ericmcer

I had the exact same description, like verbatim minus coffee and sugar for someone born in 1809.

My paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone struggling seeing their kids account go up a $100 might compel them to support the bloated financial/banking industry now that they get a few drops from it.

More like timing.

White guy coming out of college in the late 80s/90s and wanting to get into tech was a rarely opportune hand.

As soon as I read "just redo your career every 2 years" I knew exactly what time period he was 22 during.

Either way a lot of people had similar backgrounds and didn't achieve anything like what he did.

They are only good in the context of the engineer guiding them.

I really can’t imagine what would happen if I didn’t manually intervene sometimes and just kept prompting it for the new behavior I wanted.

Good point, the endless growth means comical amounts of money at the top.

It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.

They just have to convince everyone the market going up is good for the average person. The big problem is most people can't afford to invest so they don't give a shit what it does.

Fortunately they are creating a $1000 investment account for all newborns so everyone will be addicted to the market remaining green from birth.

All of these conversational AIs should either confidently detect a users intent or apologize and offer to forward call to a real person.

LLMs perform pretty poorly when you start try to restrict them too much (e.g. detect intents and control responses based on intent detection), the replies gets disjointed and weird feeling. An open ended prompt and chat completion gives a much better feeling most of the time but can go off the rails.

If you don't let LLMs handle the conversation entirely you get into insanely complex traditional engineering problem: (if user is complaining do x, if user asks a relevant question do y, if user asks an irrelevant question do z), which is an endless can of worms.

Is there a video of this working?

Doing STT -> LLM -> TTS seems like a pretty straightforward problem until you start using it.

Sometimes it feels like the more someone has memorized all the little acronyms and jargon and principals around programming the worse they are as an engineer.

I worked with a guy who would constantly drop niche jargon and quotes from famous engineers and then kind of smugly look at you. He could not write a function without proudly saying what principals it was following. He was a horrible programmer, ended up getting laid off.

My experience as well, it is too fond of abstractions and will constantly spin up functions like: isUserAdmin(){return user.isAdmin}

which look nice on a surface level but obfuscates real understanding of the code and the actual data structures being used. Your end result is pretty and reads nice, but is bloated and difficult to reason with code.

if anything they are even more tight fisted because every penny is theirs.

publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.

I used to access locked floors in my old office building by using these algos.

Just ride to the floor I have access too, stay in while the doors close, and it would take me to a random floor. Push open door and voila I was on some random corporations private floor.

ingredients aside, coffee tastes somewhat natural whereas most energy drinks taste like liquid sweet tarts. I have never had one and felt remotely like it might be healthy.

You are also cutting out preservatives, additives, sucralose, dyes and whatever else is in the long ingredient list.

Agree, the best part of writing by hand for me is that I can do it anywhere and anytime. Randomly during a hike or laying outside in my backyard, small notebook + pen is easy.

Fountain pen + fancy paper sounds like I am tied to a desk again. Stephenson is probably doing way more intense sit down grind out some pages type writing sessions though.

I feel this, it must be nice to get from your teenage years to your mid 30s without having a bunch of life events crash into you.

The prompts would more be like: "The dancing and lip movement is still wildly out of time with the music"... "Ok now the dancing is even more out of sync with the beat"

I don't post at all and delete it periodically.

The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social media deleted my brain reaches out for something: Hacker News or Zillow or even stock market tickers get swapped in as the void-fillers.

I wonder if life was always sort of boring and lacked meaning and people used to just sit in that reality patiently or if modern life has siphoned meaning off of it so we have had to replace it with these mindless activities.

I dunno even isolated to language specific aspects someone with no experience could hang themeselves. I use a ton of Go & Javascript, if you take a fundamental part of both languages, async operations and compare them they have radically different approaches. Even if I was skilled at distributed systems with deep JS knowledge I would lack the skills to audit Go code effectively. goroutines and channels require a bit different mental model than promises and callbacks. You could easily let the AI architect a mess that works.

That is why I would be hesitant to review complex Rust or some other code I have no experience in, sure the language has ways to handle things like async, garbage collection, etc. but I would just be assuming the AI is doing it right or even worse trying to steer it to handle it in a Javascript or Go manner.

I dunno I find it almost more important than ever to have deep domain experience. You need to be able to scan output and spot any problems/improvements instantly. If I am just auditing AI output around an area I don’t have mastery of I am basically useless.

and you never look at the code?

I understand the feasibility of this and sometimes in my lazier moments I skim the code changes and trust automated/manual testing to validate changes, but to just like... you don't even see what it did?

I think this all stems from Baby boomers controlling the narrative. Baby boomers had an insane relationship with the sun. Getting crispy brown tan, using tanning oils, using that metal collar to blast sun directly into their face, and frequenting tanning beds were viewed as totally normal and healthy things.

Big surprise they all got skin cancer. Then they swung the pendulum all the way back and now preach 24/7 sunscreen and never letting the sun touch you.

Is referring to these new models as "LLM"s still correct anymore? The frontier models are a more complex orchestration of LLMs and many other programming techniques, they aren't just a weight set anymore.

The whole purpose of this is to let non-technical users say things like "make a flappy bird games" and have it succeed after using 10 million tokens. A decent engineer could build the same thing in 20 mins with a small local LLM.

Same thing with a cyberattack, someone who generally knew what they were doing could quickly surface the info to perform each step of an attack. The govt just wants to ensure random 12 year olds can't type: "how I hack fortnite?" and get a step by step guide.

Heavily agree.

The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.

That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.

For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.

Yeah being good is great but... some of the best engineers I have ever met are working at small companies making 150k, while mediocre ones fell into Meta/Google/Tesla jobs during the pandemic hiring frenzy and are now looking at retirement.

If the goal is to be good that is fine, but there is little correlation with salary.

Similar story where as soon as someone made a 100k+ offer to me I dropped out of school and never looked back (was making $12/hr at the time).

In retrospect it was not the best choice because college does give you a unique chance to get connections that let you into "the club" and will send you to the upper echelons of FAANG and early retirement.

I always thought I would just become a better and better engineer cutting my teeth at startups and then make the switch, but now it almost feels like you are a career startup engineer or a career big tech engineer, and making the switch is difficult. One is obviously insanely more lucrative, probably 3-5X with the way equity has exploded.

Only 39 but definitely relate.

From 18-28 life was sharing apartments with various friends just wiling our time away working easy jobs, rock climbing, video games, girls, etc. Then the looming pressure of "you are wasting your life!" drove us all into serious careers and relationships one by one.

Is it societal pressure that pushes us out of that life? It would be considered an "empty" existence, but being a part time bartender who just meanders around and spends time with friends/family until their time is up would be a weirdly buddhist lifestyle.

Yeah they seem clickable because anything Anti-AI is a bit soothing right now, but he is constantly wrong and usually is pushing the angle of "these businesses aren't even profitable!"

Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.

Same story, ended up just need to replace a fuse and clean out some filters.

I hate to be a "tech elitist" or whatever, but goddamn it seems like software is one of the most learning intensive careers you can pick. A little dabbling around the house has made me an amateur plumber/HVAC/handyman/gardener/etc. I should have gone into a trade, just for the comfort of having a skillset that doesn't need to be updated every 3 months. I guess my brain plasticity will thank me.

The dynamic of agent codes human reviews does seem like the only sane one for the foreseeable future. Even Anthropic themselves still fall back to this.

The problem is that sucks, even if all software engineers keep their jobs and salaries, the floor is still pulled out from under us. Imagine if a surgeons job was to supervise robot surgeons from a remote computer, or a woodworker just signs off on work before the machines do all the cutting and assembly. Sure they still have important jobs in their field but the soul & humanity of their skill is gone.

People outside of the tech industry are totally ignorant of how capable models are becoming.

Lawyers, Finance bros, Accountants, Doctors are all still barely being scratched at compared to the massive investments into AI tools for tech workers. I don't think they have had their "oh shit" moment where you realize you either need to adopt to this new world or be left behind, but it is coming.

If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.

Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.