There are two extremes here: first, the "architects" that this article rails against. Yes, it's frustrating when a highly-paid non-expert swoops in to offer unhelpful or impossible advice.
On the other hand, there are Real Programmers [0] who will happily optimize the already-fast initializer, balk at changing business logic, and write code that, while optimal in some senses, is unnecessarily difficult for a newcomer (even an expert engineer) to understand. These systems have plenty of detail and are difficult to change, but the complexity is non-essential. This is not good engineering.
It's important to resist both extremes. Decision makers ultimately need both intimate knowledge of the details and the broader knowledge to put those details in context.
Another point is that the world is always changing. If you work slowly, you are at much greater risk of having an end result that isn't useful anymore.
(Like the author, of course, I'm massively hypocritical in this regard).
I think that there are three relevant artifacts: the code, the specification, and the proof.
I agree with the author that if you have the code (and, with an LLM, you do) and a specification, AI agents could be helpful to generate the proof. This is a huge win!
But it certainly doesn't confront the important problem of writing a spec that captures the properties you actually care about. If the LLM writes that for you, I don't see a reason to trust that any more than you trust anything else it writes.
"Couples often flake together. This changes the probability distribution of attendees considerably"
It's interesting to consider the full correlation matrix! Groups of friends may tend to flake together too, people who live in the same neighborhood might rely on the same subways or highways...
I think this is precisely the same problem as pricing a CDO, so a Gaussian Copula or graphical model is really what you need. To plan a great party.
We tend to calculate "people at percentages", ie: 2 adults, 2 kids, 50% chance of showing up rates as an attendance-load of 1.5 virtual people (for food calculations).
Then sometimes you need the "max + min souls" (seats, plates), and account for what we call "the S-factor" if someone brings an unexpected guest, roommate, etc.
Lastly: there is a difference between a "party" and a "soirée" (per my college roommate: "you don't have parties, you have soirées!")
All the advice is really accurate, makes me miss hosting. If you want to go a little deeper, there's a book called "How to be a Gentleman", and it has a useful section on "A Gentleman Hosts a Party", and then "Dads Own Cookbook" has a chapter on party planning, hosting, preparation timelines... there's quite a bit of art and science to it!
> We tend to calculate "people at percentages", ie: 2 adults, 2 kids, 50% chance of showing up rates as an attendance-load of 1.5 virtual people (for food calculations).
>
> Then sometimes you need the "max + min souls" (seats, plates), and account for what we call "the S-factor" if someone brings an unexpected guest, roommate, etc.
I made myself a "food and drinks amount" calculator for weekends/week-long party events a few years back and it was eerily accurate once you take in unexpected plus ones, flake rates, hangovers and other computable-at-scale events into the formula!
I’ve never had the mental bandwidth to try to manage my manager and team like this. While I don’t trust them to provide the best feedback, I also don’t trust that I won’t make mistakes. And what does it matter if I cannot control everything, unless too much risk is involved.
The color of that bike shed is distracting, though. Is it purple or pink?
- bad communication possible in any medium
- pptx in NASA even today!
- issue is managers/SMEs communication differences
- issues with technical papers
- long
- boring
- vs word, excel, pdf...
(Next slide please)
Manager/SME Differences
- context vs conclusion
- tell a compelling story
- but give away the ending FIRST
- inherent personality differences
- motivations/incentives/mindsets
(Next slide)
Learning from disasters
- medium guides message and messenger
- blame tool - binary choice?
- presentation aide vs distributed technical artifact
Blaming the audience makes sense because after all, they're the ones not getting the message right and not asking the presenter to explain it better. But it remains the presenter's failure to catch their attention better and try to deliver a clear message.
Every time I had a presentation, I tried to analyze the failures (including listening to me when it was recorded, a really painful experience). Certain mistakes such as like having slides on a white background that makes attendees look at the screen and read instead of watching the presenter and listening to him can be devastating. Just because attendees are naturally attracted by light. It's not the audience's fault, it's the presenter's fault (and to some extents the tools in use). A good exercise is to stop slides from time to time during the presentation (i.e. switch to a black one), you'll be amazed how much you suddenly catch the attention, you feel like you're at a theater. It even manages to catch attention of those who were looking at their smartphones because the light in the room suddenly changes.
Also another difficulty which is specific to English native speakers is that many of them initially underestimate the difficulties of the audience to catch certain expressions (with some people it's very hard to distinguish "can" from "can't" for example, which complicates the understanding), or idiomatic ones, or references to local culture, because such things are part of their daily vocabulary. Of course, after a few public talk, when they get questions at the end proving there were misunderstandings, they realize that speaking slower, articulating a bit more and avoiding such references does help with non-native listeners. Conversely, when you present in a language that is not yours, you stick to very simple vocabulary using longer sentences to assemble words that try to form a non-ambiguous meaning. It can probably sound boring for native speakers but the message probably reaches the audience better.
In any case, it definitely always is the presenter's failure when a message is poorly delivered and their responsibility to try to improve this, however difficult this is. It's just important never to give up.
"... if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking..." this sounds a lot like Google's "Knowledge Graph". https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph. (Disclosure: I work at Google.)
If you ask an LLM where you can find a structured database of knowledge with structured semantic links, they'll point you to this and other knowledge graphs. TIL about Diffbot!
In my experience, it's a lot more fun to imagine the perfect database like this than it is to work with the actual ones people have built.
This essay would benefit from results from computational complexity.
P vs NP, of course, but also the halting problem and Rice's theorem: non-trivial semantic properties of programs are undecidable.
In other words, if you say "this is the solution to that sudoku puzzle", that's easy to verify. "This sudoku puzzle has a solution" is almost certainly much harder to verify. "Here's a program that can solve any sudoku puzzle - impossible (in general).
Ads on the page aren't the same thing as ads interspersed with the results. The ads used to be in a sidebar, or in an inset with a different background color that appeared above all results.
Read your own link:
> For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the right of Google’s search results
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
It’s crazy on the web when you point out that google or google products used to be much better in the past someone will come out of nowhere to tell you it’s always been that way
what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know
"The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.
If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion. But you can't just make up false statements and expect to be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him. I don't think an instinct to point out inaccuracies can explain that. There would have to be inaccuracies to point out first.
If you believe stuff like this isn’t actual astroturfing, you must face that from somewhere there seems to exist a deeply ingrained belief from a subset of extremely vocal and argumentative people that Google is amazing and if it isnt well that’s just how the web is now (ignore the google man behind the curtain that created the modern web in the first place) and if it’s not that well, it’s always been this way (even if it hasn’t).
There is a very strong stance on this site against talking about astroturfing, and I understand it. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out where this general type of sentiment originates. I don’t know any google enthusiasts and am not sure I’ve ever met one. It’s a fairly uncontroversial take on this website and in the tech world that google search has worsened (the degree of which is debateable). Coming out and saying boldly “no it isn’t, you’re lying” is just crazy weird to me and again I’m very curious where that sentiment comes from.
see some of the sibling and aunt/uncle comments in this thread to get at a little of what I’m talking about.
I was a google fan back when they first started and were just a search engine. Search engines like Yahoo and excite became massively bloated and ad-filled while google was clean and fast.
I wasn't a fan for very long. Google got creepy fast, and at this point their search is becoming useless, but for a short time I really thought that Google is amazing and I was an enthusiast.
All I see here is someone making a claim and someone else making a different claim. They may have erroneously intended the claim in opposition, either missing or interpreting differently the 'interspersed' qualifier. Or, alternatively, they may believe when any ads appeared is more meaningful in the context of this discussion.
I think Google search has gone downhill tremendously to the point of near uselessness and have been a Kagi subscriber for awhile, but I don't see astroturf in this instance. Do you have other examples?
> Except that jkaptur is the one making up false statements, and then providing "citations" that contradict him.
I believe I have covered that case in my comment. Let me quote the relevant part here for you: “What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.”
That being said could you help me by pointing out the inaccuracy in jkaptur’s comment? It seems fairly simple and as far as I can see well supported by the source.
Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google - It’s not just one guy’s “fuzzy feeling.” It’s been written about in so many thousands of words over the last two years and is the general sentiment across the tech space. It’s sort of the major reason big companies like chatGPT, and smaller ones like Kagi are trying to swoop in and fill this void. it’s fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
You can sealion with posts like this all you want but every time someone counters a post like this with ample evidence it gets group downvoted or ignored. You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
Since we don’t have a time machine and can’t study the google of 2015 we have to rely on collective memory, don’t we? You proclaiming “it’s always been this way” and saying any assertion otherwise is false is an absolutely unfalsifisble statement. As I said, anyone over 25 knows.
Besides perusing the wealth of writing about this the last two years or so, in which the tech world at large has lamented at how bad search specifically has gotten - we also see market trends where people are increasingly seeking tools like chatGPT and LLM’s as a search replacement. Surely you, a thinking individual, could come to some pretty obvious conclusions as to why that might be, which is that google search has got a lot worse. The language models well known to make up stuff and people still are preferring them because search is somehow even less reliable and definitely more exhausting, and it was not always this way. If it was always this way, why are so many people turning to other tools?
> Other than the fact the parent comment to this subthread is posting a literal factual innacuracy regarding the history of ads on google
Sounds like it should be very easy to counter their argument then.
For my education could you tell me which part of their message is inaccurate? The “Google was founded in 1998” or the “and you could buy ads on the search results page in 2000.” part?
> You are also making an assertion that you’re free to back with evidence, that google and google products are not noticeably worse than 10 years ago.
I did not make such an assertion. Where in my comment do you think i’m making that assertion?
> You proclaiming “it’s always been this way”
I’m sorry but who are you quoting? Did you perhaps misclicked which comment you wanted to respond to?
Many people who post here are, were, or would like to be Googlers. Maybe not so much astroturfing ao much as a kind of corporate hasbara (though maybe both).
> Maybe not so much astroturfing as much as a kind of corporate hasbara
What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.
In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.
"The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-94 11306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project."
On the other hand, there are Real Programmers [0] who will happily optimize the already-fast initializer, balk at changing business logic, and write code that, while optimal in some senses, is unnecessarily difficult for a newcomer (even an expert engineer) to understand. These systems have plenty of detail and are difficult to change, but the complexity is non-essential. This is not good engineering.
It's important to resist both extremes. Decision makers ultimately need both intimate knowledge of the details and the broader knowledge to put those details in context.
0. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
reply