davnicwil

The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.

Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.

And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.

I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.

To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.

Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.

You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.

I'll check out Dagger, sounds interesting.

Yeah I've really been enjoying using AI to write docker/compose config and related ad hoc scripts. It was all pretty understandable anyway, but now you can just set up whatever you can think of in literally minutes, even if you just want a particular configuration as a one off. It's a great era for devops!

I'm a big fan of docker and mainly just want to say thanks for bringing it about.

I remember my first time trying to use a container was about 2015 on a beach cafe's wifi in Bocas del Toro, Panama. You can imagine how it went...

After a brief hiatus though I was back to it and since then it's been a core part of many a local dev stack and even production stack (compose) I've set up. I recall the magic moment for me being when I first realised you could mount src to use all your local native dev tools while completely virtualising everything else, including and especially whatever combo of runtimes and dependencies you need.

It was just a lightbulb moment, like it entirely solves 'works on my machine', setting new people up on a project, it just seems like how software engineering ought to work and once you have experienced it it's difficult to go back.

I'm curious, as its creator are you still using it, or as someone who can clearly look ahead to experimental ways of doing things are you on to the next thing whatever that may be? If so, what is it? :-)

you might be right, but without evidence of this we can't know.

Much less than seeing new software products being shipped, we havn't even seen attempts at them being shipped, or built for that matter, again excluding this sort of meta software around the AI itself like harnesses and tooling.

We could speculate that attempts have been made but not shipped, and the details of why not being revealed, but then we're just back to it being talk with no demonstrable stuff happening in the world that backs it up.

At a certain point the offhand hints at exponentials in the narratives are going to have to come into contact with reality.

There's been this continual allusion to ever-narrowing circles of influence and ever-accelerating capabilities behind the curtain, but in fact things do keep coming out from behind said curtain and while their capability is indeed advancing it doesn't really seem at all like it's accelerating, even, let alone vertical.

Also at what point do we raise the fact that despite the ever narrowing circles of access, nobody within those circles seems to be able to actually do anything with it that's ostensibly what it's sold to do? All they seem to be able to do frankly is build more models and harnesses and tools designed to consume more tokens from the models they build, but not actual directly useful new or innovative software that generates what could be very real revenue.

Eventually when you keep talking about exponentials but not that much seems to be demonstrably changing, the narrative is going to run out of steam.

This is just incredible, I had absolutely no idea of the context of 'a Grand Day Out' being a solo school project.

There's no way I'd imagined it wasn't done in a professional setup by a full team.

A real standout part is how he commuted by bus to the studio for years, to work on it mostly alone. Truly amazing dedication to a passion project.

I haven't watched it in probably 25 years but I'll find it now and appreciate it all the more for knowing this!

> 4 years ago, a program that could create photorealistic pictures, talk to you in any language of the world and solve the hardest math problems that we know, we would have called it AGI.

I keep seeing this idea and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I think it could be a bit like saying if you showed someone 500 years ago a smartphone they would likely conclude at first it was magic. But once you had some time to let them use it and tell them how it all worked on a high level they would eventually obviously realise, no, it's not magic.

I guess just in the same way if you presented current LLM tech out of nowhere a few years ago to someone who'd never seen it, I concede they may be likely to imagine it was AGI in that first conversation, depending on their background.

But after using it for a bit and learning what an LLM is etc they'd land exactly where everyone is today - a great technology useful for some things, not AGI, not magic.

I've ridden that design in Italy! I'm not sure they still exist but it was a lovely way to travel (something like Genoa to Pisa I believe).

Double decker trains I just find fun for some reason, and you get slightly better views riding up top over fences and walls and such.

it was a little tongue in cheek, but one concrete example of what I meant is the UK system being on a narrower gague than most of the rest of the world because it was built early and is next to impossible to change, meaning taller double decker trains aren't possible.

It's interesting that escalators generally run slower in the US since their inventor was American: Jesse W. Reno.

It does seem like a bit of a trend in engineering that the first to get there set slower standards that others then copy, speed up and otherwise improve upon. See Britain and trains.

On that note, the very same Jesse W. Reno tried to build a spiral escalator in London in 1906 in Holloway Road tube station, the shaft for which still exists today. It never made it into production aparrently, but goes with the trend.

fair point. It seems to me like more of the ideas now make it through to production though.

To be honest in my opinion car design got so boring in general since about 20 years ago that it's nice to see it mixed up with these hyper futuristic concept designs.

It makes the future feel fun, and feels like a return to adventurous aesthetics for the pure sake of it. At the very least, it's noticably different and interesting. I hope architecture follows suit.

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