keybrd-intrrpt

> Zuck: "They 'trust me'"

> Zuck: "Dumb fucks"

- 2004

> ___ has been working hard to control the scientific narrative on their products

Instead of tech, tobacco, whatever

It's just corporations.

The food and sugar industries have tried to control or pollute scientific narrative. The car industry ("Unsafe at Any Speed"), oil and gas, mining, chemical manufacturers, and on and on.

Why do so many people seem to forget the lessons of the past with some "shiny new" industry, become enamored with it, and think "wow, these are the good guys!".

When billions upon billions, and now in some cases *TRILLIONS* of dollars are at stake, corporations will do whatever they can to protect and grow that money.

Notion Mail, Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, Relay, a bunch of Salesforce, Upwork, Gitlab (~15% layoffs), Atlassian (lots of layoffs already - more product cuts coming), Stack Overflow, ...

And that's not counting AI companies "cannibalizing" their own products, like Sora video generation

> Ultimately the value will be in the data.

And the compute.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI(whatever is it called these days) are sitting on mountains of compute.

Yes, local and open-weight models will continue improving, and they'll be good enough for an increasing number of tasks. But there's a difference between making yesterday's capabilities cheap and pushing the frontier forward.

The most capable models will likely continue to demand enormous compute resources, both for training and inference.

And the pricing is already there - we're charged for token usage, not model access. Draft an email, summarize a paper - basically free. But the "big stuff" will require Frontier-models with Frontier-level of compute.

OpenAI spent something like tens of millions on "solving" a Millenium Prize math model. And there will always be another problem worth throwing massive amounts of compute at, whether it's mathematics, scientific discovery, engineering, etc.

> six months of being stupid on purpose

Those are rookie numbers.

I've been doing that for 40 years

For sure.

Especially as organizations grow in size.

A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim.

But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge.

Microsoft: 223,000 employees

Alphabet / Google: 198,933

Apple: 150,000

Oracle: 141,000

Meta / Facebook: 75,472

I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail).

I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating.

Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"

> removing those people disrupts the organization

Or worse, you removed the workers and left the 'telephone' people.

In my anecdotal experience, MOST companies don't take any time to understand what they are cutting.

They kill "Project X" so the easy answer is that everyone involved with Project X must go. Regardless if they were useful or could be useful elsewhere.

Or they cut by salary, employment length, etc.

Especially when school is not in session and children are not present.

How much is that likely to bias the dataset?

> the proof did not explain why

So humans do/did still have a role to play

Right?!

It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.

Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"

> the critical part of the backend where a new 300ms delay will cost the company millions then yeah.

If it is so critical, why don't we have tests and benchmarks for it?

Oh right, because "Greg the super-coder" never wrote any of this down and it lives in his head so he can be the arbiter of change.

It was toxic before agentic coding, it's still toxic now.

Document your systems. Add tests and benchmarks for what is important.

We've always known this, we have a dozen or more textbooks written about it. But we always gave it a pass because "Greg the super-coder" was producing more value than he was hurting.

That's no longer the case. Your best coder is now Opus or Astra

> We shouldn't give up on line-by-line review for serious applications.

But how many changes are actually serious?

I can have an agent mass-produce security bug fixes, zip through our low-priority backlog, etc.

IMO - we need to get out of our own way.

Building is cheap now. Agents are also really good at following checklists and running tests.

So instead of having individual engineers reviewing code, we need to

* Leave human review for the most impactful changes

* Get better at defining the quality bar

* Continually codify human concerns into rules or systems that can be checked against

A lot of this was touched on a few months ago with Spec-driven development becoming a hot topic when agentic coding started.

We should continue that with spec-driven review, testing, etc.

Another reason:

They keep all the input and use it for training data and reinforcement.

If you're being "mean" to it, you're "spoiling" the data you "give" to them - causing them more work to filter it out later.

As with most things in business and life - just follow the money