rockemsockem

The contradiction is that breaking up Google and Amazon would also destroy categories of business where the United States is dominant over other countries.

Prevent them from buying their competitors, for sure, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there are many neat ways to parcel these companies up into neat little independent business units. There is at best a very small number of ways to do this and the government will not get it right, just look at their most recent attempt with Google to strip out Chrome of all things.

Just to be clear on my stance,I agree that blocking the irobot deal was absurd. Context matters in a big way, clearly they were struggling and were basically alone in the market as an American company.

I think you also need to apply that context to Google and Amazon and consider whether the government would do so wisely.

Never on time, but always eventually.

Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this.

I doubt it though

There are some other benefits like having different release cycles for core infrastructure that must never go down vs a service that greatly benefits from a fast pace of iteration.

Literally one function per service though is certainly overkill though unless you're pretty small and trying to avoid managing any servers for your application.

For those numbers, yeah you should absolutely do that. But you might want to host your database on different machines than your application because the numbers will likely differ by much more than a few hundred MBs.

Good point, I was primarily thinking of engineering reasons, but alas there are indeed other concerns.

Splitting up responsibilities into separate services should in fact primarily be done to reduce costs.

There is in fact software that consumes large amounts of resources for fundamental reasons that saves real dollars when it is split into different units for the purpose of scaling those units independently. Most of that software is not primarily dealing with the number of connections it has.

What are you talking about.

When people talk about scaling requirements they are not referring to minutiae like "this function needs X CPU per request and this other function needs Y CPU per request", they are talking about whether particular endpoints are primarily constrained by different things (i.e. CPU vs memory vs disk). This is important because if I need to scale up machines for one endpoint that requires X CPU but the same service has another endpoint requiring Y memory whereas my original service only needs Z memory and Y is significantly larger than Z then suddenly you have to pay a bunch of extra money to scale up your CPU-bound endpoint because you are co-hosting it with a memory-bound endpoint.

If all your endpoints just do some different logic and all hit a few redis endpoints, run a few postgres queries, and assemble results then keep them all together!!!

EDIT: my original post even included the phrase "significantly different" to describe when you should split a service!!! It's like you decided to have an argument with someone else you've met in your life, but directed it at me

You need multiple services whenever the scaling requirements of two components of your system are significantly different. That's pretty much it. These are often called micro services, but they don't have to actually be "micro"

Seems like that would be pretty huge.

Except Apple is the one making file sharing hard between non-Apple devices and they aren't making most of their money on ads

I am very much not an AI skeptic, I use AI every day for work, and it's quite clear to me that most of the layoffs of the past few years are correcting for the absurd over hiring from the Covid era. Every software company really convinced themselves that they needed like 2-3x the workforce they actually did because "the world changed". Then it became clear that the world in fact did not fundamentally change in the ways they thought.

Chat GPT just happened to come out around the same time so we get all this misattribution

You say you've used AI tools for code review and deploys, but do you ever just use chat GPT as a faster version of Google for things like understanding a language you aren't familiar with, finding bugs in existing code, or generating boilerplate?

Really I only use chat GPT and sometimes Claude code, I haven't used these special-cased AI tools

I agree about the summaries! I think AI is applied in a lot of bad ways ATM although TBH I've heard some people like the summaries

I do agree that there seems to be a bubble, imo it's largely in the application space with the likes of cursor being valued at $23B+, but I don't see GPU purchases going down anytime soon and I don't even see usage going down. If these overhyped apps fail then it seems like something else will take their place. The power that LLMs provide is just too promising. It seems like those predicting things like a global economic crisis or the new big model-providers like OpenAI going to 0 just think that AI is like NFTs with no real intrinsic value.

There's a weird gleefulness about AI being a bubble that'll pop any day now both in this thread and in the world at large. It's kinda weird and I find most of the predictions about the result of such a bubble popping to sound highly exaggerated.

I'd say the most mundane thing I use chat GPT for is to tell me which deeply nested menu some option is in for software I don't use very often.

I feel like most people would get value out of that.

Most recent example from a few days ago 'How do I change settings around spacing for "heading 2" in a document?'

If you're talking about all of AI with your statement I think you may need to reconcile that opinion with the fact that chat GPT alone has almost 1 billion daily users. Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI.

If there's something more specific and different you were referring to I'd love to hear what it is.

Sounds impressive enough to probably get a senior role somewhere. Maybe you aren't selling yourself well in your resume?

IMO it's always been a red flag if a company doesn't do coding screens, even if someone at the company says they're good. There's just too many awful programmers out there to be willing to move forward with a candidate on word of mouth alone.

It really sounds like you just need to brush up on your interviewing skills, maybe some leetcode practice, maybe you just need someone to stare at you while you solve problems to get over the nerves of the situation.

I used to practice in an environment without even basic autocomplete because I felt like it was more effective, maybe something like that would help you.

That's why I said algorithm efficiency and not wall-clock time or something else implying that I was talking about real-time.

If your algorithm is poorly designed and does significantly more work than necessary then that is independent of physical memory.

It's like you are trying to misunderstand me.

As in they didn't ask leetcode-style questions or you solved the same sort of questions no problem?

Are you only applying to senior roles? Idk the specifics of your background, but it sounds like you haven't been somewhere long enough to get promoted and have largely worked on your own projects.

To me that doesn't really say that you have senior engineer skills, i.e. designing scalable systems (both in compute and development-wise), leading multi-person projects, considering trade-offs, etc.

All of software engineering is not derivative of memory organization. Algorithm efficiency for example is entirely independent of physical memory implementations. Just because an algorithm may use a set or an array does not make it derivative.

> This is why any EE/ECE grads are much better developers than CS grads, because once you understand fundamentals

This is largely not the case in my experience. They probably understand the lower level details of manipulating memory better, but there's a lot more to developing software than understanding that memory is a specific place.

There are plenty of non political conversations on Reddit, it's a really big site.

I think you're both correct and I think your analogy about Reddit being a minefield is perfected if we imagine that it's a minefield in a beautiful place.

Great experience with one step and blown to bits with one small step in a different direction.

Right, to catch a predator managed to catch people without needing to backdoor stuff. These people are just lazy and incompetent, potentially intentionally.

Do you recognize that a 100,000+ person organization might contain a large number of people who disagree with any random project at any given time?

This has happened before.