The first punchline

> Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission

They had a great article on this too.

It is not necessary in a theoretical sense, but in a practical sense developers that care about memory efficiency only have a handful of options.

If you also care about memory safety it further limits options.

I couldn’t tell if this article was genuine or satire, and I changed my mind several times throughout.

See this thread from a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

You’re gonna love ctrl-r name-of-command

> Try debugging without breakpoints

Why would you need to give this up? I use breakpoints with terminal debuggers all the time.

Yea this take makes no sense. What in the world is wrong with debugging with breakpoints?

It is for many problems, especially concurrency related ones, much less powerful than trace points. But the issue I have seen is that some tools like gdb have unergonomic support for tracing so there I tend to use break points or printf debugging just because the tracing support is so bad in gdb.

It’s a particular subcategory of cork sniffing where you pick the hardest, dumbest way to do things because you’re a Real Developer

There is a good argument for never using debuggers except for core development- Once finished your logs/metrics/events should be good enough to understand what is happening in an application. If debugging your application requires breakpoints you wont really be able to debug a live instance, and wont be able to easily signal off what is happening in the future.

That is a reasonable argument - but it was not made in the article and also does not preclude the use of breakpoints (see your except clause which covers a lot of ground).

It actually said

> Debug your code without visual breakpoints

With ‘visual’ being the important aspect.

There's another section below your quote where the author also wrote:

  The Challenge
  [...]
  3. Try debugging without breakpoints

The alternative to breakpoints is to study the output logs. He wrote:

  Real Growth Requires Discomfort
  [...]
  Debug using logs and terminal output

Fair, I didn’t read that far as I got bored of the “thou shalt” nature of the thing.

Tbh it's the default way I start my app in, debug mode xD

> Will admit It's not great (probably not even good) but it definitely has throughput

Throughput without being good will just lead to more work down the line to correct the badness.

It's like losing money on every sale but making up for it with volume.

In some ways, Firefly being canceled was the best thing that ever happened to it.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.

If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

You get what you measure.

It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?

Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.

Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans

Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?

I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.

Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.

For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.

That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.

This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.

> Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.

Exactly this. Businesses decide whether to pay for ads based on clickthru rates and conversions. Bots don't click through. They don't convert. If these rates fall, advertisers will pay proportionally less as their max bid, and Search ads revenue will fall substantially.

That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real users.

The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.