That actually has a simple answer, for most businesses it's not that you can't do what your suppliers do for you, it's that you'd rather use your resources (time and capital) towards something else because that's where they generate the most value.
For a simple example, I know how to make sandwiches but if I'm throwing a customer event I just want to buy them from a catering company. Then they have to deal with buying ingredients, hiring people, doing health code inspections, getting liability insurance, etc. Even if an AI could do all the management of it for me, I still wouldn't want to put in the capital resources towards it.
Not to mention, there are already (pre AI) machine-generated proofs that we've pretty much agreed not to try to explain fully, like the four-color theorem which ends up with brute-force verification of 600+ cases (down from close to 2,000 when first demonstrated)
The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.
> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.
I don't know what you mean by that. I used to live in a tier 2 European city pre Internet and there were lots of things that were a pain to buy. We'd often have to check multiple stores. Specialty hobbies were served by one or two shops that you had to drive to. I remember having to take the train to a different city to buy a memory card for my computer. There was real consumer cost and societal cost.
The warehouse and online order model is economically a lot more efficient. The real question is what to do with the surplus it generates, make Bezos richer or something else?
A lot is said in this thread about user preferences for info density, but it is really a lot more than preference. there's also a big component of it that is user productivity focused. Info-dense UIs simply require a lot less scrolling around and pagination to look at relevant data. For example the ability to look at multiple charts side by side instead of having to scroll one chart after another into position enables users to spot differences that they wouldn't otherwise see.
Yes. I wished we recognized more often that hyperproductivity exists for these engineers with different strengths too. It just looks very different than Bob's twenty feature launches per quarter
I agree, Bob is great. I think scaling a concept is also really really important. We need features but we need scalable frameworks and platforms to support these features. Bob's not going to write the distributed db system that makes his feature look good, but that also needs engineering. That too needs to be good enough to ship and no more btw, but it's more often the work of a team that has to slow down and think carefully about what it's doing, especially when evolving long-running platforms
Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.
I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...
Er... I think I'm used to folks putting in a little bit more homework into creating some form of a consensus or alliance around their position before selling it out in the open
With respect to whomever this dude thinks he is, it's egregiously "main character" to frame a policy recommendation for the US in terms of what's important to his personal beliefs.
Work out how many bowling alleys there are and how many of them are in the market for an upgrade or a fresh install, trying to get to be the king of that hill is a lot of work and risk for not really life changing rewards compared with what a self-avowed SRE could make just pulling paychecks
With respect to bowling alleys, for things like professional shows or food safety it's a bit more than "nobody got fired for buying IBM". The stuff's gotta be able to survive field conditions and not cost millions of dollars in refunded show tickets or spoiled foods. Manufacturers test and make themselves accountable for this. Cheap, customized modules work until they don't, and by then the engineer who put the custom system together in the first place isn't there to fix them. Who would you call when some quick-and-dirty integration code that was burned into these embedded modules without ever being put in a source versioning system fails in some weird edge condition? OP is an SRE, it's ok for him, but the average farmer or show operator doesn't have the skill.
I've worked with similar tools and while they're impressive, it's too often the case that the LLM literally makes up fake but realistic looking data and pretends that it's real. This includes pretty deep fakery like setting up mock database connectors so that it looks like you're fetching data from the right place, but it's just getting synthetic data
I agree that a lot of progress in math comes from refactorings and novel concepts that generalize neatly. My point is that those breakthroughs don't happen through refactoring in a vacuum, they happen because the refactoring is undertaken with a specific motivation. It often ends up having more general applications than the original motivation, but doing it without a specific motivation doesn't usually yield progress.
It's the same as with software refactoring. If you refactor without a sense of what you want to get out of the refactor, how do you know whether you're refactoring the right things?
Besides the legal requirement, the reason these companies go public is often to provide liquidity for early investors or employees. So they do want to have as good of a margin story that they can, at least in terms of unit margin.