addisonj

I will be the first to acknowledge that humans are a bad judge of performance and that some of the allegations are likely just hallucinations...

But... Are you really going to completely rely on benchmarks that have time and time again be shown to be gamed as the complete story?

My take: It is pretty clear that the capacity crunch is real and the changes they made to effort are in part to reduce that. It likely changed the experience for users.

IMO, this isn't entirely a "new world" either, it is just a new domain where the conversation amplifies the opinions even more (weird how that is happening in a lot of places)

What I mean by that: you had compiled vs interpreted languages, you had types vs untyped, testing strategies, all that, at least in some part, was a conversation about the tradeoffs between moving fast/shipping and maintainability.

But it isn't just tech, it is also in methodologies and the words use, from "build fast and break things" and "yagni" to "design patterns" and "abstractions"

As you say, it is a different viewpoint... but my biggest concern with where are as industry is that these are not just "equally valid" viewpoints of how to build software... it is quite literally different stages of software, that, AFAICT, pretty much all successful software has to go through.

Much of my career has been spent in teams at companies with products that are undergoing the transition from "hip app built by scrappy team" to "profitable, reliable software" and it is painful. Going from something where you have 5 people who know all the ins and outs and can fix serious bugs or ship features in a few days to something that has easy clean boundaries to scale to 100 engineers of a wide range of familiarities with the tech, the problem domain, skill levels, and opinions is just really hard. I am not convinced yet that AI will solve the problem, and I am also unsure it doesn't risk making it worse (at least in the short term)

I genuinely think systems like Unison are "the future of computing"...

But the question is when that future will be.

Part of the beauty of these sorts of systems is just that the context of what your system actually does is in one system, you aren't dealing with infra, data, and multi-service layers

Maybe that means it is a much better foundation for AI coding agents to work in? Or maybe AI slows it down? we continue to try and throw more code at the problem instead of re-examining the intermediate layers of abstraction?

I really don't know, but I do really want to learn more about is how the unison team is getting this out in the market. I do think that projects like this are best done outside of a VC backed model... but you do eventually need something sustainable, so curious how the team things about it. Transparently, I would love to work on a big bet like this... but it is hard to know if I could have it make financial sense.

With all that, a huge congrats to the team. This is a truly long-term effort and I love that.

not disagreeing with your point here, or in the follow-ups of the pain of https for "local network" apps... but I really wish that we could get to a place where we could get away from this distinction. Obviously, ipv6 is not that easy or realistic, but that really is, imho, the "right" long term answer.

Having gone down the path of being able to just spin up "local" services that get a publicly routable (but most often firewalled off) ipv6 IPs and then good DNS integration is really neat... but still requires lots of technical chops. I wish that weren't the case

My point is not that value extraction wouldn't happen, my point is simply that in addition to the value extraction we also made other huge shifts in economic policy that taken together really seem to put us on a path towards an "AGI or bust" situation in the future.

Is that a bit hyperbolic? isn't this just the same as dotcom and housing bubbles before where we pivoted a bit too hard into a specific industry? maybe... but I also am not sure it would be wise to assume past results will indicate future returns with this one.

I will repeat my comment from 70 days ago:

I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast that we are way out over our skis in terms of what is being promised, which, in the realm of exciting new field of academic research is pretty low-stakes all things considered... to being terrifying when we bet policy and economics on it.

That isn't overly prescient or anything... it feels like the alarm bells started a while ago... but wow the absolute "all in" of the bet is really starting to feel like there is no backup. With the cessation of EVs tax credits, the slowdown in infra spending, healthcare subsidies, etc, the portfolio of investment feels much less diverse...

Especially compared to China, which has bets in so many verticals, battery tech, EVs, solar, then of course all the AI/chips/fabs. That isn't to say I don't think there are huge risks for China... but geez does it feel like the setup for a big shift in economic power especially with change in US foreign policy.

I think the answer to that right now is highly workload dependent. From what I have seen, it is improving rapidly, but still very early days for the software stack compared to Nvidia

Really impressive... but wow this is light on details.

While I don't fully align with the sentiment of other commenters that this is meaningless unless you can go hands on... it is crazy to think of how different this announcement is than a few years ago when this would be accompanied by an actual paper that shared the research.

Instead... we get this thing that has a few aspects of a paper - authors, demos, a bibtex citation(!) - but none of the actual research shared.

I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast that we are way out over our skis in terms of what is being promised, which, in the realm of exciting new field of academic research is pretty low-stakes all things considered... to being terrifying when we bet policy and economics on it.

To be clear, I am not against commercialization, but the dissonance of this product announcement made to look like research written in this way at the same time that one of the preeminent mathematicians writing about how our shift in funding of real academic research is having real, serious impact is... uh... not confidence inspiring for the long term.

I had an ex90 on pre-order for a long time, placed it within the first ~30 days of it being open.

It looked to be (and is!) an absolutely beautiful vehicle and also seemed to be making choices in the hardware (lidar) that I hoped, would, eventually deliver a combination of safety and self-driving capabilities that would be unmatched. I was willing to pay a premium and knew that it would take some time for the self-driving to come to fruition, but figured it would be a capable vehicle until that point in time.

But dang, what a botched launch. Not only were there all these issues, which are insane to me that Volvo didn't have more people in social media / subreddit, but also from a financial perspective the car is just insanely hard to get into. Lease terms were absolutely terrible.

I ended up getting a Hyuandai Ioniq 9 and am really glad I went that direction. Yeah, it doesn't offer as much as a Tesla in terms of FSD, but it also has better build quality and interior quality nearly matching the Volvo. I like the styling (but I know some do not), and it has actual physical controls for the stuff I care about and the best heads up display I have used (favorite feature: you get photos of incoming caller). NACS is also great... but I can't bring myself to take 2 spots yet at superchargers.

I am experiencing a strong sense of "why didn't I think of that" while also really hoping it isn't another strong, family friendly concept that gets quickly enshittified for profit.

Seriously, kudos, for a great concept, good website, and really, not that bad of pricing. Sure you can do it cheaper DIY... but where is the fun in putting an office-styled VOIP capable phone in a kid's bedroom? (though converting an old-phone to tunnel over VOIP sounds like a fun weekend project to do with my pre-teen)

But... dang, does it feel like yet another thing that will start great and get terrible over time or just dropped and be e-waste. Kid cell-phone plans that don't give me choice of provider, youth-focused budgeting/saving apps that are 4x more expensive than just a classic bank account and require an app to effectively use, and by far, worst of all, all the "kid" versions of tablets, youtube kids (which I can never get to not show ads even though I pay for premium!), that claim to give parents control... but really just seem like the minimum effort to make parents feel like they are putting in guardrails while still being designed to maximize the addiction early.

While I am really glad we are trying to build tech that helps kids have a better relationship each other while still using technology... it seems like most still fall to pressure of profit and either term into extremely over-priced offering that is hard to justify or can't make it and turn into junk with no re-use.

Once again, this product, right now, does not look to be that... but now having been bit a few times, I am much more cautious and either worry it will become e-waste or the price jacked up by 3x what it is today.

seconded, I have never wanted a HN "follow" feature before, but this project sounds great

I absolutely sympathize with this and was/still is my opinion... but the only "evolution" of that is the hope that, while I don't think you can prevent the scams and short-term pain on labor markets... you maybe, actually, genuinely get a tool that helps change some of the dynamics that has led to the absolute discrepancy in power today.

If AI is truly as revolutionary as it could be... well, who is to say it isn't the pandoras box that destabilizes the tech giants today and gets us back to a place where a team of 10 can genuinely compete against 1000. And not in the "raise cash, build fast, and get out while things are good" trend... but actually in building, small, more principled, companies that aren't pushed to do the unsustainable things that current market pushes them to do.

Once again... it is more likely than not to be a pipe-dream... but I am starting to think it may well be better to be realistic about the momentum this freight train is building and see if it can be repurposed for my world-view rather than to cede the space to the worst of the grifters and profit-seeking-at-all-cost types.

Oh my, these comments will be fun...

What I find most interesting here is the explicit mention of using Socratic method and how, paired with it not being a human, seems to be what allowed for deeper introspection of one's own beliefs.

For me, the hardest part by far of any conversation like this is the patience to listen and then respond in a way that allows for introspection. It is like swimming upstream, it just tires you out really quick.

The trope of an old wise one who does a lot of listening but can say a lot with a few words maybe is less about the wisdom gleaned and more about patience developed.

I don't think we can call AIs wise, they typically aren't succinct, but the patience they definitely do better than average human and maybe that is their biggest advantage in any context where they are educating

I hope this is more common knowledge these days... but this is good framing and makes really clear the costs.

What this article doesn't cover... and where a good chunk of my career has been, is when companies are driven to break out into services, which might be due to scale, team size, or becoming a multi-product company. Whatever the reason, it can kill velocity during the transition. In my experience, if this is being done to support becoming multi-product, this loss in velocity comes at the worst time and can sink even very component teams.

As an industry, the gap between what makes sense for startups and what makes sense for scale can be a huge chasm. To be clear, I don't think it means you should invest in micro-services on the off-chance you need to hit scale (which I think is where many convince themselves of) nor does it mean that you should always head to microservices even when you hit those forcing functions (scaling monoliths is possible!)

That said, modularity, flexibility, and easy evolution are super important as companies grow and I do really think the next generation of tools and platforms will be benefit to better suiting themselves to evolution and flexibility than they do today. One idea I have thought for some time is platforms that "feel" like a monolith, but are 1) more concrete in building firmer interfaces between subsystems and 2) have flexibility in how calls happen between these interfaces (imagine being able to run a subsystem embedded or transparently to move calls over an RPC interface). Certainly that is "possible" with well structured code in platforms today... but it isn't always natural.

I am not sure the answer, but I really hope the next 10 years of my career has less massive chasms crossed via huge multi-year painful efforts and more cautious, careful evolution enabled by well considered tool and platforms.

I had the awesome, yet terrible experience to work on an obscure Nintendo feature.

By networking, I am assuming you mean console stack... which I had experience with myself, and yeah... not great. But even more, their web services (more than 10 years ago at this point, hopefully better now) were so, so bad.

The thing that struck me then, and continues to seem true, is how much they just don't really seem to care and that they singularly focus at being good at innovating where it matters: games and differentiated hardware.

Young me thought they were silly for being so "behind the times". Older me respects it more.

Yeah, engineering high scale distributed data systems on top the cloud providers a very weird thing at times.

But the reality is that as large enterprise move to the cloud, but still need lots of different data systems, it is really hard to not play the cloud game. Buying bare metal and direct connect with AWS seems a reasonable solution... But it will add years to your timeline to sell to any large companies.

So instead, you work in the constraints the CSPs have, and in AWS, that means guaranteeing durability cross zone, and at scale, that means either huge cross az network costs or offloading it to s3.

You would think this massive cloud would remove constraints, and in some ways that is true, but in others you are even more constrained because you don't directly own any of it and are the whims of unit costs of 30 AWS teams.

But it is also kind of fun

S3 scale is quite massive with each object spread across a large number of nodes via erasure encoding.

So while you could get unlucky and routed to same bad node / bad rack, the reality is that it is quite unlikely.

And while the testing here is simulated, this is a technique that is used with success.

Source: working on these sort of systems

But... isn't that a core ethos of open-source? That you won't ever come even close to capturing the full value provided by a piece of software... but the nature of the problem is such that the value could never be created unless it was open.

I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in different communities.

I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you. That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your business exist in the first place.

That does not match my experience. Engineers learn a new tool, that tool is successful in solving a problem. Whether it is recency bias, incorrect pattern matching, or simply laziness, the tool is used again but with reduced success. Repeat that process a few more times (sometimes in different organizations) and now the tool is way outside the domain, ill-fit to the task at hand, and a huge pain.

That often happens with engineers who pushed that tool getting promoted a few times and building their career on said tool, which is where I have seen this being pushed down, but I think it is important that in most cases are still engineers

Man... this stuff sucks. If I were panic, I would do the same... but I also wouldn't want to be the one at google to navigate this.

With Google Drive now being at the center of so many companies for storing business data, I am certain it is a juicy target, and third party access with full access to read and write to that big hard drive full of proprietary data is one that I would understand want to lock down... but not like this?

I don't think the market is anywhere near to shifting where business are going to dump google drive en masse, but as the ecosystem shrinks because so few companies can afford the cost to play in google's backyard, it does make me wonder how many companies are going to absolutely resent google, comparable to the way they resented oracle.

I want to make clear that I agree with the author that the current way in which AI is being used to make a 10x improvement in efficiency is NOT going to work, and it is for exactly reason stated:

10x-ing requires deep conceptual understanding – exactly what GenAI lacks. Writing lines of code without that understanding can only help so much.

IMHO, the real opportunity with AI, is to get developers less critical in being the only ones who translate conceptual understanding of the business problem into code and get developers more focused on the domain they should be experts in which, imho, is the large scale structure of the system and how that maps to actual computes.

What I mean by that... developers, are, on average, not good at having deep conceptual understanding of the business domain... and maybe have that understanding in the computational domain. All of the 10x developers I have ever met are mostly that because they do know both the business domain (or can learn it really quick) and the computational domain so they can quickly deliver value because they understand the problem end-to-end.

My internal model for thinking about this is we need developers thinking about building the right "intermediate representation" of a problem space and being able to manage the system at large, but we need domain experts, likely supported by AI assistants, in helping to use that IR to express the actual business problem. That is a super loose explanation... but if you have been in the industry awhile, you probably have felt the insanity of how long it can take to ship a fairly small feature because of a huge disconnect between the broader structure of the system (with microservices, async job systems, data pipelines, etc, which we can think of as the low-level representation of the sytem at large) and the high-level requirement of needing to store some data and process it according to some business specific rules.

I have no idea if we actually can get there as an industry... it is more likely we just have more terrible code... but maybe not

Like others, I empathize with this, but it got me wondering more what that difference is, because I have "achieved" a lot more in helping a group than I have as an individual.

Over time I have learned for myself, at least part of the reason, is that you don't get those moment when the thing works. Those immediate and really apparent moments, where you did the hard thing, and even if there is more to do, you solved the problem.

You don't get those moments as a manager, because people aren't machines and you can't assume anything. A hard won consensus building moment can be flip-flopped on, a coached employee who you thought really felt empowered can still struggle to speak up, etc.

In other words, I think success just tickles things different neurologically between IC and management, and I think recognizing that is probably critical to know.

If you are deciding to manage, you have to be ready 'give up' the high of solving directly or risk turning into a micro-manager or not giving enough autonomy. As a manager learning to be okay with struggling with why motivation or burnout is more of a struggle, and you just don't get those same rejuvenating moments.

At least that is how I have come to feel about it, but I am still learning to find what other moments I can recognize as a manager to allow my brain to get the rewards for the hard effort.

Do I think that we are likely to suddenly see a massive massive leap to AGI/ super AGI? Not really... But does it still seem like enough of a long tail risk in my/my kids lifetime that I hope someone is getting resources and access to think about this? I sure do.

I know comparing AGI development to nuclear weapon development is a trope at this point, and in general, not that that useful of comparison... But I do think having a group with a diversity of how to think about the impact of desired outcomes is a good thing to have whenever you are working in the realm of world changing outcomes, and it seems like the changes at openAI are eroding that to some extent, even if it is really really unlikely to come out of this specific company at this time.

I mean... It seems really logical to me that one of the worst "staples of management" is simply that so many practices are applied without much thought in general. I don't disagree with the intent here... but I also am a bit surprised at trying to instead say quarterly is likely to be better?

What is really missing, is this isn't a one way street. Please, please ask your directs, say what your intent is, what you want out of the time, what they want out of the time, and figure out the cadence that works. If they like the weekly because it turns into a moan session where they can complain, address it! It may not be the most effective... But it might it be what is needed to care for that relationship.

I have a strong believe that the most you can ever get from a management book/trainer/etc is ideas and techniques you can try,(some of which are really really good!), but you can never give someone a checklist or a flowchart and expect them to be a stellar manager and any business that does believe that is likely a place where you are unlikely to want to be a manager or be managed.

It is interesting seeing the comments here, the comments from adopters is there is a lot of value but it taking time to get up to speed. Those new to temporal a lot of questions seeking understanding.

I have spent a lot of time in the adjacent space of event driven systems and there, like here, it seems like some of the biggest challenge is just education.

I wouldn't say that EDA or workflow based systems are preferable to traditional API services with DBs, just that the space they occupy in the industry is so large that I think it is really really hard if you to introducing any different paradigms, even when you focus on domains where API services aren't a great fit (like here with long running, complex operations).

My point with this comment is simply that I think if you are trying to build anything that does things differently, developer education is as important or even more important than design and architecture, but often not considered because those building these systems are already so deep into it that they can't approach the problem as an outsider.

SEEKING WORK | Utah, USA | Remote

Engineer turned consultant for SaaS developer tools

I have spent most of my 13+ year career working on building products for developers, both for platforms internal to companies and as well as startups building for developers. While I deeply understand the technical side, my niche has been my ability to fill gaps around product, sales, marketing, and GTM to help engineers build for engineers.

previous projects: GTM planning for open-core SaaS, early sales/sales training for engineering/founder led sales, usage based pricing strategy for 10k-5M deals, developer focused content marketing, product/monetization strategy for large open-source projects

Tech Areas: Cloud, Distributed Systems, Databases, Realtime data/streaming, Operations

Email: hello@addisonj.dev

I am using custom components for all data fetching which primarily wraps the supabase JS sdk. I have some issues I still need to make a bit more robust around caching and invalidation, but the Supabase JS sdk does help some.

I do think that is another weakness right now is the built in plugins aren't quite sophisticated for a lot of real use cases

I have been using Plasmic for the last 3 months as part of a contract app where the goal was to get the technical, but not frontend experienced client able to do a lot of the design. I did a lot of custom work on components (like integrating the Supabase API and custom Auth for RLS support) as well as integrating some other endpoints/libraries.

In short, I have gone pretty deep with it as a proper "app" builder compared to maybe a more CMS/design use case. By far, for front-end low code UI tools it is my favorite. However, it isn't without the typical pains of that when the abstraction breaks it can be quite a hassle and requires some real knowledge (or support help) to figure things out. The real thing that keeps me on it though is that it really can have hand written react and Plasmic generated react live by side, which drastically lowers the risk compared to a lot of other app builders.

I do genuinely think it can speed up development for certain teams on app use cases, but I think the structure of those teams is a bit particular, because you do need someone who really knows react/next ecosystem to manage the underlying integration.

Thanks to the Plasmic team!

Happy to answer questions in thread

This is pretty interesting, but for anyone who is on semaglutide maybe not a huge surprise? At least in my experience with semaglutide, everything I consume I need less of and I feel way less desire for things.

I am not a big sweet eater, but usually enjoy a decent sized chunk of dark chocolate about every other day. I still have roughly the same cadence of wanting a piece, but the difference now a single square is enough and I don't feel the need for more. It isn't like the desire for things like sugar, fat, etc is gone, it is more like I am just wayyy better at knowing how much of that I need.

I have been on semaglutide for ~2 months and it has honestly been wonderful for me. I have described it as being the drug that helps my brain stop acting like we live in times of famine and has massively improved my relationship with food.

It really is just a shame that it is so cost prohibitive as I genuinely think that it probably could do a ton to reduce healthcare and impact of food overproduction (I eat so much less meat and I have heard some from others), but I don't think that will happen unless insurance starts covering it

This game holds such a special place for me, not only for just fun childhood memories, but also so much of what got me into the excitement of how cool it was to see the rapid progress of tech.

Certainly, it isn't atypical for software industry folks of my age to have games be a gateway into tech, but I think I was a bit different in that I rarely considered wanting to make games, rather I enjoyed the tinkering with my computer and the rapid pace at what games could do as much as the game (which continues today with my spending more money on playing with the hardware and toys rather than the actual games) and half-life just

I first played Half-Life on a family PC with no graphics accelerator and I loved it, but I remember the jank from ~15 FPS at a few hundred lines of resolution. This is what drove me to build my first computer and after debugging my way through all the issues that a 12 a year old would make when building a computer before the age of YouTube, I remember being absolutely blown away by the lighting and speed of what this little piece of hardware added to the experience.

That wasn't the first time I felt the rush of getting a computer to do something I wanted (that would probably be getting doom running in windows 3.1 after dealing figuring out the mystical "command line") but it certainly was one of the most drastic in just how fast tech changed.

A small addendum to this... I really want to figure out how to bring similiar experiences to my kids, because it was that loop of problem -> learning -> breakthrough that I think was hugely transformative to not only my career trajectory, but also just in learning to love learning.

So thanks Valve and Half-Life team for this happy memories... but maybe I won't feel the same when I try and play HL DM this weekend and inevitably realize how slow my reaction times have gotten in the last ~25 years ;)