The gender bias is clear in individual experience and data, all it takes is talking to women (or people of colour, or whatever under represented group you want) to see it.

I think Google does pretty well on this, largely due to the diversity programs that Damore was calling to have abolished.

That's not what the memo was. It ignored the evidence we have that there is systemic bias, it relied on tired and debunked tropes, and has explicit goals about preserving and elevating the privilege that perpetuates that systemic bias. That done in front of a large company filled with people personally affected by it is just a terrible idea. I'm open to discussion about this, but from the right people (those affected, with the experience) in the right context. James Damore was neither.

But honestly, if you read the memo and think it sounds reasonable, I'm not going to be able to change your mind. These biases are deeply rooted and take decades of introspection to overcome. I've been on that journey for probably 15 years and I've still got blind spots.

I think what's missed is two things:

- In the Phabricator/Gerrit model you typically end up with changes that are smaller than a PR, but bigger than a commit.

- You lose some history, or track it in a different way. With a PR you might add code to address comments in a new commit on the end, but with Phabricator/Gerrit you don't. If you already aggressively rebase in Git to absorb changes into commits that they make sense to go in, this won't be much of a change, and some systems give you views on the history happening within each change. But if you expect to see everything like that in the Git history, you may not get that, but the workflow changes around it and that's ok.

I think both types of review are in a local maxima, where you lose some things to move to the other type, and it was fear of losing those from my workflow that made me resist the change a bit. When you get there though, you realise it's just not a problem.

Taken alongside the rest of the content, it's a rejection of the idea that there is systemic bias, and much of his memo is dedicated to ways in which that bias can be propagated and solidified.

At best, the memo paints Damore as someone who is radically uninformed and parroting old and invalid talking points that others have given to him. At worst it implies that he knows what he's doing and is trying to dismantle processes and culture that are improving women's access to the workplace.

This is engineering theatre (pun intended).

The amount of hubris here is exceptional, the author doesn't even know that it's "clean room" rather than "green room". What does it even mean to build an open source AWS? There are many open source IaaS/PaaS components. Is the author suggesting any hardware design, because that's a critical component.

The only possible result of this is an AWS fanfic. An art project that looks vaguely like a cloud provider on the surface if you squint, but with zero substance to it.

And this criticism has nothing to do with AI. You'd get the same spending 100x that budget on any engineering team.

We must also look at the effect of his memo, which was to alienate many, and which caused a backlash that led to his firing. The company did not make a big deal of it just to fire him, it was individuals who were personally impacted and offended by it who made it what it was.

You could argue that Starlink have a captive audience, but that's not true in most of the UK/AU at least, where high speed internet is widely available to most. Those who need Starlink probably already have it and own the hardware, their growth market will have to be homes that have other options, and those other options don't charge $10 a month for the hardware.

The problem is that the model can't tell the difference between doing it as part of regular development and doing it in a malicious context. And the root cause of that is that these models lack any sort of real awareness. Humans don't generally get tricked into hacking (in this way).

...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription.

I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it.

They're in a hard place.

"Friendly fraud" is accidental or with the correct intentions – such as the customer not recognising the charge and charging back.

Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or SaaS) business.

Because of this, we had numerous SaaS pricing discussions where the sales rep didn't seem to understand that their pricing was just a non-starter for us. "Why wouldn't you pay $15k a month to save half an engineer's worth of work?"... because our engineers don't cost that much, and we don't have that money.

So much of SaaS pricing is predicated on customers being B2B, pure-tech, VC-funded, plenty of funding, with exceptionally high engineering costs. Essentially: cost is not a concern. Most of the world is not going to pay another $30/m subscription for every employee.

Like, I use a VSCode fork at work, but the enforced extensions store backend is based on an allowlist and extensions need reviewing to be available there.

It's not, Micro.blog is a service made and run by the author.

This sort of starts from the perspective that a privacy policy is not important, and I get why people might think that, but I think it's a harmful perspective.

Having an explicit policy about how you handle user data is far more useful than ignoring the problem and pretending that you are good for privacy because you don't collect data for ads. Almost every app collects data in some way and it's important to lay those out and be explicit about them.

This is an attitude I see from a lot of small developers, and I think it's something devs need to get better at.