They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack.
With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
I've gotten way more out of open sourcing software than I ever could have by trying to sell the same software. Not all value is monetary, and participating in open source creates different types of technical capital (reputational, barter, scratch-your-own-itch, etc). If you want to sell software, all of a sudden you're playing a very different game that is way more marketing/sales and way less technical.
There's nothing wrong with that, but know what you're signing up for. If you just want to be paid like a carpenter, contracting for time and materials is the standard way to do that, much easier than starting a software company.
Yeah but what do you want to do about it? The engineers I see making these mistakes day-to-day are not going to connect the dots if I just point them to the seminal writings. Heck, half of their complaints are of the same form as yours: if only the majority of [engineers, colleagues, stakeholders] were aware of [A, B, C principles] then we could avoid repeating [X, Y, Z failures]. Yeah it's exhausting, life is exhausting, and it doesn't inherently get better with knowledge and experience as the gap to the lowest common denominator only increases; the only balm I've found is focusing on what I can control.
We’re currently around 30 in engineering full time and 40 if you include ops, logistics etc…with new funding and coming out of stealth etc we expect to hit the dunbar number (~150 this year)
This is not true. Most fast-growing private tech companies with valuations a fraction of OpenAIs switch from ISOs to RSUs because exercise costs start to become prohibitive.
Of course they aren’t liquid yet, but they’re still RSUs, and it’s much more common than OpenAIs profit shares structure
That's just it though, the "news" is not providing valuable information to the majority of people, it's mostly a series of takes designed to fit into easily digestible narratives so they can attract enough viewers to survive as a business.
No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
Who are the people in the room (including you) and what are they responsible and/or accountable for? There's a time and place to say "that's a bad idea", but typically it's 1:1 or very small groups not in a broad team setting. You also can't always be the naysayer, it is political capital based on a proven track record of saying what we should do instead—not necessarily in the same venue, but if you're just a perpetual pessimist it's of no more value than the irrational exuberance of the naive optimist.
Not sure if I understand your question but nothing "happens to the rest", overcommitting just means processes can allocate memory in excess of RAM + swap. The percentage is arbitrary, could be 50%, 100% or 1000%. Allocating additional memory is not a problem per se, it only becomes a problem when you try to actually write (and subsequently read) more than you have.
With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
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