> Overall, my conclusion is that ChatGPT has lost and won't catch up because of the search integration strength.
Depends, even though Gemini 3 is a bit better than GPT5.1, the quality of the ChatGPT apps themselves (mobile, web) have kept me a subscriber to it.
I think Google needs to not-google themselves into a poor app experience here, because the models are very close and will probably continue to just pass each other in lock step. So the overall product quality and UX will start to matter more.
Same reason I am sticking to Claude Code for coding.
The ChatGPT Mac app especially feels much nicer to use. I like Gemini more due to the context window but I doubt Google will ever create a native Mac app.
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.
I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.
The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.
[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com
[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect
> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.
To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.
> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.
> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.
They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.
If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.
A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.
What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.
> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".
I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.
And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."
Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.
Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.
It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.
It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.
> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this
That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.
But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.
Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).
And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.
But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.
Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.
And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind they'd ban it for adults too, would help me from wasting time on them.
In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email?
I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.
Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.
So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.
HN and Reddit are both social media. Both sites are largely populated by lurkers.
I'm not sure there's a good example of a social network site left.
Even sites and services that can be used for social networking are designed to make that difficult. For example, on Instagram you can choose to follow and interact with only people you actually know and keep your profile private. That would be social networking IMHO because it's mostly one-to-one or at least one-to-not very many. But Instagram insists on showing suggested posts. You can turn that off, but after 30 days they turn it back on.
> YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments
Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist (what???), notifications (why???)
I don't know about Australia, but there's a page here detailing some of the sites that got shut down because of the OSA in the UK: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
> I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
The YouTube Kids apps and services are not included in the ban for this very reason, only the "adult" YouTube app and service. I imagine Google absolutely could create a YouTube "aussie edition" that could avoid the ban for the main service.
Communication over a distance between people who don't know each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it, like customer service... is a disaster in general.
The challenge is that once they are teens, there's a pressure from others and an inclusion aspect, or access through friends and all that.
If you're the only parent putting so many rules on your kids it exclude them from what all their friends are doing and so on. That too can have a negative impact.
The balancing act becomes tricky. If they all can't use social media, it doesn't create that impact of being excluded, they all need to adapt to socialize without.
The way I see it, it's a combination, society shouldn't create a difficult environment for kids and parents to navigate as that increases the burden on parents which will likely fail. And parents need to also make sure they appropriately regulate their kids as otherwise that increases the burden on society which will also likely fail.
If both play their part though, we can raise better kids to grow into more apt adults later in life to the benefit of everyone.
I don’t have kids, but I can see how one parent banning their kid from social media could create issues when the others are on it. I was a quirky kid that already struggled to make friends and any additional imposed quirkiness would have been devastating.
That said, and I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but what about really teaching your kid how to handle whatever bad stuff you feel is on Facebook and such? Not just one sentence as they walk past, I mean making it such a routine part of your teachings as a parent that you get to the point where you have shared moments laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I’m a few multiples of the age in question and I haven’t used Facebook in a long time, but last I heard one of the main issues is people only showing the doctored up highlight reel of their life. If that’s still the issue then I get that it can cause anxiety, but that’s also part of real life and a teachable moment. Granted I wasn’t bombarded with “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - GenAI Edition”, but the concept of someone being ‘fake’ isn’t new, and neither is the need to be able to see through it and mentally deal with it. That is the world they’re going into, whether it’s a rented Ferrari, the fake Rolex, or just a photo filter and picking one image out of 700.
Not all that interesting when you think about it. Doing so would lead to having to admit that the Go team was right that the proposed arena solution isn't right; that there is a better solution out there. Which defies the entire basis of the blog post. The sunk cost fallacy wouldn't want to see all the effort put into the post go to waste upon realizing that the premise is flawed.
The post could have also mentioned that the Go project hasn't given up. There are alternatives being explored to accomplish the same outcome. But, as before, that would invalidate the basis of the post and the sunk cost fallacy cannot stand the idea of having to throw the original premise into the trash.
It seems you need that context prior to visiting the website. Which, if you are looking to hire, and they send you to this site as a "show of skill" is totally great. But if you google searched for some info and stumbled on this, I'm not sure you'd even know what's on offer.
I agree with you, it's not that it isn't impressive, but it functions poorly as a website. Innovation in design I'd expect from the HN title is something where the 3D enhances the user experience of the website itself, navigation interfaces feel natural, and so on.
This is a very well made little game that also showcases some of their work. I was hoping for something like, now I wish all websites were like this.
It's cool, but I actually find it pretty bad as a website. The UX for navigating and all that, it's bad. I was hoping for some innovation in UX which justifies the use of 3D in the website.
The unique UX of the site, driving around in a 3D car, is what makes this site go viral on occasion. If it were "good" UX, e.g. a standard portfolio site, no one would care and this guy wouldn't be as well known as he is. Therefore the UX is good.
I think it's not a website you make to get hired to make business websites like this to display information (unless maybe it's a gaming company), but if you want someone to make a game on the web then this is a perfect portfolio site.
I agree, I was comparing it to the title of the hacker news post which initially said "Most impressive 3D website ever" or something like that. That enticed me to believe someone had figured out a really innovative way to make a website work in 3D.
As a portfolio to demonstrate your three.js skills for web game making it's really good.
But for everything else, you literally just said, the handful of AI features are better on Google products... That seldom makes the product as a whole better.
Depends, even though Gemini 3 is a bit better than GPT5.1, the quality of the ChatGPT apps themselves (mobile, web) have kept me a subscriber to it.
I think Google needs to not-google themselves into a poor app experience here, because the models are very close and will probably continue to just pass each other in lock step. So the overall product quality and UX will start to matter more.
Same reason I am sticking to Claude Code for coding.
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