3,400 karma · joined March 15, 2012
This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.
Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.
It makes the economy more efficient by reducing transportation costs, reducing carbon emissions etc.
It allows companies to hire from locations that they previously thought were unviable.
It helps employees spend less time in traffic and more time with their loved ones.
There may be some negative side-effects, such as making it harder to provide guidance to new hires, holding unmotivated employees accountable etc. But I think these problems should be manageable. Some ways to manage them would be: building more on-boarding resources (videos, documents, etc.), having regular virtual meetings with new hires and status meetings with unmotivated employees etc. It may be a good idea to pair new hires with each other on some projects or require new hires to come to office once in a while.
Ideally, companies should work around the problems with virtual work because remote work has certainly demonstrated its benefits. Let's hope that they will find those ways and improve the work-life situation for many of us.
Why are they happy?
For example, why not name "car" function as "first", "head" or "beginning"? Why not name "cdr" as "rest", "tail", "end" or "back"?
In other words, Meta is conducting business as usual.
> That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and on and on. These all get added to the system partition and often aren't removable.
Samsung is free to install software that they want on the phone, but they should make them removable. Having two versions of everything has implications for performance, security, and other non-functional requirements.
Often, people say that you should only automate things if it saves you time overall: spend 5 minutes writing a script only if it saves you 6 minutes. However, not all minutes are equal. 5 minutes when you are close to a deadline is far more valuable than 5 minutes when you are "idling".
For this reason, I always appreciate it if tools are written with automatability in mind, even if they may not save a lot of time when automated. If I have to use PyAutoGui for every automation I write, I think it will be a lot more brittle than I like. If it uses two-factor authentication, it makes the automation even less "flow-breaking".
We may still be in the early innings of the network automation game.
One factor that makes network automation hard is that networking is still lagging behind other resources (such as storage, compute, etc.) in openness and modularity.
Network devices, in many places, use proprietary gear from Cisco, etc. that has a custom user interface (modern Cisco devices do have bash).
Many networks are still managed using older protocols such as SNMP although newer protocols such as OpenConfig seem to be gaining ground.
Many companies are trying to disaggregate networks (commodity hardware + Linux) but it still has not taken off that much. Many interesting projects (such as switchdev) are languishing. Big companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon etc are building their own Network OSes (FBoss, SONiC, DentOS, etc) rather than consolidating under a common standard.
Lack of resources does not help. Even Wikipedia did not have articles on basic networking concepts until recently. The textbooks that teach this subject talk about older abandoned protocols.
We will see improved automation techniques in networking as time progresses.
For example, it should be possible to build websites for downloading YouTube videos that does not use server side code execution or bandwidth. These were popular at some point but disappeared after Java applets stopped being supported by most browsers.
If you do not have WhatsApp it has become very difficult to navigate life. For example, I had uninstalled it before going to college but had to reinstall it when I realized it might stop me from graduating.
Therefore, tying a standard to a reference implementation, especially one as reputed as SQLite, might not have been a bad outcome overall.
On a side note: the difficulty in blocking ads has shown me how much control I have lost over my devices.
Modern social networks, save hacker news, looks over-engineered.
It is difficult to find the right balance between over and under engineering, however Orkut could have used a couple of features: strict moderation and threaded conversations, but that was it.
How do you run this selection process? One way to do this is to ask the applicants who are all the candidates who can do the job. But this is a lousy way. Some people might simply say they are qualified even though they are not.
Recruiters obviously need some way to filter out the candidates who cannot do the job. But let's say that even after doing that, the number of qualified candidates are still greater than N. What do you do now? Obviously, the company should hire those individuals who, when hired, maximizes the value to the firm over the tenure of the candidate at the company.
Obviously, the company cannot simply ask the candidates who are the most valuable, because each person might respond that it is they themselves.
So, the company is ultimately looking for certain signals. These signals, if present, indicate that the candidate, when hired, will bring maximum value to the company over their tenure.
However, once the candidates understand that these are the signals that a company is looking for, they can fake it[1]. For example, in this case, the candidate figured out that the company asks toy problems in the interview and memorized the answer, albeit in this case, accidentally. However, nothing is stopping a candidate from doing this deliberately. In this case, the author is reliably able to emit this "toy problem solving skill" signal even though he may not have been able to solve the problem in the time allotted during the interview. However, the company was unable to detect this possibly false signal and therefore, he was hired. In this case, it does not look like a bad outcome for most people involved
This problem of minimizing false positives would be an interesting problem to solve. A company that solves this problem well will probably enjoy a huge competitive advantage in the market.
This is not true. People in the Indian state of West Bengal also speak Bengali and have a Bengali identity. The split of Bengal into West Bengal and Bangladesh was based on religion.