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Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 85

No, it's more about how teams work. Teams have a scope. They don't typically go beyond that scope. So if my team owns the Foo and Bar modules, I work on those. But if there's little important work on Foo and Bar, but a lot of important work to be done on Baz, it's generally organizationally difficult for us to work on Baz. Typically we need to be lent out by our manager and seconded to the other team. Which can be a lot of red tape and politics.

Now if you're imagining some alternate world where programmers an be moved at will- then we're already one big team instead of multiple small teams.

And no, a smaller team doesn't win every time. If it did, then then smallest team possible is teams of 1 and we'd all do that. There are sweet spots, which depend on the organization, the work to be done, and the importance of that work. For some that's bigger, for some smaller. I've definitely worked on teams that were both too small for the work, and that were too big.

Comment Re:Larger teams will move faster than smaller team (Score 1) 85

They can, under some circumstances. If the scope of what they work on is too small to fill the team's feature set. Or if the work they would be doing is significantly less important than other work to be done, having them in one large team makes it easier to move to more important work and can get critical features built faster. In that case it may not be overall more work done, but it may move the important stuff quicker. If larger teams weren't useful on some level, we wouldn't have teams at all- we'd all be individuals.

Comment Re:Depends on your goals, I guess. (Score 1) 85

In the end- good engineers with sufficient experience and support will get stuff working with any methodology. Bad ones or ones insufficiently supported will fail with any methodology.

There are some things that agile works well for, but it's really limited to domains where you can quickly build something tangible for feedback and you have stakeholders willing and able to give frequent feedback. UIs are a good example. It's a horrible fit for anything that requires actual research, or that can't be shown to low technical knowledge customers frequently (in other words anything that actually needs weeks or months of backend work, algorithm writing, or infrastructure to be written).

Comment Re:One behemoth isn't a trend (Score 1) 85

The problem with that is the skills needed to manage and the skills needed to do real work (let's take programming as an example) are pretty distinct. Someone can have both, but they tend to have one or the other. Forcing those without the skills to do the practical work into doing it doesn't actually help the team, it just slows everyone down. And if they get on the critical path of any project you can be royally fucked.

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem:

1)Larger team sizes. This can work if the team owns enough to keep everyone busy, but it can lead to effectively being independent subteams calling themselves one team while being inconvenienced by each other.

2)Each manager managing multiple independent teams. This can work if it doesn't overload the manager. The biggest problem is when the manager decides one team is more important and doesn't support the other(s) enough. This works better the closer the teams are, as it requires the manager to know fewer sets of collaborators and politics

Comment Re:What? (Score 4, Informative) 65

Back in the day lots of people did. Because there was no built in browser to use before IE came out. And pirating it would require getting a cd from someone else, and cd burners weren't a thing yet. Your options were use AOL with whatever they had built in on their cds, or use Netscape which you'd need to buy.

Comment Re:Prohibition doesn't work, never has (Score 1) 57

If tickets were an auction, the problem would instantly solve itself. You could even still have a secondary market for last minute buyers. And the extra revenue would go to the venue/artists, rather than a random scalper.... if those even exist anymore. I expect it's more likely Ticketmaster themselves selling them as resell at a 3x markup.

Comment Re:It will flop (Score 1) 26

Something like this needs density. If there's not enough people using it, then the per use cost will be far too much to make it economically viable. That makes cities much more attractive to startups like this. Of course there you have airspace issues with large buildings, so the true sweet spot may be relatively dense but very high income suburbs. But it sure as heck won't be rural.

Comment Re:it's getting better and better (Score 1) 101

Except it really isn't. The stuff from 2 years ago is miles ahead from the stuff 5 years ago. The stuff from 1 years ago is yards ahead of 1 year ago. The stuff from 6 months ago is nearly indistinguishable from the stuff from a year ago. Diminishing returns is hitting hard and rapidly. Many experts think that LLMs are closing in on their technical limitations, regardless of how much extra compute its given. It will need entirely new techniques to actually become much more than it is now. Which may happen, but doesn't appear to be on the horizon.

Comment Re:LOC written as a performance metric? (Score 1) 101

A study you can't even directly link to? Yeah, I call bullshit.

And my personal experience is it's at least a 50% slow down. I have yet to ever have it do anything not completely trivial that wasn't badly insecure and broken, and when using them to provide static analysis the false positive rate is around 90%.

Comment Re:LOC written as a performance metric? (Score 3, Informative) 101

No, those who aren't willing are actually following the science. Every measurement so far, every actual study has shown AI code generation is 20% or more slower for senior engineers. Even scaleai, a company founded and run by Meta's AI chief, shows the same in their data (https://scale.com/leaderboard/rli). Possibly it will someday get there, but it sure as hell isn't ready yet.

Comment Re:Strike Two (Score 1) 62

Still trivially though for any talented reverse engineer. Somewhere in the code they have a function that checks if they think they're 18 and returns a boolean. Change the function to always return true. It would be harder if it was sending the image up to the server to analyze, but local is easy to break.

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