Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.
These are great and succinct, yours and your teammate’s.
I still find myself debating this internally, but one objective metric is how smoothly my longer PTOs go:
The only times I haven’t received a single emergency call were when I left teammates a a large and extremely specific set of shell scripts and/or executables that do exactly one thing. No configs, no args/opts (or ridiculously minimal), each named something like run-config-a-for-client-x-with-dataset-3.ps1 that took care of everything for one task I knew they’d need. Just double click this file when you get the new dataset, or clone/rename it and tweak line #8 if you need to run it for a new client, that kind of thing.
Looking inside the scripts/programs looks like the opposite of all of the DRY or any similar principles I’ve been taught (save for KISS and others similarly simplistic)
But the result speaks for itself. The further I go down that excessively basic path, the more people can get work done without me online, and I get to enjoy PTO. Anytime i make a slick flexible utility with pretty code and docs, I get the “any chance you could hop on?” text. Put the slick stuff in the core libraries and keep the executables dumb
I see a similar problem in infra-land where people expose too many config variables for too many things, creating more cruft. Knowing what to hardcode and what to expose as a var is something a lot of devs don't seem to understand; and don't realise they don't understand.
Oh definitely, many headaches untangling massive “variables.tf” files where the value is identical in 100% of the target environments, and would be nonsensical to change without corresponding changes in the infra config resources/modules as well.
My favorite are things where security policy mandates something like private networking and RBAC, and certain resources only have meaning in those contexts, for heavens sake why are we making their basic args like “enforce_tls” or “assign_public_ip” or “enable_rbac” into variable params for the user to figure out
Yes I feel that when to apply certain techniques is frequently under-discussed. But I can't blame people for err-ing on the side of 'do everything properly' - as this makes life more pleasant in teams.
Although I think if you squint, the principle still applies to your example. The further you get from the 'core' of your platform/application/business/what-have-you, the less abstract you need to be.
For me, it would be because the term AGI gets bandied about a lot more frequently in discussions involving Gen AI, as if that path takes us any closer to AGI than other threads in the AI field have.
Great insight and advice I need to take - your description captures my current situation almost to a tee, better than I’ve been able to understand it for myself, so thank you.
In addition to what you described, in my case this engineer quickly recognizes other highly-effective and/or important people, and aggressively tries to build that reputation by privately messaging and even privately demoing work where the recipient has some stake in the outcome.
I would onboard him to a project, sharing all of my tools, key contacts and personal insights, e.g.
“our manager Smith is hinting that there is a big customer interested in X capability, which I’ve discussed with their power user Wilson and product owner Flores informally in recent demos. I think we could use Y approach and want to start prototyping if we get the go-ahead”
This engineer would start messaging Flores, Wilson and Smith privately and schedule calls about X excluding me and other core maintainers to push the thing forward, often proposing Y in his own words.
This strategy worked wonders for him in terms of upward movement. He is a diligent and extremely responsive to important people. But the strong engineers from whom he has effectively stolen credit, or even the opportunity to have a seat at the table in critical early discussions, obviously resent it.
His direct manager is lackadaisical and basically just gets bombarded by this engineer asking for frequent, long 1-1 calls where he shares “his” accomplishments and ideas. I’ve watched this play out in person (we are a remote-only team except for big project-related events) — his manager clearly trying to leave the event after it concluded, keys in hand and facing his car door, everyone else has said goodbye and given space, and this engineer keeps him there talking for no less than 10 more minutes.
I’ve never met someone so comically ambitious and overzealous to be seen as the MVP He was promoted in record time, much to the frustration of stronger and more critical maintainers.
I am baffled by the whole thing, and just laugh at this point. My most charitable interpretation of manager’s actions are that they do recognize the dynamic, and just don’t care because ultimately their job is slightly easier for the meantime. But if any 2+ of the critical core maintainers split in frustration, the whole thing will suffer, badly
ETA: it seems to me that remote-only teams are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing getting out of hand, because the capacity for secret communication is immensely greater
I can see that talking directly to Flores, Wilson and Smith, and proposing other peoples ideas could be grating for others. However, another way of looking at it is, that's just called "taking initiative". There's nothing to stop _anyone_ from talking directly to Flores, Wilson and Smith, go meet with them, take them out to lunch, make friends with them, etc.
If people think that Y approach is good, and talk amongst themselves about it, but don't actually write it up, pitch it to the powers that be, "sell" it, etc., then people are going to do that for them.
If Flores, Wilson and Smith are overwhelmed with one on one chats and meetings, then they'll probably push back and organize some group meetings and communications that everyone is in on. Conversely, if _nobody_ is doing that, then that leaves things wide open for _someone_ to do that, and that person is actually adding some value in doing so.
The person I work with also has a habit of cornering people when they are leaving. If you him "goodnight, see you tomorrow" at 5:30p, and pick up a bag, he will somehow interpret that as an opportunity to broach a whole new topic, and tie you up for half an hour. He does it with senior people too, it can be interesting to watch... hard to say whether it is not picking up on the social cues, or just not caring...
I don't know much about Charlie Kirk except what I've read recently. But he does/did seem to be part of a growing element of the right in the USA who stand against Israel and Netanyahu specifically. And while I support that, I don't think it's necessarily to support Palestinians, but more as an America First policy.
In that context, "of all people" makes sense to me. I too have been surprised by the move, of some on the right, against Israel, considering their almost unanimous support previously.
> I too have been surprised by the move, of some on the right, against Israel, considering their almost unanimous support previously
The right is not a monolith. Various elements on the right have always been anti-Israel, from the non-interventionists to the straight-up racists. Kirk was one of the former.
Kirk is on video making a joke about how he used to tell leftists, "they would throw you off a tall building in Gaza," but now there are no tall buildings in Gaza (hyuk hyuk), because of those "stupid Muslims attacking Jews."
As the genocide has become more and more indefensible, many right wing water carriers (also including Tucker Carlson) have been peeling off and voicing occasional (but essentially harmless) criticisms of the relationship. It's more cynicism than principle.
For context these are the questions asked since obviously this claim will change a lot based on questions. I wouldn't say it's terribly surprising based on my experiences, I've met Republicans against a lot of these things. I'm also wondering a bit how they got their sample since they had way more Democrats than Republicans and how representative it is (it also didn't close to match the racial makeup of the US). Not hating on the study, I didn't spend enough time reading it to know it's effectiveness, mainly the actual questions seemed important.
Item 1) Abortion should be illegal.
Item 2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.
Item 3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.
Item 4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.
Item 5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.
Item 6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.
Item 7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.
Item 8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.
Edit: to be clear I read the study and they used Prolific (https://www.prolific.com/) to get the participants but that means nothing to me.
This and my original comment apparently struck a nerve for some people, but I’m just sharing what I observe from the links I’ve included. I’d love to see some actual response to the content of these videos given Kirk’s apparent change of heart on Israel (especially if I’m off-base) as opposed to just downvotes with substance-free responses
I don’t think the World War II economy is repeatable today. It was a time of great patriotism with the majority of the nation supporting the war. People were willing to sacrifice for the cause and accept rationing of goods and making substitutions. They also knew that these sacrifices were temporary and helped their loved ones win the war and hopefully return to them sooner.
Today in America it is hard to get more than half the population to agree on anything. There is no unifying catalyst to bring about the consensus, cooperation, and personal sacrifice that would be necessary to implement a centrally planned economy in the United States today.
I agree with your sentiment. But where I struggle is: to what degree do each of those ads “represent one less person who would have been paid” versus those that represent one additional person who would not be able to afford to advertise in that medium.
Of course that line of reasoning reduces similar to other automation / minimum wage / etc discussions
Obviously there's some mix of the two, but given then I've seen AI used (poorly) for both TV commercials (in expensive time slots) and billboards (I think expensive as well, but I don't really know) where you know they can afford to pay "real people" to do it, there's definitely a noticeable amount of real replacement.
I'd assume they are referring to being able to run your own workloads in a home-built system, rather then surrendering that ownership to the tech giants alone
Also you get a sort of complete privacy that the data never leaves your home too whereas at best you would have to trust the AI cloud providers that they are not training or storing that data.
This, in particular, is a big motivator and rewarding factor in getting local setup and working. Turning off the internet and seeing everything run end to end is a joy
We might be talking about two different things. Yes, under normal circumstances the setup steps involve software that defaults to using telemetry -- though I'd be surprised if it's not possible anymore to achieve those in an air-gapped env using e.g. offline installers, zipped repos and wheel files, etc.
My comment was referring to runtime workloads having no telemetry (because I unplugged the internet)
> whereas at best you would have to trust the AI cloud providers that they are not training or storing that data.
Yeah, about that. They even illegally torrented entire databases, hide their crawlers. Crawl entire newspaper archives without permission. They didn't respect the rights of big media companies. But they're going to respect the little guy's of course because it says to in the T&Cs. Uh-huh.
Also, openai already admitted that they do store "deleted" content and temporary chats.
I agree but I was just (repeating?) some argument that I heard that if the companies would actually not follow on their premise that they are actually safe if they said so (think amazon bedrock tos policy which says such)
Then it will cause an insane backlash and nobody would use the product. So it is in their interest to not train/record.
But yes I also agree with you. They are already torrenting :/ So pretty sure if they can do illegal stuff scott free, they might do this too idk,
And yeah this was why I was actually saying that local matters more tbh. You just get rid of such headache.
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