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slowdog

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100% agree with this, seems weird to call an engineer “smart” for triggering an API that allows any input but can’t handle it. I also kind of doubt it was an engineer testing vs some much more subtle issue as billing is in line for everything.

If this was 10 years ago, this was also the era when any real customer could write any ARN (resource identifier) they wanted including commas due to no expected standardization across services. This could have been trivially triggered by a customer.

Just a matter of time if no one is escaping commas in billing files.

It’s less that they’re flailing and more that it’s become some sort of lord of the flies culture with senior leaders directly competing with each other to try to take their bite of the pie.

The way AWS is structured with strongly owned independent businesses just doesn’t work, as GenAI needs a cohesive strategy which needs

1. An overall strategy

2. A culture that fosters collaboration not competition

Or at least an org charts to make them not compete with each other. (Example: Q developer vs Kiro)

I bet if you looked at the org charts you would see these teams don’t connect as they should.

As a heavy EC2 user who hasn't used ECS, the behavior makes perfect sense as ECS is running on EC2 but unless I sat and thought about it my first instinct would be that AWS would make it "secure by default" on a container level since containers often have different permission requirements and so the container would be the security boundary.

That said, I'm guessing it would have been obvious to anyone once they start setting up IAM permissions and therefore not much of a pitfall.

So it's a good reminder, but I agree with you, maybe the article doesn't need to be so long to get to the same point.

It's a reasonable take from the author, but the argument that you shouldn't use a tool you don't understand cuts both ways. Avoiding powerful tools can be just as much of a trap as using them blindly.

Like any tool, there's a right and wrong time to use an LLM. The best approach is to use it to go faster at things you already understand and use it as an aid to learn things you don't but don't blindly trust it. You still need to review the code carefully because you're ultimately responsible for it, your name is forever on it. You can't blame an LLM when your code took down production, you shipped it.

It’s a double-edged sword: you can get things done faster, but it's easy to become over-reliant, lazy, and overestimate your skills. That's how you get left behind.

The old advice has never been more relevant: "stay hungry."

While I'm pro right to be forgotten, and do believe HN should allow an account delete.

But HN's ethos is to inspire discussion and readability of it. Lack of a delete seems to be by design so that conversations are always readable.

You can see the spirit of that in their guidelines[0] such as "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive".

You can further see that in the design in how they handle deletes [1], where once "archived" things are permanent

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#editde...

Leaving Google 6 years ago

Yeah I want to double down on this,

This reads like a personal goodbye that somehow got published here.... probably not for the world

For book suggestions I would suggest the old classic: “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

Talks about active listening, and remembering things about others.

As for generally not being as narcissistic, I think you’re already on the right track. 90% of being aware of other people, is being aware that you’re sucking up the airtime. Conversations are dances, both parties need to be engaged

is Dropbox too big to be acquired (by Facebook)?

Facebook is big enough to acquire almost any company they want

Can this mean that they are going to?

Put aside whether or not it makes sense to acquire dropbox.

To me this looks like they will not since it could look like a conflict of interest to stockholders and therefore a breach of fiduciary duty. Drew would stand to make a ton of money at the cost to FB shareholders in a dropbox buyout and it's not necessarily to the shareholder's benefit

If facebook wanted to buy dropbox, the safer play would be to buy dropbox, then add Drew to the board of directors

Educated Fools 6 years ago

Great article, covering something we should probably keep in mind.

Higher education is often a needless gatekeeper for keeping those with generational wealth wealthy

Often a subtext that I feel is missing here is that in the end people aren't that different on average, and our parent's wealth matter more

Today, zip code is a pretty accurate predictor of success, there's so much embedded in a zip code such as wealth, industry, and safety that affects kid's outcomes.[0]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student-success_b_1...

Educated Fools 6 years ago

Not sure if you're missing the point of the poster above.

Poster is more likely asking whether the education gained in college is actually useful vs the doors opened by having that diploma.

If one dropped out of college right before graduation with 99% of the education, likely that person would end up with worse off job prospects compared to the person who completed their program

Depends on your definition of win.

Do you mean perfect game?

Be the best?

Beat the average player?

I think there’s a bunch of vagueness but let’s take “win” to be generally better than humans, I’m not an AI expert but I suspect it’s got more to do with the popularity of the game

There’s no reason why backgammon can’t be played by machines, and definitely no reason why they would well. There’s just not as much as a marketing pop compared to chess, go or Starcraft all well regarded complex games. In a lot of ways, googles investment in AI is a marketing opportunity, and in an unpopular game there’s not as much incentive