slindsey

"CS is the welding. SE is the structural engineering."

No. Computer Science (CS) is the basis. It's the fundamentals underneath Software Engineering (SE).

The author is trying to convey that current CS education is not enough to create a good Software Engineer, which is true. But SE is a specialization and CS is a broad overview of the core components of a computing education.

If you want to create a comparison to Civil Engineering (CE), this isn't it. CS to SE is more like the underlying physics that support the specifics of Structural Engineering.

A more apt comparison is that the low-level programmer who takes a spec and just implements it is the "welding"; this would be that fresh hire out of college in their first position.

With a minimum of googling, it seems that Honda already makes this vehicle in both the U.S. and Canada. They appear to be adding shifts to the U.S. to boost production 30% while lowering it elsewhere. So "Yay" I guess. It's one of the few situations where the tariffs can work short term. In most cases, shifting production from another country to the U.S. is a multi-year investment that tariffs won't significantly impact because they are changing too often to drive such long-term decisions.

The "Intelligent Machines" podcast from twit.tv interviewed them and they get away with this because they are not recording the audio. It is never recorded or kept, it is transcribed in real-time and then sent to the AI and tokenized. Cheating maybe, but it's how they're trying to get away with it.

For years I've thought of creating a "paid" Firefox fork that is _just_ Firefox rebranded, but otherwise the exact codebase. The money brought in would be used to pay an open source developer to work strictly on things intended to be sent upstream to the Mozilla Firefox. If nothing else, it would prove whether or not people are willing to pay for Firefox.

The problem with Firefox currently is the organizational structure; the way that they need to monetize; the fact that you can't pay for Firefox development. The problem with forks is that they are all "Firefox plus this" or "Firefox without that".

This is the key message in my opinion. I've worked with wonderful software developers who can accomplish far more than others (as well as a few who are a net drain on the team.) The key is to craft an organization that allows anyone with a minimum skillset to be successful. At least on the team that I'm currently in, this means a well-defined organization with clearly defined limits of what they should and should not do. This is with respect to customers and also internally.

He has joined the same substack, The Contrarian

I've heard AI advocates talk about a "right to read" or "right to learn"; meaning that we have the right to read something and then internalize it and use it. Therefore, why shouldn't an AI have the same right? The difference to me seems to be that the AI has the ability to regurgitate it in whole.

I can read a book, learn about the concepts, then use or repeat those concepts. The AI can do the same. But is it really "learning"? It may be just spewing out pieces of the content without any understanding. In which case it's a copyright violation, right?

I HATE working out. One thing I found that worked for me was to simply do 5 pushups and 10 squats first thing stepping out of bed. No matter what. Takes a few seconds and it's done before you can complain about it. After a while I bumped the numbers up. Then again and again. I still wasn't doing a long workout, but it was something and it made a big difference in eliminating wrist and back pain from sitting all day.

After a few months something would happen and I'd stop. Then after a few more months, the pain would start again and I'd get back into it the same way.

My team recently paid for this on self-hosted GitLab ultimate. I would not suggest this for self-hosted. We've been having issues that seem to be related to self-hosting that are requiring a lot of effort from our System Admins to work through with GitLab support.

Separate from that, there don't appear to be any benefits to having it "integrated" into GitLab. I'm assuming we'll switch to another tool shortly.

If it's just the text that they're concerned about, then putting that text (email and website text content) into something that can track changes is the right solution. Developers would use git. You could use Google Docs with a separate one for each email template and website content. Maybe MS Word if they use Sharepoint.

The simple answer is probably Google Docs with all the tracking and collaboration turned on so that every change is tracked by who made it and when. But again, that's only relevant for the text and maybe minimal layout.

I would assume that the intention is that the user sets their default (e.g. Firefox) and this prevents Microsoft from changing it back to Edge.

Since it doesn't say it anywhere on the linked page or in the headline, from Wikipedia:

Capture the Flag (CTF) in computer security is an exercise in which participants attempt to find text strings, called "flags", which are secretly hidden in purposefully-vulnerable programs or websites.

I expect there are many careers that are similar. In some ways, your experience doesn't matter. A civil engineer with 40 years of experience building houses, malls, or parking garages is still a rookie if they're building their first bridge, right? Many concepts still apply, maybe even most, but it's still going to be new and difficult. I have over 30 years experience as a software developer but I wouldn't want to program for medical equipment or dive into complex low-level architecture that I haven't thought about since college.

Based on my experience with Large Language Models (LLM) so far, I see more value in niche sites that marginalia will help the user find.

An LLM is regurgitating what it reads, true or false. There's a bias for things it sees more often. There's randomness in the response. Sure, humans are error-prone but a problem with known computer responses is that humans tend to think "a computer did this so it must be right." And LLMs are not pumping out true thoughtful answers but simply putting a string of probably words together.

The internet is vast and is increasingly filled with garbage, stolen and duplicated data, and monetization. It's nice to be able to look in the nooks and crannies of the internet for data.

I'm actually more interested in sites that do personal curation of interesting links that are personally vetted and of interest to someone than what's found through google or chatgpt.

There's also that picture of the trucker that shows the damage the sun did to the left side of his face after 28 years of driving a truck. Google "picture of trucker with sun damage"

Based on my mastodon experience, it's a little more nuanced than that. You are on a server (not the star trek one). Someone on your server needs to follow stuff on that star trek server for it to show up on your server. So if your community is mostly about fishing and no one likes star trek but you, you'll never see it unless you go looking for it.

Lazarus on FreePascal

"ReactOS™ is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft® Windows™ NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7).

The ReactOS project, although currently focused on Windows Server 2003 compatibility, is always keeping an eye toward compatibility with Windows Vista and future Windows NT releases."

I always felt that they should have focused on one, probably Windows XP, and tried for almost 100% compatibility, rather than moving the target toward later releases.

ACM code of ethics and a discussion about it below. Otherwise a good general article. We (developer related jobs) need to be able to push back. But then again, some people just don't care, as long as they get paid. I still think a guild, union, or some similar organization is necessary.

https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783007

"While Bose is no longer manufacturing and selling SoundControl™ Hearing Aids, we are continuing to offer our complimentary technical support for those who have already purchased SoundControl™ Hearing Aids."

https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/earbuds/sound...

Just to take a different perspective for anyone reading this, your database is more than _just_ your persistence layer. It can be where rules about the business live. Rather than rely on 12 different applications or code in 27 different files to maintain the proper rules, you can enforce those rules right where the data lives, guaranteeing that no matter what moron is writing code, the data will be pristine because the database has checked it before putting it in.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, at least not in every case. But it's an option; one that's different from the parent's perspective anyhow.

Twice in the comments you said you wanted to discuss "neopotism" (I'm assuming you mean nepotism). Yet you didn't say that in the main question for some reason. Nepotism wouldn't be a cause of layoffs but a situation where someone was kept on despite poor performance, due to their connections (family).

Over 30 years, I've certainly seen this happen. Usually more about friendships and professional connections than family. But how a person interacts with their co-workers in and out of office hours certainly impacts their standing and their likelihood of staying at a company during a period of layoffs. Those factors are usually far more important than actual performance.

Any supervisor can manipulate the facts of a person's overall performance to seem more or less favorable in order to drive that person out or keep them. Most jobs are not strictly 100% measurable performance numbers to act on (of course there are some).

I'd say that nepotism is almost not worth considering with respect to layoffs. Do your best work. Interact as best you can with your co-workers. Control the things you can control. If nepotism is an issue, that's something specific to the circumstances or company and not likely something you can influence, so if it is a bother, move on.

Maybe others can sympathize with my personal experience. I'm a morning person. But mentally, I can't completely focus when there's things that I have to do later. I'm always worried about those upcoming things (responsibilities, meetings, kids, etc). By programming at night, after everything else is done, I can truly focus. Getting in the flow, I'm not tired and I'm completely absorbed by the current task. No future distractions.

Part of the problem within this article is the choice of pictures. The first section states, “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.” They then present 9 pictures that reinforce the concept that people all around the world expect the _same_ thing. But that's simply not true.

They didn't take that description and give it to artists all around the world to paint. "Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results."

So _they_ painted pictures that were essentially the same, reinforcing their own point. The rest of the article selects pictures reinforcing the same point.

As user nassimm pointed out, you only need to walk down the street and look around to see the differences. Travel a little and you'll see the differences everywhere.

People may want similar things, but the actualization of that is different everywhere.

One small anecdote of a project at work. The oldest current project. All our projects are fairly simple and similar. They all use libraries and templates. This one is the last of the early projects before those templates and libraries. It's the easiest to manage. Things rarely go wrong. No forced upgrades because of a library vulnerability or template update. Bugs have been always been straightforward to find and fix because everything is procedural and clear. No abstraction 7 layers deep. Just clean, simple code.

And I hope that every company understands that unless you offer a sane hiring practice, you aren't going to get the best developers.

"Every other candidate was desperate and rejected a thousand times so they're happy to waste their time on your pointless exercise that you won't even look at."

The good candidates are busy getting hired by companies that understand how to evaluate their work based on interviews, references, and several other things that don't waste their time.

Someone else pointed out the recent paper, but I'll also point out that $75k per year in the US puts you in the 1% of global population for salary. So it's not like $75k is attainable for most people.

https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...

Around 2 dollars US for a medium coffee that cost them pennies. According to him, the other things they sold were there just to bring people in. Money was in the coffee because it was cheap and easy.

Just an anecdote; I spoke to a manager at a small coffee shop and he said that they make all their money on coffee alone by 9am (and surprisingly, they licensed Starbucks coffee). Everything else was a pain and barely covered costs because of time, equipment, and effort. But coffee was cheap and easy.

It would be cool if someone who is familiar (OP?) could give a little more context. The only description on the page is the title here: "Better font rendering for Windows". The link to the main website says nothing and only provides a link to download an exe. What does this even mean? I'd like better font rendering. So I'm supposed to download this exe and... what? Is it an editor that prints nice? Does it install some drivers?