ike2792

As a very amateur woodworker in addition to my day job, I have always thought the power tool analogy is a good one for LLMs. The tools don’t remove the need for skill and being very very careful with how you use them. You can work faster but do a lot more damage also.

This is how I've felt for a long time now. Sadly, I work at a company whose leadership is incessantly pushing "AI native" and I recently was denied a promotion in part because I don't share our VP's rosy view of AI. "Innovation teams" who generate all of their code with AI get tons of recognition while real engineers that are doing real work behind the scenes are ignored by leadership. I keep hoping this bubble will burst and sanity will return, but I fear that the hold AI has on executives' minds may be a permanent one.

While obviously requiring real-world ID verification will reduce privacy, is there really any actual privacy left on today's internet? Every company from your ISP to Google to every vendor you shop at can read your browser fingerprint and IP address, which in most cases is enough to uniquely identify you. For serious privacy-concerned users there are ways around all of this but the vast majority of internet users don't really seem to care. What additional level of privacy reduction do the ID-based plans cause beyond what we already have today?

Many parents don’t have the technical aptitude to set the controls up properly. I am a software engineer and I find it challenging to keep up with the nuances of parental control setup and how to adjust it as kids get older. Content is also imperfectly tagged and smart kids can easily find loopholes in most controls. Having a centralized ID validation system wouldn’t be an ideal solution but having something baked into the Internet itself to help parents shield their kids from inappropriate would be a good thing.

I think he means "eyeware is next" in the sense that it's the industry he'll be covering next. Pretty much every brand and every layer of the eyewear industry has been owned by Luxxotica for a long time.

They really picked a strange set of claims to ask people about.

- For the protein one, it's too general of a question. Some plant proteins aren't complete proteins while others are, and animal proteins can range from super-healthy oily fish to less-healthy bacon.

- The next three are more standard "almost certainly false" claims that would make sense to ask in a survey like this.

- The acetaminophen/autism thing was in headlines recently with lots of people either hyping it up or trying to discredit it. It's hard to say anything is clear either way, but it isn't completely outrageous to believe this one.

- Finally, "vaccines are used for population control" is just an outright conspiracy theory and not even mainstream for "false health claims."

Lumping different types of questions together like this is like saying "more than 70% of people believe that butter isn't as bad as we thought or that the moon landing was faked."

When you own a lot of books physical storage becomes an issue. I had to stop buying physical books because I have nowhere to put them.

UPDATE: Solar was 37.6, not 27.7. I'm not quite sure where I got the incorrect number from. The corrected total is 121.93, which is indeed greater than the 120 for natural gas. I apologize for the error but I can't edit my original comment anymore so I'll just post the correction here. Thanks to mekdoonggi and 0xdde for correcting my mistake.

You are right, I read 37 as 27. I will update my parent comment.

They are increasing, but the level is still lower than it's been since Oct 2020. In my experience at two different companies since 2020, hiring more or less stopped sometime in 2022 to early 2023. In early 2025, some hiring started again but it's still a very low rate compared to pre-COVID, particularly for new college grads. While I don't believe that AI has actually taken any significant number of jobs in the software field, I do think it's being used as a convenient excuse by executives to lay people off. Regardless of the actual numbers though, the general perception in tech is "lots of layoffs are happening with not so much hiring" and "AI has something to do with it (either directly or as an excuse)."

This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.

Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.

I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

Vanity sizing is huge for men also. I have a 36" waist and I'm generally a 33 waist in most brands. Oddly, dress shirts tend to be spot on.