title: "Link Roundup #3" slug: "link-roundup-3" date: 2023-01-20 00:00:00.000000+00:00
Amazon is discontinuing its AmazonSmile charity program next month
"Amazon emailed participants of the free program about the news on Wednesday. The email said that AmazonSmile, which launched in 2013, 'has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped.'"
It's despicable that the Smile programme only managed to have ~$45m/year impact, during a time when Amazon was one of the most valuable companies in the world. I'll happily acknowledge that is a milquetoast take, but in truth Amazon did a poor job of promoting Smile, and it was difficult for charities to engage their constituents. The programme could have offered a link to automatically enroll: amzn.to/cancerresearchuk, which I raised a couple of times with our AWS account manager. A very disappointing whimper.
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs
"Just like how a partner at [law firm] Cravath likely sketches an outline of how they want to approach a particular case and swarms of largely replaceable lawyers fill in the details, we are perhaps converging to a future where a FAANG L7 can just sketch out architectural details and the programmer equivalent of paralegals will simply query the latest LLM and clean up the output."
I don't understand the asserting that this will only be available to senior FAANG engineers. Software engineers at all levels can benefit from understanding and leveraging LLM assisted practice. Resistance is futile. That isn't to say that we are removing the 'craft' of software engineering (though you could argue that most languages have a standardised 'style' and 'way', especially at higher levels), but more that the craft is moving to a higher level of abstraction. For better or worse.