I mean astroturfing reddit was never new. It’s why /r/HailCorporate existed and tools tried to disenfranchise that sub so much.

It’s just 10 times worse because of the phenomenon you described. It also doesn’t help that reddit and walled garden social media killed traditional forums so you don’t have those to index anymore either. You either have SEO garbage sites trying to bombard you with ads and referral links, links to a walled garden you can’t actually see, or reddit posts.

It’s a cycle that’s bound to repeat, especially with AI. Because that’s how MBAs and snake oil salesmen get money, by ruining communal spaces.

Fuck yes I’m so happy they let you tweak the bottom dock. It’s so simple but it makes me so happy

And the agents will totally remember anything and don’t have limited context windows that vanish after every command.

“Right now, we’re doing a big rebuild of our core production APIs. It’s being done by one person with like 20 agents,”

Lmao that’s totally not gonna be a train wreck at all

I’m happy I don’t work there anymore. I joined right before the layoff craze and between the horrible oncall nights and layoffs that was one of the more stressful experiences of my life.

I was gonna say I do know quite a few coworkers that love all this stuff.

I despise it with the passion of 1000 suns but it’s not universal.

I remember on launch it was a fucking miracle if the PC version could get past the intro screen. The fact that it’s remotely stable now is a bloody miracle.

Native advertising for the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

John Oliver has a good bit on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

What the fuck is IgniteTech?

It’s like the skievier part of DoorDash listings, where they’d list restaurants that weren’t on the platform, make deliveries for them and send angry customers to them when DoorDash fucked it up.

It might work for a bit but it’s gonna fizzle out if they decide to overcharge for popcorn and coke to the point it costs $100+ to watch one video game.

I have a feeling that’ll shift in the next few years.

When things are great, everyone is hiring and the money is flowing a union doesn’t seem necessary. But that’s drying up now and it’s looking to be worse than the dot com crash. That’s when BS starts to come from companies and the anti union people aren’t gonna get the same paychecks and perks they used to.

Same. Refuse to use NVIDIA going forward for anything.

I was a weird kid and had this growing up

No just consume the desired ads on the desired browsers.

The poor kids can’t even afford coal and fall through the cracks.

“What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.” Some will be open-source models available to anyone.

This is such an out of touch non-answer here.

People don’t oppose ai changes because they’re locked into a model. In fact most AI products I use for my job let you choose a fucking model.

People hate them because

A) 90% of the time they’re useless and the remaining 10 are detrimental to the product experience

B) Ethical concerns about training off of artists and authors as well as environmental impact. EDIT: or also the general trend of trying to replace humans with AI.

C) Not wanting to play into the fucking arms race the billionaire class are manufacturing

D) The time they could be useful they have a risk of being either hilariously wrong or dangerously wrong. And there’s no amount of training and GPU manufacturing that’s gonna fix that.

Absolutely none of this is addressed by the CEO. I’m sure he has to say this because of the fucking tulip crazy money is in around this but it doesn’t make it any less tone deaf or futile.

Non-engineering roles I think.

IIRC levels correspond to all employees across the company.

Yeah it’s weird and I don’t get it either.

Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.

Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.

This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.

At Amazon you have the following levels

L4 - Junior. A new grad. Expected to be promoted within 2 years or let go

L5 - Mid engineer. Very wide band. Encapsulates anything between a level 2 engineer and a team lead at other companies. Can be expected to lead individual teams at times. Is considered a “terminal” position (there’s no expectation of a promotion past here)

L6 - Senior. Has the scope of what a Staff engineer would at other companies where you’re not only concerned with your team but others in the department. I think like 10% of engineers ever hit L6

L7 - Principal Engineer. You have like 1-2 of these per department. These are more like architects at other companies. About 1-2% of engineers ever hit this band.

L8 and beyond are for fancy hires and shit. Very few if anyone ever works their way up to those bands.