Yeah, but there are dozens of AI coding assistants to choose from, and the cost to switch is very low, unlike switching operating systems.

I've tried them all and I keep coming back to Claude Code because it's just so much more capable and useful than the others.

Also it's highly multithreaded / multiprocess - you can run subagents that can communicate with each other, you can interrupt it while it's in the middle of thinking and it handles it gracefully without forgetting what it was doing

If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.

Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.

Yes, in WebKit, SaferCPP guidelines are enforced by a static analysis tool.

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia.

They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with.

They had a huge team. Hundreds of people.

It was so ambitious.

But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it.

Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan.

If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success.

But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch.

That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity.

It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?

Not only did they target Home Hub, they basically forced a rewrite on it (us, I worked on the team). After we already launched. And made our existing workable software stack into legacy. And then they were late. Then late again. And late again. With no consequences.

100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job. Too bad they're making everyone else's job suck.

By forced I guess you’re referring to the room full of leads who all said yes, but then reported otherwise back down to their ics to avoid retribution. I caught early wind of this from folks being super rude in early on the ground discussions and tried to raise it with Linus. One of the directors got his kickers in a twist and accused me of making a mountain out of a molehill. I guess clearly not, as the sentiment and division still stands.

I don't care who agreed to what, it's bad engineering practice to take a working successfully launched product and throw out its entire working software stack no matter how inelegant it seems. To what end? What did Fuchsia offer? When it finally shipped -- what, 2, 3 years late? --- custmers couldn't even tell it happened.

And in order to make it happen it also required writing the already-launched HTML-based UI in Flutter/Dart. Again ... why? What for? There wasn't even a working "native" Flutter at the time, despite promises, and there certainly wasn't a working accessibility stack -- no screen reader, no magnification, nothing -- so that all had to be kludged in. It was everything wrong with the "rewrites considered harmful" distilled.

Not to mention terrible for morale, execution, planning, budget, customer satisfaction.

I was just a lowly SWE 3 "IC" just in the trenches, not nearly as "important" as all that, so my opinion mattered not at all. But to me it violated every sound engineering / project planning principle I'd learned in the 15 years of my career up to that point. Just another event that led to me becoming quite cynical about the ability of leadership at Google to actually manage anything of significant complexity that wasn't ads/search related.

Again, Fuchsia .. very neat. But it didn't belong there.

Customers not being able to tell that it happened was a goal of that deployment.

It wasn’t anywhere near that late the numbers you’re saying was about the whole build cycle - board bringup for one of the two boards first commit in zircon was 3y before launch (that codes public, I just checked and Mike landed it in 2018) - and discussions weren’t done then, that was before any prototype/demos could be done. There were sluggish stages and project management was rough, and there were delays at the end related to quality but the quality bar was necessarily high, particularly on the core system - don’t brick all the devices in the field. And we didn’t, and that’s actually a feat replacing everything from firmware to gui in the field without users noticing.

What was the goal? Well two things: fuchsia needed a first, and realistic shipping target that wasn’t excessively lofty. Nest needed to get out of the OS game so it could focus resources on product. Chris talked about this in his 9to5google interview.

It’s a shame you feel so sour about it, everyone involved did good work. I have friends from nest and some of the ics also have similar pained history from that time - it’s sad, once upon a time it was maddening. It’d have been so easy for a leader to substantially improve that. Sure plenty of things could have been better, for sure we could have fixed these awful sentiment and relationship issues (I tried, got burned for it - that even showed up in my calibration), but we all shipped.

Other teams decommitting is just how it goes.

It's a lot of work and hard to justify if you're looking for short term improvements. But if you're really committed to long term improvements, it absolutely makes sense. Google is actually willing to make long term investments. Publicly justifying the investment has never been a goal of the project which is why most folks probably don't understand it. Honestly I'm not sure why folks care enough to even do commentary on it. If you find it useful, you can participate, if not just ignore it.

Fwiw inventing a new application ecosystem has never been a goal and is therefore not a limitation for its viability. The hard part is just catching up to all the various technologies everyone takes for granted on typical systems. But it's not insurmountable.

I'm also not sold on the idea that having more options is ever a bad thing. People always talk about web browser monoculture and cheer on new entrants, yet no one seems to mind the os monoculture. We will all come out ahead if there are more viable OS out there to use.

I think the hope is that you just start there. They might have migrated the meeting room devices. Why would you set out to replace *everything* at once? Do something, get some revenue/experience, then try to fan out.

Wasn’t Fuchsia supposed to be a platform where different OS could run in a virtual environment and software packages would be complete containers? Was not this a new way of tackling the ancient OS problem?

These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machine each catering to a different user.

That doesn't sound anything like what fuchsia is or ever was. Fuchsia takes a different set of tradeoffs with respect to baseline primitives and built a new stack of low level user space on top of those new primitives. This gives the software fundamentally different properties which might be better or worse for your use case. For consumer hardware products I think it comes out ahead, but only time will tell.

I think what op was thinking of was early harmonyos, seen people confusing those a lot. Harmony now ofc isn’t what

Reinventing QNX will be cutting edge for decades to come.

Yeah, those were definitely your imaginations.

I always felt that Fuchsia was a make-work program to keep talented kernel engineers away from other companies. Sort of a war by attrition.

That's a weird rumor that I'm not sure I understand. Things are not that complicated.

If it's even a rumor then I started it, I just can't imagine Fuchsia serves any other purpose. I don't even usually give Google a lot of credit, but I just can't imagine they made something this useless and misunderstood the feasibility of such an OS this badly. It would be like Hewlett-Packard in the early 2000s levels of incompetence.

Microsoft used to legit do this in the 90s. Recruit bus factor 1 employees from competitors by offering them large salaries.

It was much easier to cripple your competition back when there were several orders of magnitude less software engineers in the world.

And the crazy thing is there is arguably a lot more of a reason for Meta / Oculus to have had its own operating system because it is meant for a specific configuration of hardware and to utilize those hardware resources to a quite different goal than most other OSes out there. Even in that environment it was still a waste

I guess it's just a political shit show at this point. Ideas go hard if the people behind them aren't playing the game well enough, no matter their value.

There's few things worse for the long-term health of a software project than people who have hammers and are hunting for nails for them.

Isn't this how folks use Linux today? It's the only tool they know and don't understand the tradeoffs, hurting the product.

My understanding is that people are working on Fuschia in name only at this point. Of course some people are passionate enough to try and keep it alive, but it’s only useful to the degree that it can help the Android team move faster.

I always wonder why companies prefer rolling the dice to pragmatism.

A bad business decision, yes. But is it any good?

Has it been good leadership, though?

They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like:

* Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs

Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.

Did you read my comment?

> The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend.

But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.

I won't say there are exactly zero self-taught professionals in classical music because I don't know for sure. But I will say I've never heard of one. If they exist at all they're exceptionally rare.

The music industry is built on the back of people with music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session musicians are all very likely to have formal training in theory and maybe performance.

Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.

All industries are built on the backs of truly educated and passionate talent. Those people often don't reap the fruit they help sow to everyone else that makes billions, trillion off them.

Music is no different from software in thst regard.

Not only is that not true at all. There are many other jobs you can land other than performing with a formal music degree. Of course with the right experience you might get away with not getting that formal education but you open so many doors by going through school and getting the "useless" piece of paper.

Case in point: Rachel “Raygun” Gunn. She had all the credentials in the world but single-handedly became the reason break dancing is no longer in the Olympics.

Slight overstatement… break dancing was one of the locally picked sports and the next Olympics had already selected different sports before she performed…

But she is a good example of degrees not equaling skill

It should also be noted that she doesn't have a degree in "performing," as far as I'm aware, she has a degree in "studying the culture" of break dancing. So, we (or at least any of us who haven't read her work) don't actually know if she's good at what her degree is in. We just know that she's not good at performing.

Consider that there is some in-between.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

There is no in-between here. Consider:

The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it" class too and... we're back to the original argument.

The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category.

I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all.

So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.

Reminds me of when Jethro Tull won best Hard Rock/Metal category, beating out Metallica and AC/DC.

Ha ha, that's a great idea!

I love the idea of embedding sensitive topics that ChatGPT and other LLMs will steer clear of, within the context of a coding question.

Have you ever had any candidate laugh?

Any candidates find it offensive?

We usually get laughs, some quick jokes, etc., some really involved candidates will ask if it’s worded that way to prevent using ChatGPT.

No one’s found it offensive, the prompt is mostly neutral just very “dangerous activity” coded.