Meanwhile, the brightest engineer they know left to work for a startup in San Francisco.
2,593 karma · joined June 12, 2012
If I'm reading the source then Go or Zig.
America needs to learn how to evolve our system of industrial production. Our society of lawyers and paperpushers is going to get annihilated in the next ten years at this rate.
The boogieman that software patent advocates raise is that IP theft and free riding will destroy America if we don't have patents. But literally nobody is creating software to get a patent on it, and software patents don't stop anyone from replicating software.
Instead software patents are just a way for mediocre lawyers to live parasitically off the tech industry.
Imagine a world where we were so worried about bullying that we created a department to monitor all speech on the Internet, and you had to run your speech past lawyers for approval before saying anything. And you could be sued for saying anything by anyone if you didn't get lawyer approval. That would be a world with dramatically less bullying than the Internet today. AND a much worse world with much less communication. AND in that alternate world, the lawyers would argue that there would be more bullying if we put that ridiculous system to an end. And they would be right that there would be some more bullying, AND it would also be right that that degree of bullying would be worth it to have free speech.
Similarly with patents. Yeah, on the margins there might be more IP theft. SO WHAT. This system right now sucks.
Pretty amazing!
Insane that a developing country has something so seemless, and meanwhile in the USA my credit card number is stolen online every 3 to 5 years, necessitating cancellations and in some cases (as with Chase) I had to close the entire account as they could not stop the fraud even after issuing 5 new cards over the space of 6 months--somehow the new card authorizations were being ported automatically into some subscription systems.
Sovereign SOTA models might also be possible with nation-state involvement. But this is a good stopgap.
I've been a best man 6 times. A groomsman 20+ times. I'm spread really thin now that I also have kids and a wife and family commitments.
Sometimes I actually crave solitude more than anything else.
Reading this post is almost like reading about another tribe from a distant place, and what it feels like to live their lives.
Is it weird that I'm kind of envious of this guy and his life? Not enough to trade places ... because I'd miss my wife and kids and close friends ... but if I could just like be him for a few weeks and then come back to my life.
In contrast, when I go back and read Go or C code I wrote years ago, I have no trouble at all quickly figuring out what I was doing in the small programs I write.
The way these issues manifest themselves, as it recently did, was I went back to add a simple addition to a CLI tool I wrote for myself a year ago, and I was having trouble doing it because I couldn't quickly understand what I had been doing a year ago ... so I just had an AI agent do it for me. This was the kind of change that if it was a Go program, I would've done manually myself in about 5 or 10 mins.
Somewhat related. My mom once yelled at me for losing a necklace she really liked. Then we were moving her stuff out of her house and found the necklace behind a wardrobe, wedged between it and the wall. It had been there for like 40 years, layered in dust.
Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.
Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).
Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.
My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
And TBH, I have also had a few false positives. One contract I did not take (it was for a mix of equity and cash) turned into a 10B+ company, and I would have made enough to retire (again) on it over a 1-year contract. I didn't because the founder who called me just sounded completely clueless and was barraging me with marketing speak instead of explaining what he needed. I was so exhausted from his BS I just decided I didn't need the headache. (This is also a danger of having enough to retire ... you turn down a lot of potentially lucrative work because you just don't think the headaches are worth it).
In the grand scheme of things, other than that one big missed opportunity, I haven't missed too much upside by being so picky. And when I'm counseling colleagues about their unpaid contracts and conflicts, I'm always silently thanking the stars I have the luxury to say no. I know that's a priviledge.
Everything America is doing right now is because America is precisely NOT taking corporate decisions. America is doing things to the international order that are directly fucking up American corporations. Only a committed social democrat can look at the populist right-wing chaos right now, and claim that's "Corporate" action. If anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America, and that's part of the reason why Trump's racist populism is so popular ... he's exploiting a backlash. Turns out America has far more nativists than you ever imagined.
But yeah, go ahead and call it "Corporations in a trenchcoat" because then you don't have to think about how Corporations have actually played the biggest role in promoting diversity in America. While government consistently goes sharply left and right based on whichever lunatic the American public elects next.