marginalia_nu

(I authored that blog post)

I think it kinda depends on the stage of the development. If you have an application already, flame graph whack-a-mole is the normal starting point. This is the correct way to go about it because of Amdahl's law. Random optimization is extremely unlikely to pay off in a way that leads to measurable application wide performance improvements; no matter how big improvements you find for a function that's 0.1% of the run time, you'll never see more than a 0.1% improvement of the run time.

Bottoms up optimization is what you reach for if you have a known hot spot (from a profiler flame graph), or you're deliberating design choices when building something from scratch (where you can be reasonably sure performance will matter).

Of course all of this is exponentially harder for database-adjacent work since you have os and hardware level caches, possibly a buffer pool of your own, and in production you usually operate in fickle semi-resident states that are extremely hard to replicate in a benchmark scenario. So you end up with a lot of benchmarks (cold cache, hot cache, cgroup memory constraints) hoping that sort of fixes it.

I think overall there's been a huge amount of regression in discovery for music but also like... most other things. Recommendation algorithms tend to show you more of what you already like, which makes it incredibly hard to discover new things you might also like. Also creates a huge popularity bias where what's popular gets more popular and what isn't doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.

One of the lost joys of the past is reading a print magazine that has no idea who you are and discovering articles not written for your demographic, but that regardless expose you to new perspectives and ideas, maybe you find a new hobby or band or whatever, and enrich your life forever. That stuff just isn't happening anymore.

Picard is both the writing and Patrick Stewart. Picard would not be the same character if they'd cast Kevin Sorbo to play him[1]. Picard without Stewart's presence and gravitas would be something else entirely.

[1] Sorbo's portrayal of Dylan Hunt is basically just taking his Hercules role and putting him on a space ship and I have no doubt it would look the same on the bridge of the enterprise.

Proton is a for-profit owned by a non-profit foundation, and Yen is the majority shareholder of the company and board member of the Proton foundation. They were ostensibly also very financially stable. He had every opportunity to be a Picard. He chose to be a Ferengi instead.

Proton had up until two days ago ostensibly cornered a niche of the market where they could basically collect taxes off security conscious nerds and other people wanting out of big tech. This wasn't a start-up with 3 months runway. Proton was by all accounts very financially stable.

The literally only way they could imaginably fuck up what they had was if they squandered the goodwill and trust of their users.

[flagged]

They had a safe stable business with a loyal user base in a market niche they completely owned, could have basically just sat on their asses and de facto collected taxes from paranoid nerds and journalists for decades.

I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.

[citation needed]

Even still, there are gradations of using AI. Yen seems to have been on a crusade to get everyone to vibe code the entire thing. Not a lot of high performing software engineers signing off on such practices either.

You treat your team well because your highest performers are the ones with most options and the ones that will leave first when you don't. If productivity is bad before you pull something like this, you won't like what happens when all you have left is a team full of demoralized underachievers.

According to the manifesto, it seems to be that hopping aboard the AI train has inexplicably not materialized exponential revenue growth, and since it can impossibly be that AI has been oversold, the only conclusion must be that employees are dragging their feet and must be forced to go full send with vibecoding for the destined profits to arrive.

I've literally had videos like this on my feed almost all year. Idk, maybe it is about to pop, but the amount of crying wolf about it makes it hard to take it seriously.

Yeah chasing velocity like that is for startups. Proton already has a product, a competent team, and (had) a lot of soft capital in the form of a good trusted name and goodwill.

That's enough momentum to coast on for a very long time, especially since their whole deal is that they're owned by a nonprofit and don't even have shareholders to pressure them.

They really had to nothing and they'd won, the only way to lose in a situation like that is... exactly this. Andy could have probably just sat on his ass for 20 years like Gabe Newell and probably been able to buy a similar yacht at the end of it.

Can't imagine the company surviving if Andy is allowed to stay on as CEO. A company like Proton lives and dies by its reputation, trust, and goodwill. Given their mission and brand, this is spectacularly tone deaf and jeopardizes everything they've spent over a decade building up.

Only thing that might save their face is kicking Andy and following up with Japanese levels of corporate apologizing.

If anything the expectation of incredible improvements just over the horizon makes an argument for not adopting AI or at least doing so very judiciously.

Why would you spend dollars on tokens today if you expect the same tokens will get you something vastly superior in a few months, or that they'll do the same job for nickels on the dollar? Do you just hate having money or what is the problem?