ardeaver

I realize this is very much not the point, but the fact that the "Active Incident" banner is green is upsetting.

I also wonder if it's possible that this is just "blog-speak"

The author of this article has what seems like it could be a relatively thriving consulting business, so he probably writes more to advertise his services than anything else. That kind of writing surely lends itself to a particular writing style, which is a non-insignificant chunk of the kind of writing that LLMs were trained on.

If that happens, I'm betting they get slapped with something inconsequential like a $1 million fine and write it off as the cost of doing business.

Something similar once happened to me with an old domain with nameservers I had pointed to DigitalOcean from my registrar.

Managing DNS through DigitalOcean (although, this should be possible with any DNS service) requires both pointing the nameservers to that service and adding the domain to your account. If you delete the domain from your account, like I had, but forget to update the nameservers with your registrar, anyone else can claim the domain. Theoretically, if you redirect the nameservers first and then add the domain to your account, someone could swipe it from you, I guess. Though it would basically have to be pure luck.

Why is it always slot machines though?

I'd be interested to see if the actual cost of AI will actually have any impact on how often CEOs end up talking about it. In my experience, there's a certain level of assessment that goes into whether or not a line item on your expenses is considered a problem or an investment. If you can still hand wave your way into convincing investors that $200K in AI credits replaces 3 $200K/year software engineers, even though it used to be $100K for the same amount of credits, you might be fine. At some point, some part of that equation will likely fall out of favor with investors or the math will no longer work out, and maybe it's the cost of natural gas or helium.

I've always felt that AI's main contribution to eliminating jobs is giving CEOs the ability to do layoffs while trying to both separate themselves from the current economic uncertainty and imply that they are an AI company.

Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.

In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.

As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.

The news of this acquisition has made me too scared to admit that I actually have no issues Poetry.

I also think equating good = "no monetization" is exactly how we've ended up in a situation where everything is controlled by a few giant mega corps, hordes of MBAs, and unethical ad networks.

We should want indie developers, writers, etc to make money so that the only game in town doesn't end up being those who didn't care about being ethical. </rant>

The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.

You're not wrong, I just wish you were lmao

When I was really early in my career, a mentor told me that code review is not about catching bugs but spreading context (i.e. increasing bus factor.) Catching bugs is a side effect, but unless you have a lot of people review each pull request, it's basically just gambling.

The more expensive and less sexy option is to actually make testing easier (both programmatically and manually), write more tests and more levels of tests, and spend time reducing code complexity. The problem, I think, is people don't get promoted for preventing issues.

There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.

Perhaps I'm not totally clear on how this particular device works, but it doesn't seem like it has no ability to connect to the Internet.

Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to make even more money™, and you may issue a quiet, boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't Be Evil" slogan.

As far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only mode.

I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard to call that a failure since they're making tons of money.

It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That happens a lot in the tech industry.

I can also imagine that you might need to change your definition of what an accomplishment is. I tend to think of it as something that has a measurable output, but difficult-to-measure progress towards an outcome is also something (despite what product managers might think)

At my last job, we ran all of our tests, linting/formatting, etc. through pre-commit hooks. It was apparently a historical relic of a time where five developers wanted to push directly to master without having to configure CI.

I too was about to become a war criminal.