ethbr1

39 ms·

661.
by ethbr1 9mo ago
The issue isn't whether LLMs are useful: it's whether OpenAI is positioned to deliver substantial future profitability. Given their competition consists of the largest tech companies in the world, several of which are vertically-i
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I think people aren't being charitable enough. OpenAI could easily be the next WeWork.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
The fact that social media companies aren't mandated by law to provide transparency into reach / visibility is a travesty. It should be fucking table stakes for being able to run a business with that much power and influence.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I think you'd have to drill down into certain periods in their corporate history to make that argument. IBM is now notorious for having over invested in services in the 90s/00s and thus ceded their previous technical/product
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Imho, there are two key values that I've seen QA bring to software companies. 1. Deep user/product expertise. QA (and support) almost always knows more about how users (including expert users) actually use the product than dev. 2.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I'm pretty sure that the recent shitshow (at least in iOS land) is the failure to have tentpole Apple Intelligence features, so scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping things that were in no way finished (e.g. Liquid Glass UI&#x
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> Two QA per dev?? QA is a lot cheaper than dev. If your goal is to make quality software* on a fixed budget, you want to be QA-heavy. * Note: the OS definition of "quality software" drastically differs from your average app.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> But eventually there'll come a point where not having a product person high up on the org chart is going to come back and bite them in the rear end. Are there any great examples where having a non-product-focused CEO has left th
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Or simply that the current ICE and Border Patrol agents are too poorly trained to act as law enforcement. Which, given the statistic that a decent percentage of ICE applicants can't get a passing score on an open book test [0] doesn&
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
If Gore had fought harder and won, Gore would have been president but democratic legitimacy and belief in the voting process would have been damaged (in half the country). If Gore had fought harder and lost, Bush president and same. The pub
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Yes and no. It would have been corrosive to democracy to fight too hard. Gore cared more about the country than his own ambition. See: Trump
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
It wasn't intended as an exclusionary statement.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
December 12, 2000. The US might have had a president who was knowledgeable about technology and dedicated to solving climate change. Who might have chosen differently about invading Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm sure Gore would have made m
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> remember when sites blocked mobile user agents to force desktop views? You mean today, when web apps refuse to render to mobile browser agents, forcing redirect to mobile apps, but work fine when toggled to a desktop agent? TikTok, I
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> And the cars parked along the road are down a half level so you don't feel surrounded by parked cars. Putting parks half a level above (or below) street level is a surprisingly easy hack for vastly improving the experience. I wi
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Gerrymandering (on any side) isn't going to decrease unless the federal government begins enforcing it under Constitutional and civil rights law, with Supreme Court blessing. Among its many flaws, the Constitution should have had a &qu
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> Most employees are incapable of rating their manager. They can complain or praise, but they're not competent to judge whether the manager is competent. Disagree. I think most employees are qualified to judge whether their manage
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I was about to say... give dedollarization spurred by the current administration a couple more years and then compare GDP. Being the world reserve and trade currency artificially props up the value of that currency (beyond what it would oth
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Skirting close to or breaking the law has substantially worse outcomes in divided government. The GOP paranoia about November smacks of a belated realization that there might be consequences for things that were done.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Absolutely! The "How does a bad manager with a good team ever get identified/fired?" problem is something more companies should have an answer to. That's why I think skip-levels check-ins and direct reports regularly ano
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I was trying to subtly point out that the information asymmetry goes both ways: most devs aren't aware of what their managers are doing for the team either. More transparency in both directions is healthy (and skip-level meetings, for
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> They have effectively traded the operational complexity of physical sorting for the software complexity of forcing sellers to manage regional inventory better. Also total warehouse capacity and warehouse-warehouse freight capacity. +
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
> The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe. Are you referring to the work the managers are doing or the devs are doing as being invisible?
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
The joke about vibe coding replacing junior devs is apt, because it has the same failure mode -- it can build something that works, but completely incompetently and with unmaintainable design choices. Consequently, this was the reason busin
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Vibe coders are the new circa-2000 cross-trained front end web developers. Without industry experience and/or software engineering education, they zoom past a lot of hard-won lessons. E.g. the node.js packaging ecosystem wouldn't
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Soft skills, in the context it's used here, include communication skills. A key part of communication is being able to communicate ideas with someone not like you (different expertise, background, touchpoints). Imho, a lot of softwar
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
I imagine the 100k+ tons of bombs dropped on Gaza has subsequently reshuffled that list.
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Imho, we'd probably get better software developers if capstone was "build a system we'll still be using in 5 years."
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
Plutocracy?
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by ethbr1 9mo ago
What objective evidence do we have that Musk is smart? Basically: he's extremely rich Working hard and being very good at negotiating compensation packages and picking the right companies/products to be involved with (and a bit of

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