protastus

Reddit got half a billion people addicted to candy and now CEO Steve Huffman refuses to sell it because he thinks they're eating it wrong.

There's already an API and an ecosystem of third party apps. I'm amazed at the failure to embrace the opportunity to monetize this in a reasonable timescale, in a world where customers are already accustomed to monthly subscriptions.

The person sending the message is accountable for its content, no matter how it was authored.

Maybe I want to be tactful around a delicate issue, but am struggling to find the right words. An LLM can help me. Alternatively, someone who wants to be manipulative and deceitful might also optimize their message using an LLM.

The tool is of course not inherently good or evil. But one can use the tool for different moral outcomes.

The machine doesn't get tired after explaining the same thing 1000 times.

I believe it. I've used chatgpt for inspiration on how to craft difficult messages with empathy. I've been managing people for a long time and could've done it independently, but it's good to get help. It can be tough to express empathy when exhausted after a long day of urgent demands and responsibilities.

This is no different than asking chatgpt to draft code that I could otherwise write from scratch. It's like having an assistant.

> Not really mentioned was all this was changed out the blue with less than 30 days to comply. The interview touches on it but it’s insanity that a tech company think it’s reasonable for indie devs to operate under that constraint.

It's unreasonable for a company of any size. The entire storyline shows Reddit sabotaging the process. Which seems idiotic, because they're throwing away a vibrant ecosystem that is #1 in the world, and took a decade to organically grow.

A decent CEO would've made a good faith effort to monetize this rather than burn bridges.

The board wants the CEO to instigate drama and inflame their most passionate users against the company?

There's tremendous lack of tact about how this is being managed. Completely unnecessary and generally not good for business.

The Reddit board of directors should choose a CEO with better judgement because this doesn't look good.

While I am sad for the communities, I am excited at the opportunity to short this stock if it ever goes public with such poor leadership.

Regulate the veterinary use too. Some antibiotics have seen unrestricted large scale use with livestock.

Big tech does have such a mechanism. The individuals laid off generally get a couple of months to find a new job within the company. In these times there are few open positions but many do get filled by internal applicants who were laid off.

For CPU clock, I agree the gains are marginal, yet BIOS settings still allow the end user to trivially further bump up the clock. There are young people with a lot of time on their hands who will do it for that 3% uplift.

Further, with memory we have things like XMP which again are blessed by the vendors and are 100% within the definition of overclocking. Just because a memory module can run at XMP rates doesn't mean the motherboard or the CPU have the signal integrity or power integrity margins to support the timings. And this is something component vendors can't optimize from the factory (only system vendors can), because it depends on multiple parts.

In the old days one couldn't enter BIOS setup and find even a single mention of overclocking, and the term itself was taboo because it meant operating the system outside the design spec. Nowadays a lot of vendors use OC in marketing. I think this alone makes my point about being mainstream.

In the old days that would be true but nowadays OC is so mainstream that temperature sensors are expected to keep the SoC within safe limits, shutting down if needed but preventing damage.

Something escaped design models and test scenarios for this to happen with end users.

I've never worked at Google Brain, but I've been a research manager in tech for a decade, and nothing here seems surprising to me. It discusses the archetype of the well funded industry lab that is too academic and ultimately winds down.

The post makes sensible but generic statements based on the view of an IC. It tries to work back from the conclusion (Google struggles to move academic research into product) and produces plausible but hardly definitive explanations, with no ranking, primarily because there's no discussion of the thinking, actions and promises made at the executive level that kept the lab funded for all these years.

Yes, agreed. Further, this has always been the case, and it's been discussed since the Facebook IPO.

The rules of the game are clear. Someone who doesn't like this game is free to walk away and do something else (most public companies don't have a CEO with majority voting power). Complaining without acknowledging the rules seems like misdirected energy.

Indeed. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-sso

Rest-and-vest is different from "hired to do nothing". Rest-and-vest people have accrued enough seniority and tenure that the business either believes they're worth retaining or is too inefficient to detect the change in behavior and quickly manage them out.

Journalists have been milking this story for weeks now. All stories are about the same two junior recruiters who were hired just before hiring slowdown/pause. Meta was graceful enough to leave them in the payroll, and the new hires decided to shitpost on TikTok instead.

Recruiters in big tech have basically zero visibility about work happening in engineering orgs. Which in my experience is generally intense, even when the ideas are too bad to ship. I'm waiting for journalists to report on actual engineers who were paid to sit on their ass. But I am skeptical these people (if they exist) will be dumb enough to post videos on TikTok about it.

Folks proposing alternatives with math around operating cost don't seem to understand big company culture and incentives.

No Amazon executive built this service. At a massive company, products that have no champion owner at the executive level are destined to die.

The Amazon CEO doesn't fund passion projects. If an asset doesn't translate to billions in revenue and a roadmap to take over the world, it's off the radar. No executive will dare even bring this up because everyone knows it doesn't run at Amazon scale. It's lost in the noise.

Pets have diet sensitivities too, which can upset their stomachs. My cat used to occasionally throw up but with her current food she has gone for more than a year without any events.

By eating spoiled and contaminated food, ancient people were certainly getting internal parasites too (also something that a big fraction of pets have).

I think this is overindexing on Dr. Kahng (and his accomplishments) and missing the bigger argument, which I'll restate as: if this research has merit, Google should apply it to their silicon design. Then they can have a paper about how ML helped their world class engineering team create an even better chip, save design time, etc. If the research translates to strong business results, it really doesn't matter what an external researcher thinks about it.

While it's possible to slap a label of ML on a mediocre product for marketing purposes, a strong and experienced engineering team generally won't use a new tool if it doesn't make their workflow substantially better.

I agree. Corporate labs that fail to ship ultimately die a slow death.

Shipping is a different game though. It takes a culture of pragmatism that many academic groups don't have and don't want to have. I am curious to see how fast Google can pivot.

Raw pointers are still common in modern C++ and those are of course not memory safe. Reasonable memory safety out of C++ would require rigorously adhering to a subset of the language, adding bounds checking to all containers, forbidding implicit type casting, etc.

> My PTO is an earned benefit (legally)

Your case does not generalize. In the U.S., there is no federal law requiring the payout of unused PTO.

Yes, the root cause is that the U.S. barely has any labor laws, and this puts people in cruel situations that are inconsistent with the level of economic development achieved by this nation.

Many knowledge workers expect stronger guarantees for earned benefits, out of an intuitive sense of ethics and commitment, but those expectations are more in line with labor laws found in European countries. In the U.S., workers often have no recourse or leverage against even small companies, let alone Google. "Earned" benefits evaporate once the employment contract is void.

Agreed on over-indexing on "fiduciary responsibility to shareholders," and I'll go a step further.

Founders generally do what's best for the company (or try to). There are enough infamous CEOs that clearly did what's best for themselves.

Likewise, ChatGPT is dramatically more tactful, empathetic and considerate than the HR reps and directors I've worked with.

The article is so generic and abstract that even the summary is verbose.

This article is a word salad. The headline is not supported by evidence and looks like a causal fallacy.

The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator's dilemma.

The trajectory for Facebook has been consistently bad. Not knowing the "full extent" is not absolution.

The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.

> oblivious to ethical consequences of technical work

He was told about the consequences pretty much from day 1. I don't think anyone at Facebook (especially not Zuckerberg) gets to be oblivious.

> Microsoft declined further comment about Bing’s behavior Thursday, but Bing itself agreed to comment — saying “it’s unfair and inaccurate to portray me as an insulting chatbot” and asking that the AP not “cherry-pick the negative examples or sensationalize the issues.”

I love this response. Even the feisty chatbot is telling journalists to cool it with the clickbait.