aleph_minus_one

> If you value the freedom to pursue your own research direction and share your work freely, then choose academia.

The working environment in academia is often precarious :-( , so such people often have no alternatives to going into industry, even though they still deeply appreciate and are influenced by the values of academia.

With the same argument, you can argue that it is the programmer's job to decide which LLM shall work on the problem, and the programmer still gets the credit for the work. :-)

On the other hand: many managers love to claim to have been deeply involved in the development of some product when the actual work was done at least by their underlings, or sometimes even a completely different team.

If people were similar confrontive in calling out such managers ...

> SWE's are the worst about security, I swear most are worse than the average person when it comes to security practices.

My experience is completely different: many software developers are rather paranoid with respect to security, and have quite a good (though far from expert-level) knowledge about security. It's rather that many software developers are quite hostile to security practices that are mostly "security theater" and obstructs them in doing their work.

The following Reddit post

> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...

and the top answer

> https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...

describe the mindset that I observe rather well.

Nearly all people who work in tech have a university degree, many even a PhD.

> I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses.

You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.

> A lot of people just think laptop == laptop.

We are talking about highly educated people who work in software development (i.e. can assumed to have some minimum viable knowledge about computers), and not about the dumbest imaginable users.

What surprises me most about the Binance hacking story is that Binance employees seem to have used their work laptops for some "programming test" (whose purpose was - as we now know - spreading malware).

I mean: if you even consider leaving your current company, you better leave no traces of your plan on your work laptop: you either use a private laptop or, even better, some burner laptop/computer that you reset afterwards.

On the other hand (in particular for smaller companies particularly not in the USA): How much can you afford to pay? Can you actually afford the self-hosted route?

> One imagines maybe you can get to N^1.4 within that budget for whatever the brain is doing. Maybe. But that would be the limit.

Not for matrix multiplication of square matrices, since the output, which has to be written, is already of size O(n^2).

> About ETH: Many people say now that ETH was simply stated in a too strong manner, and that the correct exponential time hypothesis is SH, the Satisfiability Hypothesis.

In 3 months: some AI frontier lab will disprove SH.

> It's completely standard for "galactic" algorithms and not relevant to big-O runtime.

This is true, but if doing brute-force search for all instances below some super-astronomic threshold is part of the algorithm, you typically want to understand

- where this constant comes from,

- how much this constant can be decreased (or why it can't)

- etc.

So, proving the correctness of an algorithm which is doing brute-force search for all instances below some super-astronomic threshold is typically just the first step towards getting an understanding of the complexity-theoretic phenomenon.

So: There is indeed nothing wrong with such aspects of galactic algorithms, but exactly understanding and improving the super-astronomic thresholds involved is the next step.

> How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

German universities have a simple solution: students who believe that they have already "learned" calculus in school (in a sense every pupil with an Abitur school diploma (the kind of school diploma that you need in Germany to study at a university) had to learn) should hold to this belief at their own peril. :-)

Hint: After one week, these kids will hopefully have realized that the level of calculus that they learned in school was very shallow. :-)

> Ignoring the stabbings and shootings, the children are not disciplined, properly supported, or permitted to excel. The speed of education moves at the slowest students and interrupted by the most disruptive.

"Smart" and "disruptive" are in my opinion at least uncorrelated, perhaps there even exists a non-trivial relationship:

In my observation often children who are either much less or more smart than the average are the more disruptive ones, though the children at the two the ends of this spectrum differ in the kinds of disruptions.

Those who are in power in Western countries only preach free markets if it serves to their advantage.

An interesting consideration, but don't functional languages have overhead, too?

> Trump got confused and said shithouse (which makes no sense) instead of shithole, his original term for basically any non-white country.

Is Norway really a non-white country? ;-)

> This is the problem with HN not doing humor. You are always the one who does not grok it...

Rather: many people who are not US citizens or don't live in the USA don't really care about the gossip around Donald Trump's most recent tantrum.

> Name one instance that approaches this level of immaturity.

Not a head of state, but I nominate:

Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky (Владимир Вольфович Жириновский), "Russia's Trump"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky

> It is unfathomable to me how anyone can defend or relativize this despicable behavior.

From the perspective of a person who is neither a US citizen nor living in the USA: I (and many of my fellow countrymen/countrywomen) will relativize and defend a lot of Trump's tantrums since they give you so much material to laugh about.

:-)

> Ops is a specialized skillset completely orthog[o]nal to the business of building applications.

Exactly this was the idea: persons in a DevOps role have skills in both areas, i.e. are very wide skill set, so that one can assign them to very diverse tasks for more flexibility. Additionally, these persons can implement synergies to make things more efficient in areas that intersect both development and operation.

But in many countries (including Germany), you are not allowed to encrypt your transmissions via ham radio, e.g. using TLS with such IPv4 addresses is against the law.

If it is not rocket science, how does it work?

> Or just learn how to teach.

Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).

> Regular people don’t even upgrade to Win 10/11 unless they are forced to.

In consideration how much spying functionality was added with Windows 10 (which worsened even more with Windows 11), and that Microsoft made it insanely hard to install Windows 11 without creating some Microsoft account, it is actually very sensible that people don't want to upgrade to Windows 10/11, despite the technological improvements that these versions provide.

> Microsoft went all in and have really not got much out of their efforts.

The problem was rather that Microsoft had no real plan what they wanted to get out of AI. If they had a plan, they could have laser-focused their all-in on AI.

Instead, Microsoft just AI-slopped a lot of their bread-and-butter products, making them much worse than before. If AI is as revolutionizing and beloved by users as Microsoft believes, Microsoft could easily have created an offering like "Windows AI Pack" or "Microsoft AI" that should sell like hot cakes.

On the other hand, if you have to force AI functionality onto the users, it should be considered as a strong sign that perhaps it is not something that the users want.

> The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.

Indeed: the prosecution of Aaron Swartz drove him to suicide, while Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is still alive.

> N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case

... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.

> Funny how "maybe they work in different domain" doesn't come up here as well.

Good point. :-)

> Otherwise, the person building the bridge is not an engineer.

One is likely not an engineer if one does not notice the risk. But in practice, managers commonly desire docile subordinates, so the only thing an engineer can do in such a situation is to ensure that a paper trail gets generated that will be capable of breaking the manager's neck once the disaster has occurred. :-(