Principal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job)

2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it

2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please

> greed

Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?

I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.

If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.

To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?

AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.

It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.

Not everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...

> They invested billions. They're scared.

They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.

They invested billions. They can exit in 6 months if this thing stays afloat.

I don't think it's fear; it's greed.

These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

People (well, American people (disclosure, I am an American)), used to be scared/worried that Silicon Valley will eventually move to Bangalore or Shenzhen, because of wage-discrepancies, and so on -- and it is not a totally unreasonable concern, considering that the _Silicon_ part of Silicon Valley has been slowly relocated to Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and a few others. At this point, maybe we should start pushing that the _rest_ of Silicon Valley gets relocated somewhere else, too.

It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.

Turns out it's not infinitely spawnable after all.

BUT it is a trap: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1

Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.

Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.

Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?

Admittedly, it's a while ago. But original gmail, say, really did put a huge amount of effort into it.

We have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.

Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.

5 years ago it was blockchain & NFT’s.

Same hypers just moved to different technology.

See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship.

I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh

It doesn't mean that. A Co-Authored-By header isn't a legal signature or legal assertion of AI generated code.

Is thos actually decided yet? Closest thing was the image generation cases. What's your go to source for this?

Not that simple… this is great read: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...

Yeah the current guidance from US copyright office is that if it were said to be solely authored by copilot it would not be eligible for copyright. If it were said to be solely authored by human A (who happened to use co-pilot) the elements and arrangement of it not generated by co-pilot would be copyrightable. I’m not sure the copyright office has released guidance on attempting to register AI as a co-author I assume the registration would be rejected but you’d be able to re-submit as sole Human author.

But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.

Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.

Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.

Doubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.

Huge difference: the commit signature may not have had anything to do with Copilot, whereas email sent by mobile Outlook was... sent by Outlook.

Sometimes it randomly pushes without me asking, so I have a mess to clean up.

I can’t access that LinkedIn link without going through their Persona ID process, which requires all kinds of PII.

> LinkedIn users attempting identity verification may be unknowingly handing sensitive personal data to Persona Identities Inc., a company that distributes information to government agencies, credit bureaus, utilities, and mobile providers.

^ Link from a LinkedIn page I found on a Kagi search.

I can view some LinkedIn pages but not others without logging in.

Even though I’ve never posted to LinkedIn it only use it as a public résumé, my account was flagged as needing identity verification. I’m pretty sure this happened a year or two ago when I changed my email address from one domain I owned to another domain I owned.

I’ve never been able to log in since then, and there is no support path. The only available way past it is to simply submit all the info to Persona.

The role feels like it’s borne out of a desire to see employees as fungible.

>No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s

Indeed fellow traveller. I do.

I genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge.

The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.

Glorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.

> I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio

Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"

Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.

I like your solution better.

> If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright

How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?

Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

Truth, law and consequences (for the capital class) are so last year.

> AI-generated code should be clearly identified.

Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.

Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.

Basically what you’re saying is that if AI does anything on your computer, anything the AI impacts you should lose control over. If the AI touched it at all in any way, big or small, you now lose ownership of the actions your computer takes (on open source tools, I might add).

In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.

I prefer that my software is not a morality police.

I think the Linux kernel's standard of disclosure via the "Assisted-By" trailer is the right move.

Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.

...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.

The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).

mind-boggling people are trying to hide this, tells you all you need to know about our “profession.” presence of that hook or the like in a place of business should be fireable offense

Ask claude to “Write a hook for Claude code that rejects any get commit that includes “co-authored by Claude” in it”

Just ask Claude to write it..

I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?

DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?

It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.

It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)

GCC isn't making editorial decisions.

I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"

It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.

I've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's.

I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that.

The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.

Zed currently does not have a revenue stream. Ot's only a matter of time before the same shenanigans ensue.

Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.