Even though I've shilled the book before, it's an opportune thread to repeat the recommendation: if you haven't, read Careless People. For much of her career at Facebook, the author worked for Joel Kaplan, who was VP of Global Public Policy and is now Chief Global Affairs Officer. She's not particularly complimentary.
> Unlike the dot-com era, this is a bubble that everyone saw coming.
As far as I recall, the dot-com bubble was widely seen as such prior to it bursting. E.g. Greenspan and Buffet were both quite vocal about the irrationality of the values being assigned to companies.
I specialize in Fractional CISO and Fractional CTO engagements. I'll get you through SOC-2 or ISO-27001, hire your team, prototype your product, or help you with anything related. 27 years in startups and small tech companies, with 18 years in technical management and exec roles.
Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.
> A human is just a few chemical reactions, and fairly stable ones at that.
And humans are controllable. Pump the system full of lithium and morphine, and your human becomes much more docile. You don't need to understand the full system in order to constrain it.
So in the real world, what are the analogues to lithium and morphine we should feed to e.g. LLMS, how do we feed them, and how do we prove that it prevents unsafe behavior?
The better analogy is a jail cell imo. You can control a human and prevent them from doing harm to society by locking them in a cage, depriving them of access to weapons, drugs and alcohol. They can communicate out through controlled and monitored phone lines. OpenAI built their jail cell out of toothpicks, and surprise, the agents broke out. It’s less about forcing them to do specific things than it is about preventing them from doing dangerous things.
Maybe that's possible. But there will be a tension between how productive/useful the models can be when they are put into a very restrictive jail. In the limit they would be in a box with no way to communicate, but that wouldn't be useful to anyone. I think there will always an incentive for the people who own the models to give them more access because the increased productivity may help to outcompete their adversaries.
But let's grant that the models only communicate through certain phone lines. I think very bad scenarios are still possible. There are at least two that I can see. 1) The models exploit the users which have direct access to it. It somehow convinces them to perform tasks for it or to give it more access. 2) Control of the AI is held by a small number of people. This could be bad because it grants them an outsized power over all humans without such access, and thus lead to oligarchy/dictatorship.
Can you quote where in the article this is mentioned? I don't see it. I just see the assertion AI can be controlled without any substantive description of how.
I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.
My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.
I hope not. I've tried tiling and I just don't like it. I may be in the minority these days, and it may simply be my forty years of use patterns, but you'll have to take my overlapping windows from my cold, dead hands.
Eh… as someone who agrees, I think overlapping windows are a feature, not a bug. Very often a window is transient, in that it’s something I need to give my attention to and once it’s done, it’s gone. In a naive tiling window manager, all windows have to re-tile themselves while the transient window is open, just to then return to their previous layout once it’s done anyway. The ideal interaction in my opinion is for the transient window to simply be “on top really quick” and I can just alt+tab if I need to see what’s underneath it. The degenerate case tiling proponents always point out is that “what if the window you need is obscured” and tbh I just never have that problem? Between a quick alt+tab, or the win+arrow shortcuts doing “tiling-lite” when I need it, I’ve never thought “gee I wish something would figure out a tile layout for all these windows”.
More generally, tiling is what you want when you have a particular layout you like, each window has a reason for existence, and you want them all open and visible at the same time. That constitutes like, 10% of my time using a computer. Mostly I just want “give me a new window, let me do a thing, then it’s gone”, with said new window occupying 100% of my attention while it’s there. Having to carve out space for it in a tile layout (even if the tiling is automatic) just doesn’t make sense with the way I use my machine.
A tiling window manager is a lot more useful if it doesn’t always tile, yes. The ones I’ve tried don’t seem to have a graceful way of saying “allow overlapping just this once”, but I’ve only tried a few of them (i3 is the one I remember most. I honestly can’t remember if I tried hyprland. If I did it was probably only for a few minutes.)
Now, you seem to be upset that I don’t “have a point worth trying to understand”, perhaps you can enlighten the class and explain why your tiling window manager of choice does this better? I’ve already described my ideal interaction, so if your WM does this well I’d love to hear about it. As it is right now, you seem to be the one who’s withholding details.
> I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.
The paradigm of setting windows on the desktop strategically placed so parts of the title bars or portions of windows that can be clicked without issue are visible can be a really useful one. Combine this with virtual desktops and it works nicely so you don't have one humongous blob of everything but a few strategically placed windows dedicated to one task in each virtual desktop, overlapping so that each window is large enough to use.
I'm not a big fan of tiled windows. I tend to focus on one window at a time and if I am focusing on just one, then a large amount of screen space is wasted.
So please don't just take that away because some dev somewhere is a fan of tiling windows.
Based on his demos I don't think his statement is that overlapping windows are a relic, more that overlapping windows are a thing people deal with and we need something in between overlapping windows and Expose-style fanouts.
I stopped using them last year. They were too late to see the AI juggernaut coming and their attempts at responding have been underwhelming. They should have been pouring resources into Fleet from 2022 onwards to make this, but instead it's been a series of missteps. This looks like approximately the right offering, but where's the moat? It seems like just another Cursor/Antigravity.
It is a broader story than just the IDE integration. That's important, of course, but the post talks about agentic development across the IDE, teams, and organizations.
On my home PC I use restic, and (shockingly) I run it manually (via a script). I have a terminal banner that nags me when backup hasn't run in 24 hours, or displays spanish verb tables when it has (so I will notice if the banner doesn't show). I've been burned in the past losing a backup cron, and dead man's snitch seemed overkill for my needs here. And I've also forgotten what backup system was in place on a prior install, and it took me way longer than I liked figuring out how it was setup when I needed to do a restore.
Obviously for production systems automation & monitoring is the way. I kind of like this setup on my own machine though.
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