magicloop

Meta is undergoing a standard phase transition. It was innovation fuelled previously, but now it is value fuelled (milk the existing machine, take care of regulators, be part of the establishment). Intel and IBM are similar examples.

So Zuckerberg, to prevent this, has the right strategy - the pirates inside the organisation strategy. Jobs did this with the Mac project. The question mark really is whether the Metaverse can deliver to take over from the Social Media platforms it has. Even if you accept the promise of Metaverse, according to Carmack the execution has been poor. Normally you just buy your way out with promising startups when execution is poor but the regulators will be heavy with Meta nowadays.

Meta has star power with AI/ML. But on Metaverse there isn't much consumer data to process (yet). So its innovation vector can't be realised.

This effectively means the stars of AI/ML won't help Meta into the future. If they leave, it could be a good thing (if we are taking the value-fuelled hypothesis as their future).

Meta I think will switch to a MBA-led approach to maximise existing value, shed its research aspirations, and switch to hiring the best mechanical/devices/hardware talent it can to improve execution on Metaverse.

Under this appraisal of Meta, broad and wide layoffs, letting the superstars go is the right thing for the company. Unlocked from Meta, those engineers will forge the next great wave of tech companies. The future will be made over the next few months as those start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing. So I am most hopeful despite the bitter pill of current economic realities. In the short term there is real pain, particularly those relying on visas or the generous healthcare provisions from the company.

That's a great article. To me it makes painful reading because what it means is that some of the most talented engineers are being hired by Google to do just regular enterprise software stuff, but disincentivised to actually do innovation for which they are most able. If they were back in the open market so many great firms could have been founded, which might be the ultimate corporate strategy for Google - to take talent off the market.

If I'm understanding it correctly, you are saying doing 20% time on a side project is a career risk as you won't be seen to be "delivering" as much as your peers (because the side project is not valued).

Is it even worse than that - you get rooted out because innovation side projects marks you out as being troublesome (as it does not align with corporate plans/goals)?

One thing I can't figure out (genuine question) is why they don't have 20% time anymore for innovation. I thought it was a key driver for new products at Google. Does such a thing cause career risk, or political strife?

Also, I'd like to understand if their AI lab, Deep Mind, also suffers the same problem, or does it have a different culture? Does Deep Mind have 20% time?

I'd appreciate it if anyone within the company could explain it please.

The UK/IE market is skewed due to the legislation that essentially ignores intermediaries and considers whether a freelancer is under management supervision and control, in effect an employee (using an unfavourable tax definition of such working practices). The poison pill is the end hirer is passed liability for ensuring the worker is classed properly for tax. The game dynamics that result is that any large corporation cannot hire freelancers directly anymore for 'knowledge worker' type jobs as the taxman would just do a bulk audit and penalise in one go (rather than in the old days of individually pursuing contractors separately which is not scaleable).

So freelancing only is a reality if you just serve small companies; e.g. do word press and web site updates for a bunch of local businesses, and other ad hoc tech support type work. Big money contracts with large corporations is all done via service provider companies paying contractors through Umbrella or on their payroll.

When I started out one of my first jobs came with an on-call pager. It was a puck shaped item that you carried on your belt. When sitting on the toilet it would slide out of its carrier and fall into the basin. Nearly happened twice to me (I caught it). Several others had it fall in. It had to be vigorously cleaned before hand over to the next engineer. That is what is called a "Clean Handover".

It reminds me of: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."

I understand that Twitter no longer employs a comms team, so no comms on that particular issue. But... has the revolution come?

I was also at the same juncture and found the 'The Personal MBA' Josh Kaufman book highly valuable. Because this book is an index book. Each couple of pages is the distilled top level wisdom/knowledge of a separate business domain. If that section takes your attention it provides a curated book list for digging in deeper.

So you just read the entire book for a wide-but-shallow understanding, and then drill in to topics that interest you most.

Getting into the business domain is firstly an issue of awareness. Once you have an awareness of the landscape you build your knowledge bit by bit.

For me it was obvious that sales was my weakest area, so I focussed on that with further reading and practice. (Turned out I was quite good at it in the end - a total shock to me as I am the nerdy techie type personality).

I've got a couple of life hacks that have seen me through things quite well: 1. My short term goals are: good quality sleep (8hrs), daily exercise (30 minute walk), proper healthy good meals 3 times a day. 2. Work intensely for 40 hours a week. Then switch off, and then have a could not care less attitude until you next return.

Most work environments will recognise the discipline and reliable work ethic and will leave you alone. Some environments will measure you by hours-attendance and will push you out or criticise your work methods. These are not healthy places.

Anecdote: I was learning about climbing and the instructor showed us a thin climbing rope chord (emergency back up). He explained it was plenty to carry your weight but comically thin. What might appear that it "would never work" sometimes can work. Hence my above advice to others.

Rather than trying to be T-shaped, I think it is better to be curious and follow up learning paths on those innate feelings for exploration. Maybe your skill set becomes fractal looking. I think this can be the basis for unique value creation. (E.g. the typography course Steve Jobs did as a student, leading to care/attention to fonts on the early Macs).

I do agree with the basic idea of being T-shaped, however. I've personally seen project teams having fragile delivery capability due to a lack of skills, or lack of skill overlaps, which made the team reliant on individuals that could be off sick, on vacation, or assigned elsewhere.

Since the author mentions there are many users of curl on Apple platforms, there should be a pool of engineers from which a volunteer could be found to help out.

The author didn't mention reaching out to Apple for help? My opinion is if Apple documentation call out the use of curl as part of a workflow or enabling step, or actually as part of a product, then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty).

I would prefer to see the big tech companies contribute to a foundation who could redistribute funds to key open source groups. A credit for a cloud instance of the machine would be sufficient in most cases. It would also remove undue influence of one vendor over another. Maybe such a thing exists, and I would welcome if someone pointed it out.

When I first was learning to program I was shocked at the logical mistakes and errors I was making. I thought these were an initial bout of bad luck that would pass. But no! And I learned the craft of debugging before my programming hobby took could really take off.

Programming takes high precision thinking. Learning mathematics is what has tuned my mind to better, more precise, thinking. So I am grateful for this and feel I am a much better programmer for it. It also seems to sharpen up ones debugging skills.

There are other things that help also. Second, I'd say learning to write well helps a lot also. Programming is communication (by way of the source code you leave behind for others to read and interpret). A deft hand for exposition sits at the centre of good naming practices for code.

I think pg is one of the best placed people to critique the situation because he knows what a start-up is and how to do one, he's in the same tier of society (top tier wealth), and he knows what is takes to run a social network.

The "it is going to be hardcore from here" email the CEO sent to Tesla employees 'worked', but the same email to Twitter employees resulted in significant resignations. I think the CEO was shocked and this underlies pg's point.

Given that it was a forced buy, the game was always that of a corporate raider approach - go in, make the unpleasant but needed decisions, and then sell out as soon as the value uptick became realisable. pg applauded the cut to staff IIRC.

CEO should have taken a leaf out of Rupert Murdoch's book - as the owner don't write the headlines - let the editor do that. Being behind the scenes to just make the most considered accurate business decisions was the right way.

If instead you are out in front of the public, you're emotional side will kick in due to the slings-and-arrows coming from the audience. Hence the wrong decisions will be made.

You can't wear both the hats of 'eccentric' Corporate Jester and Corporate Raider at the same time. The Dave Chapelle boo-ing incident just underlies this.

I see reading as a knowledge compression function. So it is efficient to read something that the writer otherwise spent a long time assembling.

But reading is just a route to quality thinking. Another route is via technical debate. You verbally describe a problem and solution and then your peers drill into that and offer counterpoints. This is in my experience as beneficial as reading due its interactive aspect - which reading does not offer.

I'm glad someone pointed out these things, as I concur. I learnt C++ via the C++ programming language book, and it gave me many of the above benefits/insights. (The book has its faults though). It is akin to trawling through the CLRS book. It does make you a better programmer but no-one knows why. (An attempt at sarcasm - I know most of us never need to do advanced data structures/algorithms but it helps refine the mind for programming challenges).

The article focuses on the financial world. Historically in the UK (and elsewhere) finance roles have had strong interest for applicants, and high salaries were on offer. So the industry could pick the "most talented".

Now the model has broken down which is the motivation for the article. That's because the "talented" C++ developers have been hived off by the big tech firms (which can pay equivalent salaries or more), or the top video game companies (which generally pay low but make up for it in fun).

What remains are the "normal" developers. But their nature of business means you can't achieve a market edge with that level of talent, all else being equal.

This was never the case for COBOL because that was deployed to keep the business running, not for creating unique value and market edge. So "normal" developers work out just fine.

Finance firms hire a lot of talented graduates. They need to work against their natural inclinations, and provide training and mentorship to get those folks up to speed with C++; a long journey. They don't want to do it due to being seen as providing a cross-subsidy to their competitors when the graduates switch companies.

It is very possible to do this if you are a contractor working on a tech stack that people consider “legacy” because the software built on this will more likely be in a maintenance/bug fix phase (as a broad generalisation).

Pure bug fixing can be like being paid to solve coding puzzles. But of course often bugs are at the intersection of non technical factors other folks here have mentioned.

The proposal was unstable on both sides in fact. Jobs didn't fully appreciate the importance of power efficiency at the time - an internal team scrambled to demonstrate why Intel would have been a non-starter due to power budget. There were also ecosystem issues, since gearing up for an embedded device at that time mostly meant choosing ARM architecture for that complexity tier they were engineering.

So a deal based on any price wasn't a realistic avenue for iPhone. The fact that Intel was actually considered was itself a radical move on behalf of Steve (absent the technical obstacles that emerged later).

Actually that is the "Innovator's Dilemma" in action. Managers will always prefer to safeguard and enhance the high margin aspects of the business and discourage/under-invest in low margin disruptor aspects of the business due to cannibalization of profits and thus missing profit guidance for the quarter (thus losing compensation personally). They knew the tide was changing but organisation dynamics prevents a course correction.

Only a few companies can buck the Innovator's Dilemma, usually only founder led enterprises with significant control.

Ironically once I studied a part of TAOCP dealing with parallel bit computation as I heard it would help with a Chip vendor I was applying to for a job. The end-of-day boss fight interview arrived with a puzzle I directly solved with my TAOCP knowledge. The result was they failed me on the interview. They said the job wouldn't stretch me. As the years have passed I wonder if what I should have said was "there's no way I could solve this but I know about it from TAOCP already so this is what you do ..."

My attitude is that take-home tests should be given to candidates if they cannot share work they've already done.

This creates a win-win incentive because it would become standard in our industry to have a portfolio of GitHub contributions, a stack overflow profile, etc. At least those artefacts are helpful to a wider community as well as showing your abilities.

Couple this with an open ended technical conversation with the engineer, progressively drilling down on items they know about to see the depth of their skillset, you will understand the key skills they can present for the job opportunity.

Great to see the code up there on GitHub. So many cogent points made here. It brings it all back to me. What happened there from Symbian to Nokia and then Accenture ought to be taught in MBA programmes as a Greek tragedy.

SV companies are heavily loaded up with engineers that passed leetcode style tests. Not everyone though, due to acquisitions - engineers get grandfathered in. Leetcode coders implicitly will bias to hire other leetcode coders. There will be non-SWE departments, Program Managers etc. who might be hired via the MBA-tribe. So in the end, you end up with a mix of skills (or a mix of stereotypes) in a typical SV company. I think if it were strictly just leetcoder types the company would be a disaster (but I have no data or examples - I am interested to hear about if other folks know examples).

This model of operation feels kooky but it does work on various levels (but fails in some also e.g. as panglossian fantasies ). The overall hodgepodge results in SV dominance we see today in many sectors.

Leetcode is self-fulfilling now. It's like a ticket on to the prestige and mega-bucks ride a lot of engineers desire. People pay for the ticket with 3-4 months study. Those that cannot make the time, say due to family circumstances, are actually part of the implicit unfair bias in the system.

I think what works best is when Leetcode is part of the gauntlet but not the whole game. A genuinely good person, in terms of character, together with good programming skills is what I've seen as a company's best asset. An open ended technical focussed discussion on specifically what the engineer has done lifts the lid on that part of things.

Yes, https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep580cf25b... explains how to MDM them for OOB management. (Lights out management).

I think one of the best things about school is the timetable. You don't need to be there too much of each day, and there are generous periods of holiday. What this means is that you have lots of time on your own to go deep and explore the thing you are most interested in, whilst having enough broad knowledge of the stuff you should know via the school curriculum. School kind of offers you a taste of so many things, so you get a chance to see what your inclinations are.

People seem to think teachers can just deliver into you excellence, but excellence comes from within, and hopefully you are in an environment which permits you to grow and develop under your own personal efforts and dedication (i.e. stable home environment, warmth, food, etc.).

You've hit the nail on the head here.

Education is primarily a prestige product. Secondarily, the social and alumni effects of the network around you when you attend. Thirdly, it is the college campus experience. Fourthly, it is what you actually learn.

If you just price the value of each of these four pieces, the dynamic in the market is completely explained. Community college still provides learning, but not much on the other three factors. That is, it has become poor value for the fees it charges despite them being lower in absolute terms than prestige schools.

I'm an author of a book also published through Amazon Direct Publishing. I've documented how my book is put together with source code, so if you want to produce something suitable for self-publishing, have a look at: https://github.com/faisalmemon/ios-crash-dump-analysis-book

I make very little money on the book itself because I have a free web-based version hosted on GitHub. However, I don't know how many sales I've foregone because of this.

Curious thing about it is that the GitHub analytics tells you how interested people are in your book. My in-progress book has much more interest just from the analytics. (The Road to Zero. This book explains how to develop your own zero day vulnerabilities for iOS.)

Another thing I think is important is to know the difference between a subject book and a topic book. Subject books provide a wide coverage for a domain. You can make a lot of money if it is a hit. Topic books drill just one detail but authoritatively and comprehensively, so gain you reputation rather than money.

For me, the pleasure is in the research and writing of a book, and having people read it. Professionally, I see it as advertising for my skills. I've landed a FANG role as a result and it certainly makes contracting for roles easier.

I think is this a good document and it also brings to the table the threshold images count (around 30) and the alternate neural hash they will keep private (to guard against adverserial images trying to create a false positive on-device).

FWIW, I actually did an amateur threat model analysis in a comment in separate HN thread. I always thought this was called for because the initial document set was just the mathematics, not the people/process/implementation/policy risks and threat model that was the source of widespread concerns.

I think the situation is clear when we think of this development from a threat modelling perspective.

Consider a back-door (subdivided into code-backdoors and data-backdoors) placed either on-device or on-cloud. (4 possibilities)

Scanning for CP is available to Apple on-cloud (in most countries). Scanning for CP is available to the other countries on-cloud (e.g. China users have iCloud run by a Chinese on shore provider). Scanning for CP is not available to Apple on-device (until now)

This is where the threat model comes in. Intelligence agencies would like a back door (ideally both Code and Data).

This development creates an on-device data-backdoor because scanning for CP is done via a neural network algorithm plus the use of a database of hashes supplied by a third party.

If the intelligence service poisons the hashes database then it won't work because the neural network scans for human flesh and things like that, not other kinds of content. So the attack works for other sexual content but not political memes. It is scope-limited back door.

For it to be a general back door, the intelligence agency would need the neural network (part of apple's on-device code) and well as the hashes database to be modified. So that is both requiring a new code back door (Apple has resisted this), and a data back door both on-device.

Currently Apple has resisted:

Code back doors (on device) Data back doors on device (until now)

and Apple has allowed Data back doors in cloud (in certain countries) Code back doors in cloud (in certain countries)

In reality the option to not place your photos in iCloud is a euphemism for "don't allow any data backdoor". That is because iCloud is a data-backdoor due to it being able to be scanned (either by Apple or an on-shore data provider).

My analysis is that the on-device scanning does not improve Apple's ability to identify CP since it does so on iCloud anyway. But if my analysis is incorrect, I'd be genuinely interested if anyone can correct me on this point.

In those days Microsoft had a "curious" business strategy. They wanted Windows to be the dominant standard whilst trying to avoid monopoly litigation. So they'd charge everyone a license fee knowing that standard businesses would pay up, and those that wouldn't or couldn't were allowed to crack the software and use it. That portion of the market, the "piracy" sector wasn't in their view part of their market share numbers (they would say they weren't a monopoly). But having this in place meant it was harder for competitors to sub-divide the market into other Operating Systems and Enterprise productivity software. So it would end up as either Open Source or Windows. This is why they didn't reduce their prices for purchasing power parity purposes (to make it equally affordable in each market). The rich countries could drive their profits, and everyone else had a "free" ride just to shut the door on a competitor.

Of course, the history of Microsoft and Anti-trust litigation is well documented. Things didn't entirely work out for them.