I replied to the follow-up comment about following the guidelines in order to avoid hellish flamewars, but you played a role here too with a snarky, sarcastic comment. Please be more careful in future and be sure to keep comments kind and thoughtful.
This subthread turned into a flamewar and you helped to set it off here. We need commenters to read and follow the guidelines in order to avoid this. These guidelines are especially relevant:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
What if I told you that a dev group with a sensibly-limited social-club flavor is where I arguably did my best and also had my happiest memories from? In the midst of SOME of the "socializing" (which, by the way, almost always STILL sticks to technical topics, even if they are merely adjacent to the task at hand) are brilliant ideas often born which sometimes end up contributing directly to bottom lines. Would you like evidence of social work cohesion leading to more productivity and happier employees? Because I can produce that. (I'd argue that remote work has negatively impacted this.)
But yes, I also once worked at a company (Factset) where the CTO had to put a stop to something that got out of hand- A very popular game at the time basically took over the mindshare of most of the devs for a time, and he caught them whiteboarding game strategies during work hours. (It was Starcraft 1 or 2, I forget. But both date me at this point.) So he put out a stern memo. Which did halt it. And yeah, he was right to do that.
Just do me this favor- If a dev comes to you with a wild idea that you think is too risky to spend a normal workday on, tell them they can use their weekend time to try it out. And if it ends up working, give them the equivalent days off (and maybe an extra, because it sucks to burn a weekend on work stuff, even if you care about the product or service). That way, the bet is hedged on both sides. And then maybe clap them on the back. And consider a little raise next review round. (If it doesn't work out, no extra days off, no harm no foul.)
I think your attitude is in line with your position (and likely your success). I get it. Slightly more warmth wouldn't hurt, though.
> What if I told you that a dev group with a sensibly-limited social-club flavor is where I arguably did my best and also had my happiest memories from?
Maybe you did, and as a developer I am sure it is more fun, easier, and enjoyable to work in those places. That isnt what we offer though. We offer something very simple. The opportunity for a developer to come in, work hard, probably not enjoy themselves, produce what we ask, to the standard we ask, and in return they get paid.
It's our company, we own it. We are not 'some executives'. If someone develops an AI that can replace what we do and perform at the same level or higher, then I would gladly welcome it.
The reason you feel safe now is because of the marketing tactics of AI companies in pushing their phished goods on the world. LLMs have done anything yet other then reduced the barrier of entry into the software field. Like what google search and stackoverflow did 10yrs ago. The same principles apply, if your only skill is using an LLMs (or google searching) then you will be the first replaced when the markets turn. The ability to reason about options of a company in making money over the short term, vs long term, should be fairly easy to reason about based on the availibility of news. AI companies already know this. The stratergy has been played out. They make more money this way. They get to suck up all the info from your corperation, because they will get that data. Once they build these models, they will replace you too. Sure your saving time and money today, but thats just the cost of building the model for them.
I am pretty sure ArthurStacks account is either a troll or an LLM gone rogue troll. There are so many contradictions among his own comments that it is embarrassing to list them all. But given the reaction and number of replies he gets, the trolling is rather successful.
Looks a bit like your comment was being downvoted, which is also interesting to see. If Arthur Stacks is a bot, then it potentially follows that there is vote-manipulation going on as well, to quell dissenting opinions.
IMO this is completely "based". Delivering customer values and making money off of it is own thing, and software companies collectively being a social club and an place for R&D is another - technically a complete tangent to it. It doesn't always matter how sausages came to be on the served plate. It might be the Costco special that CEO got last week and dumped into the pot. It's none of your business to make sure that doesn't happen. The customer knows. It's consensual. Well maybe not. But none of your business. Literally.
The field of software engineering might be doomed if everyone worked like this user and replaced programmers with machines, or not, but those are sort of above his paygrade. AI destroying the symbiotic relationship between IT companies and its internal social clubs is a societal issue, more macro-scale issues than internal regulation mechanisms of free market economies are expected to solve.
I guess my point is, I don't know this guy or his company is real or not, but it passes my BS detector and I know for the fact that a real medium sized company CEOs are like this. This is technically what everyone should aspire to be. If you think that's morally wrong and completely utterly wrong, congratulations for your first job.
Turning this into a moral discussion is besides the point, a point that both of you missed in your efforts to be based, although the moral discussion is also interesting—but I'll leave that be for now. It appears as if I stepped on ArthurStack's toes, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and reply.
My point actually has everything to do with making money. Making money is not a viable differentiator in and of itself. You need to put in work on your desired outcomes (or get lucky, or both) and the money might follow. My problem is that directives such as "software developers need to use tool x" is an _input_ with, at best, a questionable causal relationship to outcome y.
It's not about "social clubs for software developers", but about clueless execs. Now, it's quite possible that he's put in that work and that the outcomes are attributable to that specific input, but judging by his replies here I wouldn't wager on it. Also, as others have said, if that's the case, replicating their business model just got a whole lot easier.
> This is technically what everyone should aspire to be
No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.
No, I think you're mistaking the host for the parasite - he's running a software and solutions company, which means, in a reductive sense, he is making money/scamming cash out of customers through means of software. The software is ultimately smoke and mirrors that can be anything so long it justify customer payments. Oh boy those software be additive to the world.
Everything between landing a contract and transferring deliverables, for someone like him, is already questionably related to revenues. There's everything in software engineering to tie developer paychecks to values created, and it's still as reliable as medical advice from LLM at best. Adding LLMs into it probably won't look so risky to him.
> No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.
True, but again, above his paygrade as a player in a free market capitalist economy which is mere part of a modern society, albeit not a tiny part.
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OT and might be weird to say: I think a lot of businesses would appreciate vibe-coding going forward, relative to a team of competent engineers, solely because LLMs are more consistent(ly bad). Code quality doesn't matter but consistency do; McDonald's basically dominates Hamburger market with the worst burger ever that is also by far the most consistent. Nobody loves it, but it's what sells.
> My problem is that directives such as "software developers need to use tool x" is an _input_ with, at best, a questionable causal relationship to outcome y.
Total drivel. It is beyond question that the use of the tools increases the capabilities and output of every single developer in the company in whatever task they are working on, once they understand how to use them. That is why there is the directive.
On the same topic, I usually refer back to this fantastic talk on how to add and commit a file without using git add or git commit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdvlu_R8EWE
In the early 16th century, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and sighted the great "Southern Sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). Afterwards, the ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian means 'peaceful sea'.
"Southern sea" sounds reasonable from the viewpoint of early Nordic seafarers. Based on a quick glance of the map, all of the Atlantic is south of Sweden.
I said the same thing to my SO the first time I tried out ChatGPT.
However, I'm not sure if AI is where I'd draw the boundary for myself at least, as I've had the same lingering feeling from only reading HN comments and seldom writing my own, or consuming BreadTube content for instance.
More often than not, my opinions and thoughts are constructed for me by someone else as opposed to me doing my own critical thinking. Perhaps I'm one of the below-average thinkers for who ChatGPT will be a godsend.
Some of my favorite thoughts are those that I wouldn't in a million years have come up with on my own. Being exposed to these is a warp gate for the mind.
The strange thing about being human is that we have an inordinate capacity to normalize and then universalize just about anything. On one had this plasticity allows us to deal with almost anything we are apt to encounter. On the other hand, it's an enormous blind spot to what could be. We're much more likely to add to our initial mental model than conceive of an entirely new perspective and it's these entirely new perspectives that I value the most.
My experience with ChatGPT writing is that, if I have some essentially boilerplate to put down on page and work from, it's "fine" so long as I know enough to cross out the stuff I don't like and expand on the parts I do. Saves some time. But if I ask it to analyze a more complicated/nuanced question, it's far less useful. It certainly doesn't come up with unique insights into complicated topics I have a lot of familiarity with so far as I've experienced.
Yeah, this is probably the reason and the author even elaborates on this in the sentences following the bit quoted by cldellow:
> Even though the data says hstore, knowing that posts will be seen by more and more people over time, I might choose the HLL solution for an actual implementation. It's far less likely to pose a bloated row problem, [...]
Just posting here too, but yup this is exactly what I was trying to convey.
Hstore might have been the fastest but the way I am using it or the scales the use case could scale to might not work out.
Bigger benchmarks could have been done! Maybe a multi part post would have been better so I could split apart methodology and results/blabbering about approach!
Strange take. Saying that racism is not new in the US (because the discussion was about the US) is not the same thing as saying that racism is a uniquely US problem.
Indeed, it's the exact same issue, and the behavior of these companies is as cynical and wrong in Russia, China, and any and all other places where they act this way.
I agree. And if they weren't, I get tired of arguments on the merits of argument "B" that states because "A" is wrong, you cannot point out that "B" is wrong too.
The danger is the mentality that we should not solve any single problem unless we can solve all of the problems. Pointing out the hypocrisy to invalidate the argument can lead to inaction.
I struggle to see the type of regulation regime that could work effectively to prevent such profiles from being created (the data collection would move overseas and then later be re-sold as contact lists, or as audiences, etc.).
Isn't that a cop out argument? Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
We have (kinda) world wide copyright laws. We have world wide drug laws. We have world wide sea and war laws. Why don't we have world wide privacy laws?
The Internet makes trying to enforce world wide privacy laws much harder than physical laws: anyone in the world can reach you and collect data about you.
> Just make it outright illegal and fine heavily per violation. You have profile information that a user didn't explicitly give you? $10k fine, each.
How do you propose to discover violations? Self-reporting won't ever happen. If you then propose to give draconian sanctions to trying to cover up such issues, congratulations, you've killed the ability of people to build anything and share it with the world.
