Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
Correct, Fidelity has a list of 25 Program Banks[1] of varying quality, so I prefer sweeps into a money market fund instead of a bank.
I also use Schwab _Bank_'s checking account instead of Fidelity's Cash Management Account for similar reasons. The latter's debit card is issued by PNC Bank and administered by BNY Mellon[2]. They are large institutions, but I have no wish to deal with the finger-pointing when something goes wrong. Whereas at Schwab, I know who to blame: Schwab.
This type of specialization or "deintegration" seen with neobanks in the name of innovation seems to be a common pattern used to skirt accountability, and it is weaponized against the average consumer's already inadequate rights and ability to recover damages.
> I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they were a waste of time and energy.
Alignment is really hard to do when management claims they're there to "support" engineers and their decisions, and not dictate from above. I see this as a great CYA move, couched in empowering language.
It is even harder when they visibly reward shiny new features while trumpeting a pivot to reliable infrastructure, only to change their mind and behavior on a whim. Mixed signals.
Some employers will have healthcare concierges that help with resolving such issues. An example is HealthAdvocate[1] (no relation). I believe some of these services will take a cut (e.g. 25%) of the money they save for you.
I cannot speak to how effective these services are. My general experience with "proxy" services have not been great, due to inadequate care or training.
So we pay people to deny coverage, and then we also pay people to deny the denying. Broken Window Theory hard at work!
It's the societal version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "dynamic tension." Just muscles pulling against muscles for their own sake, with no actual work getting done. Surely this is a recipe for downfall.
In January 2024, the Taiwan government issued an erroneous "presidential alert" to the entire country of 23 million people, warning of a "missile" from China. Occurring just days before a presidential election, some allege that sending the alert was politically motivated.
People probably think you’re exaggerating but it’s true. Sometimes when I would get blocked the suggestion was to “read the source code” or “submit a fix” on some far flung internal project. Huge fucking waste of time and effort, completely unserious.
That’s how open source already works by default. The difference is if an OSS tool is broken my boss doesn’t imply landing a fix is my responsibility on top of my regular job duties.
> being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.
yes, if its a one off. but for my last project that would involve spinning up many "XFNs" (multi-team chat fests) to argue that actually they don't want to have that change because of reason x,y and z.
At which point you just give up and make a stupid fucking hack.
So much is not about engineering excellence, its about trying to get people to accept change.
Doesn't sound like your type of company tbh, the flipside is that a "serious" company will often have broken bs too except now nobody is going to look at your contribution/fix.
Yes lmao, the number of times I would start off on some nominally useful task only to find out 3 weeks later that there is actually already a solution to that created by team XYZ that nobody in my reporting chain has ever heard of…(3 weeks was optimistic case, I remember my team member getting like 2 months in to some new data pipeline before finding out some tables already existed that did what he needed…)
Welcome to meta! where everything is a murder mystery.
Except you're not really sure if there has been a murder, or sometimes you wonder if you're the murderer, because at every turn you're told that you've been a bad dev for trying x,y and z
Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).
As an outsider, I was always under the impression that Google had a tradition of engineering excellence (robust tools, clean and while tested code following strict guidelines), while Meta has more of a Hacker culture (move fast and break things).
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