tj-teej

(Disclosure: I was at AMZN for 10 years, left at the start of this year)

The writing culture is very real, and when done correctly is fantastic. But it worked because it is harder to write than it is to get up in front of bullet points and waffle out a one hour presentation.

Writing is hard because it really forces you to think. Clearly articulating thoughts means clearly thinking to begin with.

I suspect the lower level doc reviews are going to be filled with a lot of AI slop, but I would expect that presenting a sloppy document to an exec would be met with a "what is this" a swift exit from the room just as it always has.

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Open, prefer hybrid
  Willing to relocate: No, but very flexible on travel. US/UK dual citizen, no sponsorship needed.
  Technologies: Java, Python, AWS, LLMs, AI agents, distributed systems, search, voice interfaces, AI-assisted development
  Resume/CV: https://thomasjjohnston.github.io/
  Email: thomasjohnstonjames [at] gmail.com

Engineering leader, 12+ years, 10 at Amazon across Alexa and Fire TV search. Managed a 10-person team for 2.5 years (grew it from 5, promoted two to Senior), then went back to hands-on engineering to learn AI-native development for real. Since then I've run AI agents as a complete software org (product docs, roadmap, 200+ reviewed PRs) to ship a production-ready app in weeks, and built a voice-first iOS app on on-device models. Looking for EM or senior/staff IC roles at companies building new things.

How many providers do you have to pay for to watch your favorite teams play in all their competitions now vs 20 years ago?

How different is the experience booking an economy flight today vs 20 years ago?

"Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more business outcomes with less code / fewer moving parts"

I'd simplify to "Truly capable engineers are able to achieve more positive outcomes" - half of what makes a capable, dependable engineer is knowing what outcomes are needed and making them happen.

I've been screenshotting twitter since 2016 when Brexit happened and with the goal of one day putting together some kind of art piece.

The world and our discourse around it has changed so much over the past ten years and now with this kind of technology I'm so excited to be able to classify these images from my iCloud and start on the project.

The most interesting point here is to look at Women's Soccer.

Soccer has always included lots of psuedo-nationalist reasons why different countries are better (or why the dive, why they play conservative defense, etc).

But when you look at the success of the US Women's team it's very clear that the main thing is investment in building talent. The rest of the world does it for mens soccer (football) because that's what they do. When Title 9 went into effect America put a huge amount of money (relative to other countries) into womens soccer and the US Womens team has been one of the best in the world every since.

I think the better analogy is "you could give me an afternoon in the studio with Jimi Hendrix's sound engineer and the record we create would sound very different from Jimi's albums."

After Snowden's leaks don't we know the levels of spying that's already happening today? That was a decade ago, what has changed?

And (with a heavy dose of purposeful suspension of disbelief), if ICE does deport those people they've determined are "illegal", does anyone believe that the agency will scale down and stop? There will be new "enemies of the state"

Isn't this the intent of a prediction markets?

IIRC the original prediction markets existed to try and get as close as possible to finding the true answer to open questions. Someone willing to bet a lot of money on an outcome (because they have an edge/are very sure of an outcome) is the point, they're putting their money where their mouth is...

A missed aspect of "are right, a lot" LP is that the great leaders are able to quickly realize when they're wrong and get on the right side of the argument.

It's not "are right from the start, a lot", it's "are right, a lot", kind of works in hand with the Disagree and Commit LP

It's actually very straight-forward. UBI still means that most people's money eventually flows to the rent-seekers (Billionaires). Socialism (and I know this is not the Socialism Mamdani is proposing), means that most people own the means of production and rent-seeking isn't possible.

I toured Stanford Bridge in the middle 2010s, they actually found uncomfortable away dressing rooms weren't the most effective as it either got the other team to go out and start warming up or riled them up.

When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.

If Google just copied and pasted the content from my blog and put it on their own website which had ads that paid them, preventing customers from going to my blog (and thus seeing my ads which I get paid for), that would be obviously wrong.

How is this any different?

I think the cruelty is the point

Reminds me of a joke:

Bill: "I used to think Correlation implied Causation, but I took a statistics class and I now know that's not true"

Bob: "Oh wow, sounds like that class helped!"

Bill": "..maybe!"

My favorite feature is that the little mic next to someone's name on the roster goes red when their internet is spotty. No ambiguity on who's internet is spotty ;)

These kinds of articles always make me feel like I'm living in Bizarro Land.

The Snowden revelations were over a decade ago, we know the capabilities the US Govt has, how is this even news?

Because the US has a constitution. Congress (not the Executive branch) allocates funding and the Executive Branch (in this case a Billionaire who's friendly with the President) cannot decide not to spend the money Congress has already decided to spend.

I was an intern at eBay in 2012, I was at an on-campus event and chatting with the VP who was our college sponsor. At one point he shows me his phone, someone had bought a $100K Porsche on the mobile phone app! It blew our mind.

I am riding the Caltrain south, we slowed to a snail's pace and they said it would take 2hr+ to get to Palo Alto (from SF).

A bunch of people got off, and then the conductor comes back on the PA system to say the speed limitation had been limited and "we'll be going back to 79 MPH, hold on to your hats"

I wonder how much of a relief the belief that when you sit on your deathbed you will be woken up again would provide.

Even if the tech doesn't work, I wonder how much relief from suffering the idea that it will in a hundred years could be

It's because he's not a "free speech absolutist", does he think felons should be able to vote? Of course he doesn't.

His "free speech absolutism" is a way of signaling the kinda guy he is and the kinda guys he wants to be associated with.

As a T1D I empathize so strongly with this comment.

There was a promising example in China where Scientists cured a single woman who had T1D. It's n=1, but the first step to a cure is curing someone :)

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03129-3

If anyone is curious, a Meta Data Scientist published a great piece about how the facts about what LLMs are actually doing (and therefore able to do) and how it's papered over by using chat bots. It's a long but very engaging read.

https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/who-are-we-talking-to-when-...

It's the local, when you drive you don't stop every 5 miles and pick-up/drop-off a couple dozen people :)

The bullets (limited stops) is actually really fast (~45 minutes MTV to SF).

At rush hour when it's 1.5 hours from Sunnyvale to downtown SF that's when the bulk of the bullets are scheduled and it's twice as fast as driving, plus you can have a beer ;)

Musicians need to live near each other in order to collaborate. Cities are too expensive for artists to live and the rehearsal spaces are too expensive as well. Maybe the technology is better but you have to consider the macroeconomics as well

You wouldn't block an ambulance from getting to a hospital. You wouldn't block a mother from hugging her child. Why would you block an ad??

I went to UIUC for CS ('14), in our Systems class we had one project where we had to write our own version of malloc() in C.

They made it into a competition and it was so much fun (graded on latency and efficient space usage). I remember the person who won was a PhD student who had to take the undergrad course as a prereq for some Grade level class.

It is still acceptable to make "don't drop the soap" jokes on mainstream non-edgy (Think Jay Leno, John Stewart, or Jimmy Fallon) talk shows in the US. Our Criminal System and the lack of mainstream antipathy towards it is horrendous.