chronid

> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.

There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.

You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.

This is my personal experience: I've seen multiple emails from management about handling AI properly - it hasn't improved the situation. Those people don't hear and my org still sort-of says to people to use as much AI as possible (though they've limited which models we can use, and slashed token spending).

And with hiring effectively frozen there is not even an incentive to let go of those people because they will not be replaced - they may have contributed little overall (routine tasks, oncall weeks) and now contribute 10x more spam while before they would not even try to investigate an issue, but we don't have the cycles to allocate that to someone else. And every time you tell them something they try to gaslight you by telling you they're trying to learn and you're being too aggressive.

I've become so frustrated by seeing claude-isms in slack or in emails it has become impossible for me to use it to work on my personal projects and I'm moving over to codex. Maybe it's time to try pi and some chinese models, definitely I need a break from this madness.

> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.

Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.

I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.

There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...

It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.

I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)

Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

And i want to use hibernation, as I don't mind putting my disk encryption passphrase once a day as the price of not risking having my laptop with a completely drained battery on Monday morning due to 1% battery drain/h of s2idle in my 64GB RAM configuration.

You can use suspend+hibernate to accomplish that and it works well. Unless the gods of kernel lockdown decide you cannot for your own good (and it doesn't matter if your disk is fully encrypted, you're not worthy anyway) of course. It's their kernel running on your laptop after all.

I worked in finance on the other side of the pond - developers wanted to constantly bring in and use new services but also didn't want any of the responsibility or the work needed to make compliance happy (or even in that particular company shoulder the costs). When me and other folks where brought in it to fix the "cloud strategy" it was a complete shitshow and heads actually rolled when we wrote a tool to assign costs to applications. But we had to start almost from scratch and limit usable services as we developed strategies and blueprints for each...

The complete, unapologetic desire of devs and security teams (but also many infra teams) to not have any kind of ownership was horrifying to me.

In the end there's not a single solution or strategy, it really goes back to the organization and where your weaknesses and strength are as an org. If you have a gazillion consultants following the "best practice" of the day and exceptions on top of exceptions you are dead, devops or otherwise. You will still make billions if you are the right company though regardless of your software practices, so...

They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.

The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.

Exactly how openssl was (is?) when heartbleed happened. It's nothing new sadly, there are memes about the "unknown oss passion project" holding up the entire stack all over the internet.

Isn't this intuitively true?

Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC.

Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately.

But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.

Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT.

Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!

The last rewrite I've seen completed (which was justified to a point as the previous system had some massive issues) took 3 years and burned down practically an entire org (multiple people left, some were managed out including two leads, the director was ejected after 18ish months) which was healthy-ish and productive before the rewrite. It's still causing operational pain and does not fully cover all edge cases.

I'm seeing another now in $current_job and I'm seeing similar symptoms (though the system being rewritten is far less important) and customers of the old system essentially abandoned to themselves and marketing and sales are scrambling to try to retain them.

Anecdotal experience is not so good. Rewriting a tiny component? Ok. Full on rewrite of a big system? I feel it's a bad idea and the wisdom holds true.

This is what home automation was supposed to be. You shouldn't be looking at it, it should just help you silently and reduce the amount of things you have to care about.

Turning lights off, closing shutters when it goes dark, handling temperature and CO2 concentrations, etc.

I feel people have a need to look at dashboards, have screens, etc (maybe it's some sort of sympathetic reaction about looking at dashboards all day at work?) instead of letting go. Dashboards should be looked at if something is wrong and automation is failing.