rrrx3

This is nice.

fairs... lemme go log 17 hours in an airport to make it authentic

grass touching not allowed. shareholder profits must increase

ahhh, sonnet shitting the bed explains why I started getting prompted for basic approvals last night and early this morning

In less than 3 years we’ve completely redefined how we interact with computers, and Zitron’s saying that there’s no way that investment in that pays off. He moves the goalposts every time something new proves him wrong.

To me, that’s not only not a credible stance, it’s immensely stupid.

The only way anyone could logically take that stance in the face of all the evidence otherwise is if their entire livelihood depended on it.

Oh… wait.

Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be

that or "Angry but doesn't know much"

I was a fan of his writing for a long time, but it's clear that the guy has fallen down the "build an audience that's only here for baying for blood on one particular topic" hole and won't be able to escape it.

He used to be really thoughtful and funny about the topics he took on. And I realize that's pretty standard for a critic. But now he just keeps digging deeper and deeper, getting more things wrong post after post. His posts have grown to probably 3x the frequency and 3x the length of when he was talking about stuff like Google tanking their Search business by bringing in the Ad guys.

He really used to be a "little extreme" with some really grounded viewpoints. Now it's more like he's performing the "angry british guy" in order to maintain his impression count and audience.

It reminds me a LOT of that Eli Schiff guy in the design world. A mediocre designer who couldn't get untangled from one specific design style, who figured out that anger drives clicks. Schiff became a "design critic" who eventually fell down the alt-right pathway and ended up becoming a pariah. I'm not saying Zitron is gonna turn into some right wing nutjob, but he's falling down the nutjob path right now in real time by consistently staking out the worst ungrounded takes and continually doubling down on them.

Needs dumber, less capable models for the exec roles.

What does your strawman argument about a hypothetical regression in SQLite have to do with this? What would a regression in the Windows Calculator have to do with this? What does your whataboutism prove here? Nothing.

A mistake was made. There are well worn paths for fixing the mistake. Acting like a giant fucking petulant pissbaby is not the critical path to getting things fixed and is deeply corrosive to the positive collaborative environment we’ve all spent decades building within shared, community software.

Get the fuck over yourself.

> My guess is people are tired of the "AI is the greatest thing since [cultural reference]" being forced down their throat and grasp at every straw to combat it, which is a sane response in my opinion and should be taken into account.

Let's engage in some parallelism then

This happens with literally everything in our society. Right now, every single food product seems to be infused with protein. In the past, they've had GMOs removed, MSG removed, been Fiber-infused... the list goes on and on.

We don't see people bullying and threatening grocery store clerks and managers over clear hype-cycle bullshit. Why? Because every rational person knows this is pure nonsense.

This behavior is NOT sane.

As many others have pointed out, this is just a regression that occurred during regular software development. There's nothing remarkable here that makes it AI-specific, other than that the contributions were AI-assisted. Regressions in software happen. You roll back to a stable version and make a bug report. You don't shit your diaper and sling it at the maintainer.

Acting like a giant fucking douche is NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOR.

"Mystery" doing a whole lot of heavy lifting in that headline

The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering teams has to be less than 0.1%.

The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.

The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.

Just your typical late-stage capitalism shit.

As a former adtech guy, as a general rule of thumb, I consider _all ads everywhere_ to be scams.

Apple using Taboola is so hysterical because of their claim to focus on user experience. Taboola ads are a chumbox of the absolute worst bullshit ads on the market. The only thing worse is the zergnet stuff.

The argument against this is that shovelware has a distinctly different distribution model now.

App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.

Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.

The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.

I love how quickly things are being added. It has really started to make up for years of stagnancy and "I wish CSS could..."

Something a bit more granular - think like design mode in v0. Essentially a panel that exposes UI component styling props.

I read your other comment - didn't even know about the agents, going to play with them ASAP.

Been using this for a few weeks now, and I love it. I'd love it if yall could add some more design controls!

I use my $20/mo plan with Claude Code pretty happily, regularly hitting the limits through the day at a good pace, with nice cool-downs in between while I wait.

I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?

Indeed. But keep in mind they weren't just buying the tooling - they get the team, the brand, and the positional authority as well. OpenAI could have spun up a team to build an agent code IDE, and they would have been starting on the back foot with users, would have been compared to Cursor/Windsurf...

The price tag is hefty but I figure it'll work out for them on the backside because they won't have to fight so hard to capture TAM.

So many good memories from Kali!

I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role

we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)

For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.

In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.

I love this. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to steal it for when I am back in the saddle interviewing folks. We need much more of this and a lot less of the adversarial BS.

Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.

> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.

I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.

>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.

This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

pendo, as well

Litmus, testi@, Email on Acid, InboxMonster, SendForensics, Email Preview Services…

Most if not all also support stuff like deliverability, DMARC testing, Analytics, Accessibility, as well as web-based render testing. I think rendering engine wise, Testi@ has the largest device/platform coverage. Or at least last I checked.

Another +1 for Screen studio. I use it legitimately daily in my Product Design job, and not just for customer-facing demo videos.

Clorox just fired their CISO last week for a data breach

It is terrible. Nearly unusable without an ad blocking solution. I've happily been using AdBlock (generic name, great app) on iOS for years as a local VPN and feeding it with the same filter lists I use on desktop like EasyList, Peter Lowe's List, etc. It works reasonably well, and I rarely need to disable it (but still have to sometimes).

Trying not to sound like an advert for it, I'm just a guy who uses it, likes it, and thinks the back and forth about "how much better android is" doesn't really help you solve the problem.