sdevonoes

I won’t lie. I want to be Captain/Director, not the rower.

It’s very satisfying to get rich by doing pretty much nothing. And there’s some sadness when some rower does their best but doesn’t even come close to directors/captain positions.

Some excellent rowers can make it sure, but we all are not excellent. Oh well, I stop

Users don’t like shit, though.

I think it depends on the job one has. Working as senior software engineer for international companies? Any western european country is nice and all. Top p90 salary. English only needed. Working as a bank cashier? Well, then you will notice the difference between let say Germany and Portugal. Low salary. Need proficiency in the local language, etc.

The litmus test is this: do you enjoy consuming AI-generated stuff?

I don’t. Whether it’s written text, or video, audio, restaurant menus, clothing pictures, documentation, airport control, ads…

I do think there’s value in LLMs but as a sort of better search engines and q/a machines.

Im not so sure if this is a pro or a con. Take two extremes at product building: brute force vs deep research first. I guess llms allow you to experiment quickly with many approaches and see what sticks. Without llms, you need to spend more time researching and thinking what’s the most economical approach. Im biased towards the non-llm approach

Everyone can write; that doesn’t mean everyone can produce an interesting novel. If everyone can produce software via llms, that doesn’t necessarily mean that software is useful or interesting.

Compilers also write code (they write machine code based on high level langs)… yet nobody asked the same question about them (or did they?)

AI needs to be instructed and then some kind of verification of the output is needed. Programmers do that

So, if engineers out there are not even interested in the most immediate layer of code in front of their eyes (e.g., the code that is now written by LLMs), I guess more and more the kind of stuff like the one in the article is becoming like software archeology, isn’t it?

I love to learn these stuff, and pre-llm era it gave me a plus career wise. Nowadays I guess knowing this stuff pays less off (besides increasing your curiosity)

As someone who has never visited China or the US; yes. Why? Media. School shootings, ICE, crazy president… What do I see from China? Impressive multi-million cities… and true to be told, not much.

China had a worse reputation, but not anymore since Trump leads the US.

Im not saying that the above is objective, tho

Would that single person handle different topics such as: UI/UX, security, backups, distributed systems, data migrations, infrastructure, …?

Sure thing there are engineers out there that know some about all of the above (I personally do all of that on personal projects) but you still need specialists, otherwise it’s you alone with all the unknown unknowns that the llm may claim to solve, but you cannot verify

But searching on google or SO wasn’t the bottleneck either. It was searching on your own codebase (and dependant ones) for the exact place (a class, a file, a function) where to put/delete/update business logic without breaking production.

LLMs help, but they haven’t been trained on our own repos. I don’t need the LLM to help me with algos that are available online… I need them to help me with custom business logic

Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?

Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.

Another reason why LLMs suck. So far cons > pros

Im curious, since I don’t drink coffee nor take protein supplements and the like, my question is: is the plan you keep taking what you take, let’s say, “forever”? Because the moment you stop taking, wouldn’t you notice a big drop?

One could say it’s a way of “trust, but verify “

I remember buying a Nike Tshirt in the early 2000s: good quality, and still looking decent today. Nowadays most of the Nike/Adidas/etc stuff is very low quality fabric and not necessarily cheap (at least in Western Europe)

AI as a replacement of Google. When I wanted to learn about something the usual path was: google it. Go through dozens of links, discard, filter the good ones, read them, and gain the knowledge.

Nowadays I ask the question to the LLM and for every answer I demand the links/urls where the LLM get the info from. I still read the referenced web sites. It’s faster.

We are the ones to get to decide. Do we want that? I don’t. But im just a single data point

How are (tech) consultants typically hired? They also go through the nonsense of live coding / systems design interview? Or they get asked specifically about the problem they need to solve and see if they are a good fit or not?

The problem to solve is addiction. When I was a kid I could spend the whole day and week in front of the play station… but my parents thought me that, well, that’s not normal (and ofc sent me to sleep every other night). Why social media or phones is different? Parents need to teach these kind of stuff to their kids. It’s the same for drugs, sex, money or any other thing

If LLMs can handle 99% of software jobs, then they can “crack” robotics software and then we would have LLMs on robots to replace the rest of the workers

Nerds? We are not in the 90s anymore. The stereotype of software engineers has changed dramatically (for better or worse). All my current and past colleagues are the opposite of the “nerd”: talkative, married, with kids, investing… none of them like starwars and the like

You shouldn’t run any AI cli (codex, claude code, open code, whatever) locally outside of a vm. It’s like “you shouldn’t run a .exe you downloaded from the internet if you don’t trust the source”. We will learn

Software. I typically use Macs. Previous one lasted 8-9 years (still working but bad battery). Current one (apple silicon) probably gonna last me the same time

In a world where we have people like Trump, Musk, Thiel, et al, with extreme power and resources, why would we hope for something like climate change to be addressed?

What can scientists do? Even if they are 100% right and can prove it, they have no power to do anything. Governments of the top countries are puppets of the US, so there’s not much to do. Other governments are dealing with more mundane problems. And the “A fucked up planet affects everyone equally” is just not true. Billionaires can live in a fucked up planet just fine. They don’t even need people (as demonstrated by AI and its goal of replacing workers). They truly don’t care about us. And if the worst forecast for the planet is to come, they also won’t care (they would just live to their fullest while they can)

Always surprises me how people feel identified with progress they didn’t participate with. These satellites have nothing to do with you. You didn’t build them nor researched about them. These are the toys of a far-right asshole. It sucks

I was waiting for GTA 6… but if it’s not released in disk, then I will simply pass. If new games start to be non-physical, then I will simply stop playing new games

From my naive pov: Related to computation is the concept of state (I know, functional languages can get away without it, sort of). I always wondered how the universe “knows” the mass of the sun. If there are some underlying functions/computations “running” in the background to keep planets moving and so on, and if the mass of planets is a key element in such computations… then either: the mass is calculated “on the fly” every time (seems expensive) or it’s a variable (how is it updated? Where is it “stored”?)

What is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past?

Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.

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