Hot take: i'm not sure this is actually bad for actual diversity and inclusion. From my experience (not at msft), companies continue to have many internal goals related to equal pay, gender balance, etc.
Whats changing is how this is communicated externally, and I can see why this would have to change based on the political climate.
This whole post is coming of a bit naive to me... I highly doubt this client is just an inspirational design meeting away from changing their offering and make a massive investment in customer support. I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision.
> I also don't get why a web-development consultant would feel so responsible for a pretty typical business decision by their client.
Because they are an expert in their field and the client, presumably, isn't? I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice—where the client would reject the paid expert's viewpoint so readily and firmly.
Its bikeshedding - they can see it so they have an opinion on it. I think it happens in many fields where the output is visual - photography, advertising,.....
There is also a general feeling that websites are primarily about design (rather than development) and that the design is aesthetic (rather than UI).
> I can't imagine another field—hairdressing, construction, financial advice
For financial advice, maybe not as readily, but it definitely happens pretty firmly. Lots of people have lost money taking risks they have been warned about. A lot during booms because of FOMO, and a lot because people do not even take advice in the first place.
But honestly, they are more likely to NOT be experts in the business of the client. They are experts on tech, their own business and aesthetic.
People come to hairdressers with own ideas about how their hair should look like and reject hairdressers advice. In fact, hairdressers are not even trying to give you advice unless you explicitly ask for it. They sometimes makes mild suggestions and offers, but that is it.
Frankly, financial advisors are more likely to give advice designed to max out their bonuses rather then one good for you. You probably should firmly reject that financial product or flat tire insurance.
What is the purpose of a website for a business? There is only one correct answer to that question, and if you get it right then you can make great websites for any business. This is also a question you as a webmaster have to ask your business clients and explain to them if they have the wrong idea.
The expertise offered here is "how to build a website". If the client is insisting that the dev use a specific javascript library, that would be odd.
The client here is just requesting specific content on their website, similar to someone requesting a granite countertop in their kitchen; that seems fine, even if its not particularly classy or aesthetically pleasing to the contractor.
Do we know that for a fact? You described them as a "web development consultant", but I couldn't tell for certain what their exact role on this project was. Their services page (https://www.nicchan.me/services/) lists both "Web Application front-ends" and "translate your designs into a scalable system", so I think they offer a range.
Both of those sound like expertise in building a website, and not like expertise in business strategy.
To be clear, I would personally have a similar view to the author here. I'm just surprised that they think their opinion on the strategy side matters so much to their client!
It's more similar to someone asking for a cardboard countertop - any contractor would be well within their rights to tell them it's a bad idea and would be negligent if they didn't.
I doubt the client is wanting to make a massive investment in customer support, but they're probably also not wanting to be actively hostile to anyone who wants that support. It wouldn't surprise me if the client's older support page was little more than a phone number and/or an email address, and the only reason they moved away from that is because of spam. Maybe they're another step removed from that again, but they're not the 16 steps removed that the Fuck Off page is.
If the client's intent is to provide as little support as possible, that would probably have come up during the conversation where they said they wanted that design, but it seems that they like that design for other reasons (it's a decent way to seem bigger than you actually are, seems more professional maybe?).
There is an underlying point in general, but it seems like the author has got hung up over the words "talk to our sales team" and wants to ditch the whole design and go to something with less function as a result.
If I was hiring them I might well start ignoring them at this point as well - thy are literally proposing only implementing only one of the three methods, and the most simple one at that.
I assume I've determined that customers want ready access to some questions. I assume that I have a physical location customers want to see.
Proposing to ditch these is preposterous. I could see proposing inlining the contract form. I could see using more neutral terms ('get in touch' vs 'contract our sales team').
If you're a web dev who has had past clients not pay up due to going broke/cashflow issues, then you have a bit of vested interest in seeing them succeed (and then pay you properly).
They explained it. It goes against the client's goals. Massive investment in customer support? It's about generating leads. I think you're seen it as a SaaS offering which the writer has mentioned multiple times, isn't the case for the client.
Thats true, but I think the blame is more on "American society" and not the kids working through the system.
50 years ago, college was cheaper. From what I understand getting jobs if you had a college degree was much easier. Social media didn't exist and people weren't connected to a universe of commentary 24/7. Kids are dealing with all this stuff, and if requesting a "disability accommodation" is helping them through it, that seems fine?
That seems naive, it would be like if we started dumping tons of deer food into the woods and the next year when deer are grossly overpopulated we thought "why are there so many deer now?".
Humans are as a mass dumb animals, if we give them the opportunity for individual gratification at long-term cost for the group they are going to take it immediately.
Failing out of college can be life-ruining. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of high-interest non-dischargeable debt and employment opportunities completely nuked.
Come on, let's be serious. Most Stanford undergraduate courses aren't that tough, grade inflation is rampant, and almost anyone who gets admitted can probably graduate regardless of accommodations or lack thereof. We're talking about the difference between getting an A or A- here. And Stanford has such generous financial aid that students from families earning less than $150K get free tuition so no one should be leaving with huge student debts.
But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.
As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).
> AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models.
It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs?
AI computation looks a lot like early Bitcoin: first the CPU, then the GPUs, then the ASICs, then the ASICs mostly being made specifically by syndicates for syndicates. We are speedrunning the same centralization.
It appears to me the early exponential gains from new models have plateaued. Current gains seem very marginal, it could be the future model best model that needs "1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs" won't be all that better than the models we have today. All we need to do is wait for commodity hardware that can run current models, and OpenAI / Anthropic et al are done if their whole plan to monetize this is to inject ads into the responses. That is, unless they can actually create AGI that requires infrastructure they control, or some other advancement.
That's what I was thinking as I was listening to the "be like clippy" video linked in the parent. Those local models probably won't be able to match the quality of the big guys' for a long time to come, but for now the local, open models have a lot of potential for us to escape this power consolidation before it's complete and still get their users 75-80% of the functionality. That remaining 20-25%, combined with the new skill of managing an LLM, is where the self-value comes in, the bit that says, "I do own what I built or learned or drew."
The hardest part with that IMO will be democratizing the hardware so that everybody can afford it.
Hopes that we all will be running LLM models locally in the face of skyrocketing prices on all kinds of memory sound very similar to the cryptoanarchists' ravings about full copies of blockchain stored locally on every user's device in the face of exponential growth of its size.
The only difference is that memory prices skyrocketing is a temporary thing resulting from a spike in demand from incompetent AI megalomaniacs like Sam Altman who don't know how to run a company and are desperate to scale because that's the only kind of sustainability they understand.
Once the market either absorbs that demand (if it's real) or else over-produces for it, RAM prices are going to either slowly come back down (if it's real) or plunge (if it isn't).
So we'll see what happens. People used to think crypto currencies were going to herald a new era of democratizing economic (and other) activity before the tech bros turned Bitcoin into a pyramid scheme. It might be too late for them to do the same with locally-run LLMs but the NVidias and AMDs of the world will be there to take our $.
There is a case that the indices owned by the major search engines are a form of centralization of power. Normal people and smaller companies would have to pay a lot of money to get indices for their new competing search engine. However the analogy falls apart when you look at a) the scale of the investments involved and b) the pervasiveness of the technology.
Creating a search engine index requires several orders of magnitude less computing power then creating the weights of an LLM model. Like it is theoretically possible for somebody with a lot of money to spare to create a new search index, but only the richest of the rich can do that with an LLM model.
And search engines are there to fulfill exactly one technical niche, albeit an important one. LLMs are stuffed into everything, whether you like it or not. Like if you want to use Zoom, you are not told to “enrich your experience with web search”, you are told, “here is an AI summary of your conversation”.
Exactly. I was paying for Gemini Pro, and moved to a Claude subscription. Am going to switch back to Gemini for the next few months. The cloud centralization, in its current product stage, allows you to be a model butterfly. And these affordable and capable frontier model subscriptions, help me train and modify my local open weight models.
Economies of scale makes this a space that is really difficult to be competitive in as a small player.
If it's ever to be economically viable to run a model like this, you basically need to run it non-stop, and make money doing so non-stop in order to offset the hardware costs.
I think the good news is that open-source models are a genuine counterweight to these closed-source models. The moment ads become egregious, I expect to see and use services for an affordable "private GPT on demand, fine-tuned as you want it"
So instead of a single everything-llm, i will have a few cheaper subscriptions to a coding llm, a life planning llm (recipes, and some travel advice?). Probably it.
Hot take: a flagship silicon valley startup built on hype and overzealous ambition crashing and burning in 2026 is exactly what the industry needs right now.
OpenAI doesn’t have a product? Have we existed in the same reality for the last 3 years? Something something fastest grown user base in the history of tech
No, they don't, the value of AI isn't the AI itself, it's purely the output.
If someone else can achieve the same output as OpenAI at a similar price, they are completely toast. There is absolutely nothing tying you to ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't matter, only what it produces.
Amazon was in a (similar) situation, but not quite, because they offered a unique experience. But I strongly believe that if Sears just kept their catalogue for another decade, Amazon would not exist.
Selling books online was certainly profitable, but I'm not sure about unique. Amazon's big success is that they had no particular ties to any existing publisher so they didn't have the corporate headwinds of "this will kill our brick and mortar stores and their distribution systems!".
Whats changing is how this is communicated externally, and I can see why this would have to change based on the political climate.
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