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My late grandmother had a pithy turn of phrase when I would act like she "just didn't get it".

"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."

God damn I miss Naggum.

"In many ways, the current American presidency and XML have much in common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people. Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the intelligent."

The list is just too long now: OOP, COM, CORBA, UML, Scrum, Microservices, JSON RPC, ReactJS, writing shit in JavaScript when you don't have to, LangChain, all of it. It's just fucking stupid and wrong and frankly the software business isn't for everyone.

It doesn't make you a bad person that you're not serious about this shit.

https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html

Whether or not training one giant LLM with socially enormous stakes on the output of another commercially-controlled LLM is an interesting question.

My stronger opinion is that the people who can do this stuff via having a crawled corpus of the Internet need to keep in mind that it's all our "user-generated content" that they've freely appropriated to build their models, and so whatever the technical copyright rules are (or become): you don't ethically own something that's closely imitating stuff we all wrote over the years.

For me at least, existing completely without GMail / Google SSO is unrealistic, and the million email corpus that is attached to it would be painful to part with as well.

But I've been trying to slowly de-tangle myself, and for it's faults ProtonMail has been working out pretty OK for me as a compromise between usability and true digital freedom.

The "Best Google" busts up Microsoft monopolies via going big on open software and open standards.

The "Worst Google" copies the business model they just un-fucked.

I'd say in 2023, we really need the "Best Google".

Any company can take a turn for the worse, and any time you've got SaaS deep in your stack there's risk there.

I can only say that I worry about TailScale growing up to be evil the least of basically every SaaS company I've ever used. They seem extremely serious about making the interaction a "win/win" and keeping it that way as they grow.

> I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale.

Strongly seconded. In my last company we used TailScale in some medium-advanced configurations, and from the dead-simple basic stuff up though some of the trickier stuff it's just a joy to use.. It's making much better networking practices highly-accessible and I'd bet ends up making the Internet a more secure, better organized system as a whole.

They run an amazingly transparent engineering process, for example their issue page (https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues) is a model of transparent, responsive, involved open development. They embrace cool, modern, quirky stuff like NixOS (https://tailscale.com/blog/nixos-minecraft/). It's just generally really high-quality software developed with a very cool "hacker" philosophy.

TailScale is IMHO the coolest place to work right now, and something that almost any software company should look at if they do any networking.

If there's anything not to love, I can't see it. :)

There is nothing wrong with being the category-defining early-stage investment company, and doing it as a for-profit business that's optimized for good financial outcomes.

I think what some of the insiders (like the OP) and semi-adjacent outsiders (like me) might be feeling a little queasy about is that YC began with a pretty clearly stated goal (in addition to making money) around disrupting the unproductive importance of high-status networks and signaling like elite university educations and to a lot of us (even people who didn't apply like me) that was really inspiring. And to at least some degree, YC is now a high-status network that signals well.

There's nothing uniquely bad about it, it's kind of the default throughout human history, and they are completely transparent about being a for-profit company, but it's also ok to be a little sad that it's not quite as idealistic as it used to be.

There seems to be a lot of truth in that, but I think it's also maybe a little harsh as well.

Google hasn't needed to generate another monster revenue stream outside of ad sales, so it's possible that they never really tried all that hard (they've certainly killed it on the things that protect it, notably Android and Chrome). An utterly dominant position in how people access information that lasts for decades is probably "a hell of a drug".

For example, GCP is technically a really, really good cloud offering, maybe even the best for a lot of use cases (if you haven't looked at it lately, Cloud BigTable looks friggin amazing, I wish I'd had that database for the last ten years). They've obviously failed to parley that technical achievement into dominant market share, but maybe with the pressure on around search they get serious about whatever combination of pricing and marketing and customer support that gets them some serious market share.

YouTube has been quietly building their TikTok competitor into something I'm actually starting to waste some time on, they people who work on that are clearly really good at their jobs even if they started a little slow.

And on the LLM space, honestly I'm rooting for them: MSFT/OpenAI/ChatGPT need at least some competition and they are probably the best positioned to do so. Facebook/Meta is also doing this stuff in a more "open" way and that's keeping the pressure on around some competition too.

In general this LLM stuff is going to be a great thing long-term, but letting one company dominate both mindshare and marketshare is going to make that a much rougher road for society than if it's avoided.

A very funny phrasing of some legitimately confusing news.

I keep thinking that there's no way that Brain/DeepMind are just getting stomped, lapped, generation-gapped by e.g. `ChatGPT`: they must have had an internal demo of this sort of thing like 2 years ago, right? At some point the Empire strikes back?

But the rollout and product integration has been so well done, so coordinated and cohesive that it's now just obvious that it was way too soon to count MSFT out of the game. It's all through search and Office 365 and GitHub/CoPilot/etc. and the whole stack in such a legitimately compelling way that you can almost forget that the DNA is Win32.

It's a bad thing to let Microsoft get a stranglehold on developer and user mindshare network effects: the 90s were rough. But with how cool it all is it's very tempting...

I'm aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find that investing heavily in being able to type fast and handle the tools well actually changes what code I write and not just how quickly.

The faster I've gotten at moving code around, the more subconsciously willing I've been to try something with a modest probability of working out, and more importantly the easier it's gotten to throw away a draft that isn't working out and try again.

LLMs haven't made it into my coding workflow yet, but I can see how they could be useful and the trend seems to be that they'll be in most high-octane workflows at some point.

You are correct. Thank you for straightening me out, and for linking to a good resource.

A minor note (many others here know Boyer personally and have more to add): there is a lot more to that CV than Boyer-Moore. Counting, all kinds of stuff. A true legend. May he RIP.

I probably have some wiggle room on the details, but the combination of my skills, experience, and the macro economy make me roughly a "knowledge worker". I'm interested as hell in all kinds of things, but if I "choose" not to do the "knowledge worker" thing I'm looking at a tough situation pretty quickly.

I'm sure you mean well by your comment but I'd be more interested in what you think about the broader theme of "knowledge work as a path to high achievement denominated in society's rewards" than whether or not I personally have a bunch of agency about wanting rewards.

I've been diagnosed with ADHD 4 times by 4 separate qualified clinicians and stimulant medication undoubtedly makes me more effective, so asked and answered I guess.

But I sort of philosophically struggle with the "disorder" bit of it. I live in a box with a glass wall facing other boxes with glass walls and type into a computer screen any time that I'm not actively going to the gym or doing something outdoors becuase the default thing I do is try to create enough material prosperity to exist.

This seems like something that would have a caveman climbing the walls, which is roughly how I feel about the glass box / computer screen routine when I'm not on ADHD medication.

Is is "neurotypical" to be perfectly at ease spending hours hunched in front of a screen under artifical light in order to eat, or is it "neurotypical" to be fantasizing that the pool cue next to my monitor would fly pretty straight if a lion walked through the door?

The situation that you describe is regrettable common in my experience, but by no means ubiquitous, and I'm optimistic actually reaching the end of its lifespan.

I've been out of big-name marquee tech for several years now, but as recently as late last decade it was in fact possible to achieve meaningful seniority as an engineering manager on the back of serious engagement with the subject matter. I at one time managed a team of roughly ~35 serious engineers and several managers in a critical path and was considered senior enough to be called an L7 because I read at least and usually commented on one or more diffs a day, and worked on and usually landed a diff or two a week.

I don't know where the meme started that managing technical work was orthogonal to understanding technical work, but CTOs like Carmack disagree (FWIW little old me does as well). In almost any other field from fabrication in a shop full of machines to a law firm, the top person is the most expert person, and I think it's a weird path-dependent aberration that software got off that proven paved path.

YMMV but this stuff is IMHO getting so complicated that I think managers will be trending more rather than less technical for the foreseeable future.