Light Pollution is the excess or inappropriate artificial light outdoors. Light pollution occurs in three ways: glare, light trespass, and skyglow.
\* Glare is the bright and uncomfortable light shining directly to the observer that interferes with your vision.
\* Light trespass is the unintended spill of artificial light into other people’s property or space and often becomes a source of conflict.
\* Skyglow is the brightening of the night sky from human-caused light scattered in the atmosphere.
Reflected sunlight from a human object spilling light into an environment that would otherwise not have that reflected sunlight is very much in the spirit of light pollution.
Skyglow is when you see the horizon light up in the direction of a city, not the light reflecting from a satellite. Look at the photo in your own link.
Let's assume I've read the link and have had discussions with both visual and radio spectrum astronomers and astrophysicists.
Starlink satellites pollute the night sky with both reflected sunlight and intended and unintended radio spectrum noise.
Manmade objects that inject light into an otherwise dark sky fit the category of skyglow, reflected sunlight tends to be sharper and less diffuse than atmospherically scattered ground lighting .. it's all extraneous human caused pollution from the PoV of telescopes.
The linked article from Steve Yegge (https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer) provides a 'solution', which he thinks is also imminent - supervisor AI agents, where you might have 100+ coding agents creating PRs, but then a layer of supervisors that are specialized on evaluating quality, and the only PRs that a human being would see would be the 'best', as determined by the supervisor agent layer.
From my experience with AI agents, this feels intuitively possible - current agents seem to be ok (thought not yet 'great') at critiquing solutions, and such supervisor agents could help keep the broader system in alignment.
>but then a layer of supervisors that are specialized on evaluating quality
Why would supervisor agents be any better than the original LLMs? Aren't they still prone to hallucinations and subject to the same limitations imposed by training data and model architecture?
It feels like it just adds another layer of complexity and says, "TODO: make this new supervisor layer magically solve the issue." But how, exactly? If we already know the secret sauce, why not bake it into the first layer from the start?
Similar to how human brains behave, it is easier to train a model to select a better solution between many choices than to check an individual solution for correctness [1], which is in turn an easier task to learn than writing a correct single solution in the first place.
[1] the diffs in logic can suggest good ideas that may have been missed in subsets of solutions.
Just add a CxO layer that monitors the supervisors! And the board of directors watches the CEO and the shareholders monitor the board of directors. It's agents all the way up!
LLMs are smarter in hindsight than going forward, sort of like humans! only they don't have such flexible self reflection loops so they tend to fall into local minima more easily.
This reads like it could result in "the blind, leading the blind". Unless the Supervisor AI agents are deterministic, it can still be a crapshoot. Given the resources that SourceGraph has, I'm still surprised they missed the most obvious thing, which is "context is king" and we need tooling that can make adding context to LLMs dead simple. Basically, we should be optimizing for the humans in the loop.
Agents have their place for trivial and non-critical fixes/features, but the reality is, unless the agents can act in a deterministic manner across LLMs, you really are coding with a loaded gun. The worst is, agents can really dull your senses over time.
I do believe in a future where we can trust agents 99% of the time, but the reality is, we are not training on the thought process, for this to become a reality. That is, we are not focused on the conversation to code training data. I would say 98% of my code is AI generated, and it is certainly not vibe coding. I don't have a term for it, but I am literally dictating to the LLM what I want done and have it fill in the pieces. Sometimes it misses the mark, sometimes it aligns and sometimes it introduces whole new ideas that I have never thought of, which will lead to a better solution. The instructions that I provide is based on my domain knowledge and I think people are missing the mark when they talk about vibe coding, in a professional context.
Full Disclosure: I'm working on improving the "conversation to code" process, so my opinions are obviously biased, but I strongly believe we need to first focus on better capturing our thought process.
I'm skeptical that we would need determinism in a supervisor in order for it to be useful. I realize it's not exactly analogous, but the current human parallel, with senior/principal/architect-level SWEs reviewing code from less experienced devs (or even similarly-/more-experienced devs) is far from deterministic, but certainly improves quality
Think about how differently a current agent behaves when you say "here is the spec, implement a solution" vs "here is the spec, here is my solution, make refinements" - you get very different output, and I would argue that the 'check my work' approach tends to have better results.
You're kind of making his point - the second and third paragraphs are explicitly about the fact that he is not an Ivy League professor. Be the change you want to see in the world by doing the reading first.
To be fair, "30 years of experience" likely opens more doors than any particular skill listed on your CV - that doesn't reflect the way that a majority of junior/mid-level devs need to present their abilities, where pattern-matching is an unfortunate norm, particularly when there are orders of magnitude more applicants than open roles.
Everywhere I've worked would have judged heavy emphasis on framework expertise rather than fundamental CS concepts and web standards as a red flag. I don't think it's that rare.
Mentioning ability in React is obviously not a bad thing but some people make it their whole resume.
Counterargument: my colleague with 15y exp (10 C++ & 5 Angular/Vue) has been unemployed for 2yrs already because he has no React on the CV and no local company wants to hire him (secondary size tech hub in the country, EU). He's probably have to force-relocate soon.
I'm sure I could dig into the details, but the Solid protocol seems to have similar high-level objects to AT Protocol, but a quick search doesn't reveal many sources that refer to both - are these communities ignoring each other, competing with each other, or just too new to find common ground?
ATProto team is familiar with SOLID, and we have a lot of respect for the people involved, but it didn't seem like it captured the right model for us. In particular, we felt it was important to debind identity from hosting, focus on high-scale aggregators (which are also debound from hosts), and use a data model which is more approachable to devs than RDF (json + lexicon).
TLDR: I like ATProtocol, but there are a couple of things that don't make it as decentralized/independent as I'd like. Also, the fact that everything is public in ATProtocol makes it very different from Solid. Solid is all about data ownership, and many of the use-cases require privacy. Until ATProtocol has an answer for private data, I don't think it's even worth considering for most use-cases that Solid wants to tackle.
Was that kind of control well-received by your teams? Out of context, it sounds like it would be pretty rough to be an engineer on a team where your manager had sole control over what tools you could use - I suppose it might make sense for junior devs or a very small codebase, but I would caution against taking that stance in a team where you want to facilitate mutual trust
Provided the manager only rarely exercises the power, and is open to being persuaded not to, having somebody able to veto risky dependencies can be really quite useful.
Normally when I'm the one with that power we rapidly get to a general understanding of what's small enough that I (a) probably won't care (b) will take responsibility for tweaking the schedule to makre time to get rid of it if I do.
And 'big' dependencies are generally best discussed amongst the entire team until consensus is reached before introducing one anyway.
But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters had extensive training in the work of previous masters, frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After developing that base skill and understanding, they had a better toolset to express their own originality.
Meeting up in real life is all about network effects - people make friends through networks, organize events through networks, and discover new opportunities through networks. If you're talking about small events that you found out about through sites like Meetup, those are typically successful when you have a large-enough network of people who _might_ be interested.
I've worked in this product area before, and the big threats that we always had to watch out for were
1. Spam - once the app is large enough, you will be inundated with 'groups' that are just marketing pitches for companies and products. If you don't have a system for approving groups or figuring out how to promote high-quality over low-quality groups, you're going to struggle. Also, the whole idea of 'high-quality' vs 'low-quality' groups is dangerous in various ways.
2. All the other pitfalls of user-made content, e.g. hate speech and inappropriate content
3. People will try to use this as an online dating site - you need to decide early whether that's good or bad, but it's a huge (and potentially overwhelming) aspect of creating an app like this
4. Facebook groups will eat your lunch
5. Really great to see your early caution about building too many features and trying to be everything to everyone. All conceivable features will be requested, and you'll need to have a clear vision in order to decide what is important and what is not.
I run a meet-up group, I hate meetup.com but I pay for it because Facebook groups isn't as good, and meetup.com doesn't even work properly. It's such a terribly low bar.
Meetup used to be amazing in certain cities and as someone who travels a ton it used to be my goto way to meet people.
Something happened after the pandemic though and it just turned completely garbage. All the events on there are virtual, spammy, corporate (like node js meetup stuff). Not to mention it doesn’t work half the time.
I attend 1-3 meetups a month, the recent changes made it unusable for me. They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending. I don't say they should provide everything for free, but that pricing is ridiculous.
> They want $10 a month just to check who will be attending.
Looks like this has been rolled out only recently. That's frustrating to say the least, you want to know who is active and the age/profile of attendees before you'd attend certain events. Or maybe there is someone you want to avoid.
Also yet another app looking a $10 per month subscription for basic features. Outrageous.
After the most recent price hike ($16 to almost $30/mo for the "basic" organizer plan) I decided to quit Meetup as the host of two groups after more than a decade. It's not just the money, since you were asking about pain points:
* Notifications I get on iOS are pretty much the opposite of how I set them up; I ask for relevant notifications about people RSVP-ing and commenting on my events, instead I get notifications about their own AI / crypto virtual events.
* When I do get notifications about a new comment in the 'event chat', I tap the notification, but the app just lands me on the event main screen. When I navigate to event chat (which is surprisingly hard to find) there will be an unread symbol but more often than not the actual comment is nowhere to be seen.
* Meaningless functionality being added (start an event with AI!) while pain points such as the above, and the core organizer experience overall, haven't seen meaningful fixes or improvements in years.
* No way to slice / analyze member data.
* Related to the above, you can download the member list, which gets you a file with an .xls extension but in reality is a broken csv file.
* Increased focus on having group members pay, which is hard to manage and also very hard to get any metrics on (who has paid, when, how much?)
I could go on.
Overall, from an organizer perspective, Meetup is a buggy, stagnant and increasingly expensive platform that becomes a poorer value for money with every change they make. The only reason I've stuck with it for as long as I did is that it's really the only way for me to have people organically find my group without significant effort on my part. (I am in the U.S.)
I finished making a carpooling site a few weeks ago that automatches people into the optimal groups based on their location. My site might be a good use case for you: https://antride.ca/. Would appreciate if you consider using it to save people gas and carbon emissions :)
I always set up the same event, at the same place, etc, yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous one". It doesn't have many ways to communicate with members, so I've set up a Discord server instead, which is fine. The UI is a bit confusing if you need to do anything other than set up an event. Most crucially of all, members complain that emails don't reach them, which is terrible, because then they don't know to come to the event.
> yet it's hard to just say "use all the values from the previous one"
Whaa- I'm kind of amazed they don't have this given how easy it would be to add.
I just added this exact feature to Radius because our event form was growing and becoming quite painful to fill out - it's just a dropdown with previous events at the top of the event form, nothing complex, but a huge time saver.
Adobe has some top-tier software though and they keep improving it. It's like a senior leader at my company said - "Oracle's a terrible company but their stuff works". This was during a discussion of another company's software that was also a black box and didn't even work well.
Maybe they added this recently, my meet-up has been on hiatus and just started up again. This definitely wasn't a thing up until a year or so ago, though.
I did, it can only email 500 people on the free tier (my meet-up has hundreds of people subscribed but only ~20 come to each event) and the paid tier costs $700/yr, which is way too much for a free meet-up.
I run the Helsinki JavaScript meetup (https://meetabit.com/communities/helsinkijs) and we also built our own Rails based Meetup.com alternative called Meetabit, so let me comment on your points. I hope this is useful to the original poster as well.
1. Agreed, this has been a huge problem. We partially solved it by adding a captcha, forcing email address verification and adding nofollow to outbound links. Even so we get some spam communities created on occasion which we clean up semi-automatically.
2. Not been a problem for us, but we don't have any social networking features.
3. Has not been a problem for the site for the reason above. However, this has been a bit of an issue at the actual meetups. We've recently introduced an anti-harassment policy to address this problem and I'm thinking of adding functionality related to that to Meetabit.
4. We have a Facebook group as well which was quite active before the pandemic. Now it is completely dead. Whenever I promote events I get the most engagement on LinkedIn of all places. Email is still the best way to get the word out though.
5. Agree about not trying to be everything to everyone. I also think there's a big difference between professional and non-professional meetups, so we've focused on the former with an additional focus on tech. This has allowed us to grow to about 8K users so far with no marketing spend. The features that we have that Meetup.com does not are: talk proposals and archive as well as sponsorship profiles and offers.
I am skeptical about 4. There is a reason Meetup ate Facebook for many things despite it requiring a new account, Facebook groups are terrible and Meetup shows that you can compete.
Event organizers shouldn’t centralize on Facebook.
A substantial number of people I know under 40, myself included, have deleted Facebook or logged off indefinitely (my spouse still has it so that’s how I found out.) The meetup I regularly attend that advertises on both platforms sees significant new attendees from meetup.com. It’s a shame the platform itself is falling into such disarray post-pandemic.
That is a good sign, for sure. Maybe revise to 'Facebook will eat 20% of your lunch - your business model will need to account for that'. Products like this don't have a big moat other than their network.
Products that truly intend to sow community will be okay with losing 20% of the crowd which are indeed a group who will put forth lower effort, higher noise than signal contributions, and severely change your offering's requirements.
For 5. in particular, I have a general vision of what I want the platform to be but it's always changing with new ideas here and there, and also have to consider user feedback like you say. Keeping it simple, but useful is the goal instead of being a do-everything platform that you need a Phd to use (looking at you, Google Cloud Platform).
I came here to make this comment, though without having worked in the product area. I've seen all of these issues.
1. Spam - there's a question of definition. I've seen lots of bars post their happy hour etc. Is that an event or just an ad for the bar? Lots of meet ups that are really just an hour long pitch for some service/software/consulting. I've seen a groups post the same event under different names 10-15 times. I've also seen groups somehow claim 300 people are coming to their event even though the venue only holds 80 people. I don't know what kind of backdoor they found since this "300+ people" was the number reported by the service itself, not just something in the description.
5. I don't know what "too many features" is but I did enjoy posting images to meet ups. Sure that can be done via some other service but that requires all the people at the event to coordinate separately from the fact that they already signed up for the event. OTOH I'm sure hosting images brings up all kinds of problems. Similarly, the "chat" feature has been invaluable for coordination. Show up to a picnic, need to find out where they ended up, check the chat on the event page.
> Then there's the fact that their search experience is just terrible.
Agreed - but you don't have search yet or if you do it wasn't clear. I assume that's on your TODO list.
That brings up issue 2, user made content. Maybe AI can categorize events from descriptions but on many sites with user content, people will tag themselves with whatever they think will get search results, even if their event is entirely unrelated. Which then ruins the results and makes the experience bad.
In any case, I which you luck. I'd love for there to be better solutions in this area.
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