> This isn’t even close to being true. Here’s a thing I did that made things way more complicated than is worth it for 99% of developers when there is a proprietary solution made so I do not need to worry about these things. Because it is so hard to work around it, it is entirely pointless to develop for one of the most used operating systems in the world.
Just being totally honest this is how I read this comment when I insert context that seems important to me. I respect having principles but at some point there needs to be more value in practicality over your codebase not being locked into a proprietary framework at all.
before the pandemic hit and most of the world was quarantined, we decided to give loom away to students and teachers for free and made the service 50% off indefinitely. this was generous but also strategic. we made the simple deduction that, should people be locked inside, they would naturally see their sons/daughters using loom as students. or their spouse or roommates as teacher/staff.
It seems like the Chromium issue on their bugboard, which presumably would have the example HTML and vuln patch, is blocked from being viewed. Is this because making it public increases the risk of exploitation?
X has gotten significantly worse for me. For what it's worth, I am not super anti-Elon or super left-leaning, and I only say that because I'm sure a lot of people may think I'm biased because of some political leaning. I'm really not. The service has just gotten worse, and I feel like I see enough people saying it's gotten better for them and I don't know what to make of it (maybe I'm going through some sort of psychosis). Either way it has caused me to significantly slow down on posting.
- my feed is significantly more rage-baity both from bot accounts (to be expected) and personal accounts (assuming they get paid for engagement?)
- lots of AI slop reply comments which destroyed the fun of feeling like I'd get a real conversation under every post
- way more onlyfans / porn accounts self-promoting
- lots of genuine racism and way more gender war stuff than I remember
Oh the monetization made it noticeably worse. I've been pretty active in tpot/tech twitter and it practically happened overnight. Posters figured out the best way to get engagement was to write things that are incorrect but plausibly believable to generate controversy.
It became so grating, so many people turned into rage baiters.
And you get to see complete outright racism unchecked. Like comments saying the most vile stuff, like calling something a jewish conspiracy, and they don't even get ratioed. Embarrassing to see it.
My guess is people are upset that this technology is getting pushed on them and through the industry with the promise (and shown side effect) of replacing them permanently. The failure modes of adopting this technology (early) then corroborates their anger (slop code, employees being lazy/deferring their AI bugs on them, unrealistic mania in the industry, the obvious grift, etc.). And this is all off the heel of large (and continuing) layoffs (regardless of your belief in why they have/are happening).
For people who are very pro these tools and trying to have a rational/calm conversation about practical use of AI, this response is likely very annoying. For people who are very anti these tools and trying to protect their way of life, the pro (or even tempered) reaction to wanting to use these tools effectively likely comes off as callous/idiotic/dangerous.
I once was the CTO of a company that serviced about 100k requests per day across all our services. We grew to millions and eventually 10's of millions, but, somewhere along the way, an engineer on our team decided he wanted to build a queue off LISTEN/NOTIFY semantics in order to take advantage of strong consistency with the rest of our data model, which seemed reasonable given LISTEN/NOTIFY is not that hard to understand and we did need consistency guarantees for this workflow and this would remove the need for yet another place data got stored and transfered.
In practice, this eventually ended up being very awkward because extending the functionality (since we had "built" it) and had to work around internal pg semantics (we should have just moved off much sooner). It also did not scale well. We ended up getting a ton of disk contention on our RDS instance in non-obvious ways, and the vacuum runs on that table was a nightmare. Additionally, it was hard to get other engineers to really debug and take ownership of the system because they automatically viewed a queue (very easy to understand) implemented in a foreign way (off pg internals) as something "scary". It was emotional, not rational, but we are emotional beings, and I do not blame them. These were good engineers with a lot of other things on their plates.
Obviously, this is all hand-wavy without discussing the internal schema, indeces, etc. that we had set up, but my main takeaway with core technology from this experience was to always reach for the dumb, expected, simple thing. Even if it adds another moving piece in the infra stack. Unless I need very strong data consistency guarantees, it's always better to use something like SQS, Redis queues, etc. where the understanding is that it is just a queue (or at least the API contract suggests simplicity), and then everything needs to work around it.
The fewer mechanistic responsibilities per core data store, the better in my experience.
It seems to me this can be boiled down to "using things without understanding how they work doesn't scale". Yes, vanilla listen/notify doesn't scale. But the OP actually figured out how to make it scale. So your engineers don't have to.
As the community builds, over time, distributed systems, it also understands which brick can do what, and it turns out that starting with less bricks and adding some when you actually need them makes for healthier systems.
Nah this isn't mean at all. I think this is the correct takeaway. I actually felt like I understood how the system worked and it wasn't that difficult for me, but I also understood how, as we were adding engineers who were all very under water, the idea of learning our queueing system to modify a core feature it powered seemed like a big mental context switch (bigger than it actually was). I noted this in another comment, but I am likely discounting how big of an effect our scale/growth impacted peoples' ability to adapt this system. That said, I will pretty much always choose the simple/dumb/easy to understand thing from the start even if it adds another moving component.
It is so rare that a new moving part beats other factors. But the one thing I will say is that there's tremendous advantages to of all things, your queuing system being independent of other architectural pieces : it's the one component built to natively store and forward, so if you can keep its lifecycle separate then you can harness that to decouple other systems from each other during updates, troubleshooting, patch windows etc.
> It is so rare that a new moving part beats other factors
Fair! I will restate that we were growing very fast, so that's probably an outlier environmental factor that I am potentially overly discounting. If that's not the case (likely for most startups), then maybe this is less of a problem.
I feel this is a management problem, and I disagree with the takeaway about adding a piece to the infra stack. "My devs don't want to work on part of our stack" is not a valid reason to add a new network node imo. Just make them work on it.
What is cheaper? Forcing my team to work on something they don't want to or adding a network node (that happens to also be the industry standard)? I used to think in absolutes about these kinds of things, but I came to realize along the way that people management is a process of learning which fires to take on. If I can avoid stripping away someone's autonomy, I will always do that even if I know they are not doing the correct thing (unless the wrong thing is in the critical path of the company).
The problem still needs to be solved (queue working/being up/being built around), but I am ok with the solution that might not be the best engineering solution but still delivers on the product requirements and extends the team's happiness (these systems need to be owned). These were not lazy or incompetent engineers.
similar idea, but the failure mode is better. a branch mispredict burns cycles. a bad guess here usually just means no bonus tokens.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.17192
As long as you're not bound on parallelism or bandwidth then it's "free", but if you're constrained on either resource then your lighter predictor model just needs to save you more cycles than it congests on average.
A bad guess still costs cycles, but the penalty is smaller compared to branch mispredict in the current state. But if we have some kind of pipelining, like if we have something that assumed the speculative decode is correct, then it'll be expensive again.
I hate to be negative but it feels like this is relevant to the article. I cannot bring myself to read articles that are so clearly spat out as AI slop. There’s a part of me that dies inside knowing the author did not take the time to actually write something but still demands I spend my time reading what they have written. It feels like I am betraying my own self respect.
I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear a future where this is the default state of all writing and I still need to get information important to me.
I agree that it is extremely disrespectful to your readers to produce content with LLMs that you intend for them to actually read. Luckily there are still relative obvious tells for stuff that is generated whole-cloth (especially: “Not this thing. Not that thing. Other thing”), so it’s easy to duck out.
Much of the issue with the way people use these machines is in the way they use them to denigrate the social contract. Mimicking language and expecting it to be taken seriously in a social context is an ethically nauseating thing to do: it’s essentially one half of why plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism isn’t just wrong because it is theft; it’s also wrong because it is a lie that disrespects your readers, breaking the implicit contract that what they’re reading represents your legitimately earned thoughts.
I don't really know how to word this, but it feels like we've lost a loving kind of wisdom as a society. In an effort to be better and provide access to women (a good thing), we have also pushed down men. I don't exactly know how we get back to lifting both up while evolving norms as a society. It seems so simple on the surface, but it doesn't seem to be happening in practice.
Just being totally honest this is how I read this comment when I insert context that seems important to me. I respect having principles but at some point there needs to be more value in practicality over your codebase not being locked into a proprietary framework at all.
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