9/11 either, but there was a huge difference in the level of response the public was in favor of after. It turned from an intelligence monitoring level of response into an active military invasion of multiple countries.
> Anthropic makes some good stuff, so I'm confused why they even bother entertaining foregone conclusions.
I think it’s just because there’s enough people working there that figure that they will eventually make it work. No one needs Claude to run a vending machine so these public failures are interesting experiments that get everyone talking. Then, one day, (as the thinking often goes) they’ll be able to publish a follow up and basically say “wow it works” and it’ll have credibility because they previously were open about it not working, and comments like this will swing people to say things like “I used to be skeptical about but now!”
Now whether they actually get it working in the future because the model becomes better and they can leave it with this level of “free reign”, or just because they add enough constraints on it to change the problem so it happens to work… that we will find out later. I found it fascinating that they did a little bit of both in version 2.
And they can’t really lose here. There’s a clear path to making a successful vending machine, all you have to do is sell stuff for more than you paid for it. You can enforce that outright if needed outside an LLM. We’ve have had automated vending machines for over 50 years and none of them ask your opinion on what something should be priced. How much an LLM is involved in it is the only variable they need to play with. I suspect anytime they want they can find a way where it’s loosely coupled to the problem and provides somewhat more dynamism to an otherwise 50 year old machine. That won’t be hard. I suspect there’s no pressure on them to do that right now, nor will there be for a bit.
So in the meantime they can just play with seeing how their models do in a less constrained environment and learn what they learn. Publicly, while gaining some level of credibility as just reporting what happened in the process.
Tariffs in a rapidly growing and innovative industry always makes the country with lots of protectionism end up with less competitive products because they’ve removed the competitive pressures from everywhere else in the world.
We were left behind because we shelter our own car companies in a gentle cradle where they don’t have to compete. Both parties did this while saying they wanted to “level the playing field” but chose rates that were protectionist and made competitive products prohibitive not rates that actually created a level field.
We were left behind because we tried to protect our companies from facing the future. People in this country expect that one can stand on the shore of a beach and vote on whether the tide should go in or out, and that’s just not how the world works.
You’ve made the same mistake the poster you’re replying to pointed out. Women in lesbian relationships have a high rate of having experienced domestic violence in their lives, and a study reported this which has then spread around the internet as a meme of sorts. For the vast majority of those same women, the same study reported that the domestic violence they experienced was in a previous relationship, with a man.
I was still in school during the big crash, so you’re right, my experience may be colored by that. But I keep a pad that essentially allows me to be completely without income for at least 6 months without withdrawing from any accounts which incur penalties or are tied to stock market performance. I’ve done freelancing and could spin that back up. It would be harder to land contracts during a rough economy but often people who just fired their staff need short term contracts to keep the lights on and so there’s usually opportunities for something...
You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to cobble together work during a downturn like that if I were to lose my primary job and be unable to find another. I would likely take the most fulfilling work I could find. Then when times were good I’d resume more fulfilling work. Just like I’ve done through out the time I’ve been in the field so far.
Given that we have been in a 12 year period of one of the largest tech expansions in the history of our industry, I don’t see why it makes any sense to argue that people shouldn’t be seeking fulfilling work now.
Totally get you weren’t applying the same brush to everyone!
> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to
You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!
I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.
> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.
Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.
Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.
I’ve never had much trouble finding an interesting thing to spend my work time on. The biggest problem is usually deciding when to look for something new and what I want to do next. Getting the opportunity to do that usually comes quickly from there, even if it’s not always the pathway I expected. :) I’ll admit I’ve got advantages that maybe everyone doesn’t have (a deep set of experience from a variety of areas organizations value) but I firmly believe that the world and our field would be a better place if more people fought for meaning in their work and didn’t accept roles where they weren’t finding it.
(Also like, to be clear these roles aren’t all high paying if you’ve adjusted your life so that without 300k/yr you can’t function then like, I agree you have boxed yourself into a harder corner. That said, I currently have found a combination that is both impactful and lucrative. So that’s super cool when it works out. I am desperately trying to structure my life so I’m not boxed into needing this to be true in the future because meaning in my work is still more important to me than money from my work.)
For the engineers who want to have an impact on stuff, if you’re skilled and your ideas are good and you can convince others about that, you can be given as much impact as you can eat. There’s a huge spectrum of how much impact people opt to go for. Apple is a good place to come if you want to change something about how a billion people use some technology. And generally Apple is cool with people shipping those ideas in as quick a product cycle as they can figure out how to get it done. I’ve seen multiple colleagues take something from idea to keynote (or shipping, keynote is just the most visible way in which that happens) in 12 months or less, within the first year or two of arriving. Some of my colleagues do this yearly. You probably don’t get to do that coasting, so it’s up to you.
If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.
And the reward is—more pie.
Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.
1) I agree that this is often true! Code can be pretty boring. That doesn’t mean there are no interesting problems that you can tackle with programming. It just means most people work on incredibly boring stuff and think that’s all there is and totally fine. Find something that’s a better use of your time.
2) There is more and less difficult software engineering. If yours is really boring why wouldn’t you try something more challenging? It doesn’t always pay as well but it can be a lot less terrible to experience on a daily basis.
3) Most of the hardest problems in making interesting technology that touches the world isn’t in exactly how the code is written. Learning this is the first step towards starting to be equipped to tackle the actually hard problems in our field. Which you could work on directly, if you wanted.
None of this is to say that anyone has to do this. You don’t have to have fulfillment in your job. Though you and most others should frankly probably look around and make sure the code you’re writing is doing actually good things in the world rather than bad ones, that’s an ethical obligation but one that is pretty orthogonal whether or not you’re working on interesting problems. (If people optimize solely for money though, they bend towards writing code that makes that empowers companies over people and generally makes the world a worst place. People have a responsibility to evaluate this and try and avoid the ones that don’t.)
Mostly: it’s fine to make the choice to not work on something fulfilling. But stating that there’s nothing fulfilling to work on in this world is just nonsense, defeatist and mostly means you’ve resigned yourself and everyone who takes your advice to unfulfilling, boring and miserable work that doesn’t grow you worth a damn.
And that probably sucks. So why take that approach?
I think you’re getting tripped up by some specific wording and managing to miss the point the poster was making. The point should be taken seriously even if imprecisely articulated. While most folks are against the cartels, there’s a much wider range of belief on how much they warrant government or military intervention and to what degree we should be spending various resources on them. The historical state of play was(is?) that cartels are criminal organizations which are generally a policing matter that has escalated to specialized policing agencies and multinational networks of policing agencies. The marked escalation of the military into this is a more recent piece that is somewhat more controversial. One doesn’t have to be “in favor of the cartel” to ask questions about whether our military should be bombing boats or invading countries to ostensibly neutralize organizations that historically have been subject to policing operations.
To go back to the parallel… the public wasn’t in favor of Al Qaeda before 9/11 either, but there was a huge difference in the level of response the public was in favor of after. It turned from an intelligence monitoring level of response into an active military invasion of multiple countries.