gofreddygo

nothing about that phrase is clear. frontier is as unclear as it gets by itself.

the lead that anthropic and openai had is diminishing faster than they'd like. this is them trying to be the luxury brand of ai.

The "frontier" is made up concept. Its for downstream companies to justify higher token prices. Very little to show for actual improvements.

> a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.

this is apple today.

No kidding. I got a feature handed down (with links to 4 other markdown docs) for what was discussed in person as "api to record audit events". The result is <goes to AI for word count then gives up>

     wc .\ledger_reqs.md                             
     1090  9347 68071 .\ledger_reqs.md

That would be true in the 80s, maybe 90s. The world changed. Tech's role in society changed. Its greedy. People in power in tech have made it clear they are here for the money and anything that supports it works. What you see (even here on hn) reflects that common knowledge that any new tech will only end up screwing people. This isn't my opinion but a summary of what I conclude people think of tech.

Keep your friends close, enemies closer.

There's more caveats. Top down companies (which I believe all big tech companies have turned into) have a different class of problems that isn't addressed in TFA - politics, territorialism and history. TFA does not mention them or any any opinions on them either.

In BigCo. finding problem and the technical solution dwarfs in comparison to the effort and skill required to find the people who you're going to offend with your brilliance, the beneficiaries of said problems and who their reporting chain is and their incentive structures and the art of framing solutions using terms that they and their bosses understand in entirety.

One thing i hate more is the tendency of people now to rely on such summaries over the code and copy-pasting 400 line summaries of something fundamentally wrong.

Code is more precise than english language. If it wasn't everyone would just use english to write programs.

This a a very mature, stable perspective of the world we live in. Everyone wont agree with me all the time, I don't have to either. And thats ok.

Pair programming is also a great way to foster anxiety, shill arguments and have your engineers hate each other worse than they hate the job.

I like my neighbors and love to spend some time being nice to them. Pair programming is the equivalent of being forced to live with a random neighbor in your home and you both still pay full rent/mortgage of your respective homes.

Not true.

Engineers are finding a new set of challenges but nothing of the sort that managing real people requires.

PMs, managers and leaders behaving like status update junkies is a side effect and not the reason why those roles exist.

Every. SINGLE. Recipe website.

Just search for anything like "egg omelette recipe". Click *any* link for example [1].

[1]: https://www.loveandlemons.com/omelette-recipe/

Bad engineers. Like bad wine, bad pizza and bad exes are impossible to guess till you taste it. Changes you forever. Changed me. You know its bad and good lord! dont bother explain it someone else who will not taste it themselves.

There's different kinds of bad too, some justified. The senior that made their way boot licking and being at the right place and time. The junior that just got there. The senior that does not care anymore for being left out of promo two years ago and having to report to the person they despised as being a bad engineer.

AI isn't making human behavior better. In any way.

Life is too short for all this, keep doing the good stuff, filter in the good, keep the bad out that you can, ignore the rest. Have the self reflection to know when things aren't working out, and when its worth getting out. Build the wisdom to not repeat the same mistakes. Believe that there's a lot of good work to be done in the world and contribute in any way possible.

For you and me, using a thing regularly for longer (than people around you) and possibly for more than one purpose makes for a power user.

If you're on the Pixel Watch team however... "power user" takes on a different meaning

I recently had a similar experience with Subway in a touristy region of South Dakota. Small place run by two very young girls. One managing the drive-thru, and asking customers what type of bread, what type of cheese, toasted or not and at the same time managing beeping machines and being watched on camera at ALL times. She was doing her best. The other however was terrible as half the things were run out (olives, sauces) and she had no idea how or where to refill. I could see the first shooting daggers at her.

now as a human there, i could clearly see what was happening. I could come up with a bunch of simple things that could fix it. But as I drove back with my sandwiches, I kept wondering how this shows up on a spreadsheet or some internal system that Subway might have for decision making.

That really really made me question things that I had always suspected but swept under the rug. I concluded to never go back to subway (which I've always liked FWIW) or any other fast food joint. What stops them from adding absolute garbage into the food (which will never show up in any report) or the factories that I'm not privy to if it adds to the bottom line. Fast food is no better than packaged frozen food. Fast food companies are no better than the current crop of mega corps draining every nickel and dime to the bottom line for the next quarter.

I have more respect now for few employees at some joints (even airlines) that refused to give me some food items when I was with my kid on the basis that they haven't ever seen that stuff go bad for months and their conscience wont let me feed that to my kids and handed me something else instead. This human character trait I have new found appreciation for.

And subway isn't the exception I see, its the rule. I now see the same at McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos and other fast food joints. Goddam Moneyball.

I've been collecting ideas on how and what to carry or buy when we travel instead of relying and feeding my family on this. Its hard but I think worth it.

I recently found Ross Ashby's papers on cybernetics and that led me finding out that his family published his entire indexed handwritten notes archive online [1]. Genuinely mindblowing.

[1]: https://ashby.info

this is actually a good setup, something I would like to watch

Yeah yeah. Except for me its this feeling most of the time. Everything it generates is grammatically correct, phrased tight, emdashed to death and nothing is wrong as such, and yet what i just read contributes absolute 0 to why i started the chat in the first place. Its mind bendingly similar to a work equivalent of doom scrolling is what it is.

I'm coping.

A group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills.

I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.

I have to agree with this. Completely relying on LLM for all your learning needs is a disaster. But being absolutely against use of LLMs isn't doing you any favors. This is where you don't have a formula but rely on you judgement and evidence of your having learnt something.

For example having an LLM summarize a dense topic and to find books so that you can filter faster and spend time reading those books works way better than having the LLM summarize the books or the topic (or even relying on second hand information). Another one is having the LLM quiz you on your topics of interest. With questions tailored to attack specific areas that you struggle with. Its wonderful at this, nothing I've used comes close to what an LLM can do here.

You define for yourself what your goals are, slowly refining them as you learn more, and use LLM as a tool. This ,I find works best for learning.

> Build the product once, distribute it to a million users for roughly the same cost as distributing it to one. Every incremental customer flowed largely to the bottom line.

common misconception about software unit economics. With enterprise software (one that costs real $$$) there always more costs attached post shipping. Before client/server it was support. Then it was security and the constant threat of cyber attacks.

Distributing software is nothing like distributing books.

I'd preface the solution and the key point before mentioning that I'd seen this problem before and then further ask if they still want me to code up the solution. This eliminates the case that I, the interviewee might be bluffing. Also they might just be interested to know if you can think on your feet by then adding a twist later. who knows not my call.

It would be dumb if the next one they throw at me is one i've also seen or is ridiculously hard for an interview. Then i'd question the value of my honesty.

Why are you so wedded to JSON responses?

I'd assume because of the conception that json = data. Html = presentation. But if you just use barebones html, this could work very well. Just add a wrapper in the api to return json as html to try it out a bit.

I see this as psychology driven, not math. It pushes people to look at new options and tempt an upgrade at the end of the lease (pay $1000 for a 3 year old mac or just upgrade ?).

This also pushes term completion with early termination charges (discourage selling before term ends).

And they know money will be tight for their consumers, they can't lower prices anytime soon so give out 0% loans.

Following their tradition of screwing the frugal, cheapest options seem to be excluded.

Its a subscription model for Apple hardware.

art that served the artist, served its purpose

The unreasonable difficulty of predicting (actual) future effects based on past effects with no regards to their cause.

in a decade, we're all going to say how developers job is so different and yet still the same as it was 10 years ago.

> hobby projects I still code by hand

So true. I was too blinded to not notice the joy of my hobby getting sucked away by not doing it by hand.

"How can we dig a well here" and "should we dig a well here" are neither mutually exclusive nor sufficient in their own regard.

Cant answer should we without having done a lot of it before. Cant learn unless you actually do it and see the consequences through.

For the producer, a nominal (at cost) fee is worse than an exorbitant one. better to have a few high paying customers first then drop the price inviting more than the other way around of charging nothing first then going up

screens distract everyone. I avoid them. in meetings, I use a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Everyone can see what is being written on it.

on that note, the small whiteboard right next to my desk (at home) was a great idea too