andyjda

I see this pattern a lot, and I find it telling:

- someone claims that Gen AI is overhyped

- someone responds with a Gen AI-enabled service that is

    1) really impressive

    2) is currently offered pretty much for free

    3) doesn't have that many tangible benefits.

There's many technologies for which it's very easy to answer "how does it improve life of an average person": the desktop, the internet, the iPhone. I don't think Udio is anything like these. Long-term, how profitable do you expect a Udio-like application to be? Who would pay money to use this service?

It's just hard to imagine how you can turn this technology into a valuable product. Which isn't to say it's impossible: gen-AI is definitely quite capable and people are learning how to integrate it into products that can turn a profit. But @futureshock's point was that it is the AI investment bubble that's losing hype, and I think that's inevitable: people are realizing there are many issues with a technology that is super impressive but hard to productize.

I find it annoying either way: it doesn't provide valuable/novel information and isn't conducive to productive conversation (in part because it's unclear if it's sarcastic or earnest)

why is it that any mention of Rust on the internet will bring about these wildly-overshooting claims. The amount of production software having been re-written in Rust (or replaced by a Rust counterpart) is minimal. This kind of rewrite is rare for any programming language. Yet claims like this are everywhere.

The ratio of dumb stuff to reasonable stuff being said about ChatGPT is dizzying; I truly hope it has reached its peak and this kind of hype and poorly-thought-out analysis dies down soon.

This whole article could be summarized as "How to protect your career? Be good at your job!"

The 'software dev' section is particularly off-putting. It starts off with a code-snippet that is ridiculously wrong: it defines 'typos' as any string matching this regex: '(\w+)\s+\w+'. That's right, if your text contains a word followed by whitespace followed by a word, that's a typo. The code could only appear correct to someone with no knowledge of the domain and no experience coding. The fact that this was published on "wearedevelopers.com" is a bit sad.

The article then goes on to deliver this piece of wisdom: "Coding will soon become no more than a means to an end. Which it always was." OK, if it always was, then why is this news, or a disruptive change? Also, is anybody involved with writing production software convinced that coding is somehow not a means to an end? What else would it be?

I don't have much knowledge of the other careers mentioned in the article, but I suspect the analysis and advice there is about as flawed. The suggestion that teachers should have ChatGPT grade papers while they spend more time "face-to-face with struggling students" seems particularly vapid and shortsighted as well. How would they even know who is really struggling if they're not reading their work, delegating it to a notoriously unreliable tool?

I'm with you, but I also think that discussion about specific tools often is wrongly prioritized over discussion of general principles. The lesson should be "always profile your programs, and be especially wary of third-party dependencies" rather than "avoid this specific library at all costs."

I'm assuming they also understandably don't want to start a flame war, where their specific criticism of the library is going to be taken to mean "this library is always bad, do not use it, even if its effect on performance is negligible in your case."

What is mysterious about Chekhov’s success? Genuinely curious as someone who has only read a few of his stories but finds them clearly very well written and influential. Maybe the extent of his success is still somewhat surprising?

If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand.

“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.

But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?

Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy

> engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship.

I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals. Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.

The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.

Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.

Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial

>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".

It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.

Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.

Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.

Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue

don't smartphones in China mostly run Android? Seems like a weird thing to compare OSs with apps