HN user
I also remembered his post about dropping $50k on the site redesign*
I actually thought it was a big W for him when I saw this post. But I guess, if you consider the opportunity cost of Google employment, it's a financial L.
It's almost a law "all technical discussions devolve into interview mind games", this industry has a serious interview/hiring problem.
Yeah, but you get points and badges for feeding it free knowledge, they get the cash, go figure. It's the perfect pre-NFT grift.
It's funny, since Stack Overflow has done EXACTLY this since day one (i.e. generate cash, with user knowledge provided for free).
The only difference is SO uses community, gamification & reputation facades, to convince users to participate for free.
With OpenAI its simply a blackbox, no credit is given.
So I guess the lesson is people are willing to participate and share things for free, as long as they're given credit, community standing or something along those lines.
Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.
Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.
Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.
As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.
They're pretty good at it, just from yesterday.
A $5 billion AWS investment in Mexico:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-region-in-mexico-is...
Regional and national media are swallowing it up, yeah the country needs the investment, but at what price ? Gov still mum on what it took to 'land' the deal (tax/land break).
I remembered the Amazon HQ2 hoopla from years back, that U.S state/local govs were turning over backwards to land it, offering a lot of incentives. And I just looked the yesterday, that deal (HQ2) is still on hold and it was for just as much ($5 billion).
OP's line of thought is pretty clear with the other line:
"bidding for candidates against their other options"
Then he goes on about projects having negative value and also paying employees until value is delivered.
His model is to exploit every possible loophole to make it all work and shift the most risk from management to employee.
Yes, assuming it's all legal (which it often isn't, pushing the limits like this)
Where should the line be drawn ? Pay based on what car I drive because it's less|more expensive ? What school my kids go to ?
I'm almost waiting for salary adjustments base on diet! Hell why not, veggies 'are less|more expensive'?
Conflating the three is easy, because instead of paying for delivered value, the company is doing arbitrage on location ( like it could do with gender, race or anything else)
All companies will take advantage of maximizing their profit or reducing cost, but it's a slippery slope once a subjective metric to determine value is used.
I for one live in a "low" CoL, but my AWS bill is just the same as a person in NY, SF or Geneva, should I also expect a discount because "my income is lower"? Or is it only fair to be billed equally, because the value all of us get is the.same ?
Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he be paid any less ? Why ?
What an ending...
I have never loved learning the details of an obscure communication protocol or the convoluted methods of a library written by someone who wants to show how good they are. It seems like "junk knowledge" to me. LLMs save me from all this more and more every day.
This is depressing or tongue-in-cheek considering who he is -- Redis creator -- and has an older post titled 'In defense of linked lists', so talking about linked lists in Rust is not "junk knowledge" or something an LLM can analyze circles around any human.
It's the best coding nihilism as a profession post I have read though.
The information super-trash-way, the data is feeding on itself.
We're heading back to the information dark ages. I don't know if I'm glad or sad, the pendulum is swinging the other way, where printed books or face-to-face learning, will come back in vogue to get vetted information.
Only now its more scalable to do content farm garbage with AI, it's cheaper SEO on steroids.
I'm optimistic it will one day be possible to sift through AI generated garbage, but it will take time just like it did with email/spam. And the most likely outcome will be through paid services, either paid content or paid filtering, just like email works best to this day.
I remember the early email days, early 2000's, pretty much anyone could setup their own email server (qmail/sendmail), there wasn't much spam to worry about and it required a lot of effort to make spam cost effective. Fast-forward today, even though you can still setup one, it requires a crazy amount of effort to ensure delivery in-and-out due to spam abuse, that, or pretty much paying a transactional fee, which is the easiest, so large providers don't flag email as spam.
So an account named 'amzn-throw' is trying to lecture you after leaving, this is very Amazonian of them, it's like a PIP beyond the grave.
If he's single, $70k for CDMX (Mty or Gdl, the other two metro cities) it can work, if he wants to raise a middle-class family not so much.
Rents are $1.5-2K/month in nice neighborhoods (buy range $250K up); taxes are high with a 16% VAT across the board, income taxes are high as well for this bracket; and don't get me started with schools, cars, insurance and the like.
Yeah probably half the population would 'kill' for a $70k job, but they want English fluent, highly-educated, middle-class people, cherry on top, with top notch tech skills. Those candidates either want, U.S. SDE level packages or can make more with run of the mill no-name companies remotely.
I still don't know anyone who has worked for U.S. level pay as a FTE or contractor, take a position with a subsidiary office in Mexico, the salary discrepancy is too great.
Same hiring dynamic in Mexico.
They started hiring heavily for various roles in the country's 3 major metro cities. Senior engineering roles going for $60K/yr USD.
Amazon, the retail side, has been operating in the country for years, but the hiring spree that started this summer 2023' has been for positions in Music, AWS, Devices and Real Estate.
* I don't think generative AI is sustainable in the long term if it ends up killing all the websites/artists that created the original material. *
This is the elephant in the room. Every tech wave has had its way of cajoling creators into investing time & money to make original material, then the rules changed.
Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it worked. Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of other things to keep visitors on their freeway, while avoiding sending visitors to the original site.
Reddit, Stack Overflow and others, started with gamification (points, badges) & community to incentivize users to contribute original content.
Now AI is shaking up all these approaches. But with each one, the incentive to create original material appears to dwindle, since the returns are becoming less and less.
Like what's the incentive for any professional now, if AI is going to regurgitate their original content, without any upside (i.e. no potential for reach, no gamification, no community, no recognition, etc).
They're a poster boy for Latam tech due to their growth.
While this post makes sense -- limiting tech choices -- it's rather contrarian, limiting choices to bleeding edge tech, which can go away or change on a whim.
But their culture has always been like this, I once attended a conference were they touted how they were using 'hexagonal architecture', at the time, it felt like something only Google or Amazon could get away with (inventing tech buzzwords).
For what it's worth, they have a wrap for always talking up how they use bleeding edge/buzz word tech at meetups, interviews and the like. I guess they can get away with being a unicorn in their market (i.e. Latam neobank)
Exactly
And I actually thought photographers were extinct a long time ago by every human holding a cellphone (little to no need to know about lens apertures, lighting/shadows to take a picture). Its probably been a decade since I've seen anyone hauling around photograph equipment at an event. I guess some photographers still get paid good money, but they're surely multiples less than there were 10-20 years ago.
The NLP (Natural Language) is the killer part of the equation for these new AI tools. Simple as knowing English or any other natural language, to output an image, an app or whatever. And it's going to be just like cellphone cameras and photographers, the results are going to get 'good enough' that its going to eat into many professions.
I'm wondering the same, but for the narrower white collar subset of tech workers, what will today's UX/UI designer or API developer be doing in 5-10 years.
All the implications, from UI/UX to programming in general.
Like how much of what was 'important' to develop a career in the past decades, even in the past years, will be relevant with these kinds of interactions.
I'm assuming the video is highly produced, but it's mind blowing even if 50% of what the video shows works out of the gate and is as easy as it portrays.
Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time.
What a shellacking. I never heard of her, so did a quick search, she's on X/Twitter https://twitter.com/femtechie ; and yes, her Linkedin vanity url is, get this: https://linkedin.com/in/winner
If your an OpenAI end customer, you'll be fine pre-training gpt-n models for your business; if you're an OpenAI middleman pre-training gpt-n models for other customers, what makes you think OpenAI won't eventually bypass you ? Lookup startups built around APIs and platforms, for every success, there's a graveyard filled due to APIs and platforms changing the rules.
I had multiple déjà vus, from the API golden days "build anything you want", social media telling you "build your communities with us", to app stores "we take care of the distribution"...it all works, until it doesn't...if they decide to change terms, pricing or make your product/service redundant because its 'strategic'.
It's their platform, their business, their rules.
It's going to be a walled garden dystopia, with everyone and everything asking to sign-up, subscribe or whatever to monetize content.
Scraping & siphoning content, ad blockers, both sides have been in arms race for years, AI and LLMs will just be the last straw, before almost anything of value is behind a pay/subscription wall.
The timing on this is suspect. With all the Airbnb travel and remote work dynamics, it seems like its an effort to clamp down on tax loopholes.
It's splitting hairs not calling this a 'visa'. If you have to pay a fee and fill out forms before arrival IT IS intended to regulate foreign entry, which is the definition of a visa, since you're exchanging information with immigration authorities before they let you in.
It's interesting to see the results and the potential this has to shift entire industries.
I just asked it "Best hotels in Cancun" it gave me a one paragraph answer ( https://pasteboard.co/3mfxo5cC2BEc.png )
"Great choice! Cancun has many excellent accommodation options that cater to different preferences and budgets. In terms of luxury resorts, consider checking out Le Blanc Spa Resort or Grand Fiesta Americana Coral Beach Cancun. For more affordable yet still highly rated options, I suggest Hotel Casa Mexicana or Dreams Puerto Aventuras Resort & Spa. Let me know if you want me to suggest any activities near these hotels as well."
No ads, like Google's early years. But the temptation seems too great, for these results not to be 'influenced' in some shape or form by travel portals or hotels themselves.
What's going to happen to search engines. I mean, it's not clear if the results are scraped or obtained through an API. But this is front-running Google, Google did it themeselves to hotel sites -- who have to pay ads -- but I don't see Google not protecting this market.
So many things going on here to shake things up. SEO is another thing, will there be a AI-SEO, where the model is fed crap reviews to raise certain results.
Yesterday's data dumps/APIs fostered community, new market/channel discoveries & low risk acquisitions.
Today's data dumps/APIs foster easier access to train ML/AI models to put them on the path to irrelevance. They're pulling out all stops like there's no tmw, and there might not be, if they're willing to shake things up like this.