SolubleSnake

LLMs in 5 years are going to be like Solidworks and similar CAD packages for the world of physical engineering - useful tools in the hands of a trained engineer, but hardly 'autonomous workers'

No one would value Solidworks at 1.5 trillion. That is the crux of the matter

An ERP system in...LISP? None of the reasons given as to why that would be a good idea are really very convincing or specific to LISP?

The main things you want for ERP are just to simplify database interactions as far as possible and to give you as many and as customizable options as possible for data visualization and curating information for a non techie user. I dont really get why LISP?

Lol. He has fully sold out.

This is a very poor take and based on his education and the things he has done - he surely does not think this....he's pumping LLM based startups his/(others) companies are funding...embarassing for him intellectually but probably quite beneficial financially

Look at some of the shit John Carmack now says for God's sake. Throw enough money at anyone and they turn into an idiot

DJ Shadow was amazing I am going to have to re-listen to a few tracks

My opinions on functional languages in a practical professional setting is that they largely seem like a curiosity and a bit of an oddity when you encounter them in business software at work. I worked at a company migrating a huge amount of engineering data between two different PLM systems (in our case this was data around peristaltic pumps - 3D models, 2D designs, code, electrical schematics etc). We were using model manager for the source system and windchill for the target system and model manager uses Lisp for its automation of data management tasks and despite the fact I'd had to use Miranda (the precursor to Haskell) in my functional programming module at university (UCL) I found using Lisp for something so kind of quotidian didn't really give me the same feeling that 'this is something really special' when using it for something fairly mundane. It didn't really use any of the advantages of functional languages (and their advantages are sort of more around quite academic things anyway).

Going out of your way to use functional languages at work seems a bit like deliberately using a fountain pen and purposefully writing all business communication in a handwritten beautiful cursive style - it's kind of a cute affectation rather than actually of benefit

In the future it will be considered one of the most unusual cultural/social decisions ever, that large financial services firms are as they are in the Western world.

I have never seen a group of people so frantically doing nothing of any value.

I also don't know how this should work and some people's comments on this thread seem really weird to me because it seems really unlikely that someone who was eg a 'senior software developer' somewhere could be so bad that they couldn't write basic code but maybe?

In regards your comment about the Canadian idea of 'Professional Engineers' we have the same thing in the UK but it's called 'chartered engineers' and there are (more in theory than in practice) requirements around ethical and legal issues. This isn't really used in the same way I think it's used in Canada. I have worked with CEng people and I was going to go through the process (you need two sponsors you work with and you need a STEM degree that is recognised and you need 6 years of relevant experience). It's not an easy thing to get but it's not a guarantee someone is a genius or totally reliable but I haven't really seen anyone with that behaving in a way that is completely unreliable.

I wonder if it might be something to do with 'start up culture' where you've got very small teams and they're often young. You can't really tell kids to 'do a degree, get 6 years experience, qualify...then make your 'uber for milkshakes'' (or whatever they are planning to do). If you've got really young applicants you can't really expect that.

to be clear, CEng doesn't even require an exam, although everyone who would be in a position to become CEng has already done a lot of exams.

Perhaps the Leetcode thing must exist if people just refuse to qualify and want to get busy quickly. I think that is totally fine if you're making 'Uber for milkshakes' or similar but if someone is doing something that requires some responsibility then probably better to have people be vetted by accepted peers.

It's one reason I am actually going to continue pursuing the 'physical engineering' side of my career rather than the software development (software 'engineering' side of it).

I studied CS at UCL years ago but worked mostly in teams with electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineers and on projects relating to various things in relation to various different industries as different as pharmaceutical and ship building. During that time I got qualified as a CAD engineer among other things I was required to by my employer(s).

Now, when I look at software jobs and the way software developers are being interviewed...I just can't. You would never ask eg a mechanical engineer in an interview 'so, you say you know SolidWorks? Ok, design me a sphere with a chamfered cylinder extruded from the centre of the top. It should be chamfered at a 46 degree angle to a plane passing through the centre of the sphere. Also, sweep a five pointed star around the sphere at the point that is midway above the plane and the top of the sphere'.

This is effectively what Leetcode tests etc are asking. It is a waste of everyone's time because they will either do it and think 'ok, that was weird' or they will refuse and think the company is insane.

There should just be accepted certifications for software development AND THEY SHOULD BE HARD. They should be very much failable and you should expect good people still to fail once or twice (like engineering or medical exams). Then just ignore the Leetcode stuff. It serves no-one.

Then all it really comes down to is frameworks etc and if someone is familiar with that particular framework or not. Just let people qualify out of this stupid algorithmic vetting process because it's utterly daft in the context of most jobs.

Argh gawd I hate this!

There are plenty of reasons that a department within a company will prefer spreadsheets. Software is not the answer to everything and also this is the same problem you get when Microsoft introduces those pesky 'Power App' developers etc or previously the Sharepoint 'web parts' etc....essentially someone who kind of feels they are the 'owner' of some information then decides to formalise the process in their own little way.

Now you have a person wasting a bit of time making their little tool but you've also got people complaining that someone's now essentially taken control of it etc. At a former employer our procurement team used spreadsheets to track basically everything but importantly everything on our PCBs - every single component and their suppliers and prices etc (various factories around China usually). This would have been a horrible thing to try and formalise in a web app just because of how often they were all changing their own conventions etc (often suppliers changing what information they gave to them, too). It would have been a wild goose chase to formalise it and more than the trouble it would be worth.

Guessing this has to do with how China tends to turn a blind eye (although increasingly less so) to copyright and more importantly trademark infringement issues of Western intellectual properties...perhaps Unity have tried to get some Chinese developers to remove things like Marvel characters, or Mickey Mouse and it's been ignored.

I think this is actually quite interesting when Unity itself has recently posted a tutorial on using its AI tools for the AI generation of a Nintendo character called Ness (main character in an old Snes game called Earthbound if you're not familiar)...seems a bit of a double standard if the complaint IS in fact in relation to trademark infringements.

There's a big problem that a lot of the people in AI have spent so much time with other PhDs in the AI space and working in these professional AI labs that they've forgotten or never even seen what 'normal' businesses look like.

I saw a podcast where the main guy behind Claude Code, Boris, just casually explained that at Anthropic where there are some software developers using sometimes multiple 6 figure values in dollars PER MONTH on their tokens for running their swarms of Claude agents...that might make you some kind of productivity guru but try going to your CFO and asking for these kinds of figures from each software developer PER MONTH...they will spit coffee out in your face and burst out laughing.

It would be the equivalent of saying 'yeah we want a new CAD and design management package that we basically prompt and it does everything for us'

'How much is it?'

'Well, upwards of 7 figures per year, per design engineer, and we have about 400 design engineers'.

'You want half a billion pounds, per year, so you can all play with your imaginary friends? No...piss off and get back to work'

These were always a disaster. It's essentially trying to 'Uberify' the entire economy. Be your own boss etc...People just end up sitting by the phone waiting for 2 or 3 hours of minimum wage work a day. Maybe this is possible with living with mum and dad as a youngster, or living with a higher earning spouse and looking after children...A normal person could never realistically do them it was a stupid idea to begin with

This is a fairly odd statement given that BOMs are managed in manufacturing systems and for accounting and engineering purposes in multiple different ways. This can be for anything to do with sales data for a client or for guys on the factory floor or for the accountants. There are sales BOMs, manufacturing BOMs procurement BOMs and nested BOMs etc all for different parts of the business process...you would have BOMs within the organisation that were probably nearly 70% etc or those that were 0%!

I am a CAD engineer and software developer who has worked in manufacturing a lot in the UK in various industries - products as big as superyachts and as small as peristaltic pumps. I think if the UK and EU are to try and defend their weakening and shrinking manufacturing sectors (these industries have been disappearing for my entire adult life) then it is possible but difficult...In 10 to 20 years it will be impossible.

The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.

We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!

I disagree actually. There certainly are games that I have felt are pretty 'magical' as you put it but they tend to me almost childlike in some of their design choices. Monument Valley for example was amazing. I was so impressed by that game and how it mixed the childishness of magic toyboxes and Escher inspired puzzles with the adult complexity of some of the puzzles and the eeriness of the setting.