erikhopf

Too many ideas die and smart people are discouraged by a barrage of unnecessarily critical feedback too early on. This is great advice, and one of the hardest things to do as a new manager.

It is exceptionally easy to poke holes and create FUD around new ideas. Especially at a place where everyone is smart (and wants to show it). New ideas are incredibly fragile when exposed to FUD, and FUD is cheap, so you should expect a lot of it!

As a leader you are in a great position to empower your team and create space for exploration and for ideas to grow by acting as a dampener of FUD, not an amplifier of it.

You're probably not wrong. In the Guardian article they mentioned, there's one quote that pretty much sums up what you're saying: "I’ve always known in my head that it was probably better for me to do the work on my own [...] I’m kind of a bit worried that using ChatGPT will make brain kind of atrophy because I’m not using it to its fullest extent."

Some of these points are valid though. Because you should to some degree challenge the author to simplify where possible.

Does it get out of hand. Absolutely. But calling out when a PR/FAQ is too technical is valid. Some details belong in a design doc (or elsewhere).

However, I agree with you that the intent should be to deliver a good product. Not to nitpick someone into an anxiety spiral.

All valid points. And having been at Amazon for two stints, I think it's fair to say that it really depends on who's reviewing the PR/FAQ.

I did review this PR before Werner published it, and can say that in this specific case, attributing the quotes to anyone for public release was not allowed. However, I would definitely expect the name of a real person for any quote in a PR/FAQ I was reviewing internally.

The $1mil number in itself doesn't seem too impactful, but when you take it into consideration with other reported findings, such as $55mil spent in the last year to influence the general public during election season, or the $5mil spent to honey pot activated and enthusiastic partisans -- it starts to add up -- and I imagine the numbers are much bigger, especially when you consider legitimately funded misinformation from Super PACs and the like.

Anyway, this podcast from Syracuse University was pretty interesting and discusses some of what's in this write up: https://news.syr.edu/blog/2024/10/29/the-rise-of-misinformat...

I particularly like his comparison of learning Rust to writing docs at Amazon, which are a frictionful minefield.

> Rust has a reputation for being a difficult language to learn and I won’t dispute that there is a learning curve. It will take time to get familiar with the borrow checker, and you will fight with the compiler. It’s a lot like writing a PRFAQ for a new idea at Amazon. There is a lot of friction up front, which is sometimes hard when all you really want to do is jump into the IDE and start building. But once you’re on the other side, there is tremendous potential to pick up velocity. Remember, the cost to build a system, service, or application is nothing compared to the cost of operating it, so the way you build should be continually under scrutiny.

Link to code: https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-bedrock-audio-summariz...

Shame that this is a misleading title, because it's actually an interesting article about how the FBI caught a predator in what's basically a case of dumb luck.

There are companies like Terraformation that have been doing this for a while. Beyond the biodiversity angle, seed banking seems to be very important to the long term success of regrowth projects.

Author does a great job of capturing the anxiety the captain and crew felt and the poise they demonstrated. Maybe my favorite line, "Quintal’s cucumber-cool support".

There are VS Code and JetBrains extensions, it's part of the AWS Toolkit (can be a bit hard to find). https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/latest/userguide/s...