rangledangle

We've reached the era of "good enough" ai, it seems. The truth is you don't need the best model in most cases.

To me the noise was 10% of the problem. Who wants to breathe in what lies on the ground? Just lick it instead.

Any reason why Waymo is so much more expensive than alternatives? I went across SF last weekend and Uber/Lyft was around $16. Waymo was $56.

yayayayayaya

Sounds like something you could do with SQS and Lambda. They just have massive datacenter infra and compute at disposal.

Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.

Undoing our mistake is always an option.

I feel like any code created from GPT can also be interpreted from GPT. Use a prompt like "Explain like I'm 5". Also DiagramGPT and just generating documentation in general from code.

Perhaps at some point you can screenshot the lowcode and paste the image into GPT for it to interpret, but will they build for that use-case? The former exists today.

[IT Perspective] In my personal experience, these tools also overreach. Most people I've met in IT (15 years) want to go into Engineering, or at the very least, something MORE technical and code-related.

They are hungry and willing, but often overlooked. I have seen many climb out and teach themselves code, build tools for IT and revolutionize the way teams and orgs work. It's a marvel to see someone with drive do what they desire.

Fast forward to today. I see IT forcing all members to use a low-code tool. The passion drains from their eyes. I can see the fear of the mounting weight of becoming unemployable. They've shared with me their experiences. The directions they want to go have nothing to do with Low-Code, and the roles and orgs their interviewing with aren't interested in people who build with them. The question "what have you been working on?" is like a death knell. I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't see a future beyond helpdesk because of these tools.

My point is, think carefully about who is using this product. You can kill careers with this stuff. I think it's great for business teams who want to "do x in x app when y happens in y app."

It's really sad, because almost all of these platforms are code-averse. They sell the idea that "code is the hard part". Business folk eat it up.

Then you sit there like an idiot dragging blocks around when you could have just asked GPT to bust it out in code in seconds.

They're so bad for source control and documentation, too.

I was so stoked to build stuff this way; I had the same sentiments about the learning curve, but overall it seemed like an amazing tool and pretty fun.

The problem is the people around me thought it was too difficult, and couldn't see long term. So we implemented a low code solution and now everything is in there and it's a mess/nightmare. I hate my work now, and everything we build is tightly coupled to this spaghetti platform that will inevitably decide to raise it's prices on us and we will have no recourse.

Job hunting has been tough too, because very few places have done this, so they ask "what have you been working on?" and I'm basically setting record times for ending interviews if I tell the truth.

Less technical companies throw money at problems to solve them. Like mine, sadly... Even if it takes a small amount of effort, companies will throw money for zero effort.

I just have my PC in my living room boot Straight to Steam Big Picture Mode. It's great.

When I worked there it was still called Facebook. I’m still not used to calling it Meta haha. My bad.

And just to add that last part. Moving fast was so damn cool. That shared understanding of responsibilities and freedom of making changes. In most cases of course they were added as reviewers to the revert diff review, and in some cases they knew it could adversely affect us and they’d tag us for our perspective before pushing, but the open-ness of it all. The freedom to bring me in at a later stage or for me to do the same to them.

These days at different companies it’s all planning and hashing out all those details before implementing, and then guess what? Surprises happen anyway. And in the end we become master planners and never actually build anything. Those blueprints sure do look great though.

100% agree. The culture is a huge factor as well, but in some of the environments that I encountered before and after, that culture was there, but the tools didn’t allow the same cohesion.

To your point, other experiences have shown me the ego that rears it’s ugly head when trying to move that way in an env that didn’t have that culture. At FB there was a lot of candor, but in other environments I feel like I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings in code review, or even just watching what I say in slack messages. People take work too seriously in some companies. It’s so rewarding to have fun with it.

They used to say “Nothing at FB is someone else’s problem”

I hope they still do.