Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.
The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.
Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service.
Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)
If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.
Heh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand.
I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.
> If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.
I've been watching non-developers vibe code stuff, and the general failure mode seems to be ignorance of 3-pick-2 tradeoffs.
They'll spam "make it more reliable" or some such, and AI will best-effort add more intermediary redis caches or similar patterns.
But because the vibe coders don't actually know what a redis cache is or how it works, they'll never make the architectural trade-offs to truly fix things.
I’ve noticed something similar with vibecoded game rendering logic submitted by peers. Sometimes it will be peppered with extraneous checks for nullptr, or early returns on textures that have zero size.
I often wonder if it’s the statistical nature of the LLM mixed with a request in the prompt.
AI LOVES defensive coding. I asked you for code to filter and reduce an array. I didn't ask you for a method that makes sure the array exists and is an array before it does anything else.
Yes, Gene, Justin, Shawn all somewhat knew one another. Street raced and hung out online. I started infrasearch with Gene. He also did an open source shoutcast server.
The type of oil that the US produces (light and sweet) can't be handled by US refineries which need (heavy sours). Why we are still a major importer of oil.
All oil is global commodity and the US refineries can’t take the oil that the US produces. So they mix it with heavy sours from Canada so the refineries can handle them. So a lot of the oil in the US is dependent on foreign oil as you said.
The real problem I see is the one child policy. If China decides to go to war and say they have 1000 deaths. How many bloodline die? I feel like there would be a hesitation to fight on the Chinese side if they were to take any losses.
It is one of the reasons I don’t believe China would take on Taiwan.
Well no. This will be the same as in the other countries : when you're poor and sufficiently brainwashed you go to war to "defend" your country, no question asked.
While true, China still has around 100,000,000 men between the ages of 20 and 35. Even a millions deaths would be tolerable, which itself seems crazy for an invasion of Taiwan.
Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.
I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.
I’ve been wondering if the showdown in Iran if it leads to a conflict will bifurcate the oil prices, the US vs rest of the world. If the Middle East is in smokes then the US can dictate oil prices with its control of the supplies in Guyana and Venezuela.
The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.