1,086 karma · joined January 31, 2013
Recently, Sonnet 5.5 got quite good, too, but not at the level of Opus/Fable for complex geometry
Disclaimer: I use it for very precise 3D printing, not woodwork.
We kinda-in-the-spectrum fathers of young girls are something else. Finding out at your 40s-ish that sometimes people wants to talk to "just talk" is kind of embarrassing.
The problem is the assumption that I'm obliged to endure such long pointless conversation. I'll need a very strong reason (e.g. you're literally my daughter), or I'd just leave.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly? replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor? make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
However the risks compared to physical jobs are not even close, they're at two different levels.
There's many, many things that can kill you instantly in the trades. Then there's stuff that may ruin your body no matter how careful you are.
Example: doing roofing means you're walking in a sloped plan all day long, every day. After 20 or 30 years, you'd barely have usable knees.
But now that you're asking:
It's the ones that need to make wild claims like that your brain is obsolete so they can continue operating at a huge loss.
It's the ones that have multi-year investments in data centers so would very much love a discount on the trades price tag.
It's the ones that want to monopolize and control the price and value of intellectual work.
It's the ones that have been claiming that engineers will be out of a job in 3 months for the past 3 years.
I can keep going but I think that's enough.
However the main point is: just pay attention to who is telling you to get a job in the trades instead of a knowledge one.
In my experience corporate box checkers don't care about reasoning (much less "encryption") at all, they see it as an annoying blocker in their path to the next promotion.
This is very likely the case. And if it is, then it's a lost battle. You simply can't reason with that kind of corporate people, let alone have an argument around this level of complexity. Kafka (the writer, not the message broker) predicted this 100 years ago.
When going through the article, my instinct was changing from "annoying" to "this really sounds like a Python 2/3 moment for Git" to finally "oof this is going to be a mess" in the libraries/submodules part.
It's certainly not like I remember it in the 80s, but still happens a lot, and my uninformed take is: "community" in the US was never that cohesive, it only took so much to make it fall apart.
About a year ago there was a "Show HN" post (can't find it now) and the SteamDB guy won the internet that day.
He went into details on how running SteamDB wasn't much of a trouble and it was mostly eye candy on top of the Steam API, in some VPS for $100/mo total, and little maintenance (apparently the Steam APIs are fairly stable).
If he wants to cash it and check out, fine by me, you can't blame him.
The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*].
Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English.
The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important".
[*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
What I've found is that LLMs are excellent tools for:
- Spitting out white collar corporate speak that sounds plausible to other corporate speakers
- Hugely accelerating the process of going through academia which, except for a few specific cases, is essentially years of copy/pasting
- Writing code as long as such code as been written many times before
- Figuring out which one of the 10 ads and 12 misleading links in a web search is the one you're looking for
- Summarizing a book in ten paragraphs so you don't have to read it
...which turns out a lot of people defined as "thinking". I don't agree with that. But in either case, not "too much" is being offloaded: it's all of it.
For Xbox being what it is today, which is mostly about the subscription and not the hardware console or the exclusives, you have to compound their acquisition frenzy of 2018-2020 or so, which totals about 75 billion+.
They didn't want the developers nor the catalog. What Microsoft wanted is to change the economics and dynamics of the entire games industry, to make it Netflix-like (play what's in the catalog today, pay monthly even if you don't play anything) vs. what Steam offers (purchase once, own "forever", even if it's de-listed).
But that didn't play out. Optimistic estimates put total revenue for Xbox since then in the 20B ballpark. At a ~5% margin (as other commenters have pointed out) the profit is about 1B dollars.
It means that after almost a decade, the entirety of Xbox is in the red for about 74 billion dollars, which is 74 billion away from breaking even.
Steam still dominates PC gaming. Xbox consoles can't be more irrelevant today.
This isn't about over-hiring or AI. It was a bet at the executive level that went horribly wrong. They can still do things like selling IPs at a bargain to compensate, but still. Horribly wrong.
Note: Microsoft doesn't publish hard factual data so the numbers above are somewhat speculative (e.g. "analysts data")
They're allowing comments and obviously the first thing there is a scam.
No way any goodwill on the Internet is going to prosper. Not anymore.
What got me out of academia (yup, I was a professor) was:
Do you have vast field experience and want to get into the classroom to teach how it's really done? Tough luck, you should've spent your time writing papers.
No matter how much you know or how good you are, everything is about feeding the maximalist machine, if you're an outlier, worse people with better "scores", more papers and never leaving faculty will forever beat you until they retire.
I took a good look at the publishing process. Absolutely everything about it was back-channeling to carefully select the topic, scope and reviewers of a paper to get it through the process. Goodhart's Law at its finest.
Advice given to me: "aim for a lower rank and be happy with teaching the whole thing while the old professor takes a nap in the corner".
AI or not AI, anything destroying that self-perpetuating bureaucracy is welcome.
As for the remaining 99%, maybe they should stop pretending they know (and giving advice) about navigating a typical production code base.
1% are the absolutely brilliant minds that academia was originally created for. People that, without a doubt, leave their mark in the vast corpus of human knowledge. I consider myself fortunate for meeting and learning from them, and I thank the academia ecosystem for that.
But the remaining 99% are the maximalists, as described in the article. More papers/students/grants, then repeat. Worse enough, they're absolutely useless outside of academia, as they never did anything at all outside that bubble.
An embarrassing lot of CS professors would stumble around your average production codebase.
I think AI is just the final nail in the coffin for the latter bunch, as they have been dogs eating their own tail for decades already.
That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.