I think this misses the scale of the problem. Review never fixed tech debt, nor did it fix relevant/bloated test suites. It didn't solve complexity, or eliminate footguns. Very few people (I would argue almost noone) had developed theories for what all of these even were, or how to spot them in code.
Reviewers aren't perfect, far from it. And we just gave them ~20x more code to review. Incentives mean that taking 20x longer to review is unacceptable. So where do we go from here?
On the one hand, I agree with the author - my definition is the same as theirs. On the other hand, I have moved to a country where everyone else uses a different system (it differs on whether "next friday" is in 6 days if we're talking during saturday). Are they wrong? Is all of this arbitrary? I think that learning to navigate these differences part of being a better communicator and a better person.
I would suggest that on some level we're still well inside "cleverness of the design" territory BUT that that hides a lot of complexity and nuance - for example we really haven't started to take advantage of the third dimension by any reasonable means. a perfectly optimal cpu would probably look more like a sphere than a flat square chip.
To my limited understanding we have started with layering techniques but its still pretty early days.
The reason we dont do that more is both because of difficulty in design but also manufacturing.
its one thing to actually put your headquarters somewhere. Quite another to use tricks to put your "headquarters" somewhere, and the office where you and most of your employees go to work halfway across the world.
And what of incorporating somewhere, having your headquaters somewhere else, having your main office in a third place, and this all owned by a shell company in a fourth place, with all your assets owned by a fifth company, which rents it back to you for extortionate rates, your EU subsidiary in a sixth place, the actual EU offices in a seventh place, etc etc etc.
Thats not even approaching the trickery and deceit that is accepted as completely normal - let alone the ones that actually get in trouble
Do these sorts of things have legal benefits for the companies involved? (yes)
If I had a company over a certain size, I'd probably do it too. But it has sharply negative consequences for the rest of society, and for trust in the system in general.
I get that sort of stuff quite a lot - its because my workplace uses a proxy to connect to the intranet, and traffic routed by that proxy is often blocked (zscaler)
"It's not like we have all the context of everything we ever learned present when making decisions."
We don't, no. But wouldn't it be great if we did? I'd sure love to be able to hold the entirety of the code of my organisations monolith in my head at once. It would make everything so much easier. It would definitely also cut down on the bugs I write!
Similar if I could recall all of my organisations confluence pages. Id probably be a lot better at my job. Same with all the slack history. All the hr documents, press releases, meeting transcripts. Theres practically no end to useful context even just in text form, and even if much of it is not relevant to any one task, having all of it in working memory would be fantastic, if only it were possible. I could probably make incredible cross organisational efficiencies and probably be far wealthier if I were some savant that could hold all of this in my head at once.
I get that we have agent harnesses to try and fetch only the relevant information. But most of the problems result in either failures in this process, or previous things falling out of context. I very rarely see failures where the agent forgets stuff already in context. The harnesses are making up for this exact limitation!
> Similar if I could recall all of my organisations confluence pages. Id probably be a lot better at my job. Same with all the slack history. All the hr documents, press releases, meeting transcripts. Theres practically no end to useful context even just in text form, and even if much of it is not relevant to any one task, having all of it in working memory would be fantastic, if only it were possible. I could probably make incredible cross organisational efficiencies and probably be far wealthier if I were some savant that could hold all of this in my head at once.
That sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi story where the conclusion is forgetting is not such a bad thing.
Forgetting is useful ( currently trying to build a personal system that attempts that in some sensible way -- needless to say, eh, not exactly straightforward ) for a variety of reasons, but the idea that we should keep trying to keep what is necessary and discard unnecessary things holds merit.
Current approaches require fancy tricks to fit tokens into memory, and spread attention thinner over larger numbers of tokens. The new approach tries to find a way to keep everything in a single shared memory, and process the tokens in parallel using multiple GPUs
ive never experienced that on ryanair? I fly it pretty regularly, its just the food cart, and even that feels halfhearted, I see maybe 3% of customers actually getting something, so most of the time they dont even bother asking, just roll right on by unless you go out of your way to ask for something.
The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?
If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.
I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.
googling it it seems like its still a thing. I reckon it must be on certain specific flights, maybe ones that are likely to attract a certain crowd, liverpool to malaga sort of flights maybe. Ive definitely not heard about it, but I do usually fly the same routes so
> The internet only took off because the primary business model which ran on ads
No? It took off before advertising was widespread as a primary or sole funding business model? Also there's literally nothing about advertising that requires data collection about users. Sure they love to do it, and they might even believe that it helps their profits in some way. But it's not inherent, they got along just fine with billboards and newspaper classifieds. TV ads never required personal information. Not did pre roll cinema ads, or radio adverts. Nobody was bemoaning in the streets that they couldn't possibly find anything to buy
Reviewers aren't perfect, far from it. And we just gave them ~20x more code to review. Incentives mean that taking 20x longer to review is unacceptable. So where do we go from here?
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