Charles Ma

Software engineer working on observability. ex-Uber/FB/MSFT. #bitcoin. Opinions and shitposts my own.

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@swyx Seems like npm is the problem, not worktrees

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@PeterDiamandis @ylecun Too much doomerism in the narrative in the US. Doesn’t help that media was already very anti tech before AI.

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@levelsio I heard shadowsocks is what the tech savvy crowd uses now, but getting a subscription requires going to slightly sketchy parts of the internet or setting up your own node and I haven’t needed to do that given how simple a foreign eSIM is.

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@levelsio I use Google fi from the US with global roaming and got a spare data sim to put in another device. It’s only 50GB a month before throttling but that’s better than most other options.

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@NaiMack21

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@NaiMack21 I’d call that well off/well prepared for retirement but not “very rich”. Agree it’s enough for most though

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

@artman Lots of robot friends though

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

Woah, end of an era.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is:

It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time. As a kid, I dreamed of helping build software that would be used by many people, and Google now has thirteen products used by more than a billion people (amazing!). Our work has had a tremendous impact in the world, and I have been lucky enough to collaborate and form friendships with many colleagues that I deeply admire, respect, and enjoy. It still brings me joy every time I see people out in the world using our products to find information, handle email, translate documents, watch videos, learn new things, navigate and understand the physical world, browse the web, use their phone, run large-scale computations on our infrastructure, ride in an autonomous vehicle, or perform complex tasks with the help of our AI systems. I hope you all share this sense of joy, because it is a shared accomplishment! Thank you to all of my colleagues at Google over many years!

Now I'm excited to go start @DiscoLoopAI with my longtime friends and colleagues @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML, and @quocleix.

(Updated post: slightly redacted to not have some personal info)

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

Alipay tap to pay machines seem ubiquitous in more established shops now. QR code payment is still ubiquitous(from street beggars to high end retail stores), but tap to pay clearly gaining a lot of traction. All Alipay machines in my city here. Don’t know if tencent has a similar product or not.

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

In China this week. Last couple years the big thing I noticed was the convenience of delivery services and number of electric cars on the road.

This year, it’s seeing AI more in everyday life.

🧵 on my observations:

[Charles Ma @charlesma_]

Gamification is another, I have to dismiss
several casino style spin wills and call to action to get a prize or discount with every interaction. Really gets in the way when I care about efficiency on my short time here rather than the best possible deal. Imagine the temu design but applied to everything.