skeeter2020

"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!

which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!

and IME the #1 rule for us is work in a profit center, not a cost center. When you're cutting there's a law of diminishing returns, but the floor is so incredibly low you don't want to be near it just to clear the blade.

>> I've started largely using this site in a read-only fashion. The SNR here now is too low and I'm too busy. Found my time better spent in more focused offline and online communities.

How's that going for you?

I have seen at least one example develop in real time. You typically spent years building before you had a platform, then lack the enthusiasm from senior leadership to invest the next 12-18 months with no new features and hard to quantify - maybe no - returns. Then you get displaced by newcomers who are "platform native"; what this really means is their engineering misteps haven't been discovered yet, or even if they guessed correctly the world has turned and made their previously correct solution now a failing one. And now we have something called "AI-native" that is going to solve this once and for all with some sort of magic, and you can't lead these companies unless you truly believe in the magic.

We shipped more code! We merged 5x faster! We spent more tokens!

>> Every time we sped up one step, work piled up at the next... we started going through the entire process of shipping software, one step at a time...

I feel like I'm being gaslit here. You can become CTO with this lack of business fundamentals, and a basic misunderstanding of systems engineering?

tangentially related - I remember my Dad bringing home a Vic-20, pecking in a sample program and then nothing but syntax errors, despite it being entered exactly the same as the printed manual. Turns out the number 0 and the letter O are not the same thing to a computer.

Why are you writing tests on the actual provider? IME these types of tests are slow, brittle and don't give you much value. Even if you get a true positive, what can you do about it?

Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.

>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice

That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?

I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either.

>> I will take books...

and you can, without attacking the GP statement about their PERSONAL preference, or clumsily trying to tar them with some sort of pejorative NASCAR paintbrush.

My initial reaction as well. If you believe AI has made what you do irrelevant, change what you do. If you really want to do something different, stop playing the knowledge arms race game with a computer program. There has been "analog" LLM-like ventures (aka big, rich tech corporations) for a long time, yet they didn't previously solve all engineering problems; you can now use technology as a great equalizer, or change your focus to something AI can't even do if you don't want to play the game.

Maybe you're not actually solving a problem, but revisiting a solved problem? Maybe you need to pursue bigger problems, or stop playing this version of the game? How can the title be "Challenge is Gone", then the post be about how what you used to do is (you believe) no longer relevant, and you're not sure what's next - isn't this the answer you're looking for?

MY kids are now teenagers and stopped playing with lego years ago, but even when they were ALL about the lego it was a very different approach. They have a lot more than I ever did, and it was collect-assemble-display for the most part, compared to my childhood remix approach. I guess when you have a shark that's essentially two-pieces snapped together, or branded minifigs it dramatically cuts down on flexibility & imagination...