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To be honest, that's the fault of the websites themselves. Google is just an amplifier of a world web wide problem.

While true, google can punish them by ranking the offending sites lower than non offending ones.

I think we can blame google for the login with google prompts given they provide an SDK for that exact use case.

It's symbiotic. Google has been aggregating data from these websites for years to serve as summaries in search, reducing traffic to the sites. More pernicious is AMP, where the site is basically copied to the Google server. This force websites to use AdSense and structure the content in certain ways. If a site doesn't want to use AdSense, or allow Google to summarise the site, it gets down-ranked in search. A death sentence. Further, Google's algorithms routinely promote spam because this is most profitable for Google. Hiding the important information 3/4 of the way down a 10,000 word article with a hundred different kinds of ads on the page. Since the "good" websites have to compete with these spam websites, they either adapt or give up monetisation.

One of the more horrifying stories to read was about [Code Yellow back in 2019.](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-2019-code-yellow-blurr...) Google's algorithms were getting too good. Users were finding what they wanted too fast. They'd type in their query, the first result was good, then the user would close the tab. For Google, this meant less ad revenue. They wanted users to stay on Google for longer. *So they chose to degrade the algorithm quality.* Users would have to click multiple links to find the information they wanted, and inside every link was ads served by Google. This is one of the pivotal moments in one of the worst cases of enshitification in software history.


>If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better

It has certainly been better for junior devs, mid devs, anyone looking for zirp era salary growth and supply demand ratios. For a senior code-adverse coaster looking forward to see his static salary get eaten by inflation, life has indeed never been better.


Yeah, at Corp, that makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of scrappy startup silliness. "I am one person and I deal with any and all code to get my product built."

From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?


> "I am one person and I deal with code to get my product my built." From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?

Building a product is easier now, same way making a photograph is easier now. Making a reliable and high income living out of it though, it looks increasingly uncertain.

In a world with abundant music and photography, just saying that you made your music using Reason/ProTools or you made your photograph with a Leica isn't enough. I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.


> I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.

Agreed. It's not even a new thing. They tried to teach me/us long ago, starting by putting it into words we might more easily understand, such as "Customer Development" lol.

When I realized that it was the sales guys that will have the power in the mid-term new world, I got genuinely upset. However, maybe they always had the power and I just didn't want to accept reality.

Now, I believe the most desired hire in the near future will be the PMM.


They always had the power.

What is PMM?

> A Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in tech is a strategic bridge between the product, sales, and marketing teams who defines who a product is for and why it matters.

A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.


Some orgs use PMM for product management and marketing.

Percona Monitoring and Management [0].

...or not. Probably not.

0: https://github.com/percona/pmm


It's probably Product Marketing Manager. So essentially selling the new stuff to new and old clients at scale.

I'm guessing PM mistyped

No it’s Product Marketing Manager. A common title and one part of the holy trinity (PM, EM, PMM) at bigger companies.

Anyone who has learned a language knows this anecdotally. The linguistic structures need to be marshalled by active cognition (editing and writing). Merely reading and watching is not enough.

So Searle was right.

About what?

Yes, but part of the reason ZuckOff is trending now is because it is also popular outside tech circles.

The name is also much more engaging. As we all know, naming things is hard. While NearbyGlasses is simple and descriptive, it's not emotionally charged like ZuckOff.

The technical type tends to miss the power of the following algorithm.

marketing > technical ability

It's been this way ever since I've worked in the industry and will probably never change because of human behavior.


    No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun
    It's never what you do, but how it's done
- Nas

> Dishwasher rinse aid in beverages happened yesterday but I’ve also had makeup remover in condiments

I am sorry but could you explain the meaning of this sentence?


There is a setting in the “Reminders” app where Siri will automatically categorize your reminders into certain categories. If you have a shopping list and you add chickpeas and red beans for example it might put them into a category of “pulses and grains”. I think the idea is you probably buy all the things in a particular category from the same kind of store (or the same section of a supermarket or whatever).

For me yesterday I needed to buy dishwasher rinse aid so when I added it to my shopping list siri put it into the “beverages” category, and when my wife on a different occasion asked me to buy some makeup remover for her siri put that into a “condiments” section.

I have not done anything (on purpose) to make the classification like this by mistraining it or whatever - it’s just been that bad out of the box.


Dishwasher rinse aid - the tablets you put into the machine containing chemicals

Beverage - another word for drink

Makeup remover - for women

Condiments - something added to food to enhance its flavor

iOS tries to put shopping list items into AI named groups but doesn't seem to understand what objects actually are so it makes mistakes.


Agent technology labs are likely exempted of this due to the significance ascribed to their work.

> Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test,

False sense of security. What's stopping the agents from doing an elaborate form of "Assert.IsTrue(true)" in some/most/all of the tests since you are vibing it and not reviewing it?


Exactly what happened in a PR from a few months ago, from the beginning it felt wrong, pytest was moved from the dev group to the main import section. Then imported in our models. To add ignores everywhere.


Agreed. If you don’t want to read the code that’s fine, but you have to read the testing code. Otherwise you have no idea what’s going on.


Yeah, you have to have some level of involvement. It's crazy that we are actually talking of 100% dev involvement to literally 0% involvement.

If you're working with agents that severely misaligned you'll probably have issues way beyond fake tests.


It seems to me that chances of misalignment are a function of accumulated usage time. Eventually, it will happen.


Look at the COBOL devs. They are been called in their retirement years. You don't want that to be you. Life is short


Have you seen what they charge per hour? Let’s just say it’s not Upwork rates.


my uncle is 70+ years old and he's one of those haha

I saw him starting at a monitor at midnight, back all hunched up and thought "nope, not what I envision"


Because safety isn't a priority at OpenAI and they had (have?) been falling behind Anthropic in the LLM race? Big fans of the saying: move fast and...


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