I think this is the crux of why, when used as an enhancement to solo productivity, you'll have a pretty strict upper bound on productivity gains given that it takes experienced engineers to review code that goes out at scale.

That being said, software quality seems to be decreasing, or maybe it's just cause I use a lot of software in a somewhat locked down state with adblockers and the rest.

Although, that wouldn't explain just how badly they've murdered the once lovely iTunes (now Apple Music) user interface. (And why does CMD-C not pick up anything 15% of the time I use it lately...)

Anyways, digressions aside... the complexity in software development is generally in the organizational side. You have actual users, and then you have people who talk to those users and try to see what they like and don't like in order to distill that into product requirements which then have to be architected, and coordinated (both huge time sinks) across several teams.

Even if you cut out 100% of the development time, you'd still be left with 80% of the timeline.

Over time though... you'll probably see people doing what I do all day (which is move around among many repositories (although I've yet to use the AI much, got my Cursor license recently and am gonna spin up some POCs that I want to see soon)), enabled by their use of AI to quickly grasp what's happening in the repo, and the appropriate places to make changes.

Enabling developers to complete features from tip to tail across deep, many pronged service architectures would could bring project time down drastically and bring project management, and cross team coordination costs down tremendously.

Similarly, in big companies, the hand is often barely aware at best of the foot. And space exploration is a serious challenge. Often folk know exactly one step away, and rely on well established async communication channels which also only know one step further. Principal engineers seem to know large amounts about finite spaces and are often in the dark small hops away to things like the internal tooling for the systems they're maintaining (and often not particularly great at coming in to new spaces and thinking with the same perspective... no we don't need individual micro services for every 12 request a month admin api group we want to set up).

Once systems can take a feature proposal and lay out concrete plans which each little kingdom can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to for further modifications, you can again reduce exploration, coordination, and architecture time down.

Sadly, seems like User Experience design is an often terribly neglected part of our profession. I love the memes about an engineer building the perfect interface like a water pitcher only for the person to position it weirdly in order to get a pour out of the fill hole or something. Lemme guess how many users you actually talked to (often zero), and how many layers of distillation occurred before you received a micro picture feature request that ends up being build and taking input from engineers with no macro understanding of a user's actual needs, or day to day.

And who often are much more interested in perfecting some little algorithm thank thinking about enabling others.

So my money is on money flowing to... - People who can actually verify system integrity, and can fight fires and bugs (but a lot of bug fixing will eventually becoming prompting?) - Multi-talented individuals who can say... interact with users well enough to understand their needs as well as do a decent job verifying system architecture and security

It's outside of coding where I haven't seen much... I guess people use it to more quickly scaffold up expense reports, or generate mocks. So, lots of white collar stuff. But... it's not like the experience of shopping at the supermarket has changed, or going to the movies, or much of anything else.

> At least no one's sitting around pretending it's going to actually do anything useful anymore

It enriches certain elected officials (and their friends). That's why the US Government holds a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve".

Other than that if you measured the utility of Crypto assets versus AI, there's no argument that AI (even though it's in a bubble) is still more valuable per MWh than Crypto.

Oh ya, AI may be frothy and bubbly right now but there will certainly be and already are tremendous real world software and hardware products and tech flowing out of the space

The thing is, if they were uploading your messages, then they'd want to do something with the data.

And humans aren't great at keeping secrets.

So, if the claim is that there's a bunch of data, but everyone who is using it to great gain is completely and totally mum about it, and no one else has ever thought to question where certain inferences were coming from, and no employee ever questioned any API calls or database usage or traffic graph.

Well, that's just about the best damn kept secret in town and I hope my messages are as safe!

And I'm no fan of Meta...

Where were the Facebook whistleblowers about the numerous IOS/Android gaps that let the company gain more information than they were to supposed to see? Malicious VPNs, scanning other installed mobile applications, whatever. As far as I know, the big indictments have been found from the outside.

>Malicious VPNs

AFAIK that was a separate app, and it was pretty clear that it was MITMing your connections. It's not any different than say, complaining about how there weren't any whistleblowers for fortinet (who sell enterprise firewalls).

>scanning other installed mobile applications

Source?

I mean, why not be concerned about both lol? We can do two things at once I think, and both of those things sound fairly negative.

I just bought a flip phone and a cool pocket sized camera. I've gotten down to leaving my phone at home a fair amount, and leave my phone on a speaker that's not near anything I sit on when at home.

It's awesome, come on back out to reality. I frequently go out at this point, come back home and go to see if I have any messages and realize my phone was on me the whole time and I had no idea (I also silence pretty much everything...).

I'm super pumped to have an actual camera to play with that's pocket sized too since I did miss the camera. But now I'll have something tremendously superior and can leave that aging device filled with way too many 2FA codes I don't want to inadvertently lose at home.

You don't need to leave behind the conveniences of a smartphone to have a phone that is smart but without the dopamine traps. There are solutions out there like TechLockdown which allow you to make a dumbphone out of your smartphone using MDMs, while still keeping critical things like messenger apps, a predefined list of websites, navigation apps, etc.

Yea, I know, but smart phones are getting bigger and bigger. I'd rather a much nicer camera, and a small dumb phone which texts and calls. As opposed to a smart phone with a much worse camera, that also texts and calls and does maps.

I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.

Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.

What kinda phone do you have? I was nostalgic for getting an old nokia, but when I actually did, using it was surprisingly painful. I guess that's kind of the point?

I still need a proper mp3 player (been using an old android) and a camera though.

...and a Kindle, and a fax machine ;)

As a side note, the "old" style Nokias now seem to be running on some kind of emulation... The Nokia startup sound lagged and stuttered and made me die a little inside.

Yea, when I'm on the move I rarely use more than texting and the camera. So I got a Nokia flip phone, and I'll see how it is. Worst comes to worst it'll be 90 bucks lost and I'll move back to something a bit more full featured. But really I chose for size, and to be able to text and make calls. It's possible I'll end up sticking with my mini for a while.

I also got a really nice pocket camera which I'm much more excited about. It's called a Ricoh, so the camera and the phone should fit in my pockets without any real trouble or bulge. Plus keys, and wallet, and I feel like I'm set.

I do use an old Nokia and I find the UI to be surprisingly well designed a lot of time. For example keys are async, so you can already have opened the SMS editor, before the display has updated. Not that that display update would be that slow, we are talking about ~300ms. Also nearly everything is doable with very few keypresses, its really impressive.

I am quite curious, what was it exactly that you found painful.

"Congress has been in a state of relative gridlock for many years, across multiple administrations whether republican or democrat. As a result, presidents have increasingly been leading by executive order rather than legislation. That is not Trump's fault, that is just the state of the country."

"People thinking that Trump is a king or dictator are delusional, because the US doesn't work that way. If Trump rounded up thousands of US citizens and simply burned them alive, he would be arrested by the military and impeached by congress, because there are red lines that basically everyone agrees on."

So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?

Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king?

Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?

"Talk about taking over Canada or Greenland is just rhetoric to get better deals and improve ally strength, because this is what Donald Trump has been doing since the 1980s. Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."

You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?

Just trying to understand.

"Doing something with Venezuela is part of basic US national strategy, not simply a spontaneous whim of Donald Trump."

Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?

If it's just part of our national strategy, why'd the rational change so frequently and why does no one seem to have heard that before Trump decided to start focusing on it and amassing weapons off their coast?

"This doesn't mean you have to like a current president personally or morally, or even agree with everything they are doing, but at least you can gain more perspective around what is real and what is not."

Primo ending though.

> So presidents are acting more like kings, but Trump... isn't?

No US president is a king, because the US doesn't have kings. The country isn't structured that way. Most countries legitimately do not understand this, because almost no countries are structured the way the US is.

> Does pardoning people who commit acts of violence in your name not sound like a king? Or what about pardoning people who donate do your campaigns?

A king is a very specific thing and you don't need to be a king to have a power which has been delegated to you.

> You think Donald Trump has been _strengthening_ our relationships with allies? In what manner has he done that in your mind? Is it the tariffs, the denigration, or the threats that are helping? And how does Canada talking about moving away from the US at Davos, then confirming it again later play into that? Is our allies cutting off signal intelligence actually a sign that our bonds with them is getting stronger?

When people watch news or listen to world leaders talk, it comes with a sense of authority. Many people are predisposed to automatically think that is the end of it, that they've found the truth. Like clockwork, Trump says some big bold thing that gets people talking and he does this to produce the kinds of results he's after that other people have trouble getting. It gets him a lot of criticism and hate, but he's been doing this since the 80s or even earlier.

He creates a "monument", because he says that nobody cares about deals that aren't monumental. The small uninteresting deals don't get much attention. People don't invest in it. As a result, he thinks small deals are actually harder to do than big deals. So he makes everything a big deal. He's a big deal. Ukraine is a big deal. Gaza is a big deal. Canada is a big deal. Greenland is a big deal.

Now, in order to be credible, he has to be known as a person who does get some big things done. So what you do is you see what can you actually do, and you do the biggest thing you can get done. Now you have credibility. You use that credibility as leverage to make larger claims and people will take your larger claims seriously, even if people who are anchored in reality may have the sense to know that larger claim is a bluff. He bluffs so much. If you remember that old youtube video of trading up from a paperclip to trade all the way until you get a car, it's like that.

So much talk about threatening to leave NATO, or destroying NATO by invading Greenland or any of that nonsense only makes NATO stronger. It makes them say, "hey, we need to be more independent. maybe we can't fully rely on the US if they're talking like this. let's invest more." When they invest more in their military, now the whole alliance is a little stronger. This is important, because World War 3 may be coming and we either need our allies to join us in some way in South East Asia, or we'll need them to be able to hold their own in Europe.

It amazes me the stuff he gets away with, but he's not any kind of threat to democracy.

> Which part of US national strategy is that exactly? Sure Maduro is pretty universally condemned by anyone paying attention, but so are plenty of other authoritarian regimes? Is part of the national strategy leaving the ruling class exactly the same as the one the apparently corrupt dictator we deposed had and then extorting it for millions of barrels of oil? Does the richest country in the world, which also is the largest oil producer and has plenty of access to a very stable world oil market need to resort to extorting barrels of oil from foreign dictators as part of national strategy?

We were already in Venezuela in the 1900s. It is estimated to have upwards of 300 billion to over a trillion barrels of oil. That dwarfs basically every other country. Oil is important for global stability and we still haven't discovered any energy solutions that fully erase dependence on oil. So long as it is needed, it has to come from somewhere. If Russia and China control it, that risks oil being traded primarily in some currency other than USD, even propping up some reserve currency. Venezuela also had Russian and Chinese military hardware, with Russia recently agreeing to send them missiles. That allows for comparisons with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were also a stopping point for the shadow fleets which were breaking international law and helping fund Russia's war in Ukraine. Iranian terrorist groups were also operating in Venezuela. It was also at risk of becoming the next North Korea, but with both nukes and oil. It would've been a nightmare for freedom, democracy and global security.

I think there's a place for both.

We have services deployed globally serving millions of customers where rigor is really important.

And we have internal users who're building browser extensions with AI that provide valuable information about the interface they're looking at including links to the internal record management, and key metadata that's affecting content placement.

These tools could be handed out on Zip drives in the street and it would just show our users some of the metadata already being served up to them, but it's amazing to strip out 75% of the process of certain things and just have our user (in this case though, it's one user who is driving all of this, so it does take some technical inclination) build out these tools that save our editors so much time when doing this before would have been months and months and months of discovery and coordination and designs that probably wouldn't actually be as useful in the end after the wants of the user are diluted through 18 layers of process.

I feel like if you're really spending a ton of time on off by one errors after twenty years in the field you haven't actually grown much and have probably just spent a ton of time in a single space.

Otherwise you'd be senior staff to principle range and doing architecture, mentorship, coordinating cross team work, interviewing, evaluating technical decisions, etc.

I got to code this week a bit and it's been a tremendous joy! I see many peers at similar and lower levels (and higher) who have more years and less technical experience and still write lots of code and I suspect that is more what you're talking about. In that case, it's not so much that you've peaked, it's that there's not much to learn and you're doing a bunch of the same shit over and over and that's of course tiring.

I think it also means that everything you interact with outside your space does feel much harder because of the infrequency with which you have interacted with it.

If you've spent your whole career working the whole stack from interfaces to infrastructure then there's really not going to be much that hits you as unfamiliar after a point. Most frameworks recycle the same concepts and abstractions, same thing with programming languages, algorithms, data management etc.

But if you've spent most of your career in one space cranking tickets, those unknown corners are going to be as numerous as the day you started and be much more taxing.

This is why Hackernews and all other social media are blocked on my phone which I now leave across the room all day long when at home, and at home when I go out a lot of times.

Now, I read the New Yorker which I had a pile of half read issues. There's one at the table where I eat, one in the loo, one on the couch, and when my brain gets tired of staring at the wall... I pick up a copy when I don't want to do anything particularly creative.

Finishing a good New Yorker article, or a book laying by my bed often expands my worldview, my vocabulary, and my understanding of current events. Reading a ton of comments online has never really produced that same experience even in a place like HackerNews which has (IMO) much higher quality comments than many places.

So you can get back into it! And it seems to be like riding a bike, very easy to get back into. And the more I read, the more I'm happy I'm reading.

Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.

And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.

There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.