braza

To be honest, even the official guide [1] for BG does not have any information about how to make some info about query cost, budget, and service limits mechanisms [2].

I think the HTTP Archive team could set something in that regard.

PS: When I was an instructor for some cloud training in AWS, the first 2 hours were only to set up billing and budgets to avoid any kind of situation like this. No one would start training without all those locks in place in the first place.

[1] - https://github.com/HTTPArchive/httparchive.org/blob/main/doc... [2] - https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/best-practices-costs

I do not buy that cause in Central Europe there’s a lot of tech companies offices closing or exiting, and the whole scene of startups and scale ups are not so dynamic as USA and if you go to pitchbook/Crunchbase you will see tons of “startups from 2011” with overhead/org bloat with last round in 2020/21.

If I was employed in some company in Central Europe, I would not bet my livelihood in any kind of job stability that is sold in the region by work council or regulations that can be easily hoped.

> The last point I want to make is I feel like it's been forever since I had a conversation about craftsmanship on the job. It's possible I have just found myself in the wrong places time and time again.

I can relate with the OP, not in terms of craftsmanship but criticality of things during the development process and operations.

When I worked in finance (algo trading), I was amazed at how we had so many controls and guard rails we had to ship something, that during the time was almost impossible to go south because if we knew that if something went off our company would be burst more or less like Knight Capital.

Fast forward to working in some SaaS, I always struggled to understand how things were so low impact/critical/important and how those things happened almost every second. Was hard to believe that some folks on the fund using VBA and excel spreadsheets were way more careful coding than allegedly professional software engineers. After some point in time, I just felt sloppy the whole process.

With time comes maturity and you start to realize that each company has some kind of meta-culture around how things are done and you end up adapting yourself; but is not an easy process. Another thing that I noticed is that your early experience in SWE or experiences that you're operating in hyper critical industry or a world-class environment creates a massive imprinting that you carry along your entire career.

From an outside perspective, I see that most of them are proud of the European values and how they permeate their societies since integration with other countries 'till a more friendly aspect from the richer countries (Central Europe) to the less fortunate ones (Eastern Europeans).

But as soon some of the traits of those countries starts to appear in a slightly fashion, those friendly societies will fight tooth and nail to establish their values even over the European ones (e.g. social integration, education, etc). DHH made a great summary over it [1].

For instance, in some parts of Central Europe, if you're speaking a different language with your child on a train people feel entitled to ask you to stop and speak their language since you live there.

I lived in US for a while and I never have seen that.

[1] - https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-reality-of-the-danish-fairytal...

> Sure, effective communication could also come across rude in certain situations, but for most people being rude is not an active choice they make but something they feel entitled to.

On top of that, the critique that I have with the article is that we should combine both, but I can relate that most of the rude people are classified as Mechanistic, using the parameters of the article.

That's why I disagree with the premise that you should combine, in my experience the amount of Humanistic people should be at least 8:1 for each Mechanistic, with strict and top-down principles and policies that dictate what is acceptable or not.

What I see in most of the working places is that, when you have a single default-rude person (mislabed as Mechanistic) the blast radius of people being shut down is way greater, and on the long run tanks everyone productivity.

> “When everyone has the same mindset, the team becomes an echo chamber. Balance allows the team to find more holistic solutions to problems"

I can relate to that as a Latin American working in Europe; in the USA specifically this balance is way easier to find and there are more checks and balances.

My first year here I came from this Humanistic Mindset which is the standard in America as a whole; however being in EU I found out that most of the people run (not are, but run) in this Mechanistic Mindset.

Initially makes sense because when you have a a different background, the best you can do is equalize the communication style.

Someone said something interesting about those differences that relate to the article: In the US the culture is more or less like a salad, where maybe all the ingredients are sliced but more or less you know each one, and the result is something good. In Europe, the culture is more like a soup or a Fundue where differences are below the water but the surface is homogeneous, or all the ingredients are melted together.*

* N.B: I do not have a horse on this race or any preference over another.

But in this case, Github had 3 major tailwinds: (1) the popularization of VCS, (2) the network effect due to the number of users and (3) it's more or less the mandatory part of modern software engineering.

For the use case that you mentioned, I agree that it is important and I understand. Still, for the folks that aren't relying upon LLMs or are doing some vanilla/traditional ML in some laggard industry, I have a hard time believing that those folks are going to HF.

> have built up a community and ecosystem around their offerings

The community it’s great and I am user for a while. My doubt is that if there’s a lot of use cases where companies and/or MLEs/DS will do some “git pull model_v0.1” from any of the HF model store.

Maybe it’s a naive question, but here we go: Following HF for a while in the industry, despite all the UI/UX, what’s the business use case to use them instead a “s3” to distribute the models or some kind of torrent for a non-centralised model distribution?

After the whole debacle around the GPT4chan[1] and the whole gating mechanism for models, it’s hard for me to think how some entity can trust that they are not going to shutdown or do gating due to some ToS shenanigans. In other words: if you’re this man in the middle between models and clients, it’s not better to treat yourself as a “dumb pipe”?

N.B.: I think the company has a great culture seeing from the outside and I assume that I can be misinformed about their business model.

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT4-Chan

Thanks for the words. Maybe it's about the whole experience that I got in the beginning of career that several experienced folks told me "See, learn Python/Ruby 'cause it has more jobs available and pay more". It was true on my demographic at that time.

Along the time I was not exposed to those "low level" languages and it had the effect that I never had that perception. That's why I felt that my experience was subpar: In a point in time, I was living in a complete different epistemic universe even being on the technology.

> C can teach you useful things, like how memory is a huge array of bytes, but you can also learn that without writing C programs. People say, C teaches you about memory allocation. Yes it does, but you can learn what that means as a concept without learning a programming language.

The problem with those takes is that it always come from the people that already know it and had a lot of baggage that distorts it’s view that no one else should learn.

Due to several reasons I always worked with high level languages and last year I started to learn C and C++ and how beautiful was to know exactly how are you allocating resources in your application that I felt quite good programming mentally and intellectually.

When you come from a world of resource overprovisioning (CPU, memory) when you start to get your head about those languages that puts performance first, you feel good about it in the first moment but in the second after you feel that your whole experience was subpar due to lack of a thought process.

Outside AI and LLMs, there are some solid use cases for those Vector Search Databases? Maybe I am not seeing something, but it’s hard to see it gaining traction outside tech companies.

I see it in another way: in the past aesthetics and the richness in the detail was beloved to connected with the divine and sublime, and in a more contemporary times is related something more experimental.

However, in the modern world with set of regulations plus complexities with urban places, and cost of build is not viable to have such so great ornaments around.

For instance: one of most recognised and awarded architects had a lot of criticism[1] due to a new set requirements for urban life.

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/slideshow/the-dark-side-of-oscar-n...

I used to like documentaries a lot but after Discovey/NatGeo started to do dramatisation in almost all documentaries, most of the substance was exchanged by irrelevant dialogs along the way plus factual inaccuracies are rampant.

> Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo

My perception at that time (autumn 2017) was that Tensorflow had the biggest unforced fumble in the modern history in artificial intelligence, not having the vision to make an API aiming the researchers.

They made the almost impossible and took down Theano and Torch in less than 2 years and fueled with a lot of money from Google got the ecosystem for at least 2 years.

I think they thought like “hey, we won’t the comercial ecosystem, so it’s over; academics and research will follow; even this inflexible and cranky API. If they complain, push Keras to them all”.

What happened in reality was, at the time that Facebook made an absolutely wise decision to lift Torch and unite research and a better UX, it just twisted the situation that for me it’s just bonkers to imagine how Google let that happen?

I do not have a straight answer, but one thing that I saw working is the concept of “Good fences” where folks still act as a team but has clear touch points related with problems and when things goes south everyone knows what to do.

> Because interfacing via API is expensive. Writing APIs for others to use productively isn't easy and change management also adds a lot of overhead.

I agree in principle, but there is a lot of “unseen coordination/communication” costs that it’s easy taken for granted.

When I was working on telecom doing interfacing with carriers (e.g T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) on thing that I noticed was how simple was to work with those folks: Ok, this is the standard XML, those are the endpoints, that’s the list of error codes, the rate limit is X requests per second, a bunch of files will be on this FTP at 5AM daily basis, and if you face more than 100ms latency from our side just call this number.

Working with “product” companies without silos most of the time it’s design by committee, folks that won’t keep the service running wanting to have a say in our payload wanting us to change our overly reliable RabbitMQ to use their Kafka.

I can resonate with the author, giving the context working on Scaleups and Big companies, where the coordination and communication plays a very heavy toil on the actual work.

I do not believe in this model of “big collaboration” with folks swarming around a problem and each one with partial context trying to fix something that structurally has a huge communication, coordination and technical coupling.

The best work experiences that I had was in teams that we establish the APIs, S3 buckets where the processed batch files will stay an maybe a e-mail list where someone will reply if something change.

I was in the RUP universe for a period of my career and I would never want to go back on it agile was a refreshing breeze back then.

However, the framework needs updates in several important areas: operations, data science, end of the PO figure and incorporating other actors as part of the feedback cycle, tech debt management, how to deal with uncertainty more efficiently, and so on.

Unfortunately due to a lot of issues in our industry, agile got a lot of bad rep plus a lot of luggage it turns very hard to have a dispassionate discussion that the IQ of the participants does not drop 20%, at least. It's a shame, but I really would like to see some updates on this.

BS is most of the time a slang for Bullshit.

+1

Not to dunk on the author, but after reading a bunch of literature on it and experimenting with 2 asset bubbles myself, it's quite bad that people dilute the word/economic phenomena without any further research from the past.

What is happening is that we have a great fragmentation of technology due to its many barriers of adoption and commoditization, where everyone will surely try to ride their R&D teams and investments.

At the end of the day markets will pursuit the maximum edge with the cheapest price available (in this case Open Source models, libs, and data(?), and consumers will converge to the cheapest of the best network; so the most rational movimento for a lot of businesses is to bet in something that can give some positive returns instead to miss out and be eaten.

I do not have any horse in this race, but it’s quite surprising for me that USA is jumping in and Europe and China are not championing the operations for the security in the Red See even having more vested interests on the transportation.

I think and I hope she wins; but a question for the non-American persons here: Do you still feel free to post any kind of criticism online nowadays? (e.g. Twitter, forums, etc.)

At least from 2014, I feel less compelling to write anything marginally controversial online 'cause calculating the payoff between feel good to post something online versus the risk of being fired/doxxed/others is so asymmetrical that sometimes is better to go on the streets and/or talk with a representative in private than post it online.

For any GameDev here, why that industry specifically is so brutal with the workers? I have seen several industries in technology (e.g. embedded systems, defence tech, Fin Tech, SaaS, etc) and none are so brutal in terms of overworking and being so disposable (on the eyes of some execs) as GameDev.

I used to work on a place that everything was open by default and in comparison with closed by the default was a blissful experience.

I never got the point why with 3 months of work I had access to the AWS account, all repos and passwords.

After some point in time I tried to understand with the IT director and he told me that he prefers to have a tougher hiring process and huge onboarding process and have that instead to ensure security first approach.

He told me that in some previous experiences he lost productivity with closed by default plus he used to have the same security issues.

I am keen to imagine that this is impossible in a big company.

> but most of the time you won't, for many reasons

This.

One thing that I noticed working in 3 different continents is that the learning/teaching on technology (CS?) is highly fragmented and it's quite hard to find some "common ground" in practices and methods and mesh all of that in a socio-technological place makes everything harder.

A weak generalization to illustrate the point: A [Continent A] developer will be more resource aware due to their natural lack of, an [Continent B] developer since it has more human capital available (better mentors, big ecosystem, huge amount of finance capital) will have more room for scaling ideas, a [Continent C] developer will have a better understanding of the intricacies due to their formal education and cultural aspects.

Placing all those people underneath a tech project and not having a program to terraform biases and level them to a shared and understandable set of expectations is the root cause of all this debacle.

I really liked the stories and most of them are inspirational for me; however I must confess that every time that I read such remarkable histories and those guys doing relevant stuff; I feel bad about the work that I do as a corporate software developer.

My day starts debugging some arcane shell scripts embedded in some yaml in the CI tool; at afternoon I need to optimise some SQL query moving several sub queries that makes the execution plan costly and transform it in small steps in temporary small tables; and before I leave I just noticed some bug in production caused by wrong typing in Go and I need to fix it.

I mean, it’s hard to think about the work that I am doing going towards to a mastery state.

I really appreciate those histories, but for me it’s more or less watching Apocalypse Now from the perspective of a low level cooker/dish washer on the grand scheme of things.

I don't own a Tesla, but I have a relevant anecdote related to your post. I rented a Model 3 in Switzerland and while the car was drivable, I felt that the interior was cheaply made, giving the impression that I was driving a toy car.

The car had a lot of plastic and whenever I drove over bumpy roads, there were cracking friction sounds everywhere. Additionally, the acceleration was extremely sensitive, making it difficult to maneuver in tight streets.

Question to the european residents: In the case that Brussels approves those regulations, for the European resident users that rely on those to be prohibited services (e.g. X payments [1], payments on those adult platforms, etc.) what kind of procedure can be done to ensure access? Is that even legal?

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67749228