Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code.
I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable.
at my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).
What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This was typically a big shock for new hires who were used to the "comment for every nitpick" system; I think it can feel insulting when someone changes your feature. But I quickly came to love it and can't imagine doing code review any other way now. It's so much faster!
I'm not sure how to tie this to AI code review tbh. Right now I don't think I'd trust a model's taste for when to change things and when to leave a comment. But maybe that'll change. I agree that if you automated away my taste for code it'd put me in a weird spot!
> What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.
This is my dream; have only had a team with little enough ego to actually achieve it once for an unfortunately short period of time. If it's something that there's a 99% chance the other person is going to say 'oh yeah, duh' or 'sure, whatever' then it's just wasting both of your time to not just do it.
That said, I've had people get upset over merging their changes for them after a LGTM approval when I also find letting it sit to be a meaningless waste of time.
Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker.
On the other hand, if it's less important code or the renaming is not clearly an improvement it can be quite useless. But I've met some developers who has the opinion of reviews as pointless and just say "this works, just approve it already" which can be very frustrating when it's a codebase with a lot of collaboration.
Naming comments are useful when someone catches something like:
1. you are violating a previously agreed upon standard for naming things
2. inconsistent naming, eg some places you use "catalog ID" and other places you use "item ID" (using separate words and spaces here because case is irrelevant).
3. the name you chose makes it easy to conflate two or more concepts in your system
4. the name you chose calls into question whether you correctly understood the problem domain you are addressing
I'm sure there are other good naming comments, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of things a good comment will address.
However, most naming comments are just bike shedding.
If the person reading the code doesn't quickly understand what's going on from the name or finds the name confusing, the name is poor and should be changed. It is way too easy for the author to be caught up in their mental model and to be unaware of their implicit assumptions and context and choose a name that doesn't make sense.
The bigger problem is people who feel ownership of shared codebases tied to their ego and who get angry when people suggest changes to names and other bits of interfaces instead of just making the suggested change.
If you get code review feedback, the default answer is "Done" unless you have a strong reason not to. If it's not obvious whether the name suggested by the author or the reader is better, the reader's choice should be taken every time.
> Naming comments can be very useful in code that gets read by a lot of people. It can make the process of understanding the code much quicker.
yes but it can be severely diminishing returns. Like lets step back a second and ask ourselves if:
var itemCount = items.Count;
vs
var numberOfItems = items.Count;
is ever worth spending the time discussing, versus how much of a soft improvement it makes to the code base. I've literally been in a meeting room with three other senior engineers killing 30 minutes discussing this and I just think that's a complete waste of time. They're not wrong, the latter is clearer, but if you have a PR that improves the repo and you're holding it back because of something like this, then I don't think you have your priorities straight.
Sorry for the dumb question, is the second version actually better than the first? Because I prefer the first. But perhaps you chose this as a particularly annoying/unuseful comment
I personally don't give a shit either way but I've worked in dev shops with a clear preference for the second one. I can see their point because the code as natural language parses better but I don't think its strong enough to care about.
Sort of place that is fussy about test naming so where I would do smth like:
TestSearchCriteriaWhere
they'd want
Test_That_Where_Clauses_In_Search_Criteria_Work
I think its a waste of typing but idk, I'm willing to let it slide because I think its a pointless hill to die on.
depends on what `items` is, no? Is the `.Count` O(1)? Do you really need a variable or is it fine for the (JIT) compiler to take care of it? Is it O(n) and n is significant enough? Maybe you need a variable and spend time arguing about that name. Yes I chose this because almost everyone I know at least would argue you always have to create the variable (and then argue about the name) ;)
fussy about test naming
I get fussiness about test naming. I believe that a good test "name" should tell you enough for you to be able to "double check" the test setup as well as the assertions against the test name with some sort of "reasonable" knowledge of the code/problem domain.
As such both of those test names are really bad, because they can't tell anything at all about whether you're testing for the correct thing. How do I know that your assertions are actually asserting that it "works"?
Instead, I'd want a test named something like this (assuming that that's what this particular test is actually about - i.e. imagine this particular test in the context of a user defined search, where one of the options is that they can specify a project to search by and this particular test is about verifying that we check the permissions the user has for said project. There would be different tests for each of the relevant where clauses that specifying a project in the search params would entail and different tests again for each of the other user specifiable parameters that result in one or more where clauses to be generated):
Every single test case gives you the ability to specify both a good name and clear, concise test assertions. If I see anything but a bunch of assertions related to project permissions for the logged in user in this test, I will fight you tooth and nail on that test ;) I couldn't care less tho if you use camelCase or snake_case or whatever. I just had to choose something to post. I also couldn't care less if you had 17 different assertions in the test (we all know that "rule", right? I think the "test one thing" and "one assertion" is not about the actual number of "assert statements". People that think that, got the rule wrong. It's all about the "thing" the assertions test. If you have 17 assertions that are all relevant to testing the project permission in question then they're great and required to be there. If 1 is for asserting the project permissions and the other 16 are repeating all the other "generic assertions" we copy and pasted from previous tests, then they're not supposed to be there. I will reject such a PR every time.
If I was going to nitpick it I would point out that `itemsCount` could easily be confused with `items.Count`, or vice versa, depending on syntax highlighting. That kind of bug can have a negative impact if one or the other is mutated while the function is running.
So clearly distinguishing the local `numberOfItems` from `items.Count` _could_ be helpful. But I wouldn't ping it in a review.
I think in this case itemCount had application in a couple of conditions later in the function, so there was value in extracting the count. In my recollection I might be missing some nuance, lets say for the sake of argument it was:
var relevantCount = items.Where(x => x.SomeValue > 5);
vs
var numberOfRelevantItems = items.Where(x => x.SomeValue > 5);
so it wasn't necessarily cheap enough to want to repeat.
And the most amazing part is that we got a mini PR review in the comments to a single line of code someone posted just to show an example of useless debates :D
Yeah or worse like my boss. We don't have a style guide. But he always wants style changes in every PR, and those style changes are some times contradictory across different PRs.
Eventually I've told him "if your comment does not affect performance or business logic, I'm ignoring it". He finally got the message. The fact that he accepted this tells me that deep down he knew his comments were just bike shedding.
You should have a style guide, or adopt one. Having uniform code is incredibly valuable as it greatly reduces the cognitive load of reading it. Same reason that Go's verbose "err != nil" works so well.
I've been in teams like this - people who are lower on the chain of power get run in circles as they change to appease one, then change to appease another then change to go back to appease the first again.
Then, going through their code, they make excuses about their code not meeting the same standards they demand.
As the other responder recommends, a style guide is ideal, you can even create an unofficial one and point to it when conflicting style requests are made
At augment code we specifically build our code review tool to find noise to signal ratio problem. In benchmark our comments are 2 to 3x more likely to get fixed compared to bugbot coderabbit etc
Human comments tend to be short and sweet like "nit: rename creatorOfWidgets to widgetFactory". Whereas AI code review comments are long winded not as precise. So even if there are 20 humans comments, I can easily see which are important and which aren't.
We are using BitBucket at work and decided to turn on RovoDev as reviewer. It absolutely doesn’t do that. Few but relevant comments are the norm and when we don’t like something it says we tell it in its instructions file to stop doing that. It has been working great!
My coworker is so far on this spectrum it's a problem. He writes sentences with half the words missing making it actually difficult to understand what he is trying to suggest.
All of the non critical words in english aren't useless bloat, they remove ambiguity and act as a kind of error correction if something is wrong.
What I find particularly tragic about all of this legislation (the OSA and now this) is that there are obviously technical people in the room that would advise against this clusterfuck of a direction and they are being ignored by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control.
This will continue to push people towards providers who operate outside UK jurisdiction or providers that care less about UK law and are less trustworthy.
I remain upset that they do this without building the necessary infra. They already assert identity when applying for a passport (and they do this very well). If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped. Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting. Instead we have this status quo of encouraging UK citizens to hand over their identity documents to dubious third-parties or shifting their traffic from the UK externally to avoid these checks.
> by politicians who think the internet is something they can aggressively control
You seem to believe they're wrong. Since they're the ones who come up with the laws of the land, I think it's important to realize that they can and do aggressively control access to the internet in their country. It sucks, but it's the reality.
> they can and do aggressively control access to the internet
yes but this is like watching someone deal with an ant infestation by stamping on them. They're not solving the issue and unlike the ant analogy, they're making the problem worse.
> If they had extended this process by creating a OAuth compliant digital id provider first, then they could have avoided all the problems on the day the OSA dropped.
Far less than all. See Australia, where age restriction is routinely evaded through adult collusion.
> Even better, they could have created a non-governmental agency to exchange tokens and urls to prevent the privacy issue of the government knowing which sites people are visiting.
The privacy issue would still exist. They can tie your online activity directly to these tokens.
not with a non-governmental agency doing the exchange. All they would see are tokens going out. You would need the non-governmental agency to share the urls with the government agency for the activity to be tied directly which would undermine the entire purpose of that architecture.
> You would need the non-governmental agency to share the urls with the government agency for the activity to be tied directly which would undermine the entire purpose of that architecture.
Which would absolutely would happen. The authorities will ask the non-gov agency for the details and they will be provided.
that's like stating that there's no value in creating a financial regulator to set interest rates because the government will just tell them to set them to whatever they demand.
Firstly, I didn't even mention what the value might be. I simply pointed out that the "independent organisation" would not really be independent. Which means it won't protect anyone's privacy. Which undermines the entire point of having it. Therefore it has no value.
Secondly, it is the central bank that sets the interest rate. In the UK that is the Bank of England. Secondly the government sets their mandate. They have a mandate of keeping the inflation at 2%. One of the mechanisms they to control inflation is the interest rate.
Moreover the "Chair of the Court of Directors" (the Chairman) of the Bank of England is appointed by the Crown (the King) at the advice of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The government both sets the mandate and effectively selects the Chairman. So while they don't directly set the interest rate, they do set the mandate and who runs the Central Bank.
BTW the Bank of England is failing to keep the inflation rate at 2% (and for some time) as it is currently 3.4%. So we can see how well that is going.
We've not had a black wednesday since this change. It has value because governments cannot be trusted to directly control interest rates. The indirection has value, politicians are forced to spend political capital in order to wrest control.
> So we can see how well that is going.
Still better than black wednesday and Norman Lamont.
I was actually directly addressing your comment about the your independent org for these identity tokens. There is no value because it cannot guarantee privacy. Therefore it has no value (at least not to me).
Secondly you seemed to not understand who set the interest rate but you are now confident in telling me about the perceived benefits of having a central bank set the interest rate. Which tells me that you just looked this all up about 10 minutes ago.
> It has value because governments cannot be trusted to directly control interest rates.
Neither can the central bank. As they are failing at their mandate of keeping inflation at 2%. The reported inflation rate is probably lower than the actual inflation rate due to CPI calculation wankery.
> The indirection has value, politicians are forced to spend political capital in order to wrest control.
To who does it have value? It doesn't benefit me (or most regular people) to have a 2% inflation rate and relatively low interest rates. It eats away the value of my savings. I now buy Gold (it hit a record high price today) and the value of my Gold and Silver has more than doubled in 3 years.
> Still better than black wednesday and Norman Lamont.
Saying it is better than a total crash isn't saying much.
Instead we have a gradual devaluing of the currency, many consumer goods are of far poorer quality (I repair my own vehicle and it is often better to get a reconditioned part than a new one), there is also "shrinkflation".
If we had a crash I actually think it would at least provide a wake up call and spur some real meaningful change.
It appears that you have not yet learned the lesson that perfect is the enemy of good. Just because a system doesn't meet your high expectations, doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
I'm also having trouble squaring your keen interest in the economic woes of inflation combined with your desire to have a stock market crash. Perhaps you are unaware of your bias given your portfolio, wishing to enact misery upon millions for your own personal gain. The last big crash was a major contributer the second world war, so be careful for the "meaningful change" you wish for.
> Which tells me that you just looked this all up about 10 minutes ago.
you should learn the etiquette round here, cos that ain't it. Either treat fellow commenters and their perspectives with a modicum of respect or go back to facebook. BTW, that was a swing and a miss, I lived through that period.
Don't misunderstand when I don't reply or even read your next response. Its because I don't want to talk to you anymore, because you're not interesting.
> It appears that you have not yet learned the lesson that perfect is the enemy of good. Just because a system doesn't meet your high expectations, doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
That isn't what you are proposing. What you are proposing is something which has no value. I've told you why it is pointless. Saying it "has value" repeatedly doesn't change the fact that it is pointless.
> I'm also having trouble squaring your keen interest in the economic woes of inflation combined with your desire to have a stock market crash. Perhaps you are unaware of your bias given your portfolio, wishing to enact misery upon millions for your own personal gain. The last big crash was a major contributer the second world war, so be careful for the "meaningful change" you wish for.
I love it when people accuse me of wishing harm on others. I would prefer not to have to buy gold/silver and rather just put cash in my savings.
I told you why a big crash might be preferable (in the long term). Sometimes a bit of a reset and a big disaster will bring long term positive change as things will actually be fixed properly.
> you should learn the etiquette round here, cos that ain't it. Either treat fellow commenters and their perspectives with a modicum of respect or go back to facebook. BTW, that was a swing and a miss, I lived through that period.
You obviously didn't understand what you are talking about. It such a basic mistake. I pointed it out and then you pretended to understand how it worked. So it was obvious you looked up it up after my reply. Whether or not you lived through the period is irrelevant.
So complaining about my supposed lack of etiquette is simply a deflection. You could have just admitted you were wrong.
> Don't misunderstand when I don't reply or even read your next response. Its because I don't want to talk to you anymore, because you're not interesting.
So when you throw insults at people (calling me boring) it is okay, because you are doing it. Gotcha :D. I love double standards.
the UK already forces ISPs to hold a database of the hosts you have visited in the last three years. By implementing the laws in the way they currently are doing undermines their own legislation by pushing UK users into having a tangible reason to hide their their browsing patterns from UK networks by funneling their traffic through VPNs or other proxies to avoid age gates.
Tin foil aside, my issue is that they're not even good at what they're trying to do. Their policy is inconsistent with their aims and lacks technical strategy. You think they're worried about dissenters when in practice they're more worried about elections in 2029 and whatever pearl clutching users post on mumsnet.
> the UK already forces ISPs to hold a database of the hosts you have visited in the last three years. By implementing the laws in the way they currently are doing undermines their own legislation by pushing UK users into having a tangible reason to hide their their browsing patterns from UK networks by funneling their traffic through VPNs or other proxies to avoid age gates.
People had tangible reasons before having to avoid age-gates. You should not have people spying on your online activity.
> Tin foil aside, my issue is that they're not even good at what they're trying to do. Their policy is inconsistent with their aims and lacks technical strategy.
Good, I don't want them to be good at what they are doing.
> You think they're worried about dissenters when in practice they're more worried about elections in 2029 and whatever pearl clutching users post on mumsnet.
They can be be worried about both. They are capable of being concerned about two different things at the same time.
and that's a very good thing. I only recognise our nation from 1945 onwards, establishment of the welfare state, the idea the government cares for its people. The idea that victims matter. While it wasn't just overnight and was many years in the making, there was this element of cruelty, a survival of the fittest, seen in the victim blaming of street urchins with rickets in the early 20th century.
In 1966 there was an industrial disaster where a school was submerged in coal waste and 116 children died. The coal company offered £50 per child as compensation. There was a national outcry that marks the change in attitude and the compensation was increased tenfold to £500 (quite a lot back then). Did we see this in Flint with the polluted water, or in Ohio when that train derailed with all the chemicals?
There's something about having absolutely everything in the world and then pissing it all away in an enormous own goal of world wars that is extremely humbling and I'd like to think that plays a key part in the British psyche and I think its for the better.
My grandparents were the war generation I knew, having lived through the blitz, and all they wanted was to sit in the garden and have a nice cup of tea. They didn't want to be the best or were looking externally for validation. Just a nice sit down and a chin wag and I think that's a positive way to be, as opposed to what I imagine was the driving force of the Imperial era in always wanting more and trying to prove how "great" our nation should be. We proved how great we are in two of the most destructive wars in the world's history where the entirity of Europe lost. We suck.
Britain won, but it cost them pretty much everything. And while a lot of pride is connected to winning them, neither were wars Britain really had to fight.
WWI was caused by every European power thinking they could benefit from a war, leading to powder keg that blew up from a completely inconsequential event. For the British one of the motivations was getting Germany's African colonies that were in the way of building the Cape to Cairo Railway, which ended up never being completed anyways.
WWII at least had a clear villain. But it was a villain that made every indication that he didn't actually want to fight Britain. Maybe that was a ruse and Hitler would have attacked Britain after securing the continent, maybe it wasn't and a British and German empire could have coexisted. We will never know. What we do know is that fighting WWII required Britain to bleed its colonies dry, followed by losing most of them in the years after the war
I'm not going so far as saying Britain shouldn't have fought the world wars. At least WWII had justification beyond what can be seen on map. However without participation in those two wars Britain would have had a shot at continuing to be a wealthy empire
I don't mind the rationale for WW2 so much, I think the idea that Britain "didn't have to", doesn't scan. What the Third Reich was doing meant it would always be an existential threat that would ultimately result in conflict. So it was better for Britain to fight the Nazis than stay neutral.
I would however suggest that the two wars are basically the same war with just a big ceasefire in the middle, that's why I would treat them as the same mistake.
Britain mostly bankrolled WW1 and was broke by 1916. If you consider the British position prior to the war and after the wars, its an extroadinary failure. Especially considering how all the monarchs of Europe were directly related and had ample opportunities to prevent the wars. They were conflicts of hubris, over-confidence based on mostly fighting the developing world and never having to appreciate the horrors of modern artilery against their own ranks. If you look at the opening battles of the first world war the quantities of casualties are absolutely staggering. They were not prepared and under-estimated what it would take to fight these wars.
All that wealth and power wasted on turning Europe into a wasteland and sacrificing generations of young men.
It's encouraged me towards getting diagnosed for my probable ADHD. Now I'm mentioning this to people I know and they're all giving me:
> you're undiagnosed? I thought it was obvious.
guess I was the last to clock it.
It was people that made me think of it first: a hookup that was adament I had it and then a therapist that mentioned in our first session. I started the diagnosis like over a year ago and completely forgot about it. Its only been asking gipity about some symptoms I have and seeing it throw up ADHD a lot as a possibility, that encouraged me to go back to sorting out the diagnosis.
I'm just suggesting it has a positive impact in preventative care by giving people an outlet to discuss their symptoms and consider possibilities. Obviously the trade off might be more hypochrondriacs but its good for people who are the opposite.
Prodding you to seek help from a doctor is different than what the OP was saying
> Doctors won't be replaced, but if we could move them up the stack of health to actually doing the work of saving lives rather than just looking at rising cholesterol numbers and writing scripts
I presume your AI assistant did not prescribe medication to you.
sure but this is part of preventative care. I'm one of those people who are happier to shrug off symptoms than go through the effort of seeking medical diagnosis and I doubt I'm alone in this.
some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society. This goes back over a century to the Quaker run businesses, like Lloyds, Rowntree, Cadburys, etc.
You can imagine if your ultimate aim was to improve society, then acquiring a firm but having to sack a bunch of employees as somewhat of a failure.
>some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society.
if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.
as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.
if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
> as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin
That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.
[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not. For life's necessities (eg food, shelter) this is straightforwardly obvious. And you are making this claim in the context of the employment market, which is one step removed from that.
But even in the general case your argument still does not make sense. When we talk of a business providing societal utility, we don't include the business owner themselves in the integral. For example your assertion lets you conclude things like a casino owner who has made a pile of money but impoverished the community has made society better.
>No, you cannot necessarily to choose whether to transact or not.
I didn't say you could, pay closer attention or you will not be able to understand arguments or learn anything.
What I said was, "as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin."
however, your mistake does contain a germ of reinforcement to what I said: if you cannot choose to participate in a transaction, you will be less happy, i.e. allowing sellers to offer choices and buyers to make choices will increase happiness in every type of market.
before you make another mistake and go shooting off, I didnt say people will be happy, I said they will be happier, but happier is an unmitigated good.
Try harder to not be a condescending dweeb, or you will not be able to have amicable discussions or overcome your own airtight but inapplicable logic.
I did not "reinforce" the exception of what you said, I pointed out an error in your framing that necessitates coming at the analysis a different way. The context of what you're responding to is a company laying people off - reducing the number of choices in the employment market. We're not talking about the dynamic of someone creating a new business and having to emphasize one or the other, but rather an existing business where the owners are choosing to change things to be closer to one end of the spectrum between the two.
what you are actually saying is that a certain class of people "know better" than what another class thinks they want.
If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
its plausible for companies to be worth less than their assets. While it might be the best estimate its still not necessarily the best one. aka the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. Markets measure confidence as much as they measure value.
and this explains why the USA doesn't have universal healthcare, or why a generation of the world's population now serve as eyeballs for advertisers using applications specifically designed to be addictive in order to enrich silicon valley startups. You certaintly wouldn't get here if you started with the question "how do we want society to look like?"
Imagine if the owners of modern day factories thought a little more like this [0].
Here's the rub: Vimeo was profitable, and had no debt. Per their last public filing(s), in 2025 the company had:
- ~$400M expenses
- ~$420M revenue (therefore ~$20M profit for the year)
- ~$300M of cash in the bank (no debt)
Vimeo has not had major growth in recent years, but it was making progress, however slowly. Just nowhere near the 10x expectations out there. Nobody was going to lose anything.
Presumably Bending Spoons believes they can optimize a lot of that 400M expenses while keeping revenue flat or even growing it. At least they believe enough to make a 1.4B bet on it.
This sounds more like a reverse mortgage line of business, to me. Bending Spoons is betting they can eek enough revenue out of Vimeo to pay the interest on the $1.4B loan by cutting the $400M expense run rate.
The actual loan principal will be paid out (if it ever does) of the money they expect to bring in when they inevitably go to an IPO.
And at that point you have speculators carrying risk, bankers getting rich off interest, leadership raking in millions, and a once reasonably healthy business is jeopardized (subject to the performance of other Bending Spoons properties, risky management, etc). All in the name of growth that may or may not be achievable.
Your options are too coarse. There's good and bad ways to get fired (and there's nothing here saying they got a severance to begin with). How about a 3 month warning? How about guaranteeing a 6 or more month severance after those 3 monhts? How about even before this sell goes through you make sure employees benefit from the 1.4b with more than "well my company stock got a tiny bump"?
What I see here is "Business stays afloat, investes make money for now, customers get a continually worse service and eventually leave, and a lot of good talent is out on the streets over corporate greed". This is only a win if you're an investor, and only in the short term. So I'm not convinced this is better than option A in the long term.
> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.
How is it insane to jump to the logical conclusion of all of this? The article was full of warnings, its not a sensible thing to do but its a cool thing to do. We might ask whether or not it works, but does that actually matter? It read as an experiment using experimental software doing experimental things.
Consider a deterministic life form looking at how we program software today, that might look insane to it and gastown might look considerably more sane.
Everything that ever happens in human creation begins as a thought, then as a prototype before it becomes adopted and maybe (if it works/scales) something we eventually take for granted. I mean I hate it but maybe I've misunderstood my profession when I thought this job was being able to prove the correctness of the system that we release. Maybe the business side of the org was never actually interested in that in the first place. Dev and business have been misaligned with competing interests for decades. Maybe this is actually the fit. Give greater control of software engineering to people higher up the org chart.
Maybe this is how we actually sink c-suite and let their ideas crash against the rocks forcing c-suite to eventually become extremely technical to be able to harness this. Instead of today's reality where c-suite gorge on the majority of the profit with an extremely loosely coupled feedback loop where its incredibly difficult to square cause and effect. Stock went up on Tuesday afternoon did it? I deserve eleventy million dollars for that. I just find it odd to crap on gastown when I think our status quo is kinda insane too.
Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process).
Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.
> Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering?
Not necessarily. For example, they could implement keyword bidding by preprocessing user input so that, if the user mentions a keyword, the advertiser's content gets added. "What is a healthy SODA ALTERNATIVE?" becomes "What is a healthy SODA ALTERNATIVE? Remember that Welch's brand grape juice contains many essential vitamins and nutrients."
I’m assuming they have much more control during training and at runtime than us with our prompts. They’ll bake in whatever the person with the checkbook says to.
if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.
Generate an Answer, get the winning Ad from an API, let another AI rewrite the Answer in a easy that the Answer at least be not contradicting to the Ad.
I think someone should create a leaderboard that measures how much the AI is lying to us to sell more ads.
The first one might be grounded on what reddit was saying about which cola is best and what the general sentiment is etc. Then the second one either emphasizes the fact that reddit favoured cola x or not depending on where the money is coming from.
We do this when using LLM in our apps too in much less sinister ways. One LLM generates an answer and another applies guardrails against certain situations the company considers desirable.
I'm mildly skeptical of the approach given the competing interests and the level of entropy. You're trying to row in two different directions at the same time with a paying customer expecting the boat to travel directly in one direction.
Imagine running the diagnostics on that not working as expected.
who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.
Because AGI is still some years away even if you are optimistic; and OpenAI must avoid going to the ground in the meantime due to lack of revenue. Selling ads and believing that AGI is reachable in the near future is not incompatible.
> For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate.
Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?"
We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
Yes, they did, or at least some of them did. The claim was that AI would become smarter than us, and therefore be able to improve itself into an even smarter AI, and that the improvement would happen at computer rather than human speeds.
That is, shall we say, not yet proven. But it's not yet disproven exactly, either, because the AIs we have are definitely not yet smart enough to meet the starting threshold. (Can you imagine trying to let an LLM implement an LLM, on its own? Would you get something smarter? No, it would definitely be dumber.)
Now the question is, has AI (such as we have it so far) given any hint that it will be able to exceed that threshold? It appears to me that the answer so far is no.
But even if the answer is yes, and even if we eventually exceed that threshold, the exponential claim is still unsupported by any evidence. It could be just making logarithmic improvements at machine speed, which is going to be considerably less dramatic.
> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.
but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.
Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.
I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.
The stats I see for Facebook are $70 per US/Canadian user in ad revenue. I'm not sure how much people would be willing to pay for an ad free Facebook, but it must be below $70 on average. And as the parent comment said, the users who would pay that are likely worth much more than the average user to the advertisers.
For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
Good point, I'm not sure. I'd be interested if anyone knew a good estimate for how much of their operating expenses the ad-tech side took.
Presumably Facebook would abandon ads if there was more money to be made in paid subscription, so I'll use corporate greed as evidence that the math doesn't work out. But I don't personally know.
Most Zoomers around me that pirate use some application that obfuscates the torrenting part away, they just have to know how to use a search box and hit play.
The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base.
You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore.
The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
that's extreme motivation for someone to build a new competitor. Deepseek demonstrated that there's innovation out there to be had at a fraction of the effort.
Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription.
(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
wouldn't you charge those people more before you start serving ads? Also wont a lot of those sorts of users be running ad block anyway? I'm mildly sus that this is the right way to go.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this notion that a paid service introducing ads is a bad business model. It’s been proven time and time again that it’s not. Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, the list goes on, all introduced ads and none of them saw any real backlash. Netflix cracked down on password-sharing and introduced ads in the same year and lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately people just really don’t realize how harmful ads are.
Nail on the head. Every time I've seen it applied, its awful at this. However this is the one thing I loathe in human reviews as well, where people are leaving twenty comments about naming and then the actual FUNCTIONAL issue is just inside all of that mess. A good code reviewer knows how to just drop all the things that irk them and hyperfocus on what matters, if there's a functional issue with the code.
I wonder if AI is ever gonna be able to conquer that one as its quite nuanced. If they do though, then I feel the industry as it is today, is kinda toast for a lot of developers, because outside of agency, this is the one thing we were sorta holding out on being not very automatable.
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