"In many ways, the current American presidency and XML have much in common. Both have clear lineages back to very intelligent people. Both demonstrate what happens when you give retards the tools of the intelligent."
The list is just too long now: OOP, COM, CORBA, UML, Scrum, Microservices, JSON RPC, ReactJS, writing shit in JavaScript when you don't have to, LangChain, all of it. It's just fucking stupid and wrong and frankly the software business isn't for everyone.
It doesn't make you a bad person that you're not serious about this shit.
Whether or not training one giant LLM with socially enormous stakes on the output of another commercially-controlled LLM is an interesting question.
My stronger opinion is that the people who can do this stuff via having a crawled corpus of the Internet need to keep in mind that it's all our "user-generated content" that they've freely appropriated to build their models, and so whatever the technical copyright rules are (or become): you don't ethically own something that's closely imitating stuff we all wrote over the years.
For me at least, existing completely without GMail / Google SSO is unrealistic, and the million email corpus that is attached to it would be painful to part with as well.
But I've been trying to slowly de-tangle myself, and for it's faults ProtonMail has been working out pretty OK for me as a compromise between usability and true digital freedom.
Any company can take a turn for the worse, and any time you've got SaaS deep in your stack there's risk there.
I can only say that I worry about TailScale growing up to be evil the least of basically every SaaS company I've ever used. They seem extremely serious about making the interaction a "win/win" and keeping it that way as they grow.
> I'm afraid I don't have a lot to add to this conversation but I have to say I just love Tailscale.
Strongly seconded. In my last company we used TailScale in some medium-advanced configurations, and from the dead-simple basic stuff up though some of the trickier stuff it's just a joy to use.. It's making much better networking practices highly-accessible and I'd bet ends up making the Internet a more secure, better organized system as a whole.
They run an amazingly transparent engineering process, for example their issue page (https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues) is a model of transparent, responsive, involved open development. They embrace cool, modern, quirky stuff like NixOS (https://tailscale.com/blog/nixos-minecraft/). It's just generally really high-quality software developed with a very cool "hacker" philosophy.
TailScale is IMHO the coolest place to work right now, and something that almost any software company should look at if they do any networking.
If there's anything not to love, I can't see it. :)
Tailscale is cool, but if we focus on the product that this post discusses, Funnel won't give you the ability to use your own domain name. Cloudflare Tunnels will do that though. I will continue to use Tunnels.
There is nothing wrong with being the category-defining early-stage investment company, and doing it as a for-profit business that's optimized for good financial outcomes.
I think what some of the insiders (like the OP) and semi-adjacent outsiders (like me) might be feeling a little queasy about is that YC began with a pretty clearly stated goal (in addition to making money) around disrupting the unproductive importance of high-status networks and signaling like elite university educations and to a lot of us (even people who didn't apply like me) that was really inspiring. And to at least some degree, YC is now a high-status network that signals well.
There's nothing uniquely bad about it, it's kind of the default throughout human history, and they are completely transparent about being a for-profit company, but it's also ok to be a little sad that it's not quite as idealistic as it used to be.
A very funny phrasing of some legitimately confusing news.
I keep thinking that there's no way that Brain/DeepMind are just getting stomped, lapped, generation-gapped by e.g. `ChatGPT`: they must have had an internal demo of this sort of thing like 2 years ago, right? At some point the Empire strikes back?
But the rollout and product integration has been so well done, so coordinated and cohesive that it's now just obvious that it was way too soon to count MSFT out of the game. It's all through search and Office 365 and GitHub/CoPilot/etc. and the whole stack in such a legitimately compelling way that you can almost forget that the DNA is Win32.
It's a bad thing to let Microsoft get a stranglehold on developer and user mindshare network effects: the 90s were rough. But with how cool it all is it's very tempting...
Google has almost no business sense, or marketing acumen. They've only ever done one thing well, from a business perspective - create a world class search algo, put it behind a minimalistic web page, and pay for it with ads. And they didn't even come up with that business model: they just did what the competition did, but made the idealistic-nerd version of it.
Everything since then has been a combination of algorithm and compsci research (which they are world-class in; credit where credit's due), vague ideas about things people might like, and copies (or buyouts) of their competition. They remind me of my engineering friends who tried to come up with business plans in college...good at building things, but clueless about figuring out what people actually need, what they should therefore actually build, and how to make it user-friendly. You know, all the stuff that you need if you want to run a business. (As I've said before on hn, their initial competition against youtube is a great example of this)
It's a surprise that a technology came along which upended them so abruptly, but it's been clear for a long time that they were only alive because their search engine couldn't be beat, and they didn't have a clue how to replicate that success.
There seems to be a lot of truth in that, but I think it's also maybe a little harsh as well.
Google hasn't needed to generate another monster revenue stream outside of ad sales, so it's possible that they never really tried all that hard (they've certainly killed it on the things that protect it, notably Android and Chrome). An utterly dominant position in how people access information that lasts for decades is probably "a hell of a drug".
For example, GCP is technically a really, really good cloud offering, maybe even the best for a lot of use cases (if you haven't looked at it lately, Cloud BigTable looks friggin amazing, I wish I'd had that database for the last ten years). They've obviously failed to parley that technical achievement into dominant market share, but maybe with the pressure on around search they get serious about whatever combination of pricing and marketing and customer support that gets them some serious market share.
YouTube has been quietly building their TikTok competitor into something I'm actually starting to waste some time on, they people who work on that are clearly really good at their jobs even if they started a little slow.
And on the LLM space, honestly I'm rooting for them: MSFT/OpenAI/ChatGPT need at least some competition and they are probably the best positioned to do so. Facebook/Meta is also doing this stuff in a more "open" way and that's keeping the pressure on around some competition too.
In general this LLM stuff is going to be a great thing long-term, but letting one company dominate both mindshare and marketshare is going to make that a much rougher road for society than if it's avoided.
Google senior management seems out of touch. It baffles me, since they got the money and the influx of talent. If you got those things, how you use it becomes the problem and that is all on management. Google might have become the old school corporate incapable of innovating or producing new modern business lines. having worked in those corporate environments, I can say that badly incentivized management can kill any giant of industry.
Its been going on for some time. Something that was once a joke in good jest AKA Google's graveyard, is now their actual reputation, and helping their strong big tech competitors when competing on new services.
yes "They've only ever done one thing well, from a business perspective - create a world class search algo, put it behind a minimalistic web page, and pay for it with ads. And they didn't even come up with that business model: they just did what the competition did, but made the idealistic-nerd version of it."
I'm aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find that investing heavily in being able to type fast and handle the tools well actually changes what code I write and not just how quickly.
The faster I've gotten at moving code around, the more subconsciously willing I've been to try something with a modest probability of working out, and more importantly the easier it's gotten to throw away a draft that isn't working out and try again.
LLMs haven't made it into my coding workflow yet, but I can see how they could be useful and the trend seems to be that they'll be in most high-octane workflows at some point.
I think this is true but I also found limiting returns on going faster and at some point your just confident enough to try out if it is a good idea. It also becomes easier to justify, you become more trusted and you evaluate better.
Maybe that makes everyone hit that point easier, maybe it brings that point in for you. Not sure.
I used to attend cross-team meetings with a guy (works for AWS now) who was a tech lead and meeting facilitator. He gathered the agenda, presented during the meeting, assembled notes during the meeting, and distributed the notes via email at meeting conclusion. He keyboarded the entire time, looking up at the projected display. Fastest touch typist I recall seeing.
Yes and no. Most of my stuff is automated, auto completion and micro code gen. My thinking is the bottleneck, never typing speed. Measured it last summer a few times trying to beat my daughter and I think it was about 60wpm. For coding if I know what I'm doing its probably 30wpm in my editor.
Yeah, these days, IDEs like JetBrains are powerful enough that you can pull off significant chunks of refactors with a few right clicks (any sort of renaming, moving of methods, or deletion of code)
Typing will get you places faster, but some of the most productive tools we have don’t rely on it at all.
"Kiddo, every generation thinks they invented sex and fast music."