nradclif

What role do you play in creating software? If you don't need to see any code, should your employer consider cutting your position? I'm very much pro-humans-in-the-workforce, but I can't understand how someone could be ok with doing so little at their job.

It applies to the technical track too, which has levels you can move up. The names of levels vary from company to company, but most seem to have ~10, so there’s plenty of room to move up the technical ladder. I’m in the US, so I’m not sure if this applies elsewhere.

In tech companies, there’s usually both technical and management tracks, and you can be promoted up the ladder (many times over) without changing jobs. At a certain point you’ll do less design and coding, and more high level strategy, but that’s not until you’re nearing the top of the ladder.

From Gemini:

The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.

The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.

The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.

The Role of Wong Kim Ark

The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.

The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.

It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.

A million trillion operations per second is literally an exaflop. That's one hell of a GPU you have.

> if you don't go into management after about five years, usually it is seen as a failure to grow up on their career

I don't see how that's possible. Wouldn't such a norm result in something like a 7:1 ration of managers to engineers (i.e., assuming a 40ish year career, the first 5 years are spent as an engineer, and the remaining 35 as a manager)? For team managers, I've generally seen around a 1:10 ratio of engineers to managers. So a 7:1 ratio of managers to engineers just doesn't seem plausible, even including non-people leaders in management.

I don’t know the exact utilization, but most large supercomputers that I’m familiar with have very high utilization, like around 90%. The Slurm/PBS queue times can sometimes be measured in days.

Stephenson had a rough start in my opinion—Snow Crash isn’t really his best. Try Anathem instead. If you don’t like that, you probably won’t like Stephenson.

> niche domains

I’m not sure if I would call movies and video games “niche”.