> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel:
He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
replit worked really well as a way to play with code ideas. Going from 0 to running code on their site is very handy. I can try something out in python without much setup, as someone who rarely uses the language.
I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.
I am comparing it to the state of the art of AI envs and as for the setup; github could also do that for quite a long time now (but it got a lot easier and cheaper); for the past, I would say year, it was easy to experiment with whatever on github too, and recently on chatgpt and claude. All of them now have containers that start which can run anything.
So they caught up with Replit there, but AI wise replit didn't catch up with them. Sure it is interesting to watch it iterate, but that is also interesting for all the others as they do that too, just better.
I cannot see why one would use replit over the rest at this point but obviously that can change if it does get significantly better.
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training
This was making rounds on hn but I think no one bothered to connect the dots. most people cheering for that guy probably outraged over the same guy that time.
A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] threadhttps://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.
So they caught up with Replit there, but AI wise replit didn't catch up with them. Sure it is interesting to watch it iterate, but that is also interesting for all the others as they do that too, just better.
I cannot see why one would use replit over the rest at this point but obviously that can change if it does get significantly better.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?