goopthink's comments

As a recipient.

- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)

- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.

- Priority inbox rules seem reset

- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected

Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...

Https://sharedphysics.com

Https://errorstates.com

This. I encouraged my team to use a templated (standardized) ADR for any big decisions that don’t have an obvious answer or complete consensus and it had reduced the second guessing and relitigation of decisions to nearly zero. It also gave is a good snapshot of where we were when we made that call so historic decisions weren’t disparaged.

No disagreement, I think developer augmentation is an amazing productization of LLMs, and will likely be better at converting enterprises so paying customers.

But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this. Whats the number on “tons” of customers, given that these VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like mushrooms after a rain?

If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they’re burning cash at insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I’m skeptical of the financial decision here.

Is $3 billion the right price? That might be what Windsurf is being valued at (cue the “selling to willing buyers at currently fair market prices” meme), but that’s like saying “it would cost OpenAI more than $3b to staff from zero, build a competitor, and acquire a comparable volume of paying users” … and that feels like an insane statement given the implications therein?

Especially given that Windsurf (and I think Cursor too) is a VSCode fork and OpenAI is cozy enough with Microsoft? It’s not even a zero to one build.

Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor? (Serious question).

OpenAI is a technology company constantly in search of productization (ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-e), and they’ve been really good at creating product interest that converts to acquisition. An IDE is much more complex than a chat app, but given their literal billions of dollars and familiarity with developer tooling, this is a down-stack build that they could dogfood off their own tech. And especially given that some of these tools were built by tiny teams (Cursor is what, 10 people?), is this like Google and Facebook’s implicit admission that they can’t “build and grow” anymore, and need to turn to acquisitions to fuel growth?

To be fair, this is already a very real and annoying problem for unfortunately named folks, predating any DOGE work: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...

In 1964, Joe Weizenbaum created a chatbot called "Eliza" based on pattern matching and repeating back to users what they said. "He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program." People are notorious for anthropomorphizing and attributing to things attributes (including human-like attributes) that they do not possess. [1,2] LLMs are a "statistical next token predictor" by their design. The discovery that coherent and interesting communications are relatively easily statistically modeled and reconstructed if given enough computing power and corpus of training data does not therefore imply that these programs have latent thinking and understanding capabilities.

Just the opposite: it calls into question if _we_ have thinking and understanding capabilities or if we are complicated stochastic parrots. [3] The best probing of these questions is done at the limits of comprehension and with unique and previously unseen information. I.e., how do you comprehend and process to previously unseen/unfelt/not-understood qualia? Not about how you deal with the mundanity of reactions between people (which are somewhat trivial to describe and model). [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism [3] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/sketchbook/is-my-toddler-a-s... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

ACDSee

I also work in healthtech, and nearly every vendor we’ve evaluated in the last 12 months has tacked on ChatGPT onto their feature set as an “AI” improvement. Some of the newer startup vendors are entirely prompt engineering with a fancy UI. We’ve passed on most of these but not all. And these companies have clients, real world case studies. It’s not just not very far away, it is actively here.

I tried it a few months ago and most of the articles it linked me to or suggested were paywalled, each with their own subscriptions. In Apple News, you pay one subscription and get all of them unlocked. It was a no-brainer which reader to use.

But also:

> He has a deep understanding of Twilio’s business, operations and culture, having most recently served as President of Twilio Communications, and previously as Twilio’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer.

“The Silent Transformations” by RANÇOIS JULLIEN tackles this head on by highlighting western thought’s roots in ancient Greek concepts of determined forms of being and Aristotilian logic, compared against the fluidity of non-Western thought and emphasis of change over time from ancient Chinese philosophy.

To put it glibly, the Ship of Theseus problem goes away when you stop thinking of identity as discrete points and instead as a process of change and movement through time. I.e., We are not the same people we were as children, and that’s okay. Or Emerson: “I contain multitudes.”

Hiring for top talent is overrated when most of the services/products offered are pretty straightforward technical implementations. For most of the companies, what's need is competent engineers, good management, and exceptional sales/growth teams. Top tier hiring for engineers in commodified businesses where engineering isn't the market differentiator is a quick start down the path of lighting money on fire.

Thanks, and that’s an interesting idea! What do you mean when you say economic framework? I’ve been wary of economic models because they tend to oversimplify and become “confidence artifacts”, so I’ve thought of this more as a toolset for thinking through problems (meant to add some templates for putting it into practice but it was getting quite long, maybe next post!). Looking into “Product Flow”, any other framework examples to look at?

At my last company, this was so common and painful that towards the end of my tenure we started using a “No” roadmap, which was a list of things we would explicitly not do. Shooting down an idea is hard but sometimes people would go around and try to get a team working on it anyway as hidden work.

“When Everything Is Important and Nothing Is Getting Done” -> https://sharedphysics.com/everything-is-important/

Traditional prioritization is a broken process for most people.

I've worked in a company where this was the explicit hiring strategy pursued by new leadership. Two different leaders came in from two different companies (both of which had been acquired and were now seeing a lot of turnover).

In the first case, the new leadership was outside of my department but they were pressuring me as the hiring manager for a role to bring on their people, who "were known 'good' folks". When I interviewed them, the whole interviewing team agreed not to hire them because their skill set may have been good for the company they were at but a complete mismatch for the problems we had. While we didn't ultimately hire them, there was a lot of pressure and lobbying to do so.

In the second case, the new leadership stepped in as head of the department/unit I was running. They took a look at the team we had and our current operating patterns, and decided that it would be faster to replace the team with new people who fit their existing operational model than to transition the existing team over to a new way of working. No one was fired, but it was a "either they fit in with the new model, they quit on their own, or they get performance-reviewed out". The new leader explicitly said that when doing rapid turnarounds, it was easier to bring in a full transplant of their former team than to figure out new patterns of leader-employee collaboration (Not unlike Twitter right now, I'd guess). While I was still a hiring manager for the role, the final approval for a candidate no longer lay with me and many of that new leader's former colleagues were hired. While they had a lot of existing patterns of working with the new leader, their skill sets were again a mismatch for the challenges our team was facing and ended up being a series of net-poor hires who received a lot of air cover from new leadership to not lose face.

That's not to say that you can't have effective recommendations for hiring. Some of the best candidates I've hired have been through personal recommendations or bringing along former team members. My experience has been that this pattern is best tempered by a careful hiring process. It's a great way to put someone into the funnel and ensure they get some visibility, but it's an awful way to accelerate someone through and out of the funnel and onto a team.

Insofar as board members are compensated by stock grants, they are incentivized to increase the stock price. But if a board member starts trying to do independent verification of what the CEO/team is telling them, that's a sign of mistrust. Because the board primarily interfaces with the executive team, would they know where to start?

That said, I've seen some board members try this out by offering to help/chat with some under-performing teams that they have expertise working with and asking light questions/giving advice... but having been on the receiving end of a conversation like that, it often feels like there is a lot of politics going -- you don't know if someone genuinely wants to be helpful, is vetting your capabilities and fit for the role (based on the trickle-down responsibility), or is trying to do independent fact finding (trickling it back up).