I worked at a FAANG in a senior role for around 6 years and I completely agree with the article. (I left before LLM/agent use became widespread, but I would have flamed out anyway if it was forced upon me.)
It's scary just how quickly the past has been buried: Decades of accumulated insight on best practices, all discarded in service of the new electric Christ.
This hit very close home. I'm a 44 year old developer, with Software Engineering Bachellors and CompSci MPhil and PhD. All my life I spearheaded "best practices" and code quality (from Fred Brooks, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler, etc...).
But since LLMs arrived... things have become crazy. The layer of "obscurity" that permeates code writing seems to make a lot of those "standards" moot or just not really pragmatically possible to follow.
It's interesting to see which articles garner the notice of FAANG mercenaries and which escape such levels of scrutiny and rancor. This article fell well off the front page by the time of my reply and yet somebody took the time to downvote. Oh well.
The one thing people seem to agree upon is that AI is a lever of control. What's surprising to me, in all my naïeveté, is how eagerly people will enforce this at the behest of billionaires.
I think a browser is an inverted universal engine. The underlying tech is solid, but on top of it sits the DOM and scripting, and then apps have to build on top of that mess. In my opinion, it would be much better for web apps and the DOM to be sibling implementations using the same engine, not hierarchically related. You wouldn’t use Excel as a foundation to make software, even though you could.
Maybe useful higher-level elements like layout, typography, etc. could be shared as frameworks.
You are thinking along the same lines as me. The fact that the first thing to be standardized was HTML made it a fait accompli that everything had to be built on top of it, since that "guaranteed" <insert grain of salt> cross vendor compatibility.
There are many alternate histories where a different base application layer (app engine) could have been designed for the web (the platform)
As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.
> As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.
Well, yes. If you weren't dispossessed of your culture generations ago, then you won't identify with a grouping of people who were dispossessed of theirs in service to the idea of "whiteness".
You are caught up in the racial definition of whiteness, but I'm talking about culture. For the same reason a Ghanaian expat isn't black, neither would you be white. There is a reason many black Americans reject the term "African-American": it makes no sense - they were systemically dispossessed of their African roots generations ago.
Yes, we know. I am specifically talking about the resultant culture that derived from this invention. If you can understand that black culture developed out of this invention through racist policy, then it should be possible to understand how this artificial separation did the same to white people.
> What are your cultural traditions? How much do they overlap with mine as a fellow "white" person?
What are my cultural traditions? I don't have a complete answer to that. We don't exactly have a "whiteness studies" major at colleges, and I wouldn't want one without serious and thoughtful consultation with the groups of people hurt by colonization.
To study even part of a culture is lifelong work. It took black academics decades to create a complete definition of racism as we know it today. And many more decades to describe black culture, which still hasn't been fully mapped out. To untangle what white culture is and what it isn't will also take many decades.
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