After reading this and remembering an old hobby project, I decided to switch the deploy from a systemd service to PM2, which apparently has rolling deployments without needing Docker engine (for those of us minmaxing instance RAM).
>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away.
>In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.
Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev teams in Eastern Europe, right?
Not sure why that was ever the plan, as there are clearly not enough people.
Also over here, east of 15°E we were fired all the same.
I believe the plan is to quite simply "do less overall unless it's about AI", but everyone was waiting for others to start layoffs first.
I spent six months working part time and the decision makers made it clear that this is preferable for them long term. Beats getting fired, but I couldn't sustain this lifestyle - I'm frugal but not that frugal.
Pretty sure cheap foreign labor is more prevalent now than ever at every major tech company.
They really, really do not want to spend money. Especially not on Americans and their health insurance.
It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this. They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
> It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this.
Choosing to pay less is what almost all people do, and it is consistent with almost all of human history.
> They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
When push comes to shove, i.e. paying lower prices to consume more goods and services or paying higher prices to ensure your countrymen can buy more goods and services, almost everyone will choose to pay lower prices. See political unpopularity of sufficient tariffs to stop imports.
“American” is a nebulous term, and Americans have been choosing lower prices for many decades before the current crop of employees at the global big tech companies chose lower prices. It is no different than when someone picks up lower priced workers outside waiting Home Depot, who are there because they do not have legal work authorization in the US.
I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.
America could just reduce their cost of living, optimize their healthcare, make domestic business more attractive etc instead of trying to ban everything to duct tape over deeper problems
It had to be H1B Indians and outsourcing to India. As a European, I have seen some "Eastern European devs" around, sure. But they were not present at every company I worked with. Indians were. Quality-wise, it was always the same story, but I'm not going to elaborate. Everyone who is ready to accept it, knows what I would be saying anyway.
No, you probably need to elaborate on that. Because in my experience, the quality from people in India varies just as much as the quality from any other country, including the USA.
What does make a difference is the company they work for. Large hourly "body shops" gives you coders whose quality tends to be lower, regardless if we are talking about an Indian firm or an American firm. Direct hires of independent individuals tend to be higher. But there is always individual variation.
You see people from India more, sure. There are more of them. Over a billion of them, to be precise. Anyone who dismisses a billion people as "always the same" is not being clever, they are being racist. And you know that, otherwise you wouldn't have pre-empted this response with "everyone who is ready to accept it."
Say that there are communication gaps to overcome. Say there are cultural differences. Say that those cultural differences change the assumed business expectations and the mechanisms by which people express their thoughts and opinions. Those things are all true. My recommendation to anyone who has an urge to dismiss an entire population is to instead get to know them: Step up and learn how your teammates think and work. It will make for a better team, better communication, and better results.
I'm not racist. I don't care about race. I do care about culture a lot. By culture I mean a set of "default behaviors" and values that people from said culture are more likely to exhibit. That's where my issues with Indians began and continue. Of course you are right that generalizing over 1+ billion people is a futile exercise. Intellectually, I agree. And yet, in my personal experience, certain behaviors and attitudes they have just keep coming up with frequency, that just doesn't match any other group of people I have been interacting with. I live a rather international life. I interact with people from many, many cultures. I currently live in a culture, that is completely alien to my own, and I love it. It's not a problem of closed mind or some kind of supremacy thinking. I am free from that.
Specifically about Indians - I find that great many of them prefer memorizing over thinking. In the IT consulting days of my career, I noticed that they seemed to have 4-5 solutions, that they would apply to all problems. Whether the solution would fit the problem or solve it, was secondary. If it did, great. If it didn't, well that was someone else's problem. Half of my job was fixing stuff that an Indian "fixed" before me. The appearance of having fixed something was much more important than the actual fixing. It was all about appearances with them. While people in general seek recognition, I have never met another group of people who are so eager to lie and cover things up to gain some perception of short-term bump in status. It's not isolated to work environment. You see, I suspected myself of perhaps being racist in the end, so I would challenge myself to befriend Indians if I met any - just to see. Maybe I was being judgmental and wrong? The last time I tried it, the Indian man I met kept kissing my ass so much I had to cut him off. Why did he do that? Based on what he was saying, he saw me as someone from an "upper caste" (he projected his ideals of a successful businessman on me) and desperately wanted me to know how much I have done for him (I haven't done anything other than having a few conversations about life and business in general). Took me a while to understand that all this excessive praise and ass kissing was an attempt to elevate himself by proximity to something great. Needless to say I am nowhere as great as he portrayed me to be. Later I also found that half the stuff he shared with me was made up to impress me.
Another feature of their culture is extreme pride. They will never stop talking about India, Indian culture, Indian food, etc. They expect you to praise it, be in awe. If you aren't, they will pressure you to change your mind. Since working with them was a universally appalling experience, I wasn't impressed, so that came up a lot. You see this pride and attention seeking everywhere online. A normal person will say "Hello", "Good morning". An Indian will say "Good morning FROM INDIA". It must be mentioned, because it must be noticed and praised. It's just tiring. There is a reason why so many are waiting for country-based filters on Twitter. You wouldn't have guessed which countries are most upset about this.
I am certain that there are reasons and explanations for all of this and that there are many exceptions. As you have mentioned, there are so many of them, they can't all be like that. And fair enough. I just find all of this so tiring, that I don't want to deal with them at all. If 1 out of a 100 is a smart and pleasant person, they are still surrounded by 99 that I don't want to deal with. It might be sad, but it is what it is.
For real work I'm already on Opus full time (plan+execute). I think there's a different space for cheap-but-good-enough options for small-to-med repo hobby projects. (Not enough usage to warrant a plan.) And Opus is only ~30 tok/s while grok-code-fast-1 is ~120. So planning with Opus and executing with grok-code-fast-1 is still on the table for me - it's good at following explicitly written plans, lightning fast.
We ran it. Scored 71 on the first pass. The analyzer flagged traction as the weakest dimension which is accurate. We have users but early revenue so the metrics aren't there yet. It also flagged that our moat narrative was asserted not demonstrated. Also fair. Data flywheel defensibility is real but we hadn't quantified it properly in the deck.
We fixed both. Rescored at 79. Still not above the investor visibility threshold which is the point honestly. The tool doesn't let you charm your way past weak fundamentals. You either have the business or you don't.
Worth noting we're not actively raising right now so there's no incentive to game it. We ran it because we wanted to know where the actual gaps were. Turns out the score told us the same thing our customers were telling us anyway.
The things it couldn't penalize us for are the things that are actually strong. The framework is built on a real investment rubric we use at 3P Ventures. The problem is real and well documented. The team has the right background for it.
So short answer: the pitch has the same weaknesses the business has right now. Early traction, real product, credible framework. The score reflects that pretty accurately
This doesn't mean there's no subtle accuracy drop on negations. Negations are inherently hard for both humans and LLMs because they expand the space of possible answers, this is a pretty well studied phenomenon. All these little effects manifest themselves when the model is already overwhelmed by the context complexity, they won't clearly appear on trivial prompts well within model's capacity.
Like, in Latin, the verb is at the end. In that, it's structured like how Yoda speaks.
So, especially with Cato, you kinda get lost pretty easy along the way with a sentence. The 'not's will very much get forgotten as you're waiting for the verb.
If it's between a human or an AI copywriting SEO slop, I'm happy to see an AI take that job. SEO content marketing is so painful to read once you realize you're reading it, and I have to imagine it's as painful to write if you're a technically talented writer.
I agree with you about the majority of "SEO content marketing", but a small minority of it is done by companies who genuinely care about doing good content, that doesn't only act as lazy SEO benefit but also as good marketing for people who read it.
It's a lot harder / more expensive to produce, as it needs (at least before AI, and I guess still to some extent even using AI for now) to be written by someone on the team who genuinely understands the company's technology/product/whatever well enough to educate other people about it in an interesting way, rather than it being written by low wage SEO writers who just need a list of keywords to include in the drivel that is the sort of content you're talking about. So it makes sense that most companies go with the cheap option, but it's always nice to come across ones who produce actual interesting articles.
(It's what I've always opted for when I've overseen marketing budgets, and I think the ROI is usually worth it since balancing the extra cost is the fact that the benefits go from just SEO, to SEO + word of mouth of people sharing the interesting article they read, and the awareness of the brand that comes with it. So I recommend anyone who normally chooses lazy, low quality content for SEO to consider the upgrade!)
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