codyb

At which point you've gained very little efficiency in most large organizations given that by the time you're actually doing development work at the ticket level 90% of the project timeline (identifying issues, prioritizing, creating requirements, architecture, ticket breakdowns, coordination, etc) has already passed.

If AI can enable engineers to move through the organization more effectively, say by allowing them to work through the service mesh as a whole, that could reduce time. But in order to evaluate code contributions to any space well, as far as I can tell, you still have to put in leg work even if you are an experienced engineer and write some features which exposes you to the libraries, quirks, logging/monitoring, language, etc that make up that specific codebase. (And also to build trust with the people who own that codebase and will be gatekeeping your changes, unless you prefer the Amazon method of having junior engineers YOLO changes onto production codebases without review apparently... holy moly, how did they get to that point in the first place...)

So the gains seem marginal at best in large organizations. I've seen some small organizations move quicker with it, they have less overhead, less complexity, and smaller tasks. Although I've yet to see much besides very small projects/POCs/MVPs from anyone non-technical.

Maybe it'll get to the point where it can handle more complexity, I kind of think we're leveling off on this particular phase of AI, and some headlines seem to confirm that...

- MS starting to make CoPilot a bit less prominent in its products and marketing - Sora shutting down - Lots of murky, weird, circular deals to fund a money pit with no profits - Observations at work

It's really kind of crazy how much our entire society can be hijacked by these hype machines. My company did slow roll AI deployment a bit, but it very much feels like the Wild West, and the amount of money spent! I'm sure it's astronomical. Pretty sure we could have hired contractors to create the Chrome plugin and Kafka topic dashboard we've deployed for far cheaper

The big AI projects I've seen at work are...

- A Kafka topic visualization dashboard

and

- A chrome extension the original "developer" can no longer work on cause the bots will wreck something else on every new feature he tries to add or bug he tries to fix

I think we're a ways out from truly complex code bases that only agents understand.

I've seen a bunch of hype video where people spend lord knows how much money in order to have a bunch of these things run around and I guess... use Facebook, and make reports to distribute amongst themselves, and then the human comes in and spends all their time tweaking this system. And then apparently one day it's going to produce _something_ but two years and counting and much like bitcoin, I've yet to see much of this _something_ materialize in the form of actual, working, quality software that I want to use.

My buddy made a thing that tells him how many people are at the gym by scraping their API and pushing it into a small app package... I guess that's kind of nice.

Does not apply to the White House

The gold Donald Trump pin is just part of our culture

Like hanging his face on banners at the DOJ while proclaiming he'd be entitled to a third term?

What? Lol, they've been doing that the entire time. They're very open about the playbook lol.

Bow down, or get harassed, sued, investigated, fined, etc.

It's not the _cellphone_ that Stallman has an issue with lol

But if everyone acted like Stallman then solutions that have gone away such as public payphones would come back due to their requirement.

He doesn't give a crap if a random phone record of his appears in a random haystack, and that's kind of the point isn't it? It's the aggregated, crawlable stores that are the threat

There may be other issues with Stallman, but that behavior doesn't strike me as particularly inconsistent

Really? I'd think a human being would be more likely to recognize they'd crossed a boundary with another human, step back, and address the issue with some reflection?

If apologizing is more likely the response of an AI agent than a human that's either... somewhat hopeful in one sense, and supremely disappointing in another.

I guess you could have two people per presentation, one person who confirms whether to slide in the generated slide or maybe regenerate. And then of course, eventually that's just an agent

Wow, I'm staggered, thanks for sharing

I was under the impression that often times chip manufacture at the top of the lines failed to be manufactured perfectly to spec and those with say, a core that was a bit under spec or which were missing a core would be down clocked or whatever and sold as the next in line chip.

Is that not a thing anymore? Or would a chip like this maybe be so specialized that you'd use say a generation earners transistor width and thus have more certainty of a successful cast?

Or does a chip this size just naturally ebb around 900,000 cores and that's not always the exact count?

20kwh! Wow! 900,000 cores. 125 teraflops of compute. Very neat

Sounds like you should build a competitor if that's literally all it is...

I suspect there's quite a few other things you have to consider when you're managing trillions of dollars of transactions a year. Fraud, settlement times, up times, security, customer service, debt collection, interest rate calculation, reach, KYC, record keeping, legal inquiries.

But I'm sure we're just a couple grok comments away from a competitor

I think it's a fair point to say that many people do not feel as if they're the ones responsible even if they're direct contributors.

A lot of folk justify it to themselves.

I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.

And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.

I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.

Oh ya, AI may be frothy and bubbly right now but there will certainly be and already are tremendous real world software and hardware products and tech flowing out of the space

I think this is the crux of why, when used as an enhancement to solo productivity, you'll have a pretty strict upper bound on productivity gains given that it takes experienced engineers to review code that goes out at scale.

That being said, software quality seems to be decreasing, or maybe it's just cause I use a lot of software in a somewhat locked down state with adblockers and the rest.

Although, that wouldn't explain just how badly they've murdered the once lovely iTunes (now Apple Music) user interface. (And why does CMD-C not pick up anything 15% of the time I use it lately...)

Anyways, digressions aside... the complexity in software development is generally in the organizational side. You have actual users, and then you have people who talk to those users and try to see what they like and don't like in order to distill that into product requirements which then have to be architected, and coordinated (both huge time sinks) across several teams.

Even if you cut out 100% of the development time, you'd still be left with 80% of the timeline.

Over time though... you'll probably see people doing what I do all day (which is move around among many repositories (although I've yet to use the AI much, got my Cursor license recently and am gonna spin up some POCs that I want to see soon)), enabled by their use of AI to quickly grasp what's happening in the repo, and the appropriate places to make changes.

Enabling developers to complete features from tip to tail across deep, many pronged service architectures would could bring project time down drastically and bring project management, and cross team coordination costs down tremendously.

Similarly, in big companies, the hand is often barely aware at best of the foot. And space exploration is a serious challenge. Often folk know exactly one step away, and rely on well established async communication channels which also only know one step further. Principal engineers seem to know large amounts about finite spaces and are often in the dark small hops away to things like the internal tooling for the systems they're maintaining (and often not particularly great at coming in to new spaces and thinking with the same perspective... no we don't need individual micro services for every 12 request a month admin api group we want to set up).

Once systems can take a feature proposal and lay out concrete plans which each little kingdom can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to for further modifications, you can again reduce exploration, coordination, and architecture time down.

Sadly, seems like User Experience design is an often terribly neglected part of our profession. I love the memes about an engineer building the perfect interface like a water pitcher only for the person to position it weirdly in order to get a pour out of the fill hole or something. Lemme guess how many users you actually talked to (often zero), and how many layers of distillation occurred before you received a micro picture feature request that ends up being build and taking input from engineers with no macro understanding of a user's actual needs, or day to day.

And who often are much more interested in perfecting some little algorithm thank thinking about enabling others.

So my money is on money flowing to... - People who can actually verify system integrity, and can fight fires and bugs (but a lot of bug fixing will eventually becoming prompting?) - Multi-talented individuals who can say... interact with users well enough to understand their needs as well as do a decent job verifying system architecture and security

It's outside of coding where I haven't seen much... I guess people use it to more quickly scaffold up expense reports, or generate mocks. So, lots of white collar stuff. But... it's not like the experience of shopping at the supermarket has changed, or going to the movies, or much of anything else.

That's been my target for the last... wow... has it nearly been 18 years since I started futzing around with Bitcoin for the first time?

Been a swift drop this time. My buddy goes "if only I sold it all in October", what... like the rest of the people participating in the Ponzi scheme who would also like to cash out at the top?

Looks like all those stupid bitcoin treasury companies are finally unwinding.

At least no one's sitting around pretending it's going to actually do anything useful anymore.

The thing is, if they were uploading your messages, then they'd want to do something with the data.

And humans aren't great at keeping secrets.

So, if the claim is that there's a bunch of data, but everyone who is using it to great gain is completely and totally mum about it, and no one else has ever thought to question where certain inferences were coming from, and no employee ever questioned any API calls or database usage or traffic graph.

Well, that's just about the best damn kept secret in town and I hope my messages are as safe!

And I'm no fan of Meta...

Yea, I know, but smart phones are getting bigger and bigger. I'd rather a much nicer camera, and a small dumb phone which texts and calls. As opposed to a smart phone with a much worse camera, that also texts and calls and does maps.

I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.

Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.

Yea, when I'm on the move I rarely use more than texting and the camera. So I got a Nokia flip phone, and I'll see how it is. Worst comes to worst it'll be 90 bucks lost and I'll move back to something a bit more full featured. But really I chose for size, and to be able to text and make calls. It's possible I'll end up sticking with my mini for a while.

I also got a really nice pocket camera which I'm much more excited about. It's called a Ricoh, so the camera and the phone should fit in my pockets without any real trouble or bulge. Plus keys, and wallet, and I feel like I'm set.

I mean, why not be concerned about both lol? We can do two things at once I think, and both of those things sound fairly negative.

I just bought a flip phone and a cool pocket sized camera. I've gotten down to leaving my phone at home a fair amount, and leave my phone on a speaker that's not near anything I sit on when at home.

It's awesome, come on back out to reality. I frequently go out at this point, come back home and go to see if I have any messages and realize my phone was on me the whole time and I had no idea (I also silence pretty much everything...).

I'm super pumped to have an actual camera to play with that's pocket sized too since I did miss the camera. But now I'll have something tremendously superior and can leave that aging device filled with way too many 2FA codes I don't want to inadvertently lose at home.

"Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat. As a result, presidents have increasingly been leading by executive order rather than legislation. That is not Trump's fault, that is just the state of the country."

"People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on."

So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?

Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king?

Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?

"Talk about taking over Canada or Greenland is just rhetoric to get better deals and improve ally strength, because this is what Donald Trump has been doing since the 1980s. Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."

You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?

Just trying to understand.

"Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."

Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?

If it's just part of our national strategy, why'd the rational change so frequently and why does no one seem to have heard that before Trump decided to start focusing on it and amassing weapons off their coast?

"This doesn't mean you have to like a current president personally or morally, or even agree with everything they are doing, but at least you can gain more perspective around what is real and what is not."

Primo ending though.

I think there's a place for both.

We have services deployed globally serving millions of customers where rigor is really important.

And we have internal users who're building browser extensions with AI that provide valuable information about the interface they're looking at including links to the internal record management, and key metadata that's affecting content placement.

These tools could be handed out on Zip drives in the street and it would just show our users some of the metadata already being served up to them, but it's amazing to strip out 75% of the process of certain things and just have our user (in this case though, it's one user who is driving all of this, so it does take some technical inclination) build out these tools that save our editors so much time when doing this before would have been months and months and months of discovery and coordination and designs that probably wouldn't actually be as useful in the end after the wants of the user are diluted through 18 layers of process.

I feel like if you're really spending a ton of time on off by one errors after twenty years in the field you haven't actually grown much and have probably just spent a ton of time in a single space.

Otherwise you'd be senior staff to principle range and doing architecture, mentorship, coordinating cross team work, interviewing, evaluating technical decisions, etc.

I got to code this week a bit and it's been a tremendous joy! I see many peers at similar and lower levels (and higher) who have more years and less technical experience and still write lots of code and I suspect that is more what you're talking about. In that case, it's not so much that you've peaked, it's that there's not much to learn and you're doing a bunch of the same shit over and over and that's of course tiring.

I think it also means that everything you interact with outside your space does feel much harder because of the infrequency with which you have interacted with it.

If you've spent your whole career working the whole stack from interfaces to infrastructure then there's really not going to be much that hits you as unfamiliar after a point. Most frameworks recycle the same concepts and abstractions, same thing with programming languages, algorithms, data management etc.

But if you've spent most of your career in one space cranking tickets, those unknown corners are going to be as numerous as the day you started and be much more taxing.

I mean... companies downsizing because people aren't buying enough of their products is exactly the point of a boycott lol.

This is why Hackernews and all other social media are blocked on my phone which I now leave across the room all day long when at home, and at home when I go out a lot of times.

Now, I read the New Yorker which I had a pile of half read issues. There's one at the table where I eat, one in the loo, one on the couch, and when my brain gets tired of staring at the wall... I pick up a copy when I don't want to do anything particularly creative.

Finishing a good New Yorker article, or a book laying by my bed often expands my worldview, my vocabulary, and my understanding of current events. Reading a ton of comments online has never really produced that same experience even in a place like HackerNews which has (IMO) much higher quality comments than many places.

So you can get back into it! And it seems to be like riding a bike, very easy to get back into. And the more I read, the more I'm happy I'm reading.

Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.

And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.

There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.

You don't think boycotts work? You should ask Target how they feel about that comment.

And, amazingly enough, "boycott all these goobers" is not the _only thing_ in the world a person can do at once.

But sure, keep hurling money at people you despise while talking about how others should do better.

Boycott all these goobers.