flatline

I’m sure the big tech companies are working on exactly this and trimming resources from other areas, both from a simple logistics standpoint and from conversations I’ve had with folks who work (or worked) for these places doing AI.

I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere near ready for this type of rollout, so it will be a while before we see results. The cost of something like GPT 3.5 deployed at scale is tremendous. The censoring of responses will make it an obstreperous assistant, unless this has gotten considerably better in the last few months. And are we all just going to accept hallucinated results over something that is either vetted or clearly misunderstood?

I don’t even know how far away we are from sufficiently powerful TPUs that fit a mobile case and power profile. But I do think this is likely to be the next big mobile advancement, however far off it may be.

Mine is first initial, somewhat-uncommon last name at gmail.com. Address acquired during the public beta back in 2004.

I regularly get reminders for dental visits in Oklahoma, purchase orders for machinery in Germany, and course registrations for some person who works in my industry and was easily searchable online.

It is not so intrusive to be problematic, and is mildly interesting.

Where is the financial incentive beyond the seed funding here? Big scientific efforts like this have always been well-suited to government funding, or in some cases industrial R&D by a big established group with a separate profit center. When you have a project with a 20+ year time horizon for any meaningful progress, I just don’t think the capitalist model is going to yield fruit.

I agree with your other point that data crunching is not necessarily going to help. Low-power RF emission from lightyears away will be well below the noise floor. Some more innovative, speculative approaches would be a better use of that money, even if they all lead to dead ends.

About that scaling…

I’ve seen workflows with data chunked out into multiple excel files because the results exceeded the row limit (4 million?) Going through all that by hand was a pain, and it took hours to go from a flat file format to spreadsheets. Parquet took this down to seconds, and provided a rich data analysis API.

Spreadsheets scale for small to medium-ish workflows and are very much a drag for anything remotely “big.”

It’s all fun and games till “they” become part of a group and the antecedent is complete guesswork. I use they/them pronouns, but there is a slightly different effort for different usages, and I wish we had something else that was more natural.

From the platforms, generated by ad views by followers. Or more accurately, ad clicks downstream from that.

What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result.

I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high.

I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a much safer-than-human computer driver was within close reach. It no longer looks so rosy. I think Waymo’s approach will prove the most successful, and will end up with many of the same constraints as public transit. These companies have been going at it for a long time and have mostly demonstrated just how hard the problem really is. There is a decade of sunken cost for anyone leaving the market now. Would replacing human drivers be cost effective in any reality? I’m unsure.

So-called “soft skills” are essential to effective management and hence team cohesion, employee happiness, and lots of other hard to measure metrics which still contribute directly to the bottom line and the team’s ability to deliver. Someone with minimal technical skills and great people skills can still effectively lead strong technical teams. If those skills are not present on a team at all, they will struggle 100% of the time. Nobody may even recognize the struggle if there is no one who can identify these things.

I am employed and looking to relocate to the Bay area. I’ve been applying for a few weeks and am going into a third round interview this upcoming week. I am getting responses from established startups, nada from big tech. I’m looking at leadership roles for the first time so I’m not sure what to expect. A decade ago when I took my current job, I was looking at 4 offers after 6 weeks of applying.

There seem to be a lot of open positions, but I suspect not compared to the number of folks on the market. Big tech just dumped a bunch of folks. “Regular tech” seems to be doing fine.

That sounds like a pretty amazing layout. Maybe in 100 years we will have something like that in the US!

As a single person, I do not think living in a city is that big a challenge. Sure it’s expensive, you still have to hustle, but you can get a studio or roommates or even live with family, that is how people get by.

Once you are partnered and have kids it becomes much more challenging. I know someone who raised a family of five kids in a 2BR in Chicago, it can be done. But it’s a cultural issue: that is what poor people do, and nobody wants to feel poor. So we expect to have a big house that is unaffordable in the city and we move to cheaper climes and commute.

The nuclear family is a big part of the problem. Going back to multi-generational housing with little private space is not a super popular option, but Gen Z seems to be dipping their toes…

She points out many things that would help and yet I am unsure by how much. There is only so much land in and around most major cities. Anything “affordable” with access to desirable things will not remain so for long. The most likely outcome in my mind is endless tracts of poorly thought out suburban development, more reliance on cars and less on public transit, thus exacerbating other problems. Yes SF has some special and critical issues but demand to live in and around the city will always outstrip supply. There are a few places that have tried to do suburban city planning well, but even if you buy into a walkable neighborhood with jobs, who stays put at a job for more than a few years? Most people will still want new opportunities that will put them back in their cars.

I would love to think that remote work will solve some of this, but myself and many others do not find that fulfilling or sustainable in the same way as even being in the office 2-3 days a week. RTO is increasingly becoming a trend, which I personally find unfortunate but can understand.

We can and should get rid of some dated zoning restrictions and ineffective leaders but it’s not going to be a panacea by any means.

I have worked with interns and young devs just out of school who are sharp as tacks. I had an intern a few years ago, the first task we paired on was to figure out why our MySql connections from Qt were misbehaving. We stepped through the application code, the Qt code, found where it was failing, and ended up backporting a Qt patch from upstream to fix it. Yes, I gave him some guidance, but once he caught on he was able to navigate this complex mess of C++ code across a few technology stacks and effectively reason about it and make changes.

A lot of CS skills are generalizable. Knowledge is one component you pick up with time. A good education, self-taught or otherwise, should allow you to drop into any sort of code and be effective without much spin-up. College covers CPU architecture, assembly, networking, operating systems, web, algorithms. This is not esoteric stuff, it is very standard and you can get it all in class or from textbooks free online!

Neither is mm-dd-yy!

There is no clear path for growth. We have already written software for about every common need. The industry is finally somewhat mature, and it is hard to see how it is sustainable at this scale.

You really don’t need a ton of staff dedicated to those things in a 100 person company. This is still a small business by most measures. A C Suite? It could be a sole owner still at that size, though it is stretching the margins. Roles tend to be less differentiated in small companies, and many of those functions are filled informally.

That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.

There have been several notable collisions in the last decade. I think a full blown Kessler scenario is unlikely but it will definitely be a problem for satellite operators. Let alone the impacts on terrestrial astronomy.

The cost of preserving life, human or otherwise, has skyrocketed. When I was a kid, it cost $25 for a vet visit and something like $100 for a minor surgical procedure. Adjusted for inflation those are probably about the same today, the difference being there were no major surgical procedures available for pets. Also, the vet did not carry $150k in student loan debt.

A decade ago I had a kitten with heart arrhythmia. The vet suggested we go to a cat cardiologist. To me that seemed insane, it was going to be $1000 just to get inspected. The cat is alive and well today with no cardiologist visit.

What is the value of the kitten’s life when it was a rescue and there are thousands more to pick from if it passed?The reality is that creating life is cheap and plentiful on planet earth. The resources to preserve life are not. If you are privileged you can afford to pay for your pet’s care. That is a sentimental choice for most people, not a practical one. The equation is different for human life, but only by degree. Insurance is only going to do so much, there is a real cost to medical treatment.

Google docs, really any online collaborative editor uses them. If you have a distributed system with multiple asynchronous data feeds into the same sink, this is one way of automatically resolving conflicts. A complicated way that most applications probably don’t really need, and that does not guarantee consistency. But they are neat.

Do you really have an engineering manager role open? I may be interested, but it is not listed on that page.

I’m saying that organizations can, in fact, write safety critical code. One wheel does not need to account specifically for pedestrians crossing the road, but it does need to behave properly under a wider variety of conditions than a spacecraft or launch vehicle. Give it a decade with a half dozen teams working to making the code correct, and I think you could get there.

I am inclined to think that a commercial entity cannot reliably write safety critical code for a primary income driver. You need different financial incentives and probably a different organizational structure for this to work.

At the risk of derailing my point in minutiae, I suspect Waymo will ultimately deliver safe self-driving technology sooner than Tesla, for example.

We can write safety-critical software. Look at NASA’s CMM level 5 processes for some of their flight control software.

I’m not as familiar with applications in other domains, but I know they exist. This is typically not fun code to write. It is bureaucratic and developed over decades. It is more an engineering discipline than most commercial software. And, it is organizational, this is not code written by a single individual. I would not trust that at all. More eyes mean more trust, broadly speaking.

The 737 Max issues were not as much about software as corporate cost saving efforts.

I have no idea if the OneWheel software can be fixed. I’m sure there was real talent that went into it. I suspect the first to market and other financial incentives were big factors in this outcome. Just the fact they are only now, apparently, adding user notification of error states is kind of crazy.

So I agree that certain types of organizations are not trustworthy, but I also think the safest code we have ever written was done by…organizations.

I would consider $150k/yr in a MCOL area comfortably middle class - what single-income households used to have much more regularly. You can afford kids, a house, a car, a couple low-cost family vacations each year, and maybe put some money aside for savings.

That is now pretty much the median salary for a bunch of high earners.

The TSA is definitely the worst innovation of the last 20 years. Additional to that, lost luggage, missed or delayed flights, expensive changes - and I will still happily get on a plane without a second thought whereas I may have abandoned some other industry over far less. The ability to fly is truly miraculous. For $500 or less I can travel most of the way across two continents at non-peak times, and for about a grand I can cover most of the globe. Even poor people can scrape together that kind of money every once in a while.

I don’t prewash and it works pretty well. The problem is if bits of food sit overnight in the washer they spoil and make the whole wash stink.

I do think this is relevant to the conversation.

I don’t copy/paste code from SO but there is sometimes inevitable duplication because sometimes there is only one right way to do something! Copyright can stray into the case of the ridiculous pretty quickly.

Is an interface declaration inherently different from, say, a merge sort implementation? It’s all code. But they also serve very different purposes. I do not think prior to Google v Oracle there was much case law to distinguish between different types of code, but in the industry we recognize all kinds of nuance.

Only in part - and it would certainly not be “just fine”. Edge is pretty nice nowadays. It’s the tactics to promote it as the default - now and in the past - that have drawn so much scrutiny. And IE did used to be objectively inferior to the competition.

I’m saying the people at MS promoting this in this particular way are, well, dumb.

And yet the experience of Safari on iOS is overall pretty good. I think I would not hate the Edge experience quite so much if it did not shove MSN content in my face, display a garish bing search page, and aghressively promote their browser. Also it does not help that I have 25 years of experience avoiding MS browsers for various other reasons. I’m not saying it’s great that Apple does this, but I do think Microsoft could make fewer technically minded people (and legislators) complain about it if they were less aggressive with their tactics.

I have had so many of the same thoughts! Therapy has benefitted me greatly over the years and I have definitely grown from the experience. It has also helped me sort out the aspects of my life that therapy can help me address, and those areas in which it offers very little. There is no substitute for a supportive, nurturing environment of peers, lovers, elders, children, activity partners, business partners, etc. - take what you will from that list in which you personally find sustenance. Therapy is designed in part to help navigate those relationships, but an hour a week of talking individually to a specialist is woefully inadequate to repair any of them. The best it can do is give you coping tools and rudimentary communication skills. Increasing we are isolated and one or more of those key relationships is missing or badly dysfunctional and any support system that was once there in which those relationships could be mended is now gone.

Let’s not forget however that those support systems had (and still have) toxic attributes. They favored men, and put women and minorities in a subservient role. They tied you to family that may be abusive, or a dogmatic belief system. Kick that social structure out from under people, and what do you have left? An ever-changing and often overwhelming tapestry of less substantial and more poorly-defined relationships. Isolation as a replacement for conflict resolution. Therapy has not really caught up, nor is it even designed to address any of this.

Living debt free feels great, and is a huge privilege. Debt is perhaps the biggest economic driver humans have invented. It gives people leverage they would not otherwise have. College. Small business. Home improvement. Of course there is the downside of usury, payday loans, cc debt, medical debt, inflated education expenses, and all the other troubles caused by debt. But well-chosen debt can be a godsend.

This is particular, specifically problematic territory. I cannot imagine handing over proprietary data to a third party without a contract in place for how that data is stored and used. It’s not about innovation, it’s about using someone else’s tools without ownership. For the other case, it’s both about integrity in owning your own work, and a shield from legal consequences. These things should be very relevant to any business.

I also don’t know any professional devs who have used tools like copilot and said they were anything but a toy. I am more bullish on LLMs than most of my coworkers. I think there is a lot of potential there. I do not see that potential in the current commercial offerings, and the financial outlay to fine-tune an open-source model and run it at scale is…prohibitive.