Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"?
It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).
Living organisms evolve towards some notion of "better", and "better" is an incredibly multifaceted notion (many facets of which we simply cannot even capture in language).
Not sure how to address it though. I suspect keeping companies small and focused on quality, sustainability, and free of VC influence would be a solution. It'd take continual work though, like tending to a bonsai.
(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)
This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.
People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.
What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future when you start out building an open source project.
(Coming from having contributed to and run several open source projects myself)
In the real world, if you've got $100k, you could choose to invest all of it into project A, or all into project B, or perhaps start both and kill whichever one isn't looking promising.
You'd need to weigh that against the potential returns you'd get from investing all or part of that money into equities, bonds, or just keeping it in cash.
1. Think about what product/system you want built.
2. Think about how much you're willing to invest to get it (time and money).
3. Cap your time and money spend based on (2).
4. Let the team start building and demo progress regularly to get a sense of whether they'll actually be able to deliver a good enough version of (1) within time/budget.
If it's not going well, kill the project (there needs to be some provision in the contract/agreement/etc. for this). If it's going well, keep it going.
For some things, LLMs are great. For others, they're absolute dog shit.
It's still early days. Anyone who claims to know what they're talking about either doesn't or what they're saying will be out of date in a month's time (including me).
If anyone's interested in an analysis of Saint-Exupéry's psychology via the symbolism of The Little Prince, the book "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus" by Marie-Louise von Franz [1] is absolutely fascinating.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1404609.The_Problem_of_t...
Local-first tech has been around since before the internet, and scalable local-first tech has become increasingly accessible due to the hard work of many, many incredibly talented engineers over the years (e.g. via the R&D from Martin Kleppmann and the team at Ink and Switch).What are your top 3 apps that're currently primarily cloud-based that you'd much rather see become local-first?...
I'm possibly somewhat burnt out - not entirely sure - but the reason I say so is that it's hard to tell what actually calls to me right now, whereas 5-10 years ago I felt I had a much clearer picture. Nowadays I'm skeptical of the idea that following any passions of mine would result in a better overall quality of life.
It's tough to find something that's both fulfilling _and_ pays the bills. I'm nowhere near "rich", but I'm fairly certain being poor will decrease my quality of life substantially - regardless of how fulfilling my work is. Right now I'm stuck leaning more in the direction of the thing that pays the bills.
In your experience/journey, what tech-adjacent careers have you become aware of? I'd imagine it's easier to pivot into something "tech-adjacent" than something completely different when one is in their 40s/50s.
Having been coding for nearly 25 years now and being in engineering management for the past couple of years (still actively coding 30-50% of my time), I'm feeling increasingly tired of tech. Software development, more specifically. I'm quite capable of both producing software myself _and_ managing teams producing software.Have you pivoted from software engineering/engineering management into a...
For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.
It's way easier to censor a decentralized social network if the majority of its nodes run on AWS, GCP and Azure, for instance.
What'd be great is if we could run these networks primarily from our personal devices (i.e. true edge computing), but the more the computing's pushed to the edge the harder it becomes to implement technically and socially.
The trouble isn't a lack of the right technologies - I'd argue it's a problem in the go-to-market strategy of those building these products/technologies.
Ideas flow along lines carved out by power/influence. Facebook's early strategy was to start with restricting its usage to people at Harvard University - arguably a highly influential institution - and then expand outwards to other highly influential institutions. Only once the "who's who" from those institutions were already onboard did they let down the walls to allow us plebs in, and we all rushed in head-first.
X's current strategy leverages Musk's visibility and influence (for better or worse).
Get the most prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network, and others will follow (dramatically easier said than done, of course). But without a significant contingent of influencers/powerful people, your network's DoA.
> Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
I'd argue that a fair amount of the former results in the ability to do the latter.
There's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into designing "simple" systems (simple to understand when reading the code). Just as there's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into making "simple" changes to those systems.
Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.)
My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.