hdndjsbbs

The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas".

I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.

The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live.

Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.

If compensation for software devs was in line with other profession there wouldn't be bootcamps. The problem is it's an easy job that gets paid a ton of money

Let's say some racial ones (including hard-r n-word) and some ableist ones? Guy also talked about jerking off a lot and joked about rape.

Yeah it's an awful place to work unless you're a far-right bro. My old director used to use slurs and vape in the office. The founder hires pro gamers with no technical expertise because he thinks they're cool.

The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code.

The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.

The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".

The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.

Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.

I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.

Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now

Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.

"room temperature espresso" was the first thing I thought of - espresso is meant to be drunk hot, right away. If you let a good shot cool off and compare it to a bad shot you're not going to notice the difference as much because you made them both worse by letting them sit and cool.

For industrial processes it probably doesn't matter - look at how nescafe is manufactured.

This is just the authors explanation to explain how to encode where a card ends up. The cards don't actually have barcodes, they have a binary-encoded number where a 0 indicates the left pile and 1 indicates the right pile during a specific round of the shuffle. The number encodes the journey that card makes during the shuffle. It's not an actual barcode.

200W is pretty good FTP for an "untrained" cyclist. FTP is the maximum you can sustain for a single hour, but you're not going to do multiple back-to-back.

Obviously the peloton crowd is biased towards people who will have better endurance and higher FTP, but basically the upshot is you could run one card for one hour with the effort of a 100km long ride which most recreational cyclists do once a week.

Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe.

Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.