Got it running in less than an hour.

Having worked in another FAANG, I realize a large number of criticisms do come from imaginations, since I could see the contrast first hand. Nobody could tell exactly the consequences of all actions, most of the time it's just a buncha folks trying to figure out what to do, experimenting, iterating. Have you tried executing a conspiracy, like a surprise party? Good luck keeping a secret with more than 5 people.

There's also the problem of perspective. To a less technical engineer who don't know what they don't know, having their deliverable rejected time and again could feel like a conspiracy against them. If you read a blog post from them you'd think the culture is very toxic when everyone is doing their best juggling to be considerate while keeping the quality high.

As with others commenting on this, I've no idea how true the book is, in fact I have never read it. OTOH, even without the book, researches saying social media is making teenagers depress look convincing to me, and, although it's a losing battle, privacy matters a lot to me so I've personally stopped using social media for many years.

None of these give me full confidence to trust nor distrust the narrator, for things that you can't observe externally. It's all percentage.

There are good signs AI would eliminate whole classes of costly human errors, whether the new classes of machine only problems would cost more as models iterate is remain to be seen, which I think would be lower. I'm not super optimistic about the social economical future coming from this but from a pure tech standpoint I'm optimistic about building cost.

Edit: also to address reliability, I think a lot of things are net positive to this world without five 9s, heck even two 9s.

Edit 2: s/building cost/tco

Those work not done by specialist, would not have been done by a specialist nicely, it simply won't get done at all, we just don't have the scale. Of course there's a fine line in some cases it produces negative value, but more often than not it's some value discounted by maintenance versus zero.

But yes it's an area that still requires tweaking, which is a cost I don't want to incur. Also just within this year I got a regression (later fixed) because of a bug in nvidia-open driver so it stopped going into low power state giving me a toaster on the go. These are still very obscure to root cause and fix.

Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?

IMO the most common denominator among all these is trust, in order for many of these to work. From policy setting at strategic level, hiring, to tactical process refinement, the invariant must always be building an environment and culture of trust. Which isn't trivial to scale.

Detecting outbound network connection during an npm install is quite cheap to implement in 2025. I think it comes down to tenant and incentives, if security is placed as first priority as it should, for any computing service and in particular for supply chain like package management, this would be built in.

One thing that comes to mind that would make it a months long deabte is the potential breakage of many packages. In that case as a first step just make an eye catching summary post install, with gradual push to totally restriction with something like a strict mode, we've done this before.

Which, reminds me of another long standing issue with node ecosystem toolings, information overload. It's easy to bombard devs with thesis character count then blame them for eventually getting fatigue and not reading the output. It takes effort to summarize what's most important with layered expansion of detail level, show some.

Although from what I've read 8GB of VRAM seems insufficiently near-future proof, so I've always been eyeing 5070ti+ laptops. I wonder if there's any technical blocker that prevents offering 5070ti or the amd equivalent.

I think lots of windows antivirus come with features like this? Perhaps with vast crystalized kno eledge nowadays we can afford to create OSS system level package that offers some level of protection.

I might actually do it, any down side?

Does information no longer wants to be free now? Maybe internet, just like social media was just a social experiment at the end, albeit a successful one. Thanks GenAI.

If I were Visa/Mastercard leadership I think at least part of me would be happy to see this blow up, long term wise. Hey it's not me pushing back now, it's prigs versus the people, with a much higher chance of legislation change come out of it. Which IMO is just in this case, common carrier status as it should have, open to judicial requested blockages based on laws that are draft by folks elected by the population.

We've a buncha RFCs specifying the architecture with three branches to deal with these problems in the most agreeable way to most people, as good as we could come up with as a species. Rather than drafting new RFCs without understanding the why those three branches needed to exist, how about patching them. Complete rewrite works too but that should incorporate all the crystalized knowledge in the legacy version, which we all know is hard.

It was true before we allowed them to access external systems, disregarding certain rule which I forgot the origin.

The more general problem is a mix between the tradegy of the common; we have better understanding every passing day yet still don't understand exacly why LLM perform that well emergently instead of engineered that way; and future progress.

Do you think you can find a way around access boundaries to masquerade your Create/Update requests as Read in the log system monitoring it, when you have super intelligence?

Not mentioned in the article but this implies the importance of hiring. Having the right people to build the culture together, sitting in the room to discuss the priority of these things can turn a filibuster popping clown fiesta into productively working out actual competitive advantages for the company.

You know who you can't speak up against because they might feel upset, that your speech is mean, unkind or malicious? The privileged class. There has not been equality on social discourse for the last 10 years or so, at least for the intellectual crowd. I see this as a natural caused power balance cycle.

I was there when there was an internal thread trying to pressure management to effectively ban a book in a FAANG. I really wanted to expression my view: Censorship is more dangerous than the problem it's trying to solve. As long as it is legal publication, don't try to ban books. Let the readers decide, particularly when you strongly believe you are correct.

However there was only downside if I choose to speak up. In terms of game theory it is a 100% negative EV move. I can't say with authority whether a large number of colleagues felt the same, but given the strong filtering we tend to hire highly intelligent people, consciously choosing not to perform career ending move by saying the wrong thing isn't hard to imagine.

I don't have a concrete solution, perhaps abstractly it can be incentivized through some form of rewards and punishment tweak for the scenario above. Perhaps it can be established as a company tenant, that these speech won't affect your career (but it's not trivial since harasser attracted by those speech could hide their true intent, keep their moves subtle, it's particularly bad when these actions are usually emotionally charged). Or perhaps these ideas (truth seeking as a virtue? Be strict on yourself and forgiving on others? I can't pinpoint the most accurate words to describe it) can be reinforced stronger in education so it happens naturally.