Because Lua is popular among game development enthusiasts? It is THE scripting language of game development. It's the language of choice by Roblox Studio.
175 karma · joined May 11, 2023
The problem is the rise of Career Designers™ as opposed student of the arts. The current pipeline is dominated by candidates who realize there are few careers for liberal arts students paying six-figures and also self-aware enough to know they don't enjoy math/programming/excel (although many cashcow masters provide OPT when they don't even any math or even the rigor of a respectable MBA). Google has a propensity to hire people who hold master degrees specifically in UI/UX, but I've found only a small fraction (maybe 1/10, and definitely much lower than 25%) who has any aesthetic intuition. I've seen their non-portfolio work, such as their photography and clothing choices. The average teenager on social media probably have more artistic sensibilities than people who are supposed to be the top-tier designers. Obviously this is subjective and also a proxy metric, but I'd like to believe the ability to compose whether it's photos, interior design, or clothing is strongly correlated to the ability to design a website. Or even just having an appreciation of cinema that isn't Marvel. We end up with people who follow systematic procedure taught in a masters in UI/UX that leads to lots of and lots of overly complicated design patterns that make sense intellectually and in isolation, but will never arrive at something that is hollistically cohesively and usable like Craigslists.
Google has grown into a corporation and select for career oriented students who are studious high achievers who focuses on practical matters rather than frivolous things. Maybe that algorithm works well for programmers, where in math/programmer there is a yes/no, but even then school can't indicate who has good intuition about design. I mean the author of Vue is a design major, not computer science.
The people who live and breath art aren't being hired by tech companies to be designers, especially the large ones. They don't fit the corporate status quo, but then again they tend to be independently wealthy and never had to treat academia as a means of procuring a job anyways. At least for hackers / cybersecurity / introverted programmers types, tech companies have done a good job at assimilating people were in social outcasts in early decades. The design orgs feels much more political and feels like a grown-up version of a high school popularity contest. Google's recruitment process of emphasizing academic prestige (school, grades, advanced degrees) may work well for other areas, but it's filtering out the best candidates, and selecting for people who are frankly mediocre.
In the early days of Google, when Google was a pioneer in design, design was lead by Marissa Meyer, an engineer who had a knack for design. It she an artist? Maybe not, but Google was a pioneer in website design and it's at least in part attributable to her. Engineers who have design sensibilities are probably better for designing websites / apps than career-designers.
So that's UI designers. UX Researchers are supposed to be scientific and minor statisticians. They're supposed to glean test hypothesis and make unbiased judgements from a representative sample of the population. The UX Researchers I've worked with were some of the most unscientific and non-quantitative people I've worked in my 10+ professional years. The math stops at basic percentages. I observed some of these surveys and user studies where they prime candidates and ask leading questions towards answers they've pre-assumed, rather than actually listening to the user. That's why there is such a huge and growing disconnect between Google products' usability and the user. Most of the people who advance in this org are unsurprisingly great at talking.
What happened to Ghost (haven't kept up to date)? I remember in the first few years it felt so promising, snappy and delightful.
This is just bunch of vacuous statements. Are you suggesting this product exists not to serve a business prop or value ?
> Nobody cares if a database is fast
Businesses do. There’s a reason people don’t attempt to build their own database.
Every serious database meant for production use takes performance into consideration. People would just roll their own database otherwise, but we pile into Postgres, or even MongoDb, because they’re battletested and has had years of optimizations. More than half of the work in database implementations is in engine and query optimization.
> they care if they can get their data in and out easier.
Then just store and read flat files from disk.
Strange to use a throwaway to make this comment. It seems like you are the author justifying a product that does need to exist.
The main value prop of a DB is performance, moreso than the interface. How is this different from S3 or Firebase’s rest API?
> Nodb can easily accommodate an increase in the number of requests without breaking down or becoming slow. Your app remains responsive and reliable, even during periods of high demand.
From the limitations docs page:
> Number of read (GET) requests is limited to 10k per month
Yesterday I login to PayPal and it text messages a 2FA auth code to an old, supposed-to-be deleted, phone number. There is an option to "try another way" where they call the new phone on file and I dial in a code they show on the web. This worked yesterday and I confirmed the old phone number is not visible in the UI.
I've been living abroad and originally signed up for Google Fi. One day, Google Fi disconnected my data and phone access. SMS still works, but there are cases where you need to "authenticate" with a phone call. Turns out Google Fi has a policy in place where they disable your data/phone access if you've been abroad for over a year. Due to covid and other situations, it didn't seem worthwhile to return to the United States just to resolve this phone issue. CSR didn't seem to be trained on this case, and it took several hours and multiple escalations before anyone in customer support knew about this policy existed. Google has a bad reputation for customer service, and they made a half-baked attempt at building out a customer support team with Google Fi, but it's a joke. As a former Google employee, I understand but still find it absolutely unacceptable. The performance review cycle is broken when no one has any ownership about the product after it's shipped. Customer Support felt 80% implemented, and the product manager moved on to the next shiny thing. Google's effort to invest in training the customer support staff to be exceedingly nice and soft spoken really shows. I just wish the customer support staff were trained to actually fix issues instead of re-iterating the also useless online documents and in-app copytext of Google Fi. I've worked with GCP tech writers to publish some docs for GCP, and if it's the same org producing the customer support FAQ/script and peripheral copy in the app/online docs, I'm not surprised why it's useless.
Google Fi has all the traits of an abandoned Google project. Funny enough, I noticed yesterday they rebranded to "Google Fi Wireless". I'm sure someone got a promotion as part of that initiative. At any rate, because of the inability to do authentication over the phone, I migrated to Google Voice as I was able to keep my phone number. Google Voice has signs of age and abandonment too. But it did the job... for a while.
Today I followed the same pathway to login to PayPal and was locked out.
Yesterday there's a bug in Chrome where I do not hear sound from Google Voice calls. The initial ring makes a sound, but then nothing, so I know my browser and OS has been configured to play sound for Chrome. This was after Google showed a banner linking me to docs, which in turn instructed me to go to chrome://settings/content/sound to allowlist Google Voice. Not sure why this is needed, when the default behavior is "Sites can play sound". Still didn't work. Hopped over to Firefox and got a warning that "this browser is not supported" when attempting to login to Google Mail. Not sure what kind of security vulnerability exists at the seam between Google Account login and a few months old version of Firefox. Thankfully with an update I was able to get Firefox to produce sounds for Google Voice calls and was able to 2FA into PayPal.
Today I forgot about the Chrome bug, and after 3 attempts, PayPal locked me out. I was told to call customer support. The CS rep said they will "disable 2FA" on my account. They noted that did not see the old number listed on their side either. PayPal still has my old phone number in a database somewhere, even though I requested it deleted. Can't tell if this is or isn't a data retention violation. I received three separate emails in the following order: "you added <new phone number>", "<old phone number> removed", "<new phone number> removed". I attempt to login and greeted with "Confirm your phone number with a code ... <new phone number>". The two options are to receive a text or a call. Immediately after the clicking, I see "Sorry, we couldn’t confirm it’s you". The two options now are to "try another way" which goes back to that previous screen, or to call customer support. Customer support said I might have issues if I am using a VPN. I told them I have not been using a VPN. Customer support tells me I might have issues if I am accessing PayPal from abroad. Customer support tells me to try again in 24 hours. I ask CSR if they know it will work or they think it will work. They tell me they think. Everything was a "maybe" and that there was no way for them to override the automated system. I told them the automated system is throwing me in a loop and to contact customer support. I understand they are in a bad position due to corporate, but I asked them what is the escalation path. They said there is none. I asked to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor had a novel idea of initiating a password reset. They issued a password email. While we're waiting for the reset email, we're going back and forth on the absurdity of this process. I asked them why am I seeing the screen to confirm my phone if 2fa has been "disabled". They explain that the phone number is used as a means of confirming my identity. I told them I'm calling them on the phone right now. How else am I supposed to prove my identity if they say the phone number is the source of truth of my identity? They're vehemently defending PayPal, but reiterated there was no escalation path. All they can do is report asynchronously to "IT" and hope one day things change. 15 minutes go by and the email finally comes. Unfortunately the password reset link expires after 10 minutes. I asked the CSR rep if think it's absurd that control is handled over to the automated system, and customer support can't do anything. There should be an escalation. For example, why is there a 10 minute limit on the password reset email if it takes 15 minutes for them to come. They told me this is a "one off" and "industry standard security policy". We do this password reset thing three times, but the emails always comes in after the expiration time. They told me these systems have been in place before they joined PayPal and will remain in place after they leave PayPal.
I've been responsible for building auth/identity systems dealing with security reviews. A lot of these processes at PayPal seem illogical security theater and there is no feedback loop to fix them. The CSR rep practically told me it's best not to rely on PayPal if I don't live in America, even if I am American. They proposed a create a PayPal account in the country I currently reside in. Yeah, no. I am dubious when they can barely handle the United States case well, and I am living in a country with a much more byzantine bureaucracy. Funny enough, I've worked on an analytics / operations team at one of the largest FinTech players in the US where one of my projects was optimizing the CSR operations. Our products handled diverse user base pretty well. I don't understand how PayPal can succeed as a multi-national business.
Our lives are growingly dependent on digital systems that are increasingly complex, but they are still so jank. In this case of PayPal, they've prematurely handled off control to the machines without any way for customer support humans to intervene. At least in the country I live in it's acknowledged that the IT infrastructure sucks, and so there is always a way for human intervention. Corporate America's quarterly business cycle leads to these cost reductions that delegate more and more to automated systems that aren't robust. I feel like we've past the inflection point of where digital technology was without a doubt improving our lives.
So have up to a year after you leave the company I believe.
This is the first time I heard this term, and when I Google search "LLM developer" in an incognito tab, different device, this article is one of the first results.
Seems like we should first establish what exactly is an LLM developer.
> When I was at Google, there was a document put together by Jeff Dean, the legendary engineer, called Numbers every Engineer should know.
The personal plug and appeal to authority of "When I was a Google" is unnecessary. "Numbers every Engineer should know" is public and literally linked there. It's a weird way to start a engineering blog post and makes it feel like marketing of one's resume. Then again, I guess that's what most of these engineering blog posts are nowadays.
Indeed Jeff Dean is a legend and needing to add the "legendary engineer" qualifier detracts from this point. Let these things speak for themselves.