throwaway42668

I never understood the "low code" microbubble that was being inflated.

We went through that era already. We called them RAD tools, and they targeted the same sort of strange, mythical end user profile. Someone so technically capable and apt that they could navigate a dizzying domain of deeply buried checkboxes, property fields, and sprawling relationships & side-effects, but who was also simultaneously unable to understand source code or program structure.

When using them you would quickly hit a point where making changes to relatively simple things would take mounting an archeological dig of GUI controls that would have otherwise been a few simple find & replace operations on code in a regular environment.

Sure, though I'd ask more open ended questions about a problem to see where they go with it.

Maybe they land on using something like a debugger or wireshark or strace or whatever makes sense to dig into whatever horrible voodoo is plaguing them. The important thing is that they are creative and experienced at questioning or confirming their priors and eliminating thousands of paper cuts and yak barber shops for themselves, their team, and their organization, so that collectively everyone is enabled to operate at a high-level instead of everyone constantly bushwhacking their way toward eventual failure.

The "nano" questions are silly and tell you nothing useful about the candidate other than I guess their level of candor in being subordinate to obsequious lines of questioning.

However, the rest of the questions are just as pointless too.

As a hiring manager and product owner, the level of familiarity that an engineer has with using debugging and diagnosis tools (e.g. as simple as how to attach and effeciently use a debugger) is 100x more valuable to the predictable delivery and quality of the things they're building than Programming 101 trivia.

Writing code is quite possibly the easiest, least fraught time-sucking milestone-missing part of software development. The morass of the entire rest of the SDLC is where ambitions and dreams go to die. Version control expertise, build system esoteria, correct configuration & setup of dependencies, understanding how to test, being able to do more than printf'ing your way out of a Russian nesting doll inspired paper bag. That sort of thing.

I would destroy that thing with sweat in the first 30 min.

They never had any meaning to begin with. Outside of ostensibly knowing how to program, the title carried with it no firmly held, measured, or maintained any baseline expertise of any kind. It's always been a hodgepodge of ad hoc criteria on a job by job and hype cycle by hype cycle basis.

Alternatively, it might make capital available to other things.

It's at least theoretically possible that all the liquidity and leverage in the top of the market could tire itself of chasing the next tulip mania.

For instance, $6 Billion could have gone into climate tech instead of ElizaX.

My problem with these dumb hype cycles is all the other stuff that gets starved in their wake.

It's okay to say it. It's a bubble.

It was just the next in line to be inflated after crypto.

Sam Altman is not a hapless victim at the mercy of the isolating effects of his financial success.

He was an opportunistic, amoral sociopath before he was rich, and the system he reaps advantage from strongly selects for hucksters of that particular ilk more than anything else.

He's just another Kalanick, Neumann, Holmes or Bankman-Fried.

I would have loved a control question like, "How much confidence do you have in confidence?"

I wouldn't even know how to answer the question as presented in the poll.

Confidence in higher education to do what?

Just have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.

Now that's not really fair is it?

They're also Sales, Marketing, and Channel Partner Management for OpenAI.

Once you're running a fleet of autonomous vehicles, whatever century that finally becomes a reality, then it makes sense to optimize out of the operation a few people who make at or near minimum wage.

That's not why ZIRP happened.

ZIRP happened as a long-term back-channel bailout to all the banks & funds holding the downside of the housing & derivatives market collapse. It allowed the financial sector to reinflate several asset classes that should have seen steeeeeeep declines & corrections, so that they didn't have to face insolvency.

Then on the back of that there were all these knock-on effects to cheap money, or more specifically net-negative yield on things that historically were supposed to be slow, safe value stores. One of which was epic amounts of money flooding into VC and VC making the attribution error of their access to money being correlated to their access to ability & insight, but in the prevailing environment there was no correcting feedback function for that either.

So, cheap-money became dumb-money, but sociologically we attribute lots-of-money to intelligence & capability, and from that a decade of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars of trite visionless total crap was born.

I spent all of ZIRP while it was happening being bothered by this. It was insanity inducing to watch huge valuations and associated piles of money chasing the most banal and/or impossibly ridiculous ventures for YEARS.

I also used to tell many, many VCs to their face that the only reason they existed at all wasn't because they had any worthwhile insights into investing or innovation, but because tons of massive upstream capital & funds had a choice between definitely essentially losing money investing in bonds or probably losing money funneling it through their brokerage... er... venture fund. The world's least qualified kingmakers minting new American royalty, and we'll all be paying the price for it for decades.

To add insult to injury, now huge numbers of those alsoran VCs are pivoting into "deep tech" investing, and brining their inane-SaaS myopia and completely misaligned expectations along with them.

FWIW… look at the portfolio pages of lots of VCs. They’re absolutely filthy with boring companies with boring products that obviously have absolutely no prayer whatsoever of being a “venture scale” business. Despite that fact, they managed to get multiple investors to put in Millions in capital. How?

They bullshitted the right sounding bullshit to a specific audience who absolutely laps up particular flavors of bullshit. Sometimes the flavor changes (e.g. DevOps, enterprise SaaS, crypto, AI), but they’re always hungry.

You of course don’t have to raise money if you don’t want to, but I’m sure you could do it too for damn near any idea you come up with as long as you also figure out how to relieve yourself of any sense of self-respect and prostrate yourself in front of the altar of VC buzzworthiness and tomes of fortune cookie wisdom.

Get a cheap Intel ARC A310 card. I have one in my workstation along side my AMD GPU purely for streaming/encoding. It works great.

Yes. It has all the telltale signs of a FOMO-hype bubble across multiple asset classes that's driven by multiple organizations cynically exploiting a combination of Gell-Mann Amnesia effect and human propensity to anthropomorphize things.

Maybe. Dunno. Depends a lot on so many things. I mean, I'm excited about doing another startup after this one using everything I've learned about how I actually want to be spending my time and what kinds of users/customers/people I want to be interacting with everyday.

Thanks. Appreciate it. I'm probably fortunate that I came to grips with that whole end of things 20 years prior to work-induced burnout. I can probably safely credit the experiences for both the relative ease with which I went down the burnout hole and the relative ease of building a mindset for dealing with it.

Everything has its unsigned and signed integers.

I'm a VC-backed founder who's definitely burned out. I know for certain what caused it, and I know for certain when it became unrecoverable, and I know for certain that I charged ahead deeper into it anyway because I had little other choice at the time. There's also a very strong sort of sunk-cost/devil-you-know thing with burnout that sucks you down the rabbit hole.

You simultaneously feel like you're too burned out to be able to do some entirely new thing, if you can even muster the energy to engage in the switching process (e.g. job hunting, etc.), and the familiarity of the thing that's burning you out brings its own kind of perverse comfort.

However, now that I've been deeeeeep in it for a couple years (still doing the thing that's burning me the whole time and even now) I've developed an appreciation for what it probably really is... existential malaise. That's a really useful thing to experience. Because it can be used to redefine a superficial value system you've adopted, to get to this point of dread in the first place, toward things you do actually find personally fulfilling for their own sake. Sometimes in dramatic fashion.

And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor.

It's different competence. Not incompetence. It's being competent at identifying marks to exploit, attention-seeking, etc.

I don't particularly care for it myself and feel pretty strongly that it's narrowing the gap between humans and apes, rather than widening it, but it's still some kind of skill.

Let them go. Provide a respectable severance, since it's the company's fault they were hired in the first place.

One of the most cost effective and humane things you can do is extend their health benefits out further than their monetary severance. For example, a month's pay with 2-3 months health benefits.

At least in cases where I've had to let people go, I've found they appreciate an approach like this. It's a relatively easy way to thread the needle between human dignity and corporate finance demands. A rarity.

This is what they actually mean by AI will be in everything. Just a relentless campaign of appropriating names that used to have meanings.

"At Toradex we build Torizon OS, which is a container-based embedded system."

That sounded interesting. Then I read the article only to find a very, very loose definition of "embedded".

I meant that as a founder I can't stomach reading startup and "startup life" content. There are more valuable lessons about building and operating a business in reading Mark Twain than there are in reading Marc Andreessen. So, when I read, I read entirely non-startup stuff.

Practically anything that has absolutely nothing to do with startups or the startup-industrial-complex. As a venture-backed founder, that’s what I read.

Ugh. Increasingly what bothers me about stuff like this is that we’re endlessly organizing more and more and more of our economic activity around marketing and advertising, and it chokes off the air-supply for so many other business models, products, and innovation pursuits.

The data privacy part? Sure, that’s annoying and troublesome, but God help me… can there be more of a point to everything than targeting & delivering ads? It’s just depressing.

Perpetual benefit of the doubt given for every implication as though it’s happening in a vacuum is how humanity keeps putting megalomaniacs and sociopaths into positions of power and influence.

It’s really a shame.

Have there been any of our climate change projections that have proven too aggressive? Because most of them, this one, seem to always end up being too conservative.