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>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that sep
by sincerely 1y ago
>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.
I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?
- jychang 1y agoYou don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers. That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline. Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.
- kortilla 1y agoRichard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.
- chirau 1y ago'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.
- mcherm 1y agoChuck Norris doesn't even NEED analogies. He explains the original problem so hard that you understand it without reference to a similar but more familiar situation. Chuck Norris would probably have mentioned "dev" and "production" and never needed to discuss furniture used for stacking open-faced envelopes for holding papers.
- reactordev 1y agoChuck Norris doesn’t use AI, AI uses Chuck Norris.
- mejutoco 1y agoIf the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%. I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.
- IanCal 1y agoThat would be writing for most users but barely. I think there’s a fair reason they said “vast majority” instead.
- nkrisc 1y agoI don’t think “vast majority” has a rigid definition, but I’d put it closer to 95% than 51%. For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.
- mejutoco 1y agoI am not sure the post said "vast majority" originally, to be fair. Is there a way to check?
- rkomorn 1y agoThis is all highly personal, so just banter'ing, but: I agree there's no clear definition but 95% is even beyond "overwhelming majority" to me (with overwhelming being greater than vast). I'd call that "near totality". Maybe, at least for US contexts, "vast" should line up with "filibuster-proof"? Eg 60-65%? 75% at most. Of course, then that doesn't tell me anything about what it should mean in other contexts.
- Normal_gaussian 1y ago
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoI'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet
- siffin 1y agoSpreadsheet would have been the better analogy.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhich wouldn't be an analogy, because spreadsheet programs can be considered and often are a database.
- sooperserieous 1y ago> Be like Richard Feynman Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChadNauseam 1y agoIronically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.
- verandaguy 1y agoWell done
- notarobot123 1y agoTo be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background". The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!
- petre 1y agoMaybe it diverted too many resources from the original goal. They fixed the issue afterwards and made a fuss about it.
- unmole 1y ago> median techcrunch reader Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.
- layer8 1y agoThey are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.
- recursivecaveat 1y agoIt's kind of a beautiful turn of phrase, in that the filing cabinet is entirely superfluous, you can use almost any noun. "it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s sub sandwich — the AI agent can experiment freely with a development sandwich, but the production sandwich, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off". "When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."
- dvrj101 1y ago> Masad and his team owned the problem. he fired half of his team so it really wasn't an option for rest of them team.