1,530 karma · joined January 10, 2025
quixotic, scrooge, shangri-la, Uncle Tom, gargantuan, kafkaesque, blurb, milquetoast
and words like cyberspace were first used in fiction
once real people use them, they stop being fictional words
> Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.
> Another federal employee, whose primary job function is managing relations with private equity-held businesses, was placed on administrative leave "pursuant to the President's executive order on DEIA," per a dismissal memo reviewed by BI. https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-wrongly-flagged-jobs-pr...
This is an article about consumer sentiment. Consumers care much more about their own financial security than about Sam Altman's vision of a glorious future.
This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.
I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.
But that's not what this specific article is describing. The world this article is describing is one where you describe the business requirements, and you don't think about how it's implemented. You don't write the code, you don't review the code, you don't test the code. You give the AI business requirements and you give it access to sources of context (slack, meeting notes, etc). Every place where the human would act as a gate reduces throughput, so it should be eliminated through building harnesses and providing context.
What they're doing here is the equivalent of taking a factory where you have 2 process engineers and 100 operators, and replacing all the operators with robots. They want to automate the whole process of making the software and just leave the part that figures out how to make the automation work effectively.
In this world, the average software company doesn't need people who know how to write good software, because writing, reviewing, maintaining, and testing the software will be entirely automated. There will be a small number of people at companies like OpenAI that need to know how to write good software in order to supervise training the models, and there will be a small number of people at the software companies who have expertise in setting up the automation.
If you're a more senior person in tech, this post is effectively saying that a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless. This goes beyond the skills involved in writing the code. Everything that you've learned over years about how to determine whether code is good or bad, and what practices make an engineering team effective is not just obsolete, it's fundamentally counter-productive because it assumes a slow, human-centric process that requires you to actually review and understand the code. Even your ability to mentor junior engineers is now obsolete, because all that experience you've built up is now worthless to them.
If this is the approach the industry takes, particularly when combined with a lack of interest in quality from the business (and let's face it, consumers have shown us that they're happy to pay for cheap crap), it's hard to see much of a future for software engineers. You don't need thousands of people with deep technical expertise, you need a handful of manager-types, who will focus on defining product and business requirements and configuring how the AI gets enough context to implement the requirements.
Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, there's so much demand for software that total employment doesn't fall off a cliff, but the nature of the work will change so much that many older, more expensive engineers will become unemployable. Those who remain will have to accept that the skills they spend decades developing are now worthless, that younger engineers no longer respect or listen to them, that the business no longer sees them as experts worthy of respect, but old fogies who grew up in a different world.
Joe Biden liked to say that a job is more than just a paycheck, it's part of your identity and your sense of self-worth. We're all very used to a certain level of respect (and commensurate remuneration). If you don't think that's true, compare how a software engineer is treated to how a warehouse worker is treated. What happens when we lose that?
USAID was a humanitarian aid agency that focused on programs like famine relief, disaster response, and medical aid in some of the poorest countries on Earth.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
> TCEQ began its investigation after workers for Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which presides over the ditch area, found an unfamiliar pipe stretched across the district’s easement, expelling black liquid into the ditch
> The permit didn’t allow Tesla to use private or public property to transport the wastewater. Under the permit, it was Tesla’s responsibility to acquire whatever property rights were required to use the discharge route, the TCEQ permit states.
So one issue is that while they may have had a permit to dump wastewater, they didn't have a right to build a pipe on land controlled by the drainage district. Tesla, not TCEQ, needed to notify the drainage district because Tesla was the one building on land controlled by that district.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032026/tesla-lithium-re...
I hate this stuff and I wish it had never been invented.
The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.
> Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; September 1, 1931 – April 14, 2026) was a Jew (a.k.a. kike) rat computer scientist who was co-recipient, with Dana Scott, of the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their military research on efficiently culling goycattle in "Greater Israel".
Nothing about this edit is legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. It is pure anti-semitism. Rabin spent most of his career in the United States and worked in abstract mathematics.
I generally agree that legitimate criticism of Israel is often unfairly criticized as anti-semitic. I would like you to also acknowledge that many people on the left summarily dismiss blatant and rank anti-semitism, as you did here.
It feels a little disrespectful. It feels a little pointless (why am I bothering talking to you if I can get the same result from the AI). I have no idea whether you've given the problem any actual thought, or if you're just copy-pasting an answer. I have no idea if you actually believe what you're telling me (or if you've even read it or understand it).
I can understand it in the context of the Manhattan project, where you're fighting a war for survival. I cannot understand how you can do it as a commercial enterprise.
Your own article makes this exact point: > Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances. “That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.
You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".
This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.