If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1]
Folks focus on the impact simplicity has on the customer, but it's also worth noting the impact it has on the manufacturer. With a simple product they get a simple business.
- Simple warranty support
- No deep bench of customer support staff
- No complex financing
- Straightforward sales process
I'm more curious about the other direction. How many times has a model replied to a request with "Are you sure?" I'd bet just about zero.
In my job I do it all the time; people ask for stuff and I often spend a lot of time on clarifying questions, the most fundamental of which is "Are you sure this is what you want?"
Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea.
I think Library Science has contributed much more to modern computing than we ever realize.
For example, I often bring up images of card catalogs when explaining database indexing. As soon as people see the index card, and then see that there is a wooden case for looking up by Author, a separate case for looking up by Dewey Decimal et. cet. the light goes on.
Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner
Visual code is all over the place if you look; Any time something advertises itself as "low code" or "no code" it's a drag-and-drop flow based UI like this one. Most (if not all) ETL systems work this way, and all kinds of low-code AI Agent frameworks are cropping up.
I do agree that there very high prices to be paid for this stuff, and worst of all most of those costs are hard to see, and only crop up late in the project, when, as you point out, the more complex algorithms and processes crop up.
"No one wants to write ifs, fors and whiles as connected nodes"
For what it's worth LabVIEW presents those structures as container boxes, which IMO works well enough. To put it another way, visual coding has many problems, but when programming LabVIEW I didn't find the representation of control flow to be one of them.
Exactly! Several different sorts of folks have an interest in product architecture, and each group needs the story told at a different level of abstraction. So inevitably one has to maintain a few different flavours of the diagram and associated story.
One way I think of it is that the architect needs to market the architecture, at least a little bit. If you ask a marketing team to deliver a message they immediately start crafting multiple delivery methods to meet people where they are at. Architects shouldn't think they can somehow escape that basic requirement of effective communication.
We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is correlated with performance, but by no means determinative. More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership, reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.
And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life then I would say you're Doing It Right.
I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one. The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.
Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a while, and so they were able to break the carrier oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.
Your guess is as good as mine for China though.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/