Totally agree about the chat interface. I like to say it’s “infinitely powerful and infinitely confusing.” A dangerous combination. And, arguing with myself, I think it’s fair to say the code is AN object of our attention, if not THE object. A common metaphor being applied to agentic coding is the invention of power tools. If AI is the drill, and the goal is a house, then the code is the framing.
> A tool is not meant to be the object of our attention; rather the tool should reveal the true object of our attention (the thing the tool acts upon), rather than obscuring it
I think this is true of AI agents. What is the object of our engineering attention? Applications, features, defect resolution. Not code.
They have a monolith but struggle with individual subsystem failures bringing down the whole thing. Sounds like they would benefit from Elixir’s isolated, fail-fast architecture.
> I was being exposed to engineering concepts that just weren't a thing in agency work: unit testing, CI/CD, git hygiene, release management.
As someone who’s worked at an agency that’s grown from twenty engineers to hundreds over the last five years, what? Even when we were small and scrappy we still wrote unit tests…
“Tending bar” puts more emphasis on what one might argue is the more important part of the phrase. No one is there for the tender. Consider versus “woodworking”: you want the work, not the hunk of wood.
We need a publicly funded body whose purpose is to issue grants for firms to reproduce scientific findings. A scientific reproduction corps. Extra can be awarded for finding flawed/fraudulent research. This would create a community of organizations that counter-balance industry incentives and instill trust in our scientific process.
Would you still have, if you knew the strings that would come attached? Tracking your every move? Enabling governments to surreptitiously snoop on your audio and camera? Constant exposure to experiences designed to addict and immiserate you?
It’s not always possible to have a personal laundry machine available. Is it too much to ask that the machines also accept a credit card scanned in-person?
The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.
This is a perfect example (finally) of why even white collar workers need unions. Yes, even you in finance. Yes, even you in software engineering. It’s not just about pay!
That’s not true. We don’t need to do this. Absent intervention, sure these technologies are likely to be introduced and invade our lives. But we are humans, not computers, and despite the decisions of the last several decades, we are not required to allow market forces and the profit motive algorithm to make all decisions in our society. We can make whatever rules and decisions we want. It won’t come without a fight, but this horrifying development seems a pretty good place to start.
So have I. I love the people I work with (usually). That doesn’t change the nature of the wage relationship. We workers produce value through our labor which companies pay for in wages. Capital (CEOs, founders, VCs) wants to maximize the ratio of value to cost, therefore they wish to pay us as little as possible while getting maximum efficiency. It has nothing to do with liking your coworkers.
The only difference is our capital is digital, not physical. Binaries, not machines. As such we can build it without expensive raw materials and components, as those which form an assembly robot for example. Once one owns those binaries and other non-physical capital, one takes on the economic interests and incentives of that capitalist class, including the reduction of labor costs.
Hard to get more elitist than our politics and economy are now at the height of digital interconnection. The liberal democratic revolutions and popular democratic swell of the US labor movement under FDR all happened without the internet. A return of social connection to the community would be very much to our political benefit.
Derailments are a red herring here. The real issue being raised by the writer is: shifts on these "monster" trains are too long and employees are burning out.
What are they going to do? Refuse and lose their ridiculous salary? If only there were a way for workers to make a stand on this together, some kind of way to demands as a group.
NATO expansion did not trigger the war, Putin did that. It surely was a factor in his decision, however. If NATO, which after the fall of the Soviet Union lost its original reason for existence, had disbanded or even just stopped expanding, we'd surely be looking at a different situation today.
American Prestige focuses on American foreign policy but has been doing a segment covering the war from a heterodox perspective. The podcast is left leaning but reasonable and consistent in its analysis.