The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.
In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.
The agents are being prompted to vibe-code themselves by a post-Docker generation raised on node and systemd. So of course they emit an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow reimplementation of things the OS was already capable of.
Microsoft Excel is the #1 tool at the top of that rather narrowly envisioned slippery slope, since you ask. Followed by any web browser.
As for data access; the vast majority of firms, worldwide, in every country, have abysmal internal controls, and in many cases, none at all. The filing cabinet is unlocked all day, everything from payroll to posters is in a share that every network login can R/W, and nobody cares.
Side tangent: On one hand I have a subtle fondness for PHP, perhaps because it was the first programming language I ever “learned” (self taught, throwing spaghetti on the wall) back in high school when LAMP stacks were all the rage.
But in retrospect it’s absolutely baffling that mixing raw SQL queries with HTML tag soup wasn’t necessarily uncommon then. Also, I haven’t met many PHP developers that I’d recommend for a PHP job.
php was still fundamentally a programming language you had to learn. This is “I wanted to make a program for my wife to do something she doesn’t have time to do manually” but made quickly with a machine. It’s probably going to do for programming what the Jacquard Loom did for cloth. Make it cheap enough that everyone can have lots of different shirts of their own style.
But the wife didn't do it herself. He still had to do it for her, the author says. I don't think (yet) we're at the point where every person who has an idea for a really good app can make it happen. They'll still need a wozniak, it's just that wozniaks will be a dime a dozen. The php analogy works.
And low-code/no-code (pre-LLMs). Our company spent probably the same amount of dev-time and money on rewriting low-code back to "code" (Python in our case) as it did writing low-code in the first place. LLMs are not quite comparable in damage, but some future maintenance for LLM-code will be needed for sure.
To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google.
“Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.
I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers.
And dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of "figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity".
I have it on consumer-grade authority that the Indians got them in turn from the Shang dynasty, decimal since ca.1200BCE. Thus proving conclusively that numeral systems naturally travel deasil. Ne'er let thine diʒits, goe widdershins.
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.
Your poem finish'd, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num'rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—
