Steam, not iron.
1,063 karma · joined March 29, 2018
When your options are a few competing BigCos and you don’t have incentive to try to build it for yourself because it straddles the annoying in-between space of “frustrating enough to do something” and “ not frustrating or valuable enough to actually solve the problem.”
The site has been upgraded to 6.44 to close the vulnerability, I rotated every API key and account credential, and both manually and programmatically scrubbed every instance I could find of the code injection across the database. I think we're clear now!
Sorry to anyone caught by this and thank you to folks for flagging it (and thanks to the HN team for letting me follow up on this after comments were closed). I'm seriously mortified. X_X
[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/security/advisories/GHSA-w... [2] https://www.securityweek.com/ghost-cms-vulnerability-exploit...
> “[Companies with a good trajectory] give your resume (and career) a pedigree and an opportunity to work alongside some of the top talent or top operational structures in an industry. They also offer great paychecks that compensate for whatever issues may be present.”
Companies with a good trajectory can be awful to work for but their trajectory — and subsequently their ability to allocate value (pay, headcount, interesting challenges) to teams to make them more competitive — in my view compensates for whatever drawbacks come from them. There is some benefit to working for them. For a bad company, there is often little explicit value for working there unless you’re personally passionate about the work/industry or you need a job.
Said differently: a good company delivers value to you. In a bad company, you have to drag personal value out.
Somewhat ironic then, to not make this more explicit in an article about solving a combinatorial problem.
The way people use AI is the opposite of focus. It’s throw as much as you can against the wall because it is fast and cheap and possible. It is peanut buttering. Companies today mandate AI use so indiscriminately that you might as well call it a comparative disadvantage. It’s not that the AI is bad, but that people haven’t figured out that the core competency of an organization is focus and coordination to achieve a goal, and that victory is external — users, customers. But AI is used to unfocus, to spread, and to meet internal goals - build more, etc. The challenge was never writing more code or creating more content (all of which is ultimately a long tail of debt that needs to be cleaned up and managed by someone else), which can be done cheaply enough with other paths. It was figuring out what is worth doing, and aligning everyone around that. So in a sense, I welcome company AI mandates today because they are so misdirected as to make “doing things they inefficient way they were done before” a relative advantage.
- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)
- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.
- Priority inbox rules seem reset
- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected
Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
Https://errorstates.com
But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this. Whats the number on “tons” of customers, given that these VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like mushrooms after a rain?
If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they’re burning cash at insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I’m skeptical of the financial decision here.
Especially given that Windsurf (and I think Cursor too) is a VSCode fork and OpenAI is cozy enough with Microsoft? It’s not even a zero to one build.
OpenAI is a technology company constantly in search of productization (ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-e), and they’ve been really good at creating product interest that converts to acquisition. An IDE is much more complex than a chat app, but given their literal billions of dollars and familiarity with developer tooling, this is a down-stack build that they could dogfood off their own tech. And especially given that some of these tools were built by tiny teams (Cursor is what, 10 people?), is this like Google and Facebook’s implicit admission that they can’t “build and grow” anymore, and need to turn to acquisitions to fuel growth?
Just the opposite: it calls into question if _we_ have thinking and understanding capabilities or if we are complicated stochastic parrots. [3] The best probing of these questions is done at the limits of comprehension and with unique and previously unseen information. I.e., how do you comprehend and process to previously unseen/unfelt/not-understood qualia? Not about how you deal with the mundanity of reactions between people (which are somewhat trivial to describe and model). [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism [3] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/sketchbook/is-my-toddler-a-s... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
> He has a deep understanding of Twilio’s business, operations and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio Communications, and previously as Twilio’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”
Traditional prioritization is a broken process for most people.
In the first case, the new leadership was outside of my department but they were pressuring me as the hiring manager for a role to bring on their people, who "were known 'good' folks". When I interviewed them, the whole interviewing team agreed not to hire them because their skill set may have been good for the company they were at but a complete mismatch for the problems we had. While we didn't ultimately hire them, there was a lot of pressure and lobbying to do so.
In the second case, the new leadership stepped in as head of the department/unit I was running. They took a look at the team we had and our current operating patterns, and decided that it would be faster to replace the team with new people who fit their existing operational model than to transition the existing team over to a new way of working. No one was fired, but it was a "either they fit in with the new model, they quit on their own, or they get performance-reviewed out". The new leader explicitly said that when doing rapid turnarounds, it was easier to bring in a full transplant of their former team than to figure out new patterns of leader-employee collaboration (Not unlike Twitter right now, I'd guess). While I was still a hiring manager for the role, the final approval for a candidate no longer lay with me and many of that new leader's former colleagues were hired. While they had a lot of existing patterns of working with the new leader, their skill sets were again a mismatch for the challenges our team was facing and ended up being a series of net-poor hires who received a lot of air cover from new leadership to not lose face.
That's not to say that you can't have effective recommendations for hiring. Some of the best candidates I've hired have been through personal recommendations or bringing along former team members. My experience has been that this pattern is best tempered by a careful hiring process. It's a great way to put someone into the funnel and ensure they get some visibility, but it's an awful way to accelerate someone through and out of the funnel and onto a team.
That said, I've seen some board members try this out by offering to help/chat with some under-performing teams that they have expertise working with and asking light questions/giving advice... but having been on the receiving end of a conversation like that, it often feels like there is a lot of politics going -- you don't know if someone genuinely wants to be helpful, is vetting your capabilities and fit for the role (based on the trickle-down responsibility), or is trying to do independent fact finding (trickling it back up).
However, having been on a team that prepares board materials and also having presented to a company board, I can tell you that the information they receive is extremely carefully managed in a way that allows responsibility to seem to flow downwards rather than upwards. What you see as an IC or as a manager or ever director is extremely different from the cause and effects a board sees in a monthly or quarterly update. Hence they often come to different conclusions than the people in the trenches would. That said, I’m sure this is true for any large organizational unit (government, military, corporations, nonprofits, etc).