tylerdurden91

This is quite clearly a Big Tech problem. Promotion is not dependent on the problem or its impact but the number of people willing to vouch for that problem/work. Sooner or later people realize that they can game the system.

I've seen that these cultures eventually converge to promoting "empire building" and less efficient but highly visible teams.

This article makes it sound like solving highly impactful problems is a needle in a haystack problem (which it sometimes is), but fails to recognize that this pattern works not because it helps you find an impactful problem, but because it helps you find a large enough set of people to vouch for this problem.

Given the number of supply chain attacks via npm, maybe the recommended approach to use should be pnpm instead of npx.

We've been trying to make "screens good for kids" for >4 years now. We have some sharp view points on why things the way they are & what we can do about it. Would love feedback & pushback on our viewpoints from this community.

Currently building https://kidzovo.com to fix the addictive relationship that young kids are forming with screens.

The idea is quite simple, make an interactive youtube for kids. Instead of passively watching video content for long periods of time, make it interactive similar to how AAP recommends parents to co-view, we offer an AI buddy to co-view & engage kids with small interactive activities where kids find & tap on objects, speak to answer questions & more.

If anyone here has kids between 2-8, please check it out and let me know your feedback.

4 times. I should have mentioned that I work for Kidzovo. Also, shouldn't have been so aggressive in self promotion.

Apologies, will add the disclaimer from next time. Will be mindful from next time around excessive self promotion.

I also liked Ms Rachel, but read a really good article about video deficit. This one: https://parentingtranslator.substack.com/p/can-babies-learn-....

I have since tried using only interactive apps that would encourage kids to participate actively rather than just passively watching. When I'm around, I'll do that anyways, but it helps if the content is itself interactive.

I really like Kidzovo. They curate huge amounts of content for kids from different creators and provide this cute little owl called Ovo, that's like the child's friend on the app and every minute or so it pops up and engages kids in these mini games that get them to do activities related to what they are watching like find & tap on something or use their voice to answer questions. They also have a huge bunch of coloring sheets & jigsaw puzzles.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps mentioned here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try.

You should try out Kidzovo. They curate huge amounts of content for kids from different creators and provide this cute little owl called Ovo, that's like the child's friend on the app and every minute or so it pops up and engages kids in these mini games that get them to do activities related to what they are watching like find & tap on something or use their voice to answer questions. They also have a huge bunch of coloring sheets & jigsaw puzzles.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

You should try out Kidzovo. They curate huge amounts of content for kids from different creators and provide this cute little owl called Ovo, that's like the child's friend on the app and every minute or so it pops up and engages kids in these mini games that get them to do activities related to what they are watching like find & tap on something or use their voice to answer questions. They also have a huge bunch of coloring sheets & jigsaw puzzles.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

You should try out Kidzovo. They curate huge amounts of content for kids from different creators and provide this cute little owl called Ovo, that's like the child's friend on the app and every minute or so it pops up and engages kids in these mini games that get them to do activities related to what they are watching like find & tap on something or use their voice to answer questions. They also have a huge bunch of coloring sheets & jigsaw puzzles.

Usually I've found that kids quickly get bored of some of the other apps we've tried here, but I've seen them stick to Kidzovo for much longer. Maybe worth a try. Good thing about PBS or Kidzovo is that they dont have me looking over my shoulder like Youtube or Youtube Kids does.

Great work & thanks for doing this.

I built a library at AWS for a general canvas editor called Diagram Maker. It recently got archived so I stood up a fork here: https://github.com/sameergoyal/diagrammer and the data format we use is strikingly similar. Check it out here: https://sameergoyal.github.io/diagrammer/?path=/docs/docs-us.... The key differences are panels, workspace & editor.

I dont actively work on the project outside of bugs, but maybe there are ways to collaborate here, like moving my project to use & extend the JSON canvas spec.

I think SEO has become a cat & mouse game between the engine & websites. As a product owner, I think its great that Google publishes how it ranks to maintain transparency, but that also allows the big companies to game the system. I almost wonder if they should be less transparent on how they rank.

Further, as the big publishers as well as well known sites get more & more of Google's traffic, doesnt it create a negative feedback loop for Google? Most of these sites have their own internal search. If I know that I'll anyways go to CondeNast for travel, i'd rather go there directly & search & skip google entirely. In fact, it seems to me that it would be in Google's best interest to try & place new & unique websites towards top of the ranking much more frequently than they do. Not sure why they dont do it already.

I think instead of Youtube, pick apps that curate content on your behalf.

For example, try Kidzovo an app that curates learning content for kids, makes it interactive so kids are not only watching it passively. And we intersperse it with general questions like: "Why should you be nice to your neighbor?" and then parents can hear their kids' responses in the parents' section of the app.

Disclaimed: I work for Kidzovo.

This problem is widespread in FAANG.

At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.

Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.

However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:

- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.

- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.

Tried that again just now, fingers crossed.

Worth mentioning as mentioned in other comments that moving video data around at that scale was a bad choice to begin with. They could have considered fargate and avoided moving the data around so much as well and realized similar reductions in cost. So the wins are not really coming from moving to monolith as much as they're coming from optimizing unnecessary data transfers.

If the article said fargate, which is technically still serverless we could have avoided a whole microservice vs monolith debate or serverless vs hosts/instances debate.

To the contrary, from my time at Amazon, I felt that developers want to use more high level AWS services. Unfortunately, the landscape of AWS services is so rapidly evolving that Amazon engineers themselves cant keep up and end up using the wrong service.

As mentioned in other comments, there are options such as Fargate, that would still technically be "serverless" and still yield similar cost reductions. Not to mention that AWS also has Step functions express for "on host orchestration" use cases. This seems like a case where the original architecture wasn't very well researched and nor was the new one.

Absolutely. Neither fargate nor step functions express. Seems like they did not evaluate all the options before making the jump.

I think what most people are missing here is that they used AWS Step Functions in the wrong place. Part of the blame here is that in over enthusiasm of trying to get more users, AWS doesn't properly educate customers when to use which service. Worse, for each use case AWS has about dozens of options making the choice incredibly hard.

In this case, they probably should have used Step Functions Express, which charges based on duration as opposed to number of transitions and they're looking for "on host orchestration" like orchestrate a bunch of things which usually are done in small time and are done over & over many times. Step functions is better when workflows are running longer, and exactly once semantics are needed. Link for reading differences between Express & standard step functions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/step-functions/latest/dg/c....

This also exemplifies the fact that I learned while being at Amazon & AWS that Amazon themselves dont know how best to use AWS. This being one of the great examples. I'll share 1 more:

- In my team within AWS, we were building a new service, and someone proposed to build a whole new micro service to monitor the progress of requests to ensure we dont drop requests. As soon I mentioned about visibility timeout in SQS queues, the whole need for the service went away. Saving Amazon money ($$) & time (also $$). But if I or someone else didn't mention, we would have built it.

I dont think serverless is a silver bullet, but I don't think this is a great example of when not to use serverless. It helps to know the differences between various services and when to use what.

PS: Ex Amazon & AWS here. I have nothing to gain or lose by AWS usage going up or down. I'm currently using a serverless architecture for my new startup which may bias my opinions here.

> "At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability. "

This sounds misleading or incompetent. If someone was harvesting data, then logs would indicate how many such login attempts were being made per second/minute/hour/day and the activity would spike in certain days, times, geographical areas to suggest this kind of activity is going on.

Even if the attacker was really careful spreading their activity over long periods of time & routing it via multiple geographical areas, the overall activity would show an uptick before & after the bug.

I find it highly unlikely that a company of the size of Twitter could not ascertain from their internal data that a bug like this was exploited or not.

They state they're only interested in group level data, isnt there a way to collect data that is not able to link purchases to any individual.

Theoretically, it seems possible, if the data is never stored against the SSB, but only stored pre-aggregated against demographic markers such as location, age, etc.

If so, wouldn't it be a net win that the government has data to better plan import/export or anything else and maybe make this data public so people can use this data to come up with new businesses in the right locations without compromising individual privacy.

The stack ranking has another really bad effect for Amazon.

I have been in teams where I was doing the best work of my career, yet I was surrounded by the best engineers and hence wasnt able to get into Top Tier for my level. I changed teams and found that I was working on much simpler problems yet I was so easily Top Tier. So much so, my promotion was being discussed as I was challenging technical tradeoffs, decision making of technical ICs from above my level & proving myself right in the new org.

This made me think of the stack ranking structure. It incentivizes engineers to either move to an org where they're consistently smartest in the room and not being challenged but get top of the market compensation or stay in an org where they learn a lot but be fine with not getting the compensation they deserve.

This is recently forcing a lot of talented engineers to move to other companies where they can get both.

From a big picture point of view, I understand the original intent of PIP. However, it seems severely disconnected from the ground reality.

* It promotes lazy managers who easily put engineers on PIP. I have heard so many stories where managers put engineers on PIP as soon as they apply for internal transfers and execute very shady stuff like suddenly sending MoM for 1:1 meeting 3 days later with stuff that was never discussed, etc.

* It creates an environment of distrust amongst engineers for the system. I've talked to engineers who have lost trust in all internal mechanisms like Connections, Forte, etc. Blind is full of stories & have seen personally where none of these mechanisms are able to surface structural & cultural problems. Examples like: Managers putting unnecessary pressure on a smaller team due to inability to hire good talent and literally abusing them when they decide to leave. Managers not talking about growth and not doing anything & more importantly not knowing enough to be able to grow their engineers.

* When faced with a bad manager or bad culture, a skilled engineer faces 2 choices, either fight the good fight, try escalating, try reaching out to HR or leave the team or leave Amazon. Even if there were no bad stories, its so hard for an employee to choose the former, but with so many stories floating around, the first choice becomes impossible. That leaves Amazon with a huge blind spot around bad managers, bad teams, and bad orgs.

* In terms of impact, a bad manager has 10x more negative impact to Amazon as compared to a bad engineer, yet the PIP process is carried about when IMO Amazon should be investing in re-establishing trust with engineers, creating processes to discover bad managers, bad teams and then establishing a process to weed them out.

Disclaimer: Amazonian here (soon to be ex).

I wouldn't put Diagram Maker in the same bucket as these tools. These tools can be used directly by an End user for drawing diagrams via drag & drop or via markdown. Diagram Maker on the other hand empowers application developers to embed a tool where end users can create diagrams by drag & drop within their applications.

Some of the reasons why an application developer might prefer using Diagram Maker over using draw.io's embed mode in their application: * You want to customize the editor to match your application's styling. * You want the editor to impose your application's custom semantics, for example: your application doesn't allow cycles.

The target audience of this tool consists of application developers that want to create new applications that require their end users to author graph like structures. They can use this tool and avoid re-implementing basic interactive features like drag & drop, panel management, zooming, undo/redo, etc. Examples of such applications within AWS would be AWS IoT events & AWS IoT Things graph (existing customers), AWS Step functions, AWS Cloudformation (not using the library as of now). Examples of such applications outside AWS would be: https://www.stackery.io/, https://www.voiceflow.com/, https://parabola.io/, etc.

This tool is not limited to AWS IoT products even though that is where this tool was born. You can use this tool for rendering any graph like structure like diagrams, flowcharts, etc.

See more details here: https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/why/features.html#da....