dmazzoni

This feels like trying to rewrite history. Those of us who lived through that time know that it was real - Microsoft was extremely anti-Linux. That famous Ballmer quote wasn't taken out of context, it was one of many. Ballmer and Gates were vehemently anti-Linux for years, and Microsoft engaged in deliberate marketing campaigns to smear Linux. They saw it as real competition, and they fought dirty, as they did with all of their competitors.

Here are just a few examples I found of evidence in just a few minutes of searching:

https://slate.com/technology/2005/11/the-open-source-movemen...

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/tech-time-warp-ms-matrix/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-26-fi-micro...

The legal questions were always overblown. The concern Ballmer was raising was that if you incorporate a bit of GPL software into your own, then it could "infect" the rest of your code and force you to release more. But that's ridiculous because nobody is forcing you to incorporate GPL software into your own. There was no serious legal concern about simply using Linux - Microsoft was just trying to scare people.

Is Microsoft a different company today? Yes, in many ways. They're much better about open-source software, for sure.

I still think they're anticompetitive in many ways. Their marketing team still prefers to try to spread lies about their competition (e.g. Chrome) rather than promote their own product on its own merits.

When has 20% projects ever been about bypassing every launch process and just posting your product publicly?

Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.

My initial thought there is that you'd have an imbalance. Many token patterns would almost never come up with the assistant tag on them, for example words with typos in them.

255 characters ought to be enough for everybody, right?

Save As works fine for simple websites with static content.

Let's say you have a site that fetches content from a database. If you Save As, then at best you'll get a local copy of an HTML page with JS that loads the content from the same remote database. It might not work (since the local copy has a different origin), or if it does, it requires you to be online, which defeats half of the purpose.

What this project, and SingleFile, both do is save a snapshot of what the rendered page actually looks like at that moment in time. The scripts are stripped out so it runs locally and has no external dependencies.

Not all JavaScript, but a lot of APIs are restricted

Sure, but it used to be only a small fraction of students, not nearly half the entering class

If only there was a national standardized test that assessed whether students are prepared for college or not.

Oh, wait

Why is that better than just requiring the SAT, which while imperfect does a great job at weeding out students who have A’s in math but can’t solve 8th grade algebra problems.

I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource.

I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight.

For a while, I would even build internal services that were basically "free" because I'd just run them all at priority 0.

Over time those services got less and less reliable as overall usage started to increase, so I was forced to either justify the resources or scale back - but that was a good thing.

I feel like something similar would be a good model for AI token use: big tech companies ought to have their own self-hosted LLM data centers to power their own needs, then let employees use off-hours capacity to experiment.

Outside of experimentation, we should be encouraging token efficiency for everyday tasks. Rather than having a certain number of tokens, engineers should be evaluated based on how much they actually get done.

Using a lot of tokens to automate a process that used to require hours of human labor every week? Good use of tokens, should be encouraged.

Using a lot of tokens to debug an easy frontend bug that could have been fixed by hand, and still took you 4 hours to complete? Waste of tokens, should be discouraged.

Do you really think this "works great"?

I'm using a brand-new MacBook Pro with a high-end M5 processor, and this site is extremely unresponsive for me. Huge latency between clicking and getting feedback.

It also breaks accessibility.

The QR code use case seems far more reasonable to me, you're generating a static image.

There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities.

However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"?

AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:

- Understanding the problem - Waiting for the build system and tests to run - Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like - Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear - Uploading the PR and writing a description - Responding to reviewer feedback

There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.

Exactly.

If you want Apple-quality headphones to go with your MacBook Neo, the USB-C Earpods are $19:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/myqy3am/a/earpods-usb-c

I think mobile deposit by scanning a check with your smartphone camera is one piece of it?

I've never seen a bank offer that feature via their website.

Yeah, but there are dozens of AI coding assistants to choose from, and the cost to switch is very low, unlike switching operating systems.

I've tried them all and I keep coming back to Claude Code because it's just so much more capable and useful than the others.

Also it's highly multithreaded / multiprocess - you can run subagents that can communicate with each other, you can interrupt it while it's in the middle of thinking and it handles it gracefully without forgetting what it was doing

If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.

Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.

Yes, in WebKit, SaferCPP guidelines are enforced by a static analysis tool.

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia.

They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with.

They had a huge team. Hundreds of people.

It was so ambitious.

But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it.

Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan.

If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success.

But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch.

That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity.

It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?

Has it been good leadership, though?

They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like:

* Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs

Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.

But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.

Consider that there is some in-between.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category.

I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all.

So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.

Ha ha, that's a great idea!

I love the idea of embedding sensitive topics that ChatGPT and other LLMs will steer clear of, within the context of a coding question.

Have you ever had any candidate laugh?

Any candidates find it offensive?

They're not the only good speakers these days, though.'

When they came out, there was nothing else that had their combination of sound quality and app features.

Before their new app, the competition had basically caught up, Sonos was only marginally better in a few ways.

With their new app, I'd never recommend Sonos.

I have some old Sonos speakers that have been gathering dust for a while.

I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.

However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.

And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.

That's an example of something that can be done well or done poorly.

AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.

Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.

If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.

If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.

At many companies accessibility and DEI are rolled into the same office.

https://blog.google/authors/eve-andersson/

Do you actually have experience with those programs?

Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.

As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.

That's just one example of what they do.

You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".

How do you propose a company like Honey should make a profit without deception and scams?

Their product is supposedly: install a FREE extension and you get discount codes applied for you at retailers when you check out.

It turns out they were able to be profitable by making themselves the affiliate every time you purchase something, but that's scammy because it's stealing from others who actually generated the referral.

But what other non-scammy business model could they have? There's basically no business model for what they're trying to offer that makes sense other than end-users paying for it.