Hacker News: richardles

New comment by richardles in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

richardles — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:28:01 +0000

You're right. We need to keep tabs on the culture for new hires for the reasons you mentioned. LLMs are really good at many onboarding tasks, but the social ones.

I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse analogy.

New comment by richardles in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

richardles — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 02:18:35 +0000

I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works.

It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product directions / historical context.

What LLMs are killing is:

- noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your Gemini / chat gpt sessions.

- tedious implementation sessions.

The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can tell.

New comment by richardles in "Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off"

richardles — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 08:07:26 +0000

I applaud your courage for posting here given the level of animosity in the room.

I think this change is good. It seems to take away the decision from the admin and put it solely in the hand of the user which is great.

More granular user control is also good (although that UI for deciding what gets recorded is getting messy).

Default ON is reasonable imo. Especially given that the data is only used to improve the product. In my experience CTR on autosuggestions is huge, hopefully this will improve workspace experience for quite a few people.

New comment by richardles in "Google plans to shut down Google Voice integration with classic Hangouts"

richardles — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 06:14:07 +0000

No. Google message has a web app already that you can use. You can now login to google message with your google account (no need to do the awkward qr code thing) and call/text from there. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/23/new-messages-for-we...