mrisoli

My GF works with energy infrastructure in Colombia and they have lots of issues with people stealing copper, I didn't verify her claim but she said despite not having natural sources of copper Colombia had significant export volume of copper, pretty much all stolen. Her company has launched multiple investigations and unveiled gangs and networks repeatedly.

Wehad a junior engineer do some research on a handful of different solutions for a technical design and present the team, he came up with a 27-page document with 70+ references(2/3 of which were reddit threads), no more than a few hours later after the task was assigned.

I would have been more okay with AI generated code, it would likely have been more objective and less verbose, I refused to review something that he obviously didn't put enough effort himself to do a POC on. When I asked for his own opinion on the different solutions evaluated he didn't have one

It's not about the document per se, but the actual value of these verbose AI-generated slop, code that is executable, even if poorly reviewed, it's still executable and likely to produce the output that satisfies functional requirements.

Our PM is now evaluating tools to generate documentation for our platform based on interpreting source code, it includes description of things such as what is the title and what the back button is for but wouldn't inform valid inputs for the creation of a new artefact. This AI-generated doc is in addition to our human made Confluence docs, which is likely to add to spam and reduce quality of search results for useful information.

I feel the same way, if all one is doing is feeding stuff into AI without doing any actual work themselves, just include your prompt and workflow into how you got AI to spit this content out, it might be useful for others to learn how to use these LLMs and shows train of thought.

I had a coworker schedule a meeting to discuss a technical design of an upcoming feature, I didn't have much time so I only checked the research doc moments before the meeting, it was 26 pages long with over 70 references, of which about 30+ were reddit links. This wasn't a huge architectural decision so I was dumbfounded, seemed he barely edited the document to his own preferences, the actual meeting was maybe my most awkward meeting I've ever attended as we were expected to weigh in on the options presented but no one had opinions, not even the author, on the whole thing. It was just too much of an AI document to even process.

He doubled down on his opinion by sharing a sequence of posts from a X account that denounces "woke activism" in the software industry and open source projects. He criticised the political activism in open source projects, then, ironically, suggested Palmer Luckey should step in to steward NixOs.

I also left my home country about a decade ago.

I was already expecting a lot of gambling site ads, they took over the soccer tournament sponsorships almost completely anyway.

But what I found out when I came back in the last 3-4 years 100% shocked me. It wasn't just TV and soccer teams, I saw gambling ads in napkin holders at some restaurants, bus stops. I went to get a haircut and the barbershop had TV with gambling ads adorning their frames.

Multiple parties that eventually devolve into a two-party system, for decades it was PT-PSDB until PSDB imploded, now it's PT vs whatever the right/center coalesces into(MDB for decades, PSC after that, now PL). In fact it's more of a two-personalities system at this point, with the right clinging desperately into Bolsonaro's fading popularity while the left clings onto Lula's image as much as they can after failing to make any successor popular.

And after elections, yes, it just turns into negotiation with center parties that will sell off their support for vote-buying projects.

Interestingly, I've spotted a few places in Portugal already accepting Pix as a form of payment, catering to a large demographic of Brazilian immigrants and tourists.

Varies by country, but yeah, in general Credit Card options in Europe are pretty bad, here's my research on options in Spain:

Sabadell: No fees no perks for CC

Bankinter: No fees no perks for CC

Ing: No Fees no perks for CC

BBVA/Santander: Offer an Iberia cobranded card, 9k avios on 2k EUR spent on first 4 months, Iberia Silver Status, 1 point per 3 euros spent, 90 EUR annual fees

Caixa: Vueling card, slightly better avios earnings than Iberia card, some minor vueling perks, fast track at airports 90 EUR annual fee, also a Lufthansa card that offers 7k bonus miles, 95 euros annual fee, no info on miles per euro spent

Amex: Only worthy option, 1 mile per euro, 80k welcome bonus, unlimited lounge access, 400-500 euro credit welcome bonus, 250 travel bonus(used to be flights/hotels, now just hotels), fast track at airports, 780 euro annual fee, network in Europe is growing but I'd say still not accepted at places 50% of the time in Spain.

Revolut: Ultra could be the only comparable option to Amex that it offers unlimited lounge access and 1 point per euro at 660 euros annual fee

So yeah, the only option that actually gives you something is Amex, as the Iberia/Vueling options are laughable and the only reason why you'd have the free CC from other banks is because they are free.

Which confused me, as someone from Belo Horizonte who started uni just around that time. As far as I knew, Google was generally known one of the highest paying companies by far back then. It's benefits were unmatched because the SV-style of office with all the perks were not commonplace in the region, and employee turnover was low to non-existent. Even getting an interview if you didn't have a masters or phd was pretty difficult if not impossible(without connections).

Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.

First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.

Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.

And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.

In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.

Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.

Or in other words, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Sounds like every startup ecosystem

What seemed quite common for me was(working in European startups): Company gets investment from american investors, investors either recommend synergy with products or bring some trusted executives, new executives bring in their own crew especially at the director/higher management level, goes on to favor their decisions over others who have either more experience or knowledge about the company/product.

Goals are not met, either due to external circumstances or because executive applied strategies they were familiar with from previous gigs but don't fit the reality of that company, executive steps down "voluntarily", their pawns are let go shortly afterwards, hire new executive in place, back to step 1.

Nitpicking your comment but that's not Olympic archery, olympic archery doesn't include compound bows, only recurve bows(also the Olympics specifically uses 70m distance only).

Chrome is core to Google's business so it's worth it advertising, they also advertise the Pixel phone a lot in high-end places in global cities because they need to gain market share for mobile browsing and phones against Apple.

Anything else, not that important, even GCP which is their major bet doesn't really get any ads because it's a business product so not much sense in doing so.

They seem to believe word of mouth/viral marketing works because it worked for gmail and chrome, so they didn't double down on Stadia before product market fit, and that caused Stadia to fail(along with Google's short attention span reputation).