moandcompany

Does anyone miss Meatless Mondays?

SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.

Too big to burn

Yep... Along with this

Verification aligns with a specification. E.g. verify if what was implemented matches what was specified.

Validation aligns with a requirement. E.g. verify if what was implemented solves the actual problem.

Understand what your boss's boss cares about and make sure your work can described in relation to those goals or concerns.

You can use nvidia-smi to set a target maximum power draw and performance mode to bring idle power levels down. Also make sure your computer is using the server/headless mode driver to keep idle power consumption down.

Google and Meta/Facebook have generally aligned and numerically equivalent levels for the main Software Engineer and Engineering Manager ladders.

Adding a correction on above ->

L7 is Senior Staff Engineering Manager (M2)

L6 is Staff Engineering Manager (M1)

they are of equal level to the SWE ladder L6 and L7 titles

It's been a few years, but from what I recall, a Principal is a Director-equivalent (L8) level.

The prior poster is missing the L7 tier, which is Senior Staff Engineering Manager for the Engineering Manager Ladder.

L8 is a Director on the Engineering Manager Ladder L8 is a Principal on the Software Engineer (SWE) Ladder.

Tech-Lead Managers (TL/M or TLMs) were on the SWE Ladder.

For reference:

Software Engineer Ladder

L8 - Principal Software Engineer

L7 - Senior Staff Software Engineer

L6 - Staff Software Engineer

L5 - Senior Software Engineer

L4 - Software Engineer II

L3 - Software Engineer (new graduates would start here)

----------------------

L2 and below exists in rare occasions.

Engineering Manager Ladder

L8 - Director

L7 - Staff Engineering Manager

L6 - Engineering Manager (M1)

L5 - Engineering Manager (M0 - normally this level does not exist for external hires and is for the rare situation when a SWE is converting to the Engineering Manager ladder)

Adding some additional context on most of the above:

Yes, as commissioned US military officers they become subject to UCMJ.

USDS and DDS employees are/were civilian federal employees with capacity for legal authority to act on behalf of the US Government.

DoD and its branches have uniformed service members subject to UCMJ, but they also have many civilian employees with decision making authority and ultimately the services report to civilian secretaries; the ratio of uniformed service members (e.g. enlisted, and commissioned officers) to civilians can vary greatly by service. Another main difference to consider beyond UCMJ would be eligibility to be considered a combatant versus not; not all uniformed personnel should be considered combatants. "Authority" is not exclusive to uniformed personnel.

Many DoD programs can be led or managed by civilians, typically a GS-15 which is roughly equivalent to O-6 (e.g. Army/Air Force/Space Force Colonel, Navy Captain)

If I recall correctly, Palantir's main starting point beyond some of its fraud-tracking origins at Paypal were through its attempts to compete in the DCGS-A / replacement acquisition in DoD.

Crowdstrike had Dmitry, but its main US Government ties were through Shawn Henry, a former director of investigative operations at the FBI; Crowdstrike had a few business lines in its early days, which included its intel/research/analysis services, breach investigation/remediation services, while it was developing its endpoint protection products/platform.

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And to the upstream parent comment:

> The key difference is the DDS folks were not uniformed military. That can make all the difference when trying to sell your product or service to a military decision maker.

A lot of DoD acquisitions, developments, operations decisions end up being materially informed by civilian personnel that are direct employees of the US Government, contractors supporting the US Government via Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations (FFRDCS, labs, etc.), other contractors, etc. In some cases, it seems like the DoD programs are entirely reliant (i.e. dependent) on their contractor support (via FFRDCs, labs, etc).

Some of this comes from the fact that the typical active duty officer's assignment duration in a particular role (e.g. acquisition program manager, chief engineer, etc) ends up being two years or less before a permanent change of assignment (PCA). Having organic civilian staff in these roles can be essential for maintaining continuity and can be a key part of a program/mission's success.

(Also worth noting that in a lot of cases where the head of a program is a civilian employee, it's not uncommon to find that are military retired, prior service but separated, and/or also a reserve officer in the same or very adjacent field)

Sometimes you have to go with the least dirty shirt in the hamper

Concur. This is part of why Suite A ciphers (algorithms) exist, and the second component includes robust key management practices are so important (this includes hardening of devices to prevent leakage of signals that could compromise those keys or the cryptographic processes themselves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography

"Zonal" relates to the concept of "availability zones" which are the next-smallest unit below a (physical) "region."

Most instances of a cloud ___ created in a region are allocated and exist at the zonal level (i.e. a specific zone of a region).

A physical "region" usually consists of three or more availability zones, and each zone is physically separated from other zones, limiting the potential for foreseeable disaster events from affecting multiple zones simultaneously. Zones are close enough networking-wise to have high throughput and low latency interconnection, but not as fast as same-rack, same-cluster communications.

Systems requiring high availability (or replication) generally attain this by placing instances (or replicas) in multiple availability zones.

Systems requiring high-availability generally start with multi-zone replication, and Systems with even higher availability requirements may use multi-region replication, which comes at greater cost.

Perfect for saline solution, right?

Technically correct is the best kind of correct. Symbolically, in this context, they were seen as diamonds in the sky, aka stars :)

I don't know much about his family life, but it's very plausible that he spent more time working during his lifetime than with his family, and this is a good take. Considering the company's state of affairs, I would assume he was under a tremendous amount of work-related stress during the last few years, if not the majority of his career, peaking in this role.

JH Han came from Samsung's Visual Display (tvs, smart tvs) business unit which is part of Samsungs larger consumer electronics business which includes things such as home appliances. Mobile electronics such as Galaxy brand smart phones are another business, and Han was promoted to lead the businesses spanning all of those groups, which was (re)named to called "Device Experience (DX)". Samsung's semiconductor fabrication and component businesses have normally had a separate "CEO" from the consumer electronics finished products businesses (aka. "SET")

The company name of "Samsung" originates from the founder's admiration of Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi, known as "keiretsu" and their place in its economy; he hoped that his company would also endure as a shining symbol in the sky, like stars. Mitsubishi means three stars in Japanese language.

Samsung the company started as something resembling a dry goods market.

1) This appears to be what Apple has concluded by the action they're taking and implied by the premise of the article, versus my personal opinion.

2) The examples given may have been produced by AI/ML-based technologies developed at Apple, but may not have been the work of Apple's AI/ML Organization. Many "groups" (divisions) within Apple have their own teams using AI/Machine Learning (e.g. AI/ML Org coexisting with AI/machine-learning work and teams in TDG/VPG, SPG (special projects group: the one previously working on a car), etc.

Given the size of Apple and these orgs, plausible. Siri also had a bunch of folks that came in from outside, through acquisitions, and did their own thing or tried to identify themselves and their roles as something different from Apple norms.

Apple had teams involved with AI/ML in several divisions also, from AI/ML (including Siri), TDG/VPG, SPG...

JG is famous for research teams doing "hillclimbing" but the organizations doing this seldom thought deeply about where they were hoping to end up, what would be good-enough, or when it would be time to find a new hill.

The Vision/Vision Pro product was also years behind schedule, based on original expectations, and some people feel that they had to launch something so that's why we got what we got.

A few quick cliffs notes plus added info:

John "JG" Giannandrea was hired over to Apple around 2018 to head Apple's new AI/ML division, which would include the Siri organization that predates Giannandrea's tenure at Apple. Giannandrea was previously the executive in charge of Google's Research division.

Mike Rockwell was hired into Apple from Dolby Labs around 2015 to head a group called "TDG" that would be the R&D and the product group for what we know today as Apple Vision, an AR/VR headset. The same organization had its own AI/ML applied research teams focused on computer vision problems, and had hired in folks from Microsoft's Hololens team.

From what the article describes, the Siri organization is being moved from Giannandrea's scope to sit under Rockwell, and Rockwell will be moving away from the Apple Vision organization.

Apple hired Giannandrea to build an organization like the one he led at Google, and appears to have found that that the AI/ML organization built at Apple struggled to manifest its work into successful product wins despite the massive financial investment. It's worth noting that at Google, Giannandrea was succeeded by Jeff Dean, and the organization was more recently reorged to become the "Google Deepmind" we know today also had the same struggles.

Alphabet/Google have GCP, VirusTotal, Chronicle, and Mandiant under their umbrella already.

In theory they do have access and should, but in practice they don't.

Samsung's flagship mobile phone products tend to ship with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in competitive markets, such as USA/North America, versus their "in-house" Exnyos SoC used in markets where consumers tend to have less choice (e.g. Samsung S-series phones with Snapdragon for USA, Exnyos for EU and KDM markets)

I didn't see Founder, Angel-Investor, growth-hacker, ex-Google Tech Lead in the samples...

> Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?

This is the result of Apple being vertically integrated and reusing components from other product lines in products like Apple TV. The SoC used in the Apple TV are from lower-tier bins of chips produced for mobile applications.

With the Apple TV, you are getting a SoC that is effectively the same as a recent-year iPhone. With most other Smart TV devices you are getting a low computational power SoC, Raspberry Pi tier, with processing blocks that are optimized for the video playback and visual processing use cases.

Apple also does this with the iPhone where the non-flagship variants will reuse components or designs from prior years.

Television/Smart TV manufacturer margins are in the single-digit percentages and the Samsung and LG tv businesses are significantly threatened since their high-volume products have been commoditized from Chinese producer competition. Most potential customers are shopping based on screen size per dollar, versus specs like peak luminance and contrast ratios. Flagship TV products like "The Wall" are low-volume halo products. Lifestyle products like "The Frame" exist because they are able to differentiate to certain segments of customers that place enough value the packaging aesthetics to buy a higher priced product with better margins for the manufacturers.

Most other hardware device manufacturers are jealous of Apple's margins. Nvidia would probably be one of the few exceptions.

Thin margins on commodity tier products drive these manufacturers to cut their BOM costs as much as possible, even if it makes the product worse in other ways. This is also the big driver for why ads are appearing as part of the Smart TV experience at the device/screen level. Vizio for example shared that they made more money from their ACR business than they did from the device sales themselves. There are companies with business models based around giving you the screen for "free" in exchange for permanent ad-space. Even adjacent products and companies like Roku have business models where they are selling their hardware at near break-even cost points because their business model is built around 'services' from having a large user audience.

> "We are a fintech startup helping SMEs raise capital from our platform where we provide diverse financial products ranging from Term Loan, Revenue Based Financing to Syndication, we face one unique data challenge: Our data comes from everywhere."

Reading carefully: the result of this work yields an expected $21,000 USD in annual operating cost savings for infrastructure services.

Is this resume driven development?

What was the opportunity cost of this work? Is the resulting system more or less maintainable by future employees/teammates?

I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems.

They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors

It would be interesting to analyze a dataset of commercially sold prepared "coffee" drinks from vendors like Starbucks to see how many are actually coffee, versus coffee-flavored soft drinks, and how this changed over the last few decades.