I do wish they updated this to 2026 google! I don’t think it would be nearly as interesting though since they do get rid of most red tape but since everything is enterprise scale, it’s never easy.
The bureaucracy is way worse. BCID requirements. MDBs that take 4+ hours to roll out. The Byzantine array of different MDB group types, often with two party control. GDPR company compliance. Tagging proto fields with provenance. Documents are private by default now. Most support happens in chat groups, and is if you're not at deepmind your help requests are getting ignored.
Spending a month filing GUTS tickets to get your intern access to basic tools. XManager idle pruning. GCP automated boq setup/teardown tools usually fail and you have to fall back to getting support from a contractor 12 time zones away.
I wish that the remake focused on the new bureaucracy stuff (or even new technical stuff), instead of being a near 1-for-1 rehash of the old one. E.g. it's not like anyone is being recommended to serve out of a bigtable for the last decade or whatever. But it's also not like the replacement(s) are problem-free when it comes to quota, etc.
The bureaucracy is why people trust Google with their data. I wouldn't use a Google if I thought they didn't have BCID and proto field provenance and the rest of it.
Yeah, it's also different from the pointless technical complexity that this video is about. But that exists too. Could've talked about how spinning up a cronjob the new way takes 2 weeks regardless of what it's doing, how there's a proliferation of different config languages, or how everything is deprecated / not ready still.
Xoogler here (2011-2018). It's heartwarming that a core part of Google culture ("for every problem we have 3 solutions: 2 that are deprecated and 1 that is experimental") is alive and well.
You could just read their whitepapers and accept them at face value. What other major SaaS providers are publishing about their technical countermeasures against insider risk?
If a company publishes loads of articles about how they have technical controls for privacy and security, through encryption and compartmentalization and code review and build provenance and so forth, and all the people who work/worked at said company are always whining about how onerous those processes are, then what gives you reason to doubt it?
I wish I had an answer for you. I spend at least half of the past year trying to make that decision. The internal LLM that can read all the docs and code, you'd think, could get the context to know what the optimal state is, but it easily gets confused by out of date documentation and recommends paths that are going to be marked as "why didn't you use the new thing?" at review time, OR it builds out a solution using "oh, this isn't ready for use yet" parts.
Agreed. Google long ago passed the event horizon where they could keep pretending they were not mission-critical infrastructure for a significant portion of their users, and (from privacy to reliability) I'm glad they've put in structure to enforce acting like it, even if that means they no longer feel like working at a startup.
Everyone who wants to work at a startup knows where to find the rest of Silicon Valley (and Austin and etc.). I wish them the best and I look forward to reading their data-breach disclosures if they get popular enough for anyone to care about what they're doing.
I was at Meta when it was forced by the FTC to start adding this compliance stuff. It SUCKED to retrofit everything.
Now I'm at google, and onboarded on to the version of the infra that already went through that, and I can take it all at face value. It is a PAIN still, but this is the reality of a system that interfaces with O(10^8) users, O(10^2) governments.
Don't forget to mention automatic enrollment of your production group into access-on-demand. Any minor access on the production now requires the group manager's approval. I had a fun time with some production fire where only director level folks can approve the access. Even funnier thing is that this "refactor" was done without any prior notice.
I recommend the glove 80 for split ortholinear mechanical keyboards. It’s got plenty of of keys for coding. Also you can mount it to camera tripods and actually use it when tilted which really improves ergonomic factor.
It’s not just you, I think some engineers benefit a lot from AI and some don’t. It’s probably a combination of factors including: AI skepticism, mental rigidity, how popular the tech stack is, and type of engineering. Some problems are going to be very straightforward.
I also think it’s that people don’t know how to use the tool very well. In my experience I don’t guide it to do any kind of software pattern or ideology. I think that just confuses the tool. I give it very little detail and have it do tasks that are evident from the code base.
Sometimes I ask it to do rather large tasks and occasionally the output is like 80% of the way there and I can fix it up until it’s useful.
* Code using sympy to generate math problems testing different skills for students, with difficulty values affecting what kinds of things are selected, and various transforms to problems possible (e.g. having to solve for z+4 of 4a+b instead of x) to test different subskills
(On this part, the LLM did pretty well. The code was correct after a couple of quick iterations, and the base classes and end-use interfaces are correct. There's a few things in the middle that are unnecessarily "superstitious" and check for conditions that can't happen, and so I need to work with the LLM to clean it up.
* Code to use IRT to estimate the probability that students have each skill and to request problems with appropriate combinations of skills and difficulties for each student.
(This was somewhat garbage. Good database & backend, but the interface to use it was not nice and it kind of contaminated things).
* Code to recognize QR codes in the corners of worksheet, find answer boxes, and feed the image to ChatGPT to determine whether the scribble in the box is the answer in the correct form.
(This was 100%, first time. I adjusted the prompt it chose to better clarify my intent in borderline cases).
The output was, overall, pretty similar to what I'd get from a junior engineer under my supervision-- a bit wacky in places that aren't quite worth fixing, a little bit of technical debt, a couple of things more clever that I didn't expect myself, etc. But I did all of this in three hours and $12 expended.
The total time supervising it was probably similar to the amount of time spent supervising the junior engineer... but the LLM turns things around quick enough that I don't need to context switch.
I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What scares me is non-technical people just vibe coding because it's like a PM driving the same juniors with no one to give sanity checks.
> I also think it’s that people don’t know how to use the tool very well.
I think this is very important. You have to look at what it suggests critically, and take what makes sense. The original comment was absolutely correct that AI-generated code is way too verbose and disconnected from the realities of the application and large-scale software design, but there can be kernels of good ideas in its output.
I think a lot of it is tool familiarity. I can do a lot with Cursor but frankly I find out about "big" new stuff every day like agents.md. If I wasn't paying attention or also able to use Cursor at home then I'd probably learn more inefficiently. Learning how to use rule globs versus project instructions was a big learning moment. As I did more LLM work on our internal tools that was also a big lesson in prompting and compaction.
Certain parts of HN and Reddit I think are very invested in nay-saying because it threatens their livelihoods or sense of self. A lot of these folks have identities that are very tied up in being craftful coders rather than business problem solvers.
I think that social media has been a massive experiment where we asked, what if we let capital interests subvert our desire for community to get us to watch ads? And we have learned that it’s just not a good idea. I think perhaps Digg was one of the better ones but I solemnly wish social media was mostly illegal, especially advertising based, for profit sites.
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.
The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.
Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.
If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.
People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.
They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.
it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is
I am trying to build a Wikipedia for golf course architecture. Free shared info, genuinely about showing pride in your home club, printable yardage books if people make them…
The biggest response I get is “yea but the info on my course is blank, this sucks.”
I suspect there are only like 10% of folks who are remotely altruistic, and maybe 0.1% that would bother to even quickly edit Wikipedia if they found an error.
The vast majority of social media is carried by a few folks who genuinely want to connect and share things they love. After that the follow along is people critiquing, which is fine (I’m doing it now) but it doesn’t actually build anything.
problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers
and the walls of the echo chambers are built of addicting infinite feed algorithms, that's the core of it, outrage exchanging outrage amongst people who agree on one thing - THIS OUTRAGES ME
> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.
The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)
Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.
I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.
Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.
On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."
Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.
And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.
You are definitely right there, reddit has become more annoying because even old reddit now has chat pinging me all the time. And every single time I post a comment on my iPhone reddit I get reminded to subscribe to notifications for comment replies.
Hackernews mostly survives because it's the Y Combinator sponsored boardwalk over the incessantly sucking carp of tech bro daydreamers hoping for success by osmosis.
I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.
The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.
you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc
The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.
Not remotely the same thing. HN's ads are text-only job postings for companies in YC's portfolio. "Online ads" on the other hand are an unregulated wasteland of scams, dropship brands, misinformation, titillation, and culture war ragebait.
True, but how many sites allow users to down-vote or flag the advertisements? A lot of the blatant ad posts wind up flag-killed and only people who have "show dead" enabled ever see them.
Hacker news is not an app for cheap entertainment. Social media is. Hacker news is predominantly used by professionals, entrepreneurs, and/or tech interested/adjacent people. Social media isn't. Internet access and historical self selecting of people who sought out online spaces for interaction/community (it was not the norm, nor as acceptable, in fact often considered weird) acted as a gatekeeper that previously skewed early social media to have a different user base than today.
I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".
Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.
Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.
There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.
If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".
Social Media and News aggregation are not entirely different things, right? I mean, in the sense that News (and other link) Aggregation was one of the things that grew into Social Media. I think you are right to say it is more of an aggregation site, but also it’s worth nothing that in Digg’s heyday, Social Media was barely a thing.
Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.
> As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.
That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.
> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.
It’s ok to have emotions, even as an adult, we all have feelings. However, it’s important to be kind to other humans and to treat humans with respect. Even on the internet, even when people are proposing removing features from a browser. Now it can be difficult to voice opposition without coming off as rude but its definitely an important skill for a professional to have.
I think this is especially true on GitHub where people are using their real professional identities. I’m honestly shocked that anyone can just comment on these proposals given how toxic it gets. Imagine if this is your day to day work environment - you’re trying to improve the web, which is already a tremendously difficult thing while all of these keyboard warriors are insulting you and your efforts. I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone.
> However, it’s important to be kind to other humans and to treat humans with respect.
Very true. But why is that argument never deployed against the bullies?
Chrome's developers say "We want to do X". People say "No, please don't." Chrome says "I'm not going to respect your wishes."
Where's the equality in that?
> Now it can be difficult to voice opposition without coming off as rude but its definitely an important skill for a professional to have.
The same is also true of people making those proposals. Chrome devs should know (from bitter experience) that releasing a high-handed statement, studiously ignoring all dissent, and then swinging the ban-hammer is going to lead to ill-will.
Again, why isn't anyone calling for them to be more calm and respectful of the people they're hurting?
> I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone.
I've been on the receiving end and - yes - it sucks. But given that they know these proposals would be contentious, why didn't they approach this in a more respectful and collaborative manner?
How would you expect equality in an arrangement where you have a few hundred to a few thousand very specific kind of people producing something for billions?
They are in a special position. Every time you depend on someone to do something for you you cannot perform yourself, either due to a time or any other constraint, that is no longer an equal relationship, and it cannot be. You can make it codependent at best, which is not the same, and doesn't apply here.
All the licensing and open collaboration theatrics are just that, "words on a piece of paper" and things that can go away. I feel people really misjudge the "power" they "gain" from "open" and "transparent" processes like this.
> Chrome's developers say "We want to do X". People say "No, please don't." Chrome says "I'm not going to respect your wishes."
Absolutely not what's happening in that thread. Complete nonsense. It's a discussion/proposal.
The bullies are the people coming in and commenting with a bunch of rants, personal abuse, etc. Not the ones wanting to have a technical discussion (either pro or against removal). This is classic "reversing victim and offender" abuser/bully stuff.
> Very true. But why is that argument never deployed against the bullies?
Unfortunately part of being an adult is realizing there are no bullies. There are adults with power and some people who wield unfairly, but that’s different from a mean schoolchild, although the similarities are there. I don’t think the people who work on browser standards are bullies and it’s weird to frame them in that way.
> Where's the equality in that?
I guess why do you think there should be equality between users and the people that work on browser standards? It’s a committee not a direct democracy. Although they do take user feedback seriously, they surely can’t only do what every vocal minorities wants right?
> Again, why isn't anyone calling for them to be more calm and respectful of the people they're hurting?
They’re not be disrespectful by moderating the thread. They’re simply trying to do their jobs without being insulted constantly. It’s a bit different. They are actively responding respectfully to the feedback, I don’t think they’re hurting people.
> But given that they know these proposals would be contentious, why didn't they approach this in a more respectful and collaborative manner?
How could it be more collaborative? It’s already a request for feedback on an open forum. The comments aren’t even deleted just hidden because they’re duplicates. I’m curious what could be more collaborative?
This blog post reads to be self aggrandizing and that the author is very entitled. It’s not a government service - habeaus corpus / expectation of fairness do not apply here, full stop. Maybe they should but that’s a very different discussion.
The author seems like they’re repeatedly dunking on LinkedIn for their own vested self interest of promoting their product, and as a result, someone revoked their account. It seems like a pretty obvious TOS violation to shit on the brand of the company’s platform you’re using and although the author couldn’t find a term of service that they’re violating, I’m sure there’s something in there. It’s not a grand mystery - someone at LinkedIn noticed their posting and thought it was wrong for someone to use their platform to shit on the LinkedIn brand.
Golden rule of using a platform - you don’t own what is in there. If you ever threaten the platform even in the slightest way, then they will remove you without a second thought. Again maybe this is unfair but it’s not like this persons rights are being violated.
Finally the way it’s written seems to assume malicious / stupid intent constantly. To me, the people making these systems are potentially colleagues of mine and I do not want to disparage them unless I am totally sure they are doing something reprehensible. It’s disrespectful to smear a whole system just because you don’t like an individual moderation action.
Would you be okay if LinkedIn and GitHub banned your account without any explanation? Or are you of the opinion that it's not a possibility because you follow all of their ToS to the letter at all times? Do you admit that you'll never provide any objective feedback about these companies since that may (or even should?) violate their ToS in your opinion?
It's interesting that you immediately assume that she's actually disparaging LinkedIn in any way, without any such proof being available. Providing any critical opinions whatsoever, about the company as a whole, is now disparaging the individual employees of the company? Why are you disparaging the author of the essay? What if she's your colleague, too?
You might want to check your biases if your first instinct is to immediately assume anyone who's been wronged in any way by any bigtech platform is immediately an entitled person by having an issue with such an action, and is doing nothing more than disparaging the colleagues of yours.
How can you be sure that the person who's been deplatformed is not a colleague of yours, too?
Why is it okay to disparage private individuals in private capacities (and to deny them their livelihood in these cases of LinkedIn and GitHub bans), but not okay to provide less than ideal feedback about monopolistic multibillion-dollar companies?
> Would you be okay if LinkedIn and GitHub banned your account without any explanation?
If I was doing something like shitting on the brand and advertising my competition product with the platform then I would not be totally surprised. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> Or are you of the opinion that it's not a possibility because you follow all of their ToS to the letter at all times?
Yes. Platforms literally have the right to ban you for any reason without giving an explanation. If you don’t like that then you should lobby the government. I do think it would be better for society if there were certain laws platforms had to follow! But do I trust the government to get those laws right? Not yet. Maybe in 10 years.
>Do you admit that you'll never provide any objective feedback about these companies since that may (or even should?) violate their ToS in your opinion?
WTF ? You can definitely provide objective feedback to LinkedIn in the form of like feature requests lmao. But when you insult their product and then sell your own product that’s not objective feedback. You’re obviously self invested. Your goal isn’t to improve LinkedIn, it’s to sell your own product.
Which is ok! LinkedIn is a platform with many issues that there absolutely should be startups that try to fix them. But don’t pretend it’s like a massive tragic conspiracy when your account gets banned. You were simply poking a bear and the bear swiped at you.
> Why are you disparaging the author of the essay? What if she's your colleague, too?
I am being critical - I don’t think it’s the same as calling people who work at a company stupid or malicious. I never claim the author is stupid, just blind sided by their own hubris maybe. I believe they’re very smart and I’m sure they’re good at their job.
> How can you be sure that the person who's been deplatformed is not a colleague of yours, too?
I’m not sure of that. I tried to be fair in my critique. Maybe I got a bit spicy but it’s the internet.
> Why is it okay to disparage private individuals in private capacities (and to deny them their livelihood in these cases of LinkedIn and GitHub bans), but not okay to provide less than ideal feedback about monopolistic multibillion-dollar companies?
It’s ok to provide feedback of platforms. Just if you do it and you get banned don’t be surprised. Getting banned from a platform doesn’t meant you did something that “wasn’t ok.” It just means the platform decided to do it. Providing critical feedback of a platform while promoting your own competing product is not surprising to get a ban.
My experience reading this article was being confused about why someone is listing all the drawbacks with i-frames - even obscure drawbacks that most people would not ever encounter. Then I noticed it’s just an Ad for their product.
I think this kind of blog post should be illegal - there needs to be a disclosure at the beginning, ie, this is informative but it’s also an advertisement. Then I would know to not read any further.
I-frames are actually pretty useful tools. They’re the only way to allow HTML content from another site to exist on your site without trusting or sanitizing it. They actually work pretty well for dashboards.
They come with some serious drawbacks, most notably, not being able to edit the content of the iframe.
I generally prefer using an API or a npm module so I can customize the content of the iframe.
I really hope they figure it out. It would be an amazing piece of evidence about the harms of social media and we’d be closer to banning it for everyone.
I legitimately think that social media should be wiped from existence. Of course there could still be group chats, forums, blogs but we need to move away from having everyone’s relationships and desire for community be so easily capable of being exploited for ad revenue.
Think of banning all tobacco besides pipes, hand rolled ones and cigars. Yes, you’d still have people smoking but you’d have much less of it. Similarly, there’s no need for instagram, Facebook, TikTok or twitter to exist.
Perhaps any law that bans social media also makes hacker news and Reddit illegal! I would be alright with this personally. Hackernews could be replaced with a newsletter and Reddit would be better off if it were federated.
I would recommend to not make a web framework with the idea of it being popular, like competitive with react. It’s much better to make a library that works with react / vue / svelte and see if that can become popular.
There are enough web frameworks. If you make a blog post where you state what limits you have with the current state of web technology, and you describe it really well, I’m sure someone will be able to point out how there is a web framework that deals with that. Or a way to implement that in current web frameworks.
Maybe I’m too experienced but these lessons are really basic and they don’t really touch on advanced cases. I like the concept of defensive CSS but clearly there isn’t much there.
One case they failed to
address is that when you use CSS text truncation generally you need a tooltip to view the entirety of the text.
I would have appreciate a bit more depth or experience, something that’s not just explaining what useful CSS rules are.
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