2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it
2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
[Rant-Example] The goshdarn ticketing-system hijacks alt-f, so that instead of opening the File menu of my browser, and instead toggles the favorite-status of whatever ticket I happen to be viewing.
Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine.
Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear.
Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture.
JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this.
https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/
Well, too many to have a single website be consistent across browsers.
But as a user I'm using one specific browsers, and I expect all websites be consistent for that browser.
Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?
It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.
I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit.
Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.
And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?
There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management.
By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.
It couldn't exist without engineers.
Before the more recent wave of successful tech startups (say, from 2010 on), a very large amount of programmers were incredibly sensitive to anything related to topics like (posisbility of) surveillance, privacy, authorities (including government), centralized infrastructures, DRM etc.
In my feeling, the only reason why this mindset shifted is because from this wave on, in the USA, programmers were showered in money.
The interesting question rather is: now that tech companies want to become more frugal with respect to paying programmers, will the mindset among programmers shift back or not?
I want to get rich too. I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. I don't want to just survive. So I can't say I don't empathize.
> I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.
This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed.
> I want to get rich too.
You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Are they? I seriously doubt billions of people earn 200k+ salaries.
Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.
> Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Things are not looking good out there. Billions of people get by without compromising? Billions of people live in poverty too. Not something I'm looking forward to dealing with, should the great AI replacement ever come knocking on my door.
unfortunately that is the state of our society right now and it is hard to see this changing.
It's not looking too good out there. We've got trillionaires bragging to people's faces about how they're all going to be replaced by their AIs. It got to the point someone threw a molotov into one CEO's home.
Source of income? The promise of AI is to literally make all humans economically redundant. In a capitalist world, what is the point of keeping economically useless people alive? People who do nothing but cost society money? Why not turn them all into soylent instead?
If we don't create a post-scarcity society now, I'm not sure we ever will. Choices aren't looking too good out there.
Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.
You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.
Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.
I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
And they're right.
Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?
I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.
If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.
To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.
Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.
I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of money?
For me (and many others), money is a means to an end. I don’t want money per se, I want housing and food and things that money can buy.
But for a few, money is the goal. They want money for the sake of more money. They don’t need more. That’s greed.
In my experience, it's much simpler.
People are greedy if they make things I want cost more.
More likely, never learned about it in the first place, save a few whispers. Who's got time to go digging in deep, when there's 'experiments to run, research to be done' ...
> I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
new blood, new greed
(Previously) Microsoft EVP: "Dumb decision" -> org executes
(Now) Microsoft PM: "Dumb decision related to AI" -> team immediately executes
So they've pushed bad decision making down the hierarchy?
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
The AI gigawatts are all in data centers.
They never cared for the environment (in this way, at least).
Anyway, I agree with the notion of the extreme energy-inefficiency of LLMs. The scale of it makes it hard to imagine any less efficient product will ever be invented.
https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-update-will-help-your-pc-...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/04/22/reduc...
That reminds me of a few years ago when Android phones replaced the behavior of "long press sleep/power button" from "shut down" to "ask AI about what's in your screen". Perhaps a manager got promoted somewhere for "raising AI usage" in Android phones.
Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
When did this happen?
Mmm... I think I missed that part.
So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.
Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.
Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them
Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.
Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.
Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.
I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.
On the one hand MS was a web pioneer — asynchronous web calls and ActiveX technologies that were surprisingly capable — but these were peripheral to their main goals.
Instead of MS extending their unified development platform outwards, something .Net promised to enable, effectively the opposite happened. .Net chased Java, but Java was being pushed out by Ruby on Rails. .Net web starts chasing RoR, but then Node is getting cool. .Net Web starts chasing Node and that effort splits .Net into uhhhhh ‘Framework’ uhhh ‘standard’ (ie Old-and-working), and .Net Core (what a container based web stack VM needs to look like).
The problem at that point, IMO/IME, is that Node is JavaScript, and those awesome server-side geniuses dump too-easy tooling while recreating every problem of every stack ever (ie LeftPad, loosely goosey versioning, and NPM being a crypto hackers wet dream). The .Net that started as Enterprise Server Stuff is now kinda sorta ‘Whatever’ about versioning, stability, roadmaps, and platform planning. Everything from DataAccess to GUI was churned needlessly for almost a decade, and everyone using that platform looks and feels like an a-hole because huge swaths of MS tech is abandonware resulting in perpetual rewrites of recent-term work and silos of competence.
No one can explain what framework to use to write a basic windows application anymore… Office uses React, and Windows does too… the fat cats who made MS into M$ knew better than that, the M$ who chased cloud growth and cut staff for stock price has never cared.
I will fight against any Microsoft tooling being used at every company until I die. This is unforgivable.
They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
What we seem to be experiencing is a combination of monopoly power/abuse, and regulatory/government/court capture to keep it in place.
We accept this the same way we accept the air quality wherever we are.
Yes, Linux is there, but consider the barriers to the average person of truly adopting a strict Free Software life. Consider how many things in life now simply demand for you to have an Android or iOS phone. Things as simple as parking.
I really liked Copilot - it gave you a lot of tokens across a bunch of models and their agentic features were perfectly serviceable, alongside it being really affordable! And then they moved over to usage based billing and it no longer has that advantage over the alternatives: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...
I still think they have a really good AI tab autocomplete implementation and it's nice to be able to use that in VSC without swapping to another editor altogether... but that's not enough to really make me pay for their subscription. I could probably move to Zed altogether if I had a problem with VSC itself, though at least the base editor doesn't feel like it has been enshittified and I quite like it, all things considered.
We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death
They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...
Have you read this?
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Microsoft's B2C reputation is undeniably burnt, but their B2B mindshare is unshakable.
I don't think it's fear; it's greed.
I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest?
Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?
Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.
You could say it's the terminal[2] user interface.
Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.
> turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface
It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.
The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.
So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.
Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.
There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.
What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?
Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.
AI companies are in trouble.
Even this supposed profitable enterprise, the people involved are absolutely too moronic to be able to control the thing they try to invent, it will just be a matter of time before it turns around and eliminates them as well...
Some are piling on masses of debt to built capacity (eg. Oracle). Others are just reinvesting the profits from the rest of their company (eg. Google, Meta).
Anthropic’s moat is their best tool, Claude Code.
OpenAI’s moat is the brand of ChatGPT, once the fastest growing app in the history of the world.
It’s possible that open weight models keep pace, but it’s also possible that the investment to train them becomes prohibitively expensive and open weight models cease to keep pace with the large foundation model companies.
There is no theory that says the current frontier models cannot exist in models with 1/100th the compute waste ;). When we start trending in that direction, and oh wow we truly are, there will be no reason for these services. You could run them on your own hardware without serious investments.
The moat openai and anthropic have is them among others have attempted to buy all of the computer hardware for the next two years. That's intentional. They know the only existential threat to them is anyone coming up with a way to do this better than them. It's already happened and it's going to become more and more divergent.
It's not a theory. These smaller models that are coming out are huge advances for the field.
I can't comment on companies training practices. That would be proprietary stuff I guess. I think the claims that the advances being made are due to distillation alone are completely unfair. The advances alone are not just data.
Chinese megatechs stole copyrighted data AND trained their models on derivative / synthetic data that came from the US foundation models.
I’m happy Chinese foundation model trainers were able to use Huawei (homegrown) hardware to train their models (also because having Nvidia dominate that sector is terrible for competition), but if Chinese megatech companies are just deriving their open weights models from US companies, then this is just an IP theft exercise.
I haven't read the claims, so I don't know how easy it will be to work around them. This particular one seems to cover encoder-decoder networks, so it's not necessarily applicable to later LLM implementations. But I'd be amazed if Google didn't have several other relevant patents in their arsenal.
the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.
Robotics isn't even 1% of the way to replacing anything.
Consider why every neat demo is a backflip and not washing the dishes or laying bricks or something.
It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.
In all seriousness, the silicon is still designed in Silicon Valley but maybe you don't hear about that as much? Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia, etc. all have a huge presence there still.
Just to emphasize my point, China is not being deprived of chip _designs_ (via export bans of ASML-made lithography equipment), but rather of the actual physical machines that rearrange the atoms.
We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.
It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.
This paper proposes a solution for which the framework/base is missing.
VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.
Same hypers just moved to different technology.
Because I am too nice and even though every conversation had an element of grift there was still a conversation. Most of them are lost, or struggling with their identity. Yes there's some greed but half of them just want to fit in somewhere and they aren't technical geniuses despite loving technology. I like people like that, of course with out the grift.
That said we don't keep in touch anymore. I do miss them though. I'm something like an abused dog that has seen too many things in their life to not look past all ugliness and see someone's inside. I hang around a lot of hurt people because í want them to have a safe person they can come to if they choose to heal.
Wow that's personal. I should stop posting here and go find some new friends.
I never said grifters but a fair share of my social circle pumped crypto’s/nft’s when they bought some(small amounts but whatever).
Same people just can’t shut up about AI/LLM’s. I don’t care your LLM helped you generate an outlook email address export tool when a quick google reveals outlook can export the email address natively with just a few clicks.
Some people made a lot of money off of those platforms. Everything was a nice story, but once you dug just a wee bit... smoke and mirrors.
I’m yet to see actual productivity result from people paying to talk to chatbots to generate boilerplate.
But I tend to shy away from hypers so the LLM craze is passing me by. I have seen uses of AI/ML that helps recognise objects in images which I have seen it do OK at(and it should because it’s the same image just 10m down the road). A human then reviews the outputs. It also spits out highly inaccurate outputs fairly often that the human is necessary even with a feedback loop.
I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh
Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.
These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.
Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account.
I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction.
Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made.
We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.
Most people obviously use multiple accounts of different types. Those who have crypto wallets will never reveal them to you in the interest of their privacy.
Stablecoin firms make so much cash via interest that they're easily over-capitalized.
If you're foolish enough to be manipulated by VC interests, that's your own fault. I would focus on the tech, not on what VCs want you to believe. This applies generally, irrespective of the sector. I don't know why this is hard to understand.
If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.
TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it
"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
Which literal 20+ year period was that?
Have we been using the same Google?
Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.
Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?
FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.
Besides the use of chrome by Netscape/Mozilla that you mention, roughly around that time I heard it used by HCI people to refer flashy GUI design for cosmetics rather than function, and specifically to changes in a particular MacOS version.
I wonder whether Netscape/Mozilla jokingly then used it as a term for the GUI toolkit "trim" around the browser page. Given that this was a transition to the important stuff being on the Web page, rather than your computer. And/or whether Google did.
Mozilla named the web program Phoenix for rebirth. A company objected. Mozilla renamed it Firebird because phoenix was a fire bird. They named the mail program Thunderbird for similarity of Firebird.
The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.
Not wanting to admit term was taken from competing browser is perfectly fine explanation
> JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.