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scarface_74

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Reach me at dandies.tapir7y@icloud.com

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imgur.com 11mo ago

Google: Was 1995 30 years ago?

scarface_74
11pts0
onemileatatime.com 12mo ago

American Tourists Are Ripped Off in Some Paris Restaurants

scarface_74
20pts9
www.theatlantic.com 1y ago

The Conversations Doctors Are Having About Vaccination Now

scarface_74
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www.seangoedecke.com 1y ago

I don't care if my manager writes code

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onemileatatime.com 1y ago

American, Delta, and United Profitability Divide: What's Driving It?

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www.joelonsoftware.com 1y ago

Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon (2000)

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www.writing-skills.com 1y ago

Why bullets won't make your case

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awealthofcommonsense.com 1y ago

The Middle Class, the Top% and the Bottom 50%

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www.barrons.com 1y ago

Trump Tells Car Companies Not to Raise Prices

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www.wsj.com 1y ago

Job Seekers Hit Wall of Salary Deflation

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us.abalancingact.com 1y ago

Federal Balancing Act: An Interactive Budget Simulation

scarface_74
2pts0
www.motherjones.com 1y ago

America's Real Criminal Element Is Lead (2013)

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8pts6
www.macworld.com 1y ago

Apple C1 modem real-world tests: Good enough, but a step slow

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www.nbcnews.com 1y ago

Defense Secretary orders a halt to offensive cyber operations against Russia

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21pts7
www.seangoedecke.com 1y ago

Weak Managers

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www.seangoedecke.com 1y ago

Engineers who won't commit force bad decisions

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www.theverge.com 1y ago

TikTok is back in the App Store

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131pts219
newsletter.goodtechthings.com 1y ago

The death of the [modified] developer (2024)

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medium.com 1y ago

Every infrastructure decision I endorse/regret after 4 years running a startup

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newsletter.goodtechthings.com 1y ago

I'm glad I took the off-ramp from software engineering

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42pts22
daringfireball.net 1y ago

TikTok is now distributing its Android app via side loading

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6pts2
www.cnbc.com 1y ago

Judge pauses Trump federal employee buyout offer pending court hearing

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8pts0
www.seangoedecke.com 1y ago

Why does AI slop feel so bad to read?

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46pts31
www.theregister.com 1y ago

Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves with Stadia,Chromecast,DropCam

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www.theregister.com 1y ago

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands RTO despite remote work pledge

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162pts244
www.vox.com 1y ago

Why big tech turned right

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leaddev.com 1y ago

How to Give Pushback to Leadership

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www.seangoedecke.com 1y ago

Crushing Jira tickets is a party trick, not a path to impact

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89pts81
www.schneier.com 1y ago

AI Mistakes Are Different from Human Mistakes

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www.readtrung.com 1y ago

Apple's M&A Strategy

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3pts0

Nasdaq 100…

https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

Nasdaq was the first to consider a rule change that would grant mega IPOs like SpaceX early admission to its flagship Nasdaq-100 index. The exchange and index provider began a consultation period in February to assess the viability of and industry response to a proposed “fast entry” rule. The change was approved on March 30 and will be effective on May 1.

There is a difference between a SaaS offer where you are running your code and serving multiple customers on one server/set of servers and running random customer code like Vercel.

This is completely different. While for Uber and AirBnb as the person delivering the service I have to worry about a private citizen either doing harm to my property (more statistically likely) or my person (much less likely), if I am pulled over by a cop carrying illegal goods I have to deal with the law enforcement.

Insurance can take of property damage.

My personal threat model is:

1. Law enforcement with qualified immunity and a “monopoly on [legalized] violence” .

.

.

99. Everyone else

I review AI generated test of AI just like I reviewed tests of developers on a team I was leading.

There is no “morality” when it comes to my job. Outside of my feeling morally obligated to give my employer the benefit of all my accumulated skills for 40-45 hours a week in exchange for the money (and in a previous life RSUs) in my account.

I feel accountable to my coworkers and customers to deal with them fairly and honestly.

What other moral obligation should I have besides my employer, coworkers and customers?

And then as experience developer you would have to try one of the other tools in your toolbox. Why should someone tie a hand behind their back and not use an LLM out of some sense of nerd pride?

And that same user is already trusted to have admin access to the entire organizational AWS credentials - I did say it was an internal management site.

The lambda itself only has limited permissions to the backend. The user can’t do anything if the lambda only has permission to one database and certain rights to those tables, one S3 bucket, etc.

Heck with Postgres on AWS you can even restrict a Cognito user to only have access to rows based on the logged in user.

And the database user it’s using only has the minimum access to just do certain permissions.

My responsibility is to make sure my code meets functional and non functional requirements. It’s to understand the *behavior*. My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that.

Someone thought I was naive when I said my vibe coded internal web admin site met the security requirements without looking at a line of code.

I knew that because the requirements were that anyone who had access to the site could do anything on the site and the site was secured with Amazon Cognito credentials and the Lambda that served it had a least privileged role attached.

If either of those invariants were broken, Claude has found a major AWS vulnerability.

Exactly this, I lead cloud consulting + app dev projects. Before I would have staffed my projects with at least me leading it and doing the project management + stakeholder meetings and some of the work and bringing a couple of others in to do some of the grunt work. Now with Gen AI even just using ChatGPT and feeding it a lot of context - diagrams I put together, statements of work, etc - I can do it all myself without having to go through the coordination effort of working with two other people.

On the other hand, when I was staffed to lead a project that did have another senior developer who is one level below me, I tried to split up the actual work but it became such a coordination nightmare once we started refining the project because he could just use Claude code and it would make all of the modifications needed for a feature from the front end work, to the backend APIs, to the Terraform and the deployment scripts.

I would have actually slowed him down.

Oracle is not fine. They are borrowing money hoping to get paid back by money losing OpenAI propped up by VC funding.

No business is going to run workloads on OCI outside of ones running Oracle. They a They are a way distance fourth in cloud. I’ve been working in cloud consulting for five years including the first three directly at AWS (Professional Services). No one worried about having talking points about competing against Oracle.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon have both internal products that can benefit from inference and cloud hosting.

You should listen to the latest episode of the Acquired podcast about Google.

Google also has GCP and unlike OpenAI who is dependent on VC funding and Oracle who is borrowing money. Google throws off cash like crazy and self funds its infrastructure which is already better than everyone else’s

We do? Have you been reading the news where the President is firing AGs who won’t go after his enemies and firing FBI agents who didn’t agree to perp walk his enemy? Not to mention he just pardoned 1500 domestic terrorists in January.

Public companies are outright bribing the President to get mergers passed (Paramount) and the entire confiscating TikTok to give it to his buddy at Oracle on the cheap can’t be ignored.

On the federal level, there really isn’t any legal standard anymore.

Who gets hurt when the bubble pops? And who will the government need to bail out?

Last time, a lot of the companies were public and the general public saw stock losses. This time the only companies that are publicly really exposed by the AI bubble are Nvidia with all of their circular financing and Oracle. Of course Tesla has always been a meme stock.

Defined contribution plans - for now - can’t have private equity in their funds. Defined benefit plans and endowments are exposed.

Apple famously hasn’t invested that much in AI, Google is spending a lot on infrastructure. But between search and GCP and YouTube they have a real business plan and are funding based on profits. Amazon is in the same boat. Microsoft is bowing out of spending money on training and focused on inference - and they also have Azure. Meta is making money using AI for ad targeting and probably in the future to generate ads.

I can also see consulting companies being hurt (I work in cloud consulting) as businesses are throwing money at them to “AI enable” their business.

I tried with ChatGPT, the Meta AI app, the Gemini app and Grok.

ChatGPT freaked out, Gemini got it right (there isn’t one).

Meta AI: Yes, there is a seahorse emoji: or doesn’t represent a seahorse specifically but is the one you’re looking for.

(Those emojis are fish and shells)

Grok gave me a random emoji of a whale

I work for one reason - to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. There is no higher calling.

If I were 22 post 2010, instead of 1996, you damn well better be believe I would have been “grinding leetcode to get into a FAANG” instead of wallowing in enterprise dev making what a returning intern makes at BigTech.

I’m not bitter, by 2012 I was 38, recently remarried and wasn’t about to uproot my (step)kids. But by youngest graduated from high school in May 2020 and I had an offer from BigTech June of 2020.

I definitely encourage any younger developer to play the game.

As far as jumping ship, if my goal is to exchange labor for money, why wouldn’t I exchange the most money for my labor given my other priorities? Instead of letting a company pay me less than market value or even worse what they pay someone coming in at my level.

Besides, I had my first house built in 2002 for $175K when I was making $65K and had no student loans. Neither is true for most students graduating today.

And it’s copium thinking that people at BigTech making 50%+ more at every level work that much harder than an enterprise CRUD developer doing Java at a bank.

I’m not advocating someone works 70 hours a week at a startup getting underpaid with the promise of “equity” that will statistically be worthless. I am advocating they get paid in cash and/or RSUs and immediately sell as soon as they vest and diversify.

And next year will be my 30th year working, I’ve never experienced burn out because I exercise my agency to say “no” to being overworked knowing I could get another job worse case and continue exchanging my labor for money and stay housed and fed.

I am 51. I love small companies. My second best experience was working as the second technical hire by a then new to the company CTO who was hired to bring technical leadership into the company. The two non technical brothers who were founders outsourced the development to a consulting company until they found product market fit.

But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS.

Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services).

It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant.

Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table.

At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more.

I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs

But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money.

Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.

I have a different experience writing and using COM with C++. I remember ugliness around reference counting, dealing with the literally dozen of methods of defining a string and having to coerce them into BSTRs and having to deal with variant types that were a weird C union type.

Spotify goes back and forth from barely profitable to losing money every quarter. They have to give 70% of their revenue to the record labels and that doesn’t count operating expenses.

As Jobs said about Dropbox, music streaming is a feature not a product