Cocaine (the powder) is extracted from the coca leaf, which indigenous South Americans have chewed for over 8000 years. While the synthetic drug is insanely addictive, the natural form is still commonly used as a mild stimulant, probably safer than caffeine in coffee. So yes?
Visual Studio Professional did cost about $500 back in the day, although you ended up getting a perpetual licence for the software and some updates. These days they expect you to have a subscription as with all other business software.
Businesses really underestimate how much having a human representative helps customers feel connected to a business. I see it in corporate sales (B2B) where accounts are pretty much tied to the account manager. When the manager leaves, the companies refuse to renew because the account was only good because of the manager.
I think of my favorite businesses I regularly visit and they all have a memorable face to them. I feel more than a consumer. They help me understand the product and guide my decision making. They tell me when my order doesn’t make sense. And they refer me to other places they recommend. Or they tell me my problem is real and a mess, but assure me they’ll fix it.
> From a critical perspective, this signals organizational dysfunction. If a company requires 13 people to sign off on a hire, it… implies a fear of making mistakes… The company with 13 rounds was fishing for a reason to say "no”
I realized this at my current job. The decisive interview decision and feedback impressed me. Once on the inside, I could see how the “bias for action” and push for decisiveness permeated the whole company. PRs get approved timely. Meetings push for a conclusion. When someone complains about being stuck, neighbors will offer advice or even a helping hand. I’m so much more productive here than anywhere previously, and I owe it to the culture. They WANT people to succeed. But success comes with risk of failure, so the culture needs to accommodate some failure to allow people to safely take risks.
I’m my interview, I misunderstood the question and presented a solution. The interviewer tried to correct me but I didn’t understand what my mistake was. They encouraged me to just go for it. I eventually realized what they meant, I corrected myself and all of it was a stronger yes signal for them. I push forward, see mistakes, pivot fast, and iterate quickly on feedback.
Interviewers are often unsupportive or looking for a reason to say no. It screams that they’re not really “desparate to hire” and in-fact, may be difficult to work with.
The problem with LLMs using full-text-search is they’re very slow compared to a vector search query. I will admit the results are impressive but often it’s because I kick off an agent query and step away for 5 minutes.
On the other hand, generating and regenerating embeddings for all your documents can be time consuming and costly, depending on how often you need to reindex
Not an apples to apples comparison. Vector search is only fast after you have built an index. The same is true for full text search. That too, will be blazing fast once you have built an index (like Google pre-transformer).
LLMs will always have the tool call overhead, which I find to be quite expensive (seconds) on most models. Directly using vector databases without the LLM interface gets you a lot of the semantic search ability without the multi-second latency, which is pretty nice for querying documents on a website. E.G. finding relevant pages on a documentation website, showing related pages, etc. Can be applied to GitHub Issues to deduplicate issues, or show existing issues that could match what the user is about to report. There are plenty of places where “cheap and fast” is better and an LLM interface just gets in the way. I think this is a lot of the unsqueezed juice in our industry.
I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.
While I think I understand your point, there’s probably a few ways to look at this.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Those things can happen, sure, but GP is saying that the term "enshittification" was coined to describe a very specific kind of phenomenon about monopoly internet platforms and their pattern of first building dependency and market power before becoming maximally extractive. It's not supposed to be about just any generic way that software might get worse for its users.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.
It's intense market demand by people with lots of money against products that have a very long supply chain. Even with multiple sellers competing, this kind of demand is insane, and the buyers pockets run deep.
The other way I look at this is that these companies have been collecting an insane amount of wealth and value over the last 2-3 decades, are finally in a situation where they feel threatened, and are willing to spend to survive. They have previously never felt this existential threat before. It's basically bidding wars on houses in San Francisco, but with all the wealthiest companies in the world.
My experience at poorly run public schools is that leadership and admin change out VERY quickly because of burnout. The article talks about how military has long term continuity (8 year terms) but civilian have 2-4 year terms. I’ve seen schools where the principal doesn’t even stay the full year. In the end of the day, the civilian world is full of choices and people come and go at will.
