Hippocrates

So is this next on the AI assisted firmware/hardware reverse engineering block? Or has someone already gotten to it?

What a time to be alive.

I worked with and hired tons of H1Bs (and non) over the years and the idea that they earn this visa with exceptional talent is a farce. I work in bog standard web services. We fill seats with H1Bs to write ho-hum crud apps and do UX testing work. Some have been great! Others terrible.

Could be wildly different for someone in a very high-tech org or medical field, but at places I worked it was used as a convenience, but not necessary.

I'm seeing a lot of "offshoring" and go to Canada at the moment in my co.

I like the fact that we're aligning on one connector but it's hard for me to praise USB-C in and of itself. The connector feels flimsy and has some slop/play in a way that lightning did not, and especially on lower-end devices.

The charging standards, voltages, and data rates, are frustrating because they're almost never labeled. This is especially true on low end, cables, and device devices. The worst offenders will only charge with a USB-A to C cable with low voltage, which is not what I hope for when I see a USB-C port on a device.

This seems so obvious. It's like asking your manager for a raise and giving the justification that you want a bigger house.

Always be marketing what you can/will/have done for the company to bring value, not what the company can do for you.

The harness/UI that claude code brought was the thing that stole developer mindshare. Thats when people stopped coding in IDEs. Nothing to do with the underlying model.

The fact that this guy is trying to IPO a crypto company right now is a fantastic reason to present whatever evidence there is that he may be Satoshi.

That doesn't sound right. I have them on my desk. Don't even know where the bra case is. I use and charge them only once in a blue moon, perhaps every 2 months, and the battery does not die. I don't lay them flat or anything either.

> if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that.

It is! And AI is fixing precisely that. What businesses actually care about (well, 99% of them where code is written) is shipping fast and solving the immediate problem, NOT code quality and craft. It goes against what I want to believe as an engineer. Most problems are not new, they are not hard, they are not sensitive. You will need to start with a good understanding of the business need. It's not that the AI can't code to this. I will often stub out an abstraction, explain inputs/outputs in detail, provide sample data etc. That's all. There are frighteningly few showstopper problems with AI coding at this point, and it's moving so quickly.

We're not at the point where non-engineers are capable engineers with AI, but if you are an engineer not using AI extensively, you are being lapped.

It makes me feel very secure in my job that so many engineers ITT are downplaying the ability and productivity of AI coding tools. You can pry cursor out of my cold dead hands. If you aren't seeing a 10x boost, then you must not have tried it lately, or haven't got the experience to prompt well.

What it excels at: - Boilerplate code that's been written 1000x, which can saps your time and enthusiasm for the meaty problems beyond that.

- Complex DSA work. It has been demonstrated millions of times in training material.

- Simple and tedious tasks like making dummy data for tests and struct literals.

- Tightly scoped refactors.

Where does it falter?

- Mapping your product/business to the code or abstractions needed. I think this is where junior devs struggle to leverage it.

- Doing large scale multi-file refactors without proper specifics, guidance, and context. It also can't write a huge project from scratch. Humans are still need to fit the pieces all together or provide guidance. I think this gap closes soon.

Code quality simply isn't a problem IME. If it didn't one-shot your dream abstraction, you probably weren't specific enough in the prompt. Most human-written code is also junk, so pointing out a minor gaffes isn't really a dunk on AI. It's still a massive productivity booster if wielded by even a half-competent engineer.

If you make the user "go to the AI" and activate it somehow, you did it wrong.

A good AI/LLM experience is one which meets you where you are already working. Github Copilot is FAR from the best LLM at coding, but it is amazingly useful the way it integrates with my workflow.

On the other hand, Apple's Image Playground, Genmoji, and writing tools all make you visit the AI feature to use it. Same problem with chatGPT. It's absolutely painful to visit a web UI and copy/paste information in and out of the thing to get anything done.

I actually do get a little value from Apple's notification group summaries. AI/LLMs need to be blended into existing places. Bring the AI to the user, don't make the user go to the AI.

To put it another way. AI is not a feature. It can make a feature better. Somehow everyone wants it to be a standalone feature. It is not.

What’s so good about fresh air? Like I don’t want stinky stuffy air but as someone with central HVAC I had no issues with my indoor air. Are we trying to get outdoor smells? Or is it something else?

> It's amusing to think back to all the buzz around Humane's AI pin

It certainly is. And the Rabbit R1. How in the world did people who supposedly know anything about AI think they could make that work as a standalone device detached from rich context. The sad thing is, rich context may not be possible outside of OS-level integration that is gate kept, but I still think they're idiots for trying.

Why does SOTA matter here? OpenAI has actually failed already to make something useful and mass-market. After all these years of pushing SOTA, it's still a website with a text box. Siri in its current form is more useful to me than ChatGPT 4. You simply don't need SOTA models for a lot of valuable features; you need context, annotation APIs, and the right platform and integrations to assist users where they already are (on their phones, in cars, in their IDE, etc). MSFT's GitHub copilot is a good example of getting it right.

Apple relegated ChatGPT to a 3rd tier AI capability for "google answers", and "write me a poem" party tricks, and rightfully put it behind a privacy disclaimer. It looks barely better than the various ChatGPT shortcuts so many people have cobbled together. That part of the announcement stuck out like a sore thumb and looked to me like a huge L for OpenAI. The "partnership" was a nothingburger. Like someone at Apple agreed to it early on but then late in the project realized it wasn't needed at all. So much for SOTA.

Thank god. I think 1pw has been mostly good, but it has frustrating quirks... Like requiring me to input the master password on the iOS app/OSX/Browser extension (on the same device) as if each of these apps have no way of communicating.

I constantly have issues with it not engaging on a form where I have to manually switch to 1pw, though it has gotten a bit better over the years.

I hate to see a company/product get sherlocked but I don't feel like password security was something we should need to have a subscription for.