braza

I’ve worked there, maybe my 2 cents: at the end of the day I have mouths to feed and honestly I used to be idealistic regarding employer moral compass and so on, but coming from the bottom in socio-economic terms I will exercise my right to be cynical about it.

I have some support to the Trust&Safety team at the same period of the whole debate about the section 230; and from what I can tell Snap has some flagging mechanisms quite good related with people selling firearms, drugs and especially puberty blockers.

The thing that I can say is that a lot of parents are sleeping at the wheel with teenagers and not following what is going on with their child.

I think the initiative comes from some good principles, but I do not buy it because it not about fostering a dynamic European market and creating conditions for small and medium-sized companies to be able to raise and compete, but it sounds more like, _Hey, let's use the services from our own European cartel companies and help cement them, because "america bad"._

And another fundamental problem:

> Spotify is based in Sweden.[1]

> (Spotify) Paid out a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry in 2024 pg. 4 [2]

> Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Music and Entertainment Rights Licensing Independent Network (“Merlin”), makes up the majority of music consumed on our Service. pg. 15 [3]

At the end, the money will directly flow to the major labels and american artists/producers.

[1] - https://europeanalternatives.online/apple-music-european-alt....

[2] - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2024/q4....

[3] - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2024/q4...

> The problem is not that incontrovertible proof cannot be provided real time. Yielding evidence from complex, esoteric systems is always difficult and time-consuming.

Most of the heated discussions that I saw in low performing teams was because of that specific aspect.

Being more specific: if we have 3 people with different levels of knowledge, most of the time if the person that has more in depth knowledge and sense of craft will take the heated position.

> Whereas a programmer who's either straight out of school or fresh off their first internship or short-stint job is essentially all potential. So you draw their line on the basis of just a few early dots, but the line can be steep.

> It's not that different from something like the NFL scouting combine. Teams fight to find the promise of The Next All-Star. These rookies won't have the experience that someone who's already played in the league for years would have, but they have the potential to be the best. Someone who's already played for several seasons will have shown what they have and be weighed accordingly.

I know that DHH is good at programming, but I am sure he has never scouted in collective sports and/or knows the difference between programming and seeing potential in sports. Since I have been on both sides, I have a few words on why his assertions do not hold water.

At the time that you do scouting, yes, you might want to have the promising QB/WR on your team, but those guys do not have what developers have, which is, for the lack of a better name, "skills transitivity" between their positions.

A QB that has some characteristics like strategic thinking and skills to read defenses (like Peyton Manning), precision for long-distance throws (like Tom Brady), or being a dual-threat plus pocket mobility (like Russell Wilson) but it's very unlikely that with those skill sets, you'll become a great wide receiver or even a Tight End/Wide Receiver.

As a developer, yes, one can optimize the process to have the most stellar coder, but by the force of their craft, the more time they have, the more their skills enhance transitivity to other parts of the same craft.

And the good thing is that, contrary to the promising QB, over time if his not the stellar player, his skills won't make him able to transition to other parts of the team.

In concrete terms, a developer that learned in their years 1-2 to work with TypeScript, in the years 3-4 worked with Java, and in the year 5 started to touch Docker will have a way more skill set and transitivity than someone picked out of the college that you do not know for sure how their learning will affect their skills transitivity.

And another flaw in the argument, maybe a minor one: stellar potential most of the time needs to find stellar environments and conditions to thrive. The NFL teams know so much about it at terms of fundamental level that even when the worst team of the previous season generally selects the 1st pick QBs in the draft, they know that if the conditions does not change, in a few years that stellar talent will go somewhere else.

As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.

When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.

One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.

Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".

Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07887ZzKiw

Edit 2: I hit submit early and I reframed my post, sorry for the confusion.

The author gains a great insight into the social consequences of discussing politics with friends, but I think it might be part of something larger, a sort of intellectual signaling of meta-contrarianism.

At least in the countries where I live, debating politics is less about civic duty and being a citizen, and has become a substitute for sports; people prioritize their passions, and they are not concerned with getting the government to implement the policies it promised in the first place, but with defending a side.

In Germany, we see on state broadcasts every single day discussions about how the USA is bad, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, how some war in a distant place is bad, and so on; and nothing related to local politics.

If you invite someone to go to the municipal legislative service to talk with someone about why we still have underinvestment in kindergartens, even with record revenue, while other groups of society are capitalizing on social benefits, nobody will show up.

Getting in front of a keyboard and brigading online to talk about federal elections and/or officials of other countries is cool: it gives you the latest scandal of the day, you can congregate with people of your chamber, it provides audience for podcasts, and it generates talking points that sound intellectually tasty.

At least for me, the politics that matter most are local politics; and this is the craziest thing: it's the kind of politics where you can do something as an individual, you will have someone to hear you out, and with some effort, you can make a real and direct difference for your community.

> I know that parents have sheltered their children to varying degrees throughout history but now it seems way more extreme than it's ever been before.

In my case, definitely yes.

Not related to the analog/digital only, but I come from a "macho-ghetto-gansta-hood" culture. This is embedded in my community and, more or less, my city.

I will not only shield my children against it, but I will fight to the fullest extent to prevent them from even getting in touch and thinking this is attractive.

I've left my city because of it, not because I am superior or special, but because I know how pervasive and deep-entrenched and poisonous this kind of culture can be.

It will affect the way that you speak, the way that you dress, and the way that other people see you, and not only does it have this perpetual victim mindset, but more importantly, you do not know that you've become socially handicapped due to this.

Not the OP, but this was a theme in the European Parliament in 2022 [1][2] and it was the object of a document that Greenpeace made [3] showing how pervasive the Russian lobby was over climate policies.

I personally do not believe that Russia does it in Germany via the Green Party but more so over other parties, such as AfD and BSW.

[1] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127....

[2] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127....

[3] - https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-....

Maybe I wouldn't use the umbrella term "tech journalist who hates tech" because I can see where comes from the need for public scrutiny that every big industry faces when becoming influential (e.g., tobacco, food, alcoholic beverages, etc.), and I think we as a society need to acknowledge that technology enjoyed one of the biggest public good wills without any kind of critique (not criticism).

I'm OK with the articles around privacy, political influence, power affluency, and surveillance, but when this becomes the main agenda for a publication that has as a target public starttups, VCs, and other parts of their ecosystem, it's hard to stick with that. In other words, I feel better seeing that kind of content in a more nuanced and in-depth way in The Atlantic, NYT or other independent media than in a publication that does not have that pedigree.

Maybe I come from a different perspective. In my case, the technology industry was a gigantic enabler for societal mobility, social ascention, education, and a way to connect to my community, where technology is important for their economic ascent as well.

Of course I am not trying to rationalize their side that is harmful for several societies, but at least for me, TC used to be the place where I could find companies doing something useful for a couple of people.

PersonallyI would pay a service like TC circa 2014-2017 that is a directory of start-ups/scale-ups and bring some great digest about the industry in a more nuanced view in terms of capabilities and new companies.

The change of tone in Tech Crunch over the last 5 years was something that I feel personally sad about.

I was a long-time reader, and being in a peripheral place where we looked up to the American companies, TC sounded very optimistic with their coverage, bringing success stories, talking with founders, and most importantly, being on this industry radar, at least from the standpoint of a more journalistic and general audience level.

During the latest years, TC became a bit bitter around the industry and forgot the sea of small companies and scale-ups, and started to be more political and critical, and the least being a good thing in a certain way, probably does not have the ideological muscle to do it like the more mainstream media. In other words, if I want to check some critique, I would go to some independent and ideological shop and get the straight point, then some sugar-coated criticism.

Maybe this one relates more with the Americans because Ozempic became a trend there: Why are most people jumping on this drug? At least for me, besides all the cliches and stereotypes about the USA people, there's huge access to nutrition, gyms, surgical procedures, capital for buying healthy food, and medicine in general.

That's the most interesting thing because if those folks managed to get a parachute for their 1x pref investors with this abysmal final price, what does it mean for the several companies at the same situation?

It's a pity that we do not have a version of "Who's holding the bag?"[1] for LP and VC funds, but with all challenges to raise money, it would be interesting to see how many funds are losing money at the moment.

This is the inherent feature from VC funds but still, one thing is raise cheap money and having a "circular" money flowing (from A -> B - (...) -> IPO -> A) but if they do not arrive even in the IPO how this ecosystem will work if a US 5 Year Coupon pays 4.40%?

[1] - https://pscmevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Who-Is-Hol...

From the presentation

> The more code, more bugs.

I came from a place where we developed ERP software with the entire business logic in SQL Stored Procedures with some minimal UI, and working with ML nowadays, the number of bugs are more or less the same; but the difference is that it's way simpler to catch bugs in current days plus the fact that the whole apparatus of stack tracking in modern programming languages helps a lot.

Another fundamental difference is that, in that resource/technology-constrained environment, at least in my experience, there's almost no space for "user features" or "customizations" or "enhancements in UI.". The whole concept of the product was an equivalent of a barefoot experience for the users, and since there's weren't many alternatives, people used to stick with the software regardless on how it sucked.

The average corporate developer in a normal B2C or even B2B environment is involved in so much complex set of requirements and customers/clients that are hyper-sophisticated that, at least for me, it's a modern miracle how technology is delivering and thriving in such an environment.

> team of teenage

Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults).

I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern world, which is the real lack of representation of youth in politics (and maybe in the public service?) [1][2].

I was a 19-year-old holding an assault weapon in my daily work in the military with the power to terminate the lives of almost 99.99% civilians, friends with 23 starting piloting USD 5 million machines, and it's just sad to see that we as a society do not see young adults as capable as their older counterparts.

I speculate that at least in Europe, due to this credibility bias in favor of older politicians, we are facing one of the biggest violations of the intergenerational pact, which is the fact that this same youth will end up without retirement [3].

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/congress-age-de...

[2] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/both-republicans-and-de...

[3] - https://www.dw.com/en/pension-fund-crisis-looms-in-germany-a...

I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.

For myself I noticed 2 bad effects in my daily usage:

- Search: impossible to reach any original content in the first positions. Almost everything sounds like AIsh. The punctuation, the commas, the semicolon, the narro vocabulary, and the derivative nature of the recent internet pages.

- Discovery: (looking directly to you Spotify and Instagram) here I would add in the “No AI” feature another one “Forget the past…” and then set the time. I personally like to listen some orthogonal genres seasonally. But once that you listen 2 songs in a very spontaneous manner Spotify will recommend that for a long time. I listened out of curiosity some math rock, and the “Discovery Weekly” took 9 weeks to not recommend that anymore.

I know where the argument comes from, but at an extreme watching football with 22 folks running behind a ball in a slow game where 97% of the time nothing happens in terms of scoring, and in terms of tactics, today sounds like a handball game; it's boring (and I say that as a Brazilian and having attended more than 100+ in the stadium and more than 600 on TV).

The entertainment in the Olympic games is in the fact that those folks (especially track and field) go to the extreme and human limit. In other words, for regular sports entertainment, I can go to watch Green Bay Packers vs. Vikings or Chelsea vs. Manchester City; for olympic entertainment (athletes pushing to their limits), Olympics are the place to watch.

> The tv rights and advertising sell for billions. In person ticket sales in the 100's of millions.

I acknowledge that this economic output is relevant, but the real issue for me is how this is distributed downstream.

I do not think it's correct that the IOC captures a ton of value [1], and at the same time we have huge issues in terms of funding, even in very rich countries [2].

The countries and athletes make their sacrifices (i.e., one hosting and investing and the latter personal finances), but the IOC still insists on this model.

Back in the day, we used to have the idea to make the Summer Olympic games cheaper by having a permanent country/facility and fewer sports, but for any reason the IOC is against it.

[1] - https://olympics.com/ioc/funding [2] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseyedarvin/2024/07/31/paris...

I knew 2 former UFC fighters (circa 2010/2016) that got USD 20K in average for their fights. The issue is that this does not cover 100% of the whole preparation that they need to be in the octagon. For instance, from little things since food and flight tickets, going to special medication (one of them was suspended by the USDA and got banned from UFC), sparring, fighting camping, and so on. One of them told me that the UFC was only the marketing for his personal Jiu Jitsu academy as a top of the pipeline for new students.

Being a former athlete (100/200 meters), the issue is that the top-tier sports (e.g., football, volleyball, basketball, etc.) capture the majority of money/value, and if you are from javelin throwing, fencing, or racewalking, unless you have a great sponsor, it will definitely require personal sacrifices to make it to the games.

In Brazil a very long time ago, there was a gigantic tug of war between the top-tier sports (especially volleyball and football) and the low-tier sports, and the issue is that from the prize pool, most went to the major sports. The partial solution for it was to incentivize the corporations to do the sponsorships, and the ones that made it got some tax benefits (sometimes in a 1:2).

> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.

I disagree with this.

Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.

One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.

With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.

I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.

As a Brazilian I admire how some Americans here in the thread can say great things and passages about their presidents, regardless of the mistakes made and political party.

Democracies are never perfect but I strongly believe that having something to say about a president it’s a great sign of a health democracy and institution (in this case POTUS).

> Thanks to LLMs, I am now able to build iOS apps with Swift

Build iOS apps is one of the few areas where I have excitement in software engineering, and one of my biggest regrets was to get into ML/backend instead of app development.

Maybe I am 15 years behind, but the whole idea of being able to deliver something to the phone of our final customer is beyond magic for me, even working on SWE for a very long time.

Every person that has the capability to deliver something to the end user via a front-end that you can build by yourself has one of the biggest senses of agency in the SWE field in my opinion.

> Those YouTubers might not be producing erudition, but as long as they have watched a ton of content and decided what the good stuff is, and as long as their tastes seem to align to mine, then their opinion is still very useful.

In most of the (big) YouTuber movies and TV shows critics, I have a very hard time knowing what is their taste and what is a piece of art.

I think in the future the role of a critic will be more to the technical aspect of the piece, and how it fits in their lore than something related to the taste specifically.

In my case, I cannot watch most of the modern TV shows 'cause most of them lack good cinematography, character development, and sound which are important aspects for me in terms of immersion and engagement. Most of the shows today with CGI, only closed camera takes, and lack of external shooting look like sitcoms of the 90s.

That's I think most of the Youtube Critics channels lack, that kind of nuance around those technical aspects.

> Fundamentally I think we want experts, not critics.

I think both have their spaces, but honestly, I would like to have more critics.

With the advent of podcasts and YouTube channels, we have an unprecedented level of access to experts. In my case, I was about to record an album with my band, and back in the day it was hard to get information on what happens in a studio. I saw one video from a band that I liked and got more or less the idea about the process and what it takes [1].

Regarding the critics I agree with others that access journalism corrupted the role of the critics, and I tend to think that we're in thins moment another side of the layman or surface critics (in this context someone who can translate small nuggets of technical knowledge to a broader public, or infotainment) dictating part of the discourse based on cultural aspects.

One example was the whole debacle related to the Disney Star Wars series Acolyte.

The surface critics dunked the series on YouTube, and on the other side, the access journalism tried to protect the series due to the relation or personality of their authors.

I watched the whole series and even though I personally rated it 3/10, I really would like to understand the artistic and technical aspects of why the show wasn't great.

- Why the writing aspect was the main problem of the show? - What's the role of cinematography in the scenes? - How does this piece tie with the lore and what are its implications? - What are the issues with the sound and depth? - And regarding acting, which elements went wrong?

I tend to agree that the old 3 superficial paragraphs critique is gone, but I do not think that the new critique via Podcasts and Youtube are great substitutes either.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y40ZyDQXfoE

A marginally related point but I do not know if others faced the following situation: I worked in a place with a CI pipeline room ~25 minutes with the unit/integration tests (3000+) taking 18 minutes.

When something happens in production we ended up placing more tests; and of course when things goes south at least 50 minutes were necessary to recover.

After a lot of consideration we decided to focus on the recovery and relax and simply some tests and focus on recovery (i.e. have the full thing in less than 5 minutes) combined with a canary as deployment strategy (instead rolling updates).

At least for us was a so refreshing experience but sounded wrong in some ways.

> Too many fractured packaging solutions, not a single one well designed. And they all conflict.

100% this.

Last 4 years, one of the most frustrating parts of SWE that I need to deal with on a daily basis is packaging data science & machine learning applications and APIs in Python.

Maybe this is a very mid-solution, but one solution that I found was to use dockerized local environments with all dependencies pinned via Poetry [1]. The start setup is not easy, but now using some other Make file, it's something that I take only 4 hours with a DS to explain and run together and save tons of hours of in debugging and dependency conflict.

> Python developers would rather save 1 line of code in the moment, even if it pushes the complexity off to another part of the system.

Sounds odd to me in several projects that I worked on that folks bring the entire dependency on Scikit-Learn due to the train_test_split function [2] because the team thought that it would be simpler and easier to write a function that splits the dataset.

[1] - https://github.com/orgs/python-poetry/discussions/1879 [2] - https://scikit-learn.org/1.5/modules/generated/sklearn.model...

100% that.

> Large media companies have swooped in and gobbled up pretty much every major newspaper, local tv news, and local radio news.

I think the main issue is related to the funding of those projects. As a non-American but former resident of San Francisco, I would like to see more things like [1] (regardless of the political side) for local politics.

It's a pity that the national news is pushed so hard that local councils and mayors can do almost everything without any pushback, even being the kind of politics that has a direct and immediate effect on most normal people.

[1] - https://www.piratewires.com/p/downtown-is-for-drug-users-san...

Transcribing is almost at the end of the journalistic process. The hard part is getting the facts (correctly), checking and cross-checking, calling sources, trying to get back channels, in many cases have boots on the ground, and then summarize all those things and put them all together before editorialization.

> How does AI attend meetings, ask questions of local officials or bodies, provide in-person reports and original fact based copy?

I noticed that most of the journalism that I care about ~drifted~ from the writing to non-structured media (e.g. podcasts, videos), where in writting we have only things oriented to the SEO and future reference and historical purposes, and the actual red meat content comes in "conversations" or in aired media in youtube channels.

Back in the day, a journalist could sit in a hearing or in an audience, and you could read at the weekend a deep dive with key points in the trial, points made by the prosecution and defense, the verdict, and the entire trial dynamic and buildup. Currently you have in writing only some high-level summary with no specifics and maybe some journalist opinion, and the entire breakdown you can have it on Youtube.

For me, this is one of the two saddest trends that I see in modern journalism (another one is the lack of investigative journalism revealing political corruption), where you can only get in the depths by going to the prolix audio and video media formats.