Amazon does the same with product ads.

The past decade they've been replacing any leadership who thinks about serving their users or creating amazing things with people who can only think in terms of immediate money.

Don't expect them to make anything new or interesting from here on out. They got lucky that the old guard was so interested in AI, and the new leadership was unable to snuff it out before it turned out to be valuable. But Google will be unable to make anything new after AI since they have harvested their seedcorn.

Hmm I wonder how these were originally funded when it was less likely that they would work.

And by cutting funding now, I wonder what we're missing out on in the future.

Sometimes a coworker will be an ML star for a year or two, but then suddenly run out of steam. It's brutal to watch.

I used to think most smart people had similar distributions of good ideas, and it was just that the hardest working tried out all 50 of their ideas to pick out the 2 good ones. But I've seen smart and hardworking people have a hit rate of 0.

Ugh. Just write your own damn post already

It took in almost every idea, and the battlefield showed us which do work and which don't. We get to keep RAII, move vs copy, smart pointers, placement-new, and generics. We get to drop auto_ptr, copy-by-default, its specific exceptions implementation (fight me), multiple virtual inheritance, and templates as full code substitution.

In my opinion the battles have played out, and Rust is the best sum-up of what worked (it even inherited the compile times! Lucky us!)

AI is terrible at writing. Its prose is awful and horrendous to read. Plus, the whole point of reading a written piece is to hear about the author's new ideas or experiences. If AI wrote your piece it's both bad and pointless. I can also prompt the AI to hear what it knows about.

Take the new sf bay bridge span. It leaked, and had to be fixed to prevent critical parts from corroding. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Caltrans-was-warned-o...

Projects are consistently over budget, late, and shoddily done in the physical world too.

The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.

In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.

Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.