I don't rigorously define reason in the article and I state that it is hard to draw clear boundaries. I'm more relying on the readers intuitive understanding of the idea, which is perhaps not a good thing to do.
I wouldn't say that the question is completely pointless. There are a bunch of datapoints in the post that you can use to inform a conclusion about whether you think LLMs can reason or not.
Mostly agree, although I think "good" engineering culture is so incredibly rare that it feels strange to call it "good" and everything else "bad". It's more like "regular" engineering culture vs "exceptional" culture.
In my experience I think the larger any team gets the more likely the team is to hire "regular" engineers and the quality regresses to the mean. So it's only a small set of specialized teams with unusual luck and control over hiring that can become "exceptional".
So true. Communication is insanely difficult. Hiring competent, motivated engineers is insanely difficult. Working around short-term thinking executives is insanely difficult. Iterating until you stumble on a success product is insanely difficult.
How often does anyone talk about these problems in meetings? It's wild, I feel like all I ever do is argue over mostly irrelevant technical minutia.
Exactly! It's this huge elephant in the room and all we want to talk about is our editors and how Java is faster than Go or whatever.
I'm sitting in this meetings thinking "Guys, using XML or JSON truly, truly does not matter here. You have already wasted months on this shit and the value meter is still at $0. I'm telling you we can make this work with either Scala or 6502 assembly or anything in between. What matters is that we need a coherent vision, formulate actionable goals and work on improving our communication and keeping it there."
It's almost as if you are describing the meetings in my company (and my previous)
I think focusing on technical trivialities is a symptom of what type of experience the developers have and how the current workplace is organized.
In traditional companies, the developers are at the tail of a process that they have limited participation in. Most of the product decisions has been done by others and the developers often don't have enough contact with the business side to make any real impact.
You end up with an isolated group that can only influence technical desicions, so that's what they will focus on.
Choosing tech X vs tech Y is actually only 1 choice in a long chain of product, design and business choices that has led to the Jira ticket.
From their point of view, it seems like the most important desicion because it is taken out of context.
This is where experience is actually a good thing, because it increases the chance that you have been exposed to "the other side". They will also know that these types of decisions are not likely to be the reason why they fail.
By participating from the beginning you also tend to be more motivated by outcome. Technical discussions that don't have a real impact become less interesting.
This resonates with me, although I would go a step further to say the makeup/experience of the developers is a product of the competency of leadership. Most leaders wind up in their positions out of pure luck and chicanery. I can't tell you how many lay offs I've been through where the best people are let go and the worst are kept on and unintentionally sabotage the entire engineering team.
focusing on technical trivialities is a symptom of what type of experience the developers have and how the current workplace is organized
It comes from development echo chambers (including this one, sorry HN), where people tend to discuss The Right Way even if they see it not working at their own job, cause right ways feel good. New/young developers absorb it and bring it to their workplace. I did that too. It took decades to beat this shit out of myself. Now when I hear someone talking about true ways of a qualified professional developer I just remember that the business will probably pivot a couple of times before they deliver an mvp that is neither v or p.
Totally agree. And I honestly don't think Starbucks removing seating has much if any impact on reducing "third spaces" since almost everyone buying Starbucks was getting it to go anyway. This article reads more like someone being annoyed about Starbucks changing than any real evidence that third spaces are going away.
If anything, if more people are now using coffeeshops as remote offices we are likely to see new shops catered to this opening up.
I'm an American and I don't get it either. There are tons of local coffee shops _everywhere_ in America, most with better coffee, happier baristas and unique atmosphere. Have so many Americans/Canadians never... like... been to a coffee shop that's not Starbucks?
The author's library is being renovated, not disappearing. One large corporation (Starbucks) is enshittifying its experience by removing seating. I don't think the premise "third spaces are disappearing" is a valid conclusion at all.
I don't know if third spaces are indeed going away or not, but the argument here doesn't really address that.
By the way, if you don't like it don't buy Starbucks. Don't use Amazon. Don't use Twitter .(If you have the option). Not spending money/attention is more effective than complaining at changing companies' behavior.
Even in production my guess is most teams would be better off just rolling their own embedding model (huggingface) + caching (redis/rocksdb) + FAISS (nearest neighbor) and be good to go. I suppose there is some expertise needed, but working with a vector database vendor has major drawbacks too.
I think they are talking about bag-of-words. If you apply a dimensionality reduction technique like SVD or even random projection on bag-of-words, you can effectively create a basic embedding. Check out latent semantic indexing / latent semantic analysis.
Yeah, agreed. Was thinking something similar but your comment is better measured and nuanced. Like, "social media is the problem" suggests the way to help young people is get them off their phone. In some ways, yeah, I do think that would help. But the deeper causes are _why_ social media companies are allowed to keep making addictive products with no responsibility for the negative outcomes, as well as _why_ there is so much scary stuff happening with little action being taken to fix it.
