Recently came across this detailed write up of my photo archiving system. It's mostly been this way since 2015 after I gave up relying on online services.
Not selling anything, just sharing because it's worked well for me.
Everything takes longer than ppl want to wait. But when building a house, ppl are more patient and tolerant about the time taken, because they can physically see the progress, the effort, the sweat. Software is intangible and invisible except maybe for beta-testers and developer liaisons. And the visual parts, like the nonfunctional GUI or web UI, are often taken as "most of the work is done", because that is what people see and interact with.
It's product management's job to bridge that gap. Break down and prioritize complex projects into smaller deliverables that keep the business folks happy.
It's better than houses, IMO - no one moves into the bedroom once it's finished while waiting for the kitchen.
I don’t really see this as universal truth with corporate customers stalling process for up to 2 years or end users being reluctant to change.
We were deploying new changes every 2 weeks and it was too fast. End users need training and communication, pushback was quite a thing.
We also just pushed back aggressive timeline we had for migration to new tech. Much faster interface with shorter paths - but users went all pitchforks and torches just because it was new.
But with AI fortunately we will get rid of those pesky users right?
Different situation. You already had a product that they were quite happy with, and that worked well for them. So they saw change as a problem, not a good thing. They weren't waiting for anything new, or anything to improve, they were happy on their couch and you made them move to redo the upholstery.
AI isn’t ready for non coders to create and manage any complex software project.
But for someone like me who is adept at coding but not actually interested in it, it’s amazing. I get what I want with minimal effort and periodically (more rare than most imagine) I have to look at the code and either fix it or prompt it to be fixed.
I’m going to say Isaac Wasileski. While at Yahoo! In the late 2000s (when Yahoo! was still hot) - code reviews with Isaac were some of the more educational experiences I’ve had. He had such attention to detail and a very pragmatic perspective on coding. I always learned something from them. Hope he finds this because I never asked myself the question to be able to thank him.
It’s been a decade or so since I worked with Isaac and I looked him up to find he is at OpenAI. Fitting.
There was a book written a few years back that I haven't read but might answer some of these questions. "We Were Yahoo!: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook" https://a.co/d/9SuUXIn
I'll throw out Mr. Hedger Wang from Yahoo! as my nominee, he basically had the IE6 browser renderer in his head, and even though I never worked with him directly, just being able to ping on Y!M was an incredible help.
What made it special (2010-timeframe) was that we would do without thought what other companies struggled to do at that time (hot-hot failover, multi-region, "3 machine minimum" deployments), processing traffic for ~500M monthly users when spinning rust and 32gb of ram was considered "a lot".
My perspective on what happened is reeeally smart people solved really tough problems, then would either bail to Google (and later FB) to write the "v2.0" and solve those same problems but "better" or they'd go and start a full-blown company to sell that solution.
The tide rose around Yahoo! and both business-wise (and tech-wise), they didn't keep pace once their competitive advantage of "we can scale" dissipated.
More people need to feel this. Too many people deny even the possibility, not based out of logic, but rather out of ignorance or subconscious factors such as fear or irrelevance.
1) Clicking on search results doesn't bring $ to Google and takes users off their site. Surely they're thinking of ways to address this. Ads?
2) Having to click off to another site to learn more is really a deficiency in the AI summary. I'd expect Google would rather you to go into AI mode where they control the experience and have more opportunities to monetize. Ads?
We are in the "early uber" and "early airbnb" days ... enjoy it while it's great!
Despite any missteps it took, Mozilla fought a good fight. In hindsight, the mistakes seem obvious. And leadership poor.
But they pushed the open web forward. Good on them.
However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user). And I don’t think Mozilla can create something different. We need a movement more than a well funded organization for this next phase.
Wikipedia is in a very similar predicament. Or soon will be.
> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).
As I already wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44659025 (and write often on Hacker News), Firefox is used very actively in Germany; among the desktop browsers it is the 2nd most used one (and German Firefox users are often very vocal about it and love to proselytise users who use Chrome.
That doesn’t warrant the size of the organization and costs to run it in its current form. The trends are not in Firefox’s favor. I say this as someone who uses Firefox on both iPhone and OSX.
I think a slimmer Firefox that’s just community supported would be fine. Forgo monetization and AI and enjoy the niche it can survive in. I’d go for that!
I don't see myself using another browser than Firefox in the present time, it would be extremely sad to see it go if nothing else better/similar shows up to replace it.
I cannot stand Chromium/Chrome, even less after the latest changes to extensions, fuck that; don't like Safari's UX and extensions ecosystem; will never install Edge. The other browsers are mostly re-skins of Chromium, or some stupid AI bullshit.
It will be a very sad day if/when Mozilla goes and takes Firefox with it.
> However, I don’t think Firefox is important anymore (I’m a loyal user).
This sounds defeatist. What is the alternative then? Vendor specific browsers? For me that's not happening because I don't and won't buy MS or Apple products so no safari or edge.
Honestly, web complexity is out of control and browsers are beyond comprehension for mere mortals being. The fact that you need billion dollar companies to prop them up is a telling sign.
I think a different model which does not require the size and complexity of the Mozilla org is a viable option.
It would continue to lose market share and skip new features (cough AI cough). But it could enjoy a smaller steady niche there supported by the community.
This is a surprising take. I think what's available today can improve productivity by 20% across the board. That seems massive.
Only a very small % of the population is leveraging AI in any meaningful way. But I think today's tools are sufficient for them to do so if they wanted to start and will only get better (even if the LLMs don't, which they will).
Sure, if I ask about things I know nothing about, then I can get something done with little effort. But when I ask about something where I am an expert, then large language models have surprisingly little to offer. And because I am an expert, it becomes apparent how bad they are, which in turn makes me hesitate to use them for things I know nothing about because I am unprepared to judge the quality of the response. As a developer I am an expert on programming and I think I never got something useful out of a large language model beyond pointers to relevant APIs or standards, a very good tool to search through documentation, at least up to the point that it starts hallucinating stuff.
When I wrote dead end, I meant for achieving an AI that can properly reason and knows what it knows and maybe is even able to learn. For finding stuff in heaps of text, large language models are relatively fine and can improve productivity, with the somewhat annoying fact that one has to double check what the model says.
I think that what's available today is a drain on productivity, not an improvement, because it's so unreliable that you have to babysit it constantly to make sure it hasn't fucked up. That is not exactly reassuring as to the future, in my view.
Not selling anything, just sharing because it's worked well for me.
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