This is a brilliant reply. I shook my head at the original and laughed hard at your perfectly reasonable question.
It reminds me of an old joke my father used to say about jobs with virtually no interview (fast food, etc). He called it "The Mirror Test", as in if you hold a mirror up to the person, does it fog up? If yes, you are hired!
Eagerness.. you let them work through a endless labyrinth of forms. While the human drops out after the 2nd form- the ai is willing to go all the way always.
I'm not familiar with the specific example, but as a first hunch, if I had to implement such a system, it'd be part of the flow after the successful signup, not during.
I will reply here assuming that you posted with good intent. I think that their PR statement is reasonable from an investor perspective. Try to detach yourself from the personal effects of layoffs. In short, they are saying: Thanks to AI, we don't need as many people to run our business. It is pretty clear to me. Sure, you can be angry about the layoffs, but the economics are clear: AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing, so they are using layoffs to reduce costs. Imagine that you have an HR team of five people. If AI has dramatically improved worker efficiency, can you have an equally effective HR team with only four people? That is basically what happened here.
> They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained.
I see this sentiment a lot on HN. To be clear, I am responding from the perspective of US labor law and general business practices. Employment is not a sacred right in the US. The US system is (larely) hire and fire easily. As a result, the US economy is mildly unstable for the middle class normies (much, much less stable that most other highly developed nations with strong labor laws -- most of G7/G20), but overall wildly dynamic for a large economy.
"They fired some talented folks."
Sure. That is guaranteed with large layoffs. I work in an insanely competitive industry, and there are annual culls each autumn of the bottom 5%. Few are surprised by who gets cut. What is harder to forsee is a business downturn and they need to layoff X% of staff. You see good people let go. That's just life in that kind of system.
"Folks who could be retrained."
Again, in the US, for white-collar office workers, this almost never happens, and surely not for very highly skilled software developers (probably most of the layoffs at Cloudflare). It is not required by law, and it is not a common business practice in the US.
I would say the GP's phrase: "more productivity means fewer people are required" is perfect summary of my opinion (and post). Sure, you can flesh if out, but that is crux of my argument.
I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.
> For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently
I don't know what to think when I see comments like this. Everyone makes mistakes. And no one provides flawless service. If their recent issues are so damaging in your opinion, why is their business continuing to expand at more than 20% per year?
I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?
> AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing
I don't understand how this could be the case for Cloudflare specifically. They made their name with DDoS protection and sandboxed hosting. These are exactly the products whose demand rises in lockstep with agent adoption. How could they possibly be allowing all the growth opportunity to slip past them? In times like this, with rising productivity to boot, you increase headcount, not decrease.
I hope this bubble bursts soon. HR people avoiding to do their actual job seems like it is the modus operandi in the majority of businesses these days.
I am confused by this post. No trolling: You wrote "reduce". Did you mean to say/write "increase"? If you layoff people to reduce costs, then your profitability should increase.
So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.
The law is you can't descriminate against a protected class. Lots of things are protected classes, like race and religion. Old age is, but young age isn't. Clothing choices in general aren't, but if it's a religous choice, it likely is protected.
Etc.
It's kind of weird that you can fire young people because they're young, but not old people because they're old. But it's not a paradox, it's just how the system is codified.
Yes, from a legal perspective this will always be true: in-group vs out-group. Age discrimination is a special category because everyone will be in the out-group (when young) the age into the in-group. In this case, it is probably legal to fire someone for being too young. It sounds weird, but that is not a protected class of employees.
That is pretty awful write performance. Does anyone know more about this? I assume all of these hyperdense SSDs suffer from the same drawback. Also, I heard that the E3.L interface can support up to 16x lanes, but there are no practical commerical products at this point.
Consumer and data center drives play by different rules. The super high write speeds you see for consumer SSDs are usually achieved through tricks like using sections of the drive as a high-speed buffer and then using a background process to rewrite the data into the drive's high-density NAND storage during downtime. They can also use caching techniques that aren't resilient to power loss. They might allow burst performance that heats the drive up until it throttles.
This is all fine and even desirable for a consumer who will only be writing for at most a minute or two, but with a 245TB server drive you need to assume the performance will be needed constantly. They target sustainable and predictable performance.
A more convenient (and dare I say, faster) tape drive replacement for backups? They do make a good point, it would take 10*24TB drives working in the worst raid configuration to even come close to these speeds.
This is getting stupid. Now one can’t even make a reasonable polite question with praise without being asked if they pay.
Bun raised millions of dollars and was acquired by a commercial entity which bragged in the same blog post of reaching $1B. They’re not a guy with an eyepatch and a tin can out on the street.
Open-source developers should be compensated, but they don’t have to be. You can’t reasonably offer your work for free then complain someone isn’t paying you. If you want to be paid, charge for it.
Signed: A long time open-source developer who has dedicated years of full-time work to useful projects without compensation or raising VC money or being acquired.
Come on, whenever a project is discussed on hackernews, there is always one comment of "why are you working on X, when you should be fixing bug Y?!".
We are all software engineers on here (or at least many of us are), we all know how project management and prioritisation works right? We can't work on everything all at once.
given the alleged context, X being something "reported in 2023, still affecting us 3 years later", is this not a reasonable PM / priority decision to question?
> Come on, whenever a project is discussed on hackernews, there is always one comment of "why are you working on X, when you should be fixing bug Y?!".
That is not what the question is about, which you’ll see if you engage with it properly in good faith. There is a single question in the comment (indicated, as one does in English, by a question mark):
> How do you feel about all the constant concerns being raised about the quality of the project lately?
Everything else is context and opinion to explain the question.
Are you being ironic or serious? I can see both pros (encourage people to see themselves as customers) and cons (less initial adoption) to the licensing, although I'd maybe leave bug issues open for everybody.
Serious. And although 'seeing yourself as a customer' certainly makes things slightly better, I'm also referring just to the amount of cash that enters the coffers once it's no longer a tip jar per se. It is open source on the subject of copyright, but as was described in an article on here the other day, open-source doesn't mean community. By positioning the community aspect as something you have to buy into to enter, you end up (a) selling a product for cash without compromising open source and (b) ensuring everyone you deal with is serious. It's like the Red Hat model but workable at the lower end of software at the expense of lower upside.
Can I play devil's advocate for a moment? Imagine that Apple decides to protest this new rule. They say: We will stop stelling iPhones in the EU. However, you can buy from non-EU countries (US, Canada, AUS/NZ, UK, etc.), and we will ship to you, or you can use a third party shipper. I know, I know, HN crowd loves to play legal games like this ("this one weird trick...") -- they rarely work in the Real World.
Real legal question: What prevents this "legal hack"?
Legal hacks like this could work if you don't care about your market share and using dodgy import constructions. That likely won't fly if you are Apple and selling in the EU through an EU based legal entity for compliance reasons already.
The simple issue is that the EU market is a rather large market that Apple can't really afford to lose a major portion of. Iphones are a good chunk of their revenue and a lot of that is EU customers. Also, most iphone users get their phones via their mobile subscription and don't buy direct from Apple. Those phones would have to comply with local rules.
When the EU says our way or the highway, the highway could be rather costly. As others are suggesting, all Apple needs to do is certify their phones water proof and/or put a slightly better battery in their phones (> 1000 cycles). That sounds like it should be doable for them.
They'll probably emphasize their awesome new batteries and water proofing of their devices in the usual announcements later this year and that will be it. Expect that to be something you hear a lot about in phone announcements from other manufacturers in the next half year. And maybe some vendors will actually do the other thing, which would be implement actually easy to swap batteries. It might a good way to differentiate in the market. And lots of Android phone makers struggle with that right now.
This is not possible. Any product sold in the EU, regardless of where it is shipped from, must comply with EU rules and standards (e.g., safety, environmental, digital market rules…). Customs can and do block non-compliant imports.
If Apple wants to keep any of their other services and products, they will also be subject to consumer protection regulation meaning they can’t geoblock consumers and they have to ensure their unsafe products don’t end up with EU citizens.
Software people (generally) have a limited idea of just how complex and rigid customs enforcement can be. Moving physical product between countries is actually a very hard problem.
Possible EU tariffs on electronics could have some effect.
IMO Nothing legal would need to be done. I think practical reasons like shipping time, shipping cost, and the annoyance of using a phone from one region with telecoms in another region would drastically reduce sales. Also you're not going to get 1st party support and that effects Apple devices more than others.
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