I do advisory for pre-Series A startups as a last ditch effort to save them.
I do not get the unified industry delusion about "why X company has a bad product". It is usually either one of two things: comfort or ego. Everyone knows that but do not want to say it out loud.
I have seen these happen time and time again. Companies that are cash cow, do not care to do a better job. There is no incentive to do a better job. Moreover, the recurring thing is that if I did something different, I wouldn't have been this much successful in the first place.
The rest of the smart consultants walk on eggshells. They hint at stuff but never want to bite the hand that feeds them because the clients would rather fire you than be challenged.
It is not an IBM thing; it's generic business thing to some degree. I really have to call this a delusion. Good consultants submit generic reports that just tell them what they want to hear. It is not you; it is the economy. Stupid consultants that are well-meaning tell them they should be the best on competitor intel. Do you not think some stupid person did not approach IBM to do what Oracle or AWS is doing? Of course, they did, and they were fired immediately.
The best consultants are less of a consultant and more of a therapist.
After doing only four-month projects for the entire year, this year's realization was that nobody in the industry wants to do better. Everyone is in their place because of ego or a perceived sense of success. Or because of a grand conspiracy theory. IBM has a significant number of government contracts, so they are set for life because the vast majority government IT systems are pigeonholed into IBM systems. The acquisition is to tell the shareholders that we are so successful that we can literally buy companies. We do not even care to do things. Whatever the new thing is, we will buy it at some point.
Here is the secret rule to AI for the guys who really want to use AI to replace "outsourcable" positions, "AI is a helper" not an absolute solution to means.
I have an extensive experience with dealing with Chatbots and hang out in places where people tell everyone AI will not take job while knowing fully well it might alteast take away the job of starbucks drinker sitting next to your cubicle.
Here is the truth, a single AI implementation won't replace a 15 person support team out in Philippines/India, AI won't replace a 8 person team in Michigan, but.... You pick 3 people and tell them to use AI to automate their jobs.... Now that is how you get AI to do stuff.
AI is a helper. Period. Do not let anyone else tell you otherwise. I have dealt with enough support teams to know an AI can surely do a better job than $3 dollar an hour fixed contract 8 hour shift offshore support hand telling me let me escalate your question to our north american team who will be back on monday as my reponse to "Hi" and no that is not a chatbot response.
You get three decently smart guys, and you hint at them use AI to automate your job. You pay these guys the salary of 5 US support desk salary which is equal to 10 offshore support desk salary. Then you can implement AI. You need a human to AI to work. You need a guy to snooze at the steering wheel so when a guy wearing all black jumps in front of your car in the dark road who can atleast come out and call 911. Does not even need to be a smart person. Just someone capable of calling 91. Hear that Uber? What your mckinsey consultant friend from the same frat or you ex-sister in law did not tell you that to you?
AI is not going to do well in full autopilot but that does not mean it is bad. You need someone with reasonable cognition ans allow them to be in full sync. That is the future and complaining about AI won't help you keep a job or cut costs for your business.
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Now to follow up. When you have established a reasonable framework of AI driven "task execution", you keep doing incremental layoffs. As usual you want your employees to near-burnout. See where that puts you in the next few years
I think this is near-future thinking and limited to the current presiding paradigm of "AI" being based on LLMs.
Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely.
Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.
I feel sad for this project. This was a reactionary project to elasticsearch's license change to say, heck with it, I will open my own elastic spinoff with AWS.
The vibe of the project's community is pretty much reminiscent of a dead multiplier game. The community is not thriving which is essential for an OSS project and elasticsearch is virtually irreplaceable in this space. I do not know any enterprise customers using it because it is unproven and they have failed to show they are going to stick around for the long run.
Then every other SIEM platform is spinning up their own search platforms. Heck I even saw Cribl there in their own partner list which has its own search platform now. And elastic has a SIEM platform now with Elastic Security. Not sure the purpose of this project is now Elastic just won the battle and then later virtue signaled everyone by saying we are open source again y'all because even if we come around and slapped your engineers who said they are not going to touch proprietary code, your management is not going to pay for a migration to an untested fork with no long term commitment and which was essentially made out of spite.
For those of us unfortunate to use Atlassian Bitbucket, from version 9.0 onwards OpenSearch is the only supported search server [1] - it'll be interesting to see whether this view is ever flipped back to Elasticsearch in the future.
Yeah, I'm never working with Elastic again. I used Lucene first, then Solr, then a custom scaled version, so I never really needed elasticsearch until using AWS. We did have one project on AWS using elastic, but happily moved to opensearch. Seems fine.
The jury is out on ip address vs GDPR. Hashed IP address is not anonymous, nor is last digit anonymization anonymous.
So, let's not bother with it. I can say all IP address are located in earth and someone would be offended because now we are invading their privacy by knowing which planet they are from. GDPR is not clear on IP address or IP address derived metadata. There is no case law for it, nor acceptable methodology and everyone is speculating about what are the consequences of and it is mostly just opinions from IANALs. GDPR is astrology for non-enterprise companies.
The pricing page was not linked on the homepage. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't but it surely was not obvious to me.
Regardless of how good of a software it is or pretends to be I just do not care about landing pages anymore. Pricing page essentially tells me what I am actually dealing with. I knew about Zed when it was being advertised as "written in rust because it makes us better than everyone" trend everyone was doing. Now, it is LLM based.
Absolutely not complaining about them. Zed did position themselves well to take the crown of the multi billion dollar industry AI code editors has become. I had to write this wall of text of because I just want to just drop the pricing page link and help make people make their own decision, but I have to reply to "whats your point" comments and this should demonstrate I have no point aside from dropping a link.
Databricks acquired bit.io and subsequently shut it down quite fast. Afaik bit.io had a very small team and the founder was a serial entrepreneur who is not going to stick around and he did not. I am not sure who from bit.io is still around at databricks.
If I am guessing right, Motherduck will likely be acquired by GCP because most of the founding team was ex-BQ. Snowflake purchased Modin and polars is still quite immature to be acquisition ready. So, what does this leave us with. There is also EDB who is competing in enterprise Postgres space.
Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks. Databricks themselves was hinting people that that they would be potentially acquired by Azure as Azure tries to compete in the data warehouse space. But everyone become an AI company which left Databricks in an awkward space. Their bdev team is not bestest from my limited interactions with them (lots of starbucks drinkers and let me get back to you after a 3 month PTO), so they do not know who or how to lead them to an AI pivot. With cash to burn from overinvestment and the snowflake/databricks conf coming up fast they needed a big announcement and this is that big announcement.
Should have sobered up before writing this though. But who cares.
> Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks
Yeah, big companies globing up everything does not lead to a healthy ecosystem. Congrats on the founders for their the acquisition but everyone else loses with movements like this.
I'm still sour after their Redash purchase that instantly "killed" the open source version. Tabular acquisition was also a bit controversial since one of the founders is the PMC Chair for Iceberg which "competes" directly with Databricks own delta lake. The mere presence of these giants (mostly databricks and snowflake) makes the whole data ecosystem (both closed and open source) really hostile.
From context in parent, I'm reading as the sort of person who looks more competent than they are and skates from job to job quickly enough that no one notices.
BDev can be good or bad. Bad ones tend to not follow up, and Starbucks here represents they have poor decision making skills (reinforced by going on PTO for three months and not following up on commitments).
Thought the same. I mean I don’t drink it because I can make my own far cheaper but I don’t look on with scorn at those who do. It says a lot more about the person making the judgment than those who drink the coffee.
I geniunely and strongly believe PaaS and BaaS do not have a sustainable business model for the long term. Most of the platforms are losing money for each user they onboard. No matter how "loved" a platform is they are not actually making money and some point they are going to "get you". All the new platforms are constantly raising money to compensate for the costs and nobody is actually engineering solutions to reduce cost but doing feature engineering that is actually increasing their cost per user.
If Heroku works for you, that is good. Ignore my comment.
PaaS is just a middleman service providing convenience over more bare bones infrastructure. Look at the entire world of profitable middleman companies and you’ll see there’s plenty of viability in the business model, but it’s not as easy as a golden goose.
I'm with the GP here. Patrick Boyle isn't very interesting visually, he does some repetitive gesturing with one hand, and he rarely blinks, which I find unsettling. The presentation is slow relative to reading, as well.
Patrick Boyle is informative, amiable, self-deprecating, and witty. Even if he's not your cup of tea, he's a great YouTuber and I'm glad he's making videos.
I’ll be the jerk here: I’ve stopped reading articles that include the word "lesson" unless they provide tangible impact metrics—like how much money you actually made as an indie dev. I have skimmed the article and to me it is generic. It might sound harsh, but that’s the reality. Hacker News has become nothing more than a launchpad for new apps and services. These posts are often just veiled advertisements, like yet another "Show HN: Timelines.app."
I think he has been open and honest about his journey. It's much better to look at these articles for inspiration and to know that if others have done it, than so can you, if you want it bad enough. Or at least more than your present situation.
We're all different and each must find their own way. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't help it he would spill out all the details for you, because what works for others will not work for you and vice versa.
> He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.
The whole idea of this article hinges on this sentence. What disasterous thing happened exactly? Considering the premise seems to be missing, dare I say, this article seems to rhetorical.
yeah for sure he invented a premise to then write an article about something thats rhetorical. how does that thinking make sense.
Airbnb struggled for a while (in his opinion) until he changed his management style organized the whole company around a release cylce (and other bits I cant remember) and taking on much bigger responsibility for design (UI UX). its super interesting stuff. its not new actually and I saw him speaking about multiple times on youtube. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/brian-chesky-interview-orga...
I do not get the unified industry delusion about "why X company has a bad product". It is usually either one of two things: comfort or ego. Everyone knows that but do not want to say it out loud.
I have seen these happen time and time again. Companies that are cash cow, do not care to do a better job. There is no incentive to do a better job. Moreover, the recurring thing is that if I did something different, I wouldn't have been this much successful in the first place.
The rest of the smart consultants walk on eggshells. They hint at stuff but never want to bite the hand that feeds them because the clients would rather fire you than be challenged.
It is not an IBM thing; it's generic business thing to some degree. I really have to call this a delusion. Good consultants submit generic reports that just tell them what they want to hear. It is not you; it is the economy. Stupid consultants that are well-meaning tell them they should be the best on competitor intel. Do you not think some stupid person did not approach IBM to do what Oracle or AWS is doing? Of course, they did, and they were fired immediately.
The best consultants are less of a consultant and more of a therapist.
After doing only four-month projects for the entire year, this year's realization was that nobody in the industry wants to do better. Everyone is in their place because of ego or a perceived sense of success. Or because of a grand conspiracy theory. IBM has a significant number of government contracts, so they are set for life because the vast majority government IT systems are pigeonholed into IBM systems. The acquisition is to tell the shareholders that we are so successful that we can literally buy companies. We do not even care to do things. Whatever the new thing is, we will buy it at some point.