The AI-powered "replacement of engineers" that everyone keeps talking about will look less like existing engineers being laid off, and more like reduced hiring of recent engineering graduates. And, as with any large-scale technology trend, it will take a while before we can say we've come out of the innovator/early adopter phase, which we are clearly still in. In my opinion, it's always easier to invent new technology than to get people to change the ways they currently do things.
> And yet, for the people using the app, it won’t look or feel much different.
Yikes. Okay, I know I'm maybe being a bit unfair here, but I'm sorry to say that this is one of the weakest engineering blog posts I've ever read. This seems to be a massive "let's end the craziness and finally pay our tech debt" effort. Good for them, but not something that excites me about working at Facebook.
I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.
In New Zealand we have debit cards, so they act just like a normal credit card, except it needs to have money in the account for the transaction to work. So you tie it to an account that you put money into, instead of say, your every-day spending account which could contain a lot more money.
Awfully nice of our US friends to try and make and feel better about our current bit of unpleasantness with our government here in the UK, but you really didn't need to bother....
Could a situation like this happen in the UK, do you think? Not voting through a budget would normally be a confidence issue, which would bring about the fall of the government, could we have a situation where that went on for a period of time without causing a new election?
I think it used to be that a government losing a vote on a budget would mean a general election but since the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 I believe there has to be an explicit vote of no confidence in the government (or a two thirds vote by MPs) to trigger an election.
Arguably since the Lib Dems detached confidence votes from normal business the constitution has been broken; previously the "May Deal" would have been a confidence vote and its failure would have collapsed the government.
While I don't think we'll have budget issues we're very likely to go the other way: use of emergency powers to suspend Parliamentary democracy. I believe some of the Tory party are already calling for this.
They in effect voted for a dictatorship, initially for Pompey on the ground of a terrorism threat, and then later were supportive of Caesar. Pompey used the democratic tribune system which had been abolished by a previous generation of the aristocracy. The dictator argued past the traditions of the Roman Republic as exemplified by the aristocrats, and appealed directly to the people.
It's not my favorite analogy. Probably something closer to the government of early modern Poland: so paralyzed by dysfunction that it couldn't effectively govern or respond to novel threats.
I've wondered if public dialog about societal change might be improved by having a richer set of exemplars, to serve as context and landmarks in discussion.
When exploring design objectives with a client, one often provides a set of proposals, whose differences then serve as a vocabulary for discussion. Almost a basis vector set. Public dialog often leaves me with the impression of a client with an inadequate set, an impoverished vocabulary, struggling to both clearly understand and express their opportunities and desires.
For governance and society, even just current US States are variously diverse. So we might discuss whether we want aspect X of the federal government or national society, to look more like those of this state or that state, with a bit from some other. Current countries and societies provide even larger breath, and history even more.
But the goal here isn't models, merely vocabulary. Not "if we do this, then these experiences suggest these results". Such extrapolations between highly complex systems are almost silly. Though experiences can suggest possibilities. But my focus here is more on creating vocabulary. For example, I recall a story of "you don't call the police in <city in Brazil>, because they will just show up in force, smash things and people unrelated to the problem, and then leave, having done nothing but additional harm". For vocabulary, it doesn't matter whether that's true, or typical, or happens only under specific conditions, or is different now, or whatever. It's merely a tag, to facilitate discussion and reflection like "Hmm, it seems there are a few situations of that in the US too! What is the shape of such cases? Does it vary among municipalities? Why? What does the space of shapes look like? What are the class, cultural, political, and professional contexts?", etc.
Society slowly turned into an oligarchy where a handful of families owned the majority of wealth. And the same time depletion of natural resources, mostly forests, lead to systemic scarcity of fuel (wood). Increased social complexity due to the size of the empire. On top of that, ongoing wars with barbarian and Ira... I mean Persian forces.
It's gotten faster and is getting faster over time. It was much, much worse a year ago which makes me believe that the team is paying attention to speed.
Compared to the main competitor mentioned here - Confluence - it is blazing fast.
I wouldn't say mind-numbingly slow, but it does struggle sometimes. The Android app is a bit poor as well in my opinion - gets the job done, but I've seen better ones by competitors.
Despite those issues, I have fully switched over to Notion. Instead of trying to force some very specific workflow onto you, it just offers a great toolkit that you can use to manage your own work whichever way you like it.
I would prefer a native app over a web app, but I guess that's just the world that we live in today.
