Fun fact, you can actually use the current send_email binding to send emails to verified emails in your account (but this announcement will make it possible to send emails to everyone)
> Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to “vibe-coded” features that don’t work.
It’s not just engineering folks that are being asked to do more vibe-coding with AI. Designers, product folks, project managers, marketers, content writers are all being asked to vibe code prototypes, marketing websites, internal tools, repros, etc. I’m seeing it first hand at the company I work at and many others. Normal expectations of job responsibilities have been thrown out of the window.
Teams are stretched thin as a result, because every company is thinking that if you’re not sprinting towards AI you’ll be left behind. And the truth is that these folks actually deliver impact through their AI usage.
I've been trying to build a tool that solves that niche problemset of facilitating the edit flow of a dev blog.
I liked Forestry, but wanted something that was embedded directly into my website, so I built Penmark CMS https://penmark.appsinprogress.com/. Inspired by utteranc.es, it uses the GitHub API to make edits directly to your repo. It's definitely a simple CMS but I'm liking it to write for my own blog!
It uses GitHub's own APIs for syncing the storage with your repository, so there is no proxying, only direct access to GitHub.
When you sign in, a token is obtained on your behalf by the Penmark GitHub app, the redirect goes through and passes your own token to your browser, and then this allows the browser code of Penmark to use it to store & sync to GitHub directly
I've always found editing my blog via desktop editors to be inconvenient, especially when it came to keeping the repository in sync and trying to edit on the go, and relying on an external CMS or tools like the now-discontinued Forestry.io was complex to setup for simple cases and spread my website & workflow over multiple different apps. Around the same time, I discovered utterances [1] on here, a comments widget backed by GitHub for your website. Inspired by that project, I decided to build Penmark.
Penmark is an embeddable CMS for your Markdown-based, GitHub-backed sites. Penmark can be embedded directly into your website, allowing you to access a rich text CMS editing experience without external tools, and while keeping all your site's content in your repository.
It's simple to setup, embed the 3 components (Login, Drafts, Edit Post) that create the CMS experience within your site and add the GitHub app to your repository.
Once you've set it up on your site/repo, you can edit directly from your site, on the go and from any device, and let Penmark take care of all the operations needed to keep your site and repository in sync.
I am in the same boat, and I recognize that my desire for office life requires others to also come into the office. Reading this thread, it seems that the vast majority of people in this industry prefer WFH, and people who prefer WFO may have to choose specific companies or reconsider this industry.
The author brings up a good point. Starting to develop for the web still requires too much setup and configuration. No one likes/wants to be doing this. It would be nice if these were abstracted away so we could focus on actually building products.
How important is funding for a tech scene? Am I the only one who believes that culture is much more important? The most prevalent jobs for Canadians is working in the banking sector or the energy sector, two big and risk-averse sectors. I think if Canada wants to have a budding tech scene, it needs to embrace failure and thinking big.
One of Montreal's flagship artificial intelligence companies, Element AI, co-founded in 2016 by Yoshua Bengio and in serious financial trouble, was acquired by a California software firm, ServiceNow.
Published on November 30, 2020 at 9:31 am Updated at 12:13 pmShare
Karim BenessaiehKARIM BENESSAIEH
THE PRESS
It's a tragedy," said Louis Têtu, President and Founder of COVEO and Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Council of Innovators, which brings together 133 Canadian companies, some 20 of which are based in Quebec. We have just sold a block of strategic talent and intellectual property in a sector where there are many economic levers. I am outraged. »
The transaction, of an amount that has not been confirmed, but which would be around US$400 million, according to two sources, is expected to be completed "in early 2021", according to a press release issued Monday morning. By 2019, Element AI had succeeded in raising more than $200 million with the support of new investors, including the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and the Quebec government. According to an estimate by the specialized site TechCrunch, this fundraising effort gave the Montreal-based firm a value of between CDN$800 million and CDN$930 million.
This acquisition, ServiceNow's fourth in 2020, would be the largest ever made by the company, which has a market value of US$103 billion. In an interview with La Presse, ServiceNow's General Manager for the Canadian market, Marc LeCuyer, assured that two of Element AI's co-founders, CEO Jean-François Gagné and researcher Yoshua Bengio, would "stay on board". Montreal operations will continue with Element AI's half a thousand employees.
The Montreal-based company's business model, which will be integrated into ServiceNow, will be completely changed, he said. Our type of acquisition is that we take a company and rebuild it," said LeCuyer. That's what we're doing here, and it will allow us to integrate a large team of data scientists and artificial intelligence experts. »
No warranty
For the Minister of Economy and Innovation Pierre Fitzgibbon, it is "disappointing" that Element AI could not remain Quebec-owned, a failure he attributes to the fact that "it failed to deliver its business plan". He recalled that Quebec City came to the company's rescue in 2019 with a $25 million investment, only half of which has been disbursed to date. "In the transaction, this amount will be taken back, there will be no loss for the government," he said.
"Under the circumstances, he said, it is good news that outsiders are valuing the talent that we have been able to stimulate in Quebec. "Element AI will no longer have several clients, but only one who is determined that it will be their development center for artificial intelligence. "While ServiceNow has given assurances that the Montreal operations will be preserved, there is no guarantee of that. "That's their intention, but we can't ask for a guarantee, we're not shareholders. »
As for the CDPQ, spokesperson Maxime Chagnon believes that "the only possible outcome for Element AI was to find a strategic partnership that will allow it to continue its activities. As of December 31, 2019, the Caisse owned between $30 million and $50 million of the company's capital, which would not technically allow it to block a transaction. We are acting in the interests of our depositors," Mr. Chagnon added. We had provided Element AI with intensive support in recent years. ServiceNow is a much broader platform that will strengthen Element AI in its growth, which is good news for this key sector. »
New crossroads of AI
The financial setbacks have been known for more than two years. Several media reports had raised doubts about the management of the company, which has half a thousand employees, but would only have revenues of $10 million in 2018, according to the Globe and Mail.
"We were looking at that and we thought, 'Well, there's no company there,'" says Louis Têtu. It's a good example of a fiasco that has been announced for years. Here, it's the worst-case scenario: an entire block of talent moving around, backed by the Université de Montréal, from a company that could have been worth $10 billion. ServiceNow has just bought a team for cheap. »
Since 2019, Element AI has been offering its customers various applications that can be combined, in the manner of Lego blocks, especially in the cyber security, insurance and business analysis sectors. Developed from the 40 or so projects in which Element AI has been involved, notably in South Korea, these applications use deep learning to automate tasks.
Ironically, the co-founder and CEO of Element AI, Jean-François Gagné, has spoken out several times in the public arena to denounce the fact that the arrival of many American companies in Montreal in the artificial intelligence sector, notably Google and Facebook, was leading to the export of local intellectual property.
ServiceNow announced in the press release that the acquisition of Element AI would allow it to establish "a new AI hub in Canada to accelerate the development of customer-focused innovations for the Now platform. The California-based company has had a presence in Canada for about a decade, with its new offices in Montreal complementing its existing offices in Toronto.
Founded in 2004, ServiceNow has made its mark in the "digital transformation" it offers its clients, "including its IT, customer service and human resources management solutions. "We've worked with some of the largest organizations in Canada over the past decade, so this is not a new business for us here, it's a high-priority market," says Marc LeCuyer.
Thank you uberman! I've interned in a startup in the past and I must say, your description is on the dot.
Why do you say to work at FAANG 'as long as you can hack it'? Have you preferred the working environment in Big Finance or Big Pharma? Are those jobs more stable?