materielle

I think it basically stems from the idea of “conceptual learning”. Which has been a pedagogical ideology for quite some time now. And is also convenient if you’re a bit addicted to your phone, a bit lazy due to AI, and want to still feel good about “learning” things.

We’ve known that one important component for learning (not the only thing that matters, but an important one) is the memorization of facts.

There seems to be a big urge to pretend that’s not true. E.g. you can learn arithmetic without memorizing your multiplication tables, literature without engaging with the canon, and now apparently coding without even having coded.

The idea is if we start with a top-down conceptual approach we will eventually vibe our way into knowledge acquisition. Which does sort of work.

However, sorry to be a curmudgeon, but the people who just “do the work” and actually spend time on task to learn a bunch of stuff … are actually more knowledgeable on average.

Seriously, are you out of your mind?

We need a PRD, an EDD, an ADR, success metrics defined, product sign-off, leadership sponsorship, Figma designs, a Jira epic, timeline estimates, sprint planning, and statistically significant A/B experimental outcomes to be able to implement a feature like that!

The good news is that we did automate the coding portion.

Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.

People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.

On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.

If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.

I agree, Disneys’ dubs are generally of high quality.

Netflix seems to just grab radio announcers or something. The dubs are stripped of all emotions and acting. It’s like the voices are reading out an advertisement.

Obviously there’s exceptions, but Disney seems to employ actual actors. The dubs feel natural and native for the most part.

I don’t know, but typically when orgs don’t make logical decisions, it’s because internal politics are incentivizing something else.

I suspect that rate-limits would fly in the face of a lot of narratives like “Azure is ready for hyperscale”. And getting eyes on Github is probably a part of their Copilot product strategy.

The person you were applying to said “rate-limiting” but I think they meant “load-shedding”.

There’s a weird yet common attitude that nobody has to implement operating systems, databases, compilers, cryptography, consensus algorithms, etc because you should use off the shelf solutions.

This is obviously true, and there are surely more web devs than, say, compiler engineers.

But then the logic seems to go as far as to imply nobody does or should be doing these things. Where do they think the “off the shelf” solutions came from?

I worked at <big internet tech company>, and many critical systems written in the 90’s and early 2000s used bespoke compilers, caches, and consensus protocols that were hand rolled by the original developers.

Back then, most of these ideas were already present in academia. But the industry tech wasn’t quite there yet to run these huge services at scale without running into problems (paying a vendor, licensing, the open source solution not quite there or tunable enough to easily integrate it at the needed scale, no company wide consensus on a shared approach yet).

A lot of these handwritten implementations eventually informed the “off the shelf industry solutions” we have today.

I think that’s what gets me down about tech these days. There’s a weird almost anti innovation attitude, which is the opposite of what made me fall in love with this profession. I’m not saying to hand roll a consensus algorithm at your next start up. But there’s definitely a vibe these days that any sort of theoretical, creative, or innovative thinking is suspect. Get back to selling ads!

I don’t know anything about Germany’s postal service.

In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve?

As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think privatization will solve either of those.

Why do we need to reform something that already works?

Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.

One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.

Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.

That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.

If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.

Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.

I don’t know if this is the case here, but it’s very hard in general to judge how much software projects ought to cost.

Software projects will grow in complexity to consume whatever budget you give it. If you hire 50 devs and give them a bunch of business objectives, they are going to do what they do and write a ton of software.

It’s not obvious to me that it would be theoretically impossible to build a cheaper package manager.

That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.

Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.

It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.

I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.

What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

I’m not sure this is generally true, and you’re ignoring a lot of context around the specific situation of GCC.

Just to make a point: I could throw out SQLite as a project that bans open contributions and is wildly successful.

Also, as others pointed out, Linux is technically open contribution bazaar style by 2000s standards. But if you look at how to actually get involved, there’s way more friction compared to the average GitHub project.

I actually think GCC falls into the same category. Even though it’s technically open contribution these days, it’s not exactly a free for all where any AI agent can open a GitHub pull request and get it reviewed.

You have to mail patches to a mailing list and follow a bunch of super specific and arcane rules set by the grey beards.

You’re being sarcastic, but I think you’d be surprised at how often you can say no to managers or even VPs and the c-suite and … have nothing happen to you.

I didn’t realize this until I was 32.

Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.

But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.

And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.

One thing I don’t quite understand:

Wouldn’t it be in Amazon’s interest to run open models and sell time slots at around the cost of running them?

My only guess for why they don’t is that AI labs are currently selling their models at a huge loss, so this isn’t worth Amazon spending low-margin compute on compared to other higher margin products.

What I’m getting at, is maybe we won’t even need to run the models locally for the current status quo to implode. After today’s AI labs run out of free-money runway and actually have to sell their models at a price above running them, there will be the incentive for anyone with compute to just undercut by selling open-models-as-a-service at commodity prices.