The advice is not bad, just tailored towards someone looking for a good stable boring job, which is all ok. Therefore the chaos of startups is highlighted as a red flag. Might be good to add here that there are good learnings in the chaos of startups as well, for particular people, at particular times.
Is it? the "green" answers mentioned on-call and crunch periods.
I'd say these questions are simply about enquiring about a sustainable pace and humane practice, the ones you find to actually be the most important with seniority.
And you can totally have those in a startup environment; may I argue that the successful ones more often got those right than not (and also often get internally enshittified later on as they grow into the Dead Sea effect)
At some point the model providers will realize they don't need to provide apps, just enterprise-grade intelligence at scale in a pipe, much like utility companies providing electricity/water. Right now, they have to provide the apps to kick-off the adoption.
Except AI companies are not a monopoly, never mind a natural monopoly. When ChatGPT first released it was popular to predict the death of Google because they were "so far behind".
Well after a certain point people have to smell the roses, so to speak. You don't get to control your business 100%, the market tells you what to do a lot of the time.
I think, the reality is, as models become more competitive they are becoming commodities. There's really no reason an app has to be built on GPT, or Gemini. It makes much more sense for apps to be "model agnostic" and let their customers choose which models to use.
I think, if OpenAI sticks to just trying to make their own apps for everything, they will be outrun. People will make apps outside of their ecosystem and will just use them as an API dumb pipe, regardless of if OpenAI wants that. And if they don't want that and restrict it, then their models will fall to the wayside as more competitive models which DO allow that take their place.
They're in a bind here, which is probably why we are seeing this announcement. OpenAI can see the writing on the wall for them.
The problem is that "enterprise-grade intelligence", by its very nature, doesn't want to be trapped in a pipe feeding apps - it subsumes apps, reducing them to mere background tool calls.
The perfect "killer app" for AI would kill most software products and SaaS as we know them. The code doing the useful part would still be there, but stripped off branding, customer funnels and other traps, upsell channels, etc. As a user, I'd be more than happy to see it (at least as long as the AI frontend part was well-developed for power users); obviously, product owners hate this.
(Good) Apps take the context of the user and their use-case from their head and make it into something the user can see and interact with. An app might or might not be the 'product'. Unfortunately it seems there is always going to be some 'product' so dark patterns might be here to stay.
Right. Problem is, the user interface is also the perfect marketing channel, because it stands between the user and some outcome they want.
Due to technical and social limitations, most apps are also limited in what they can do, this naturally shapes and bounds them and their UIs, forming user-facing software products.
Intelligence of the kind supplied by SOTA LLMs, is able to both subsume the UI, by taking much broader context of the user and the use case into account, distilling it down to minimal interaction patterns for a specific user and situation, and also blur the boundaries of products, by connecting and chaining them on the fly. This kills the marketing channel (UI) and trims the organizational structure itself (product), by turning a large SaaS into a bunch of API endpoints for AI runtime to call.
Of course, this is the ideal. I doubt it'll materialize, or if it does, that it'll survive for long, because there's half a software industry's worth of middlemen under risk of being cut out, and thus with a reason to fight it.
200 acres should not take 4 hours. It should be coverable within 20-25 minutes with 75-65 overlap, flying height 120m with something like Mavic 3 getting a GSD of 3.5cm/px. Look at optimizing your flight overlaps and height.
It depends a lot on the terrain type - highly repetitive terrain requires higher overlap. It does sound like they have some broken setting somewhere though.
It's heavily pine forested mountain areas. With a 65-75% overlap, the SFM algorithms struggle to produce sufficient details. Additionally, because of the verticality of the terrain and very tall pine trees there's a need to have multiple angles to generate a good orthophoto. So the grid is denser than other environments for a reason. I'm continuously updating my flight plan based on the results generated -- squeezing density up/down based on observed results.
The 4 hours is an overestimate, it's probably genuinely closer to 3 hours flight time.
The area was partially clearcut about a decade back. Some areas are due for brush management and some for commercial thinning. Additionally, because it is alpine and contains a stream used by fish for spawning, it is interesting to see the variations in snow load and water flow in the stream year over year.
So there's at least a reason to get out each winter (snow load), spring (melt/brush growth/flowers), and summer/fall (stream health/identify trees once brush loses leaves).
I also like seeing if there's trees in stands dying at an unusual rate, which might indicate pine beetle infestations or sickness that I'd need to take care of.
Also, it's a fun hobby and a cool dataset to flip through.
Google just does not have enterprise DNA which requires providing long-term support for legacy systems. AWS on the other hand was able to achieve this through their customer obsession. But the absolute king in this still remains Microsoft which is why enterprises will adopt Azure with their eyes closed.
Even if the world should achieve complete peace, some power-monger will rise with an ambition to rule everyone. All the weapons of the world exist only to deter that individual.
It seems most people are arguing that the only alternative to 2 app stores is a large number of app stores. But what if the alternative is no app stores? Anyone can install whatever software they want on their device from wherever they want it. Just like it works for desktops. The need for app stores is an artificially created need (by the marketing brilliance of Jobs).
I would argue that an App Store, on mobile has helped avoid virus, and malware on phones, unlike how Windows was able to contain it. Having a trusted App Store by a company, who understands security, and has a financial backing to commit to a secure system, is beneficial all the way down.
The App Store is an app delivery mechanism. The same application sandboxing, API access restrictions etc. can all apply even if they allow sideloading. In fact that's already possible today through their enterprise deployment program.
Yeah, an App Store is in no way an artificial need. There’s a reason fortnite is on the Google Play store even when they had the option of only installing through other methods.
For non-savvy users it mostly solves the “evaluating installer maliciousness” problem. For all users it enhances convenience (unified method for installing and uninstalling software) and software discovery. It is not a perfect solution to any of the above problems, but IMO it’s very good.
In the absence of Google Play, uninstalling software would be in the same place -> settings / apps / needless tap to see all the apps / the app / uninstall. Installing would be download the apk and open it which works today, although you generally have to set a setting somewhere.
There's certainly a discovery benefit to Google Play, but anybody could build an app discovery site and make an app from that with an embedded browser, open the downloaded apks with the system intent and get the permissions prompt etc. You don't even need the special app management permission if you embrace the system tools that are already there. You would lose automatic updates without that though (but then, a lot of people in India have auto-updates off to conserve bandwidth or storage space).
Google play certainly does some small curation function, but I don't know how useful that is, and you could still have Google Play services running background scans and malware blacklists.
And believe it or not a Store does not have much to do with covering your ass when it comes to malware. There is the same security check on mac regardless where the application comes from (its done at the OS level) The only thing the App Store does is verify the developer because they have to be resisted with Apple (and makes sure Apple gets that 30 cut). Mac already does that btw (you actually cant download an app from an unknown developer by default) unless you choose to in the settings.
"Anyone can install whatever software they want on their device from wherever they want it."
This is the current situation on Android. It is similar to macOS or Windows. It comes with a store but users are free to install apps from whatever source they like.
>But what if the alternative is no app stores? Anyone can install whatever software they want on their device from wherever they want it
There was already an open, accessible, free app store called - 'Internet Browser' upon which Internet was built. These companies undermined it in collusion with the duopolies to hoard more data from their customers and are now crying wolf.
Do you mean web apps? Today they are powerful, but in 2008 browsers based web apps could not have access to a lot of things native apps could, I think, so native was inevitable, hence the AppStore.
The real problem with app stores is that selling your software direct to the user is a solved problem. In many casees the e-commerce platform you use to sell your own software
is better than the app stores for the seller (and in many cases the buyer). There really isn't much value until you start bundling the developer tools and libraries. Most of those libraries are derivative or are open source. So developers are trading no real (sorry but Apple's $100 is de minimus) up front costs for a percentage fee paid by the customer at each sale. This is probably optimal for small teams and solo devs...
Whenever I think of media, I keep going back to Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. It seems a very appropriate metaphor that there is no personal ill-will on the part of the reporter but still the quill just keeps writing in a scandalous way.
The browser is very accessible and understandable as an environment as compared to different kinds of desktop environments that exist. Sometimes having an imperfect thing which exists is better than a non-existent perfect thing. Sure, a web application will never be as snappier as a native application, but it can be built, deployed and maintained by a much smaller team than what would be required for supporting desktop applications for multiple environments. If it feels 'good enough' to the users, they won't care.
>Sure, a web application will never be as snappier as a native application, but it can be built, deployed and maintained by a much smaller team than what would be required for supporting desktop applications for multiple environments.
A webapp has a wide range of operational costs that a native app doesn't. I can't see why a modern webapp would be cheaper to develop as well with similar programming languages. Their advantage comes mainly from the lack of the need to install software, and for the data to be accessible by every device.
