NumberCruncher

This article could have been a sentence: a senior engineer does engineering and does the work of the PO/PM too.

I am freelancing on the side and charge 100€ by the hour. Spending roughly 100€ per month on AI subscriptions has a higher ROI for me personally than spending time on reading this article and this thread. Sometimes we forget that time is money...

My favourite saying is: "dumb people get old too".

Whatever the Chief People Officer of any company has to "say" is plain PR and as such can't be taken seriously...

Really sharp reasoning. This can be reversed to define an extra ordinary manager: don't care about your head count and just be a fucking grown up who's emotional state does not depend on his team's performance. IMHO this results in having a high head count and a team performing pretty well. Kinda stoic wisdom. Go and figure...

> Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million [...] users?

I am pretty sure they will be able to monetize it. But there is a big difference between "generating revenue" and "generating profit". It's way cheaper to put ads between posts of your friends (like FB started out with ads) then putting ads next to the response of an LLM. Because LLM responses has to be unique, while a holiday photo of yours might be interesting for all of your friends, and LLM inference is quite expensive, while hosting holiday photos is cheap. IMHO this is the reason why the 5th generation of ChatGPT models try to answer all possible questions of the world in one single response, kinda hoping that I am going to be happy with it an just close the chat.

They have <a really expensive> infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active <but non-paying> users.

Even worse, they train their model(s) on the interactions of those non-paying customers, what makes the model(s) less useful for paying customers. It's kind of a "you can not charge for a Porsche if you only satisfy the needs of a typical Dacia owner".

I am happy to read this here. I manage a team of 3 and code half-time. We are heavy on XP, because I introduced it. At the beginning it felt strange for the team but in between the enjoy the empowerment it comes with.

> Honestly I think lesson 7 is nobody's normal.

There are only two types of ppl: "the wrong kind of crazy" and "the right kind of crazy". Why would I want to connect with the wrong type of crazy? Ok, I don't work as a waiter.

I wish I would not have a standard post for topics like this:

Every time a surveillance system and violation of privacy rights is advertised in the EU as a solution against child abuse and trafficking I ask myself how such a system could have changed the outcome of a case like Dutroux. Would have been the dozens of witnesses and police officers involved in the investigation suicided a way sooner, later, more silently, or at all? We will never know...

It would have been interesting to see how an Elasticsearch like system performs on this task.

Marketers ship code, salespeople answer technical questions without backup...

...and you dentist cuts you hair and your hairdresser pulls your teeth. Because everything is a trade what can and should be learned, except if it's related to writing and selling software.

To be fair, you did not say that marketers ship working and maintainable code, salespeople answer technical questions without backup the correct way. Therefore you might be right, thought.

Is this not the guy who is on the payroll of Anthropic? Not because he is wrong, but because there is so much marketing going on in this space nowadays.

Why not fighting fire with fire and using AI to:

Version A: find 100 LOC which can be reduced to 50 LOC without changing the functionality. Then ask the author to go through the PR making sure it's not bloated. Repeat.

Version B: find hidden bugs. Ask the author to fix them. Repeat.

Keep them occupied saving your face. I would also fine tune an own agent to automatise this kind of work for me.