Noneofya

I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.

Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.

that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs

You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?

If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.

Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.

The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.

1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.

2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.

You have a strange notion of „everyone should“.

So? Worst case, the business folds and you start it again.

Must be great having infinite ideas and capital.

Nobody but scammers is this chill about their company going bankrupt.

There are not so plenty examples of one person businesses making that one person rich.

It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur

It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.

And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.

That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.

It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?

That‘s literally an example of the decision depending on multiple factors. Separation of concerns -> more isolation -> stronger security of the overall system is exactly one of the possible benefits of microservices.

Scale is just one. There is also fault tolerance, security, organizational separation (which can be, up to a point, also be realized with libraries as you suggest), bigger ecosystem to choose from, …

My favourite thing about microservice architecture is how simple individual microservices are to understand and contribute to.

I generally agree with your stance and I would add that I find the whole simplistic „microservices suck“ talking point as nonsensical as viewing them as a panacea. They do solve a few specific (for most companies, mostly organizational/human factors because scale and redundancy don’t matter that much) problems that are harder to solve with monoliths.

I still think this point is a bit misleading, because yes, the components become simpler, but their interaction becomes more complex and that complexity is now less apparent. See:

The architecture and provisioning of microservices can be more complicated, but from the perspective of a developer working on a microservice it should be much simpler to work on compared to a monolith.

I think that perspective often doesn’t match reality. Maybe most microservice domains I‘ve seen had poorly separated domains, but changes small enough to ignore the interactions with other services have been rare in my experience.

Tbh that sounds almost like an already built workflow engine like n8n or even Jira would be preferable to reinventing the wheel.

Thanks, this was really helpful.

Hours, not minutes. That is relevant for most businesses.

The point here is that 99% of companies are not in that scenario

I‘d argue that is wrong for any decently sized ecommerce platform or production facility. Maybe not millions per hour, but enough to warrant redundancy. There’s many revnue and also redundancy levels between Google and your mom and pop restaurant menu.

I call confirmation bias.

Lol, the entitlement. Nobody owes you a job, or their time for that matter.

And websites are not at all randomly designed. They share common concepts and design language. Buttons, dropdowns, hamburger menus, icons etc.

Just like a CV is typically chronological, because that’s what the reader cares about.

1. That‘s called stockholm syndrome.

2. Literally no relevant career goal is significantly obstructed by less git proficiency.

When has that ever worked? And why does this count as a solution rather than a poor workaround for you?

Most of this was built by Microsoft to work on Windows with git.

Hacking git into something it is not does not qualify as learning to cope with git in my book.

Apparently git does not solve all problems and there is indeed value in exploring other options and building new systems that fill other niches.

250€ for the home office setup alone. I doubt he will hand-poke your entire arm.

Memory is everywhere, whether or not anyone or anything remembers it.

That one is beautiful.

Either you’ve been using only crappy computers/software then or you’re not getting what they’re talking about. Do you feel like your car is an extension of your body when you’re driving? Because science showed that’s exactly how humans behave when driving. This is how our brain works with automatic motor functions.

C++. And it’s hated for the same reasons.

Everyone in the community, us kids included, considered this to be serious and vital work for defending the US from the USSR

Yes, because the US had one of the most effective propaganda machines of all times.

You know, participants of a war always believe their side is right and they’re fighting the good fight. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it. And while you’re certainly right that Putin shouldn’t be considered harmless, a victim or even an opponent with equally valid interests, it’s still naive to think the US is just defending against the Putins in the world.

And in another moment it’s the US again.

Now you’ve just rephrased thinking. What is „making sense of the world“?

But they lack the abstraction necessary to call them self-aware (by the current definition). That’s actually a test to check the development of a child. A child is not very intelligent yet. But it is able to become it on its own just by observing. ChatGPT isn’t.

Yet it correctly understands that faces typically have two eyes, one mouth, one nose, etc. So clearly this "lack of understanding that hands have five fingers" is unlikely to be inherent to the model.

It is, we just don’t know it’s exact features. It might very well be optimized for recognizing faces (and therefore to identify the features that make up a face). A general AI doesn’t have to be retrained on specifics. Sure, you „can“ (in a very generous hypothetical sense of the word) train a model like this on all pictures and movies in existence and then some, so that it has seen everything and never fails to give the wrong answer for any prompt that only involves things that were depicted at some point in time. You don’t have to show a child all hands on the planet for it to recognize hands have 5 fingers. You don’t even have to show children pictures of every body part once for every skin color. They only need to see 1-2 different skin colors once to make the deduction that every body part can come in different skin colors. That‘s understanding, a general intelligence. Try this with a model like ChatGPT and you get a racist model.

And I'm not arguing that GPT-3 or Stable Diffusion are omnipotent. Clearly they're not. But that doesn't mean that can't understand things in their domain. As others have mentioned in adjacent comments, the only test we have for understanding, in humans or ML models, is measuring the correctness of an output for a given input. Essentially, your argument is that "It's an algorithm, it can't understand like a human," which is begging the question. I'm not claiming that ChatGPT or any other ML algorithm is "generally intelligent." Just that it has an understanding of certain concepts.

We can also inspect the model. And even the ouputs are obviously different from what a human would be able to output, so it fails even that test.

If you argue that’s still intelligence, just on a lower level, you can absolutely do that. But at that point you’re basically saying everything is intelligent/conscious just on varying levels. In the sense that consciousness is what consciousness does. Which is a stance I generally agree with, but it’s also unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless in a scientific discussion.

No, the number of fingers is absolutely critical, you simply fail to understand what understanding a concept means. ChatGPT is, in this sense (and I know it’s probably a gross simplification, sorry OpenAI), a fancy markov chain. It can sample data that, by sheer correlation in the training data, reflects many features a typical drawing that matches the prompt would have. But it doesn’t understand what a human hand is, it lacks the ability to abstract, so it cannot deduce that there are (almost) always exactly 5 fingers. The probabilities reflected in the model kinda caught the aspect of a human hand being a collecion of these geometric shapes with those shades and whatnot, but they didn’t catch the hand as a coherent concept with a rather strict definition.

This is like the joke about training a neural net on arithmetic where you get the wrong answer repeatedly until it remembers to answer 5+5=10. but then, until there are more data, 10+5 is also 10, because it didn’t actually understand arithmetic (to be fair, a human wouldn’t understand it by a single example either).

And you can see this in action by making ChatGPT believe 5+3=7.

ChatGPT manipulates symbols, and it captured the rules to do that very well. That is one of the abilities of general intelligence, but it’s not the only criterion for intelligence. You can do more than just manipulating symbols, you can also abstract over them, form your own thoughts and questions about them, be curious, reflect on your reasoning and explain it, deduct patterns from very few data because you have all the context from your previous knowledge and the abstractions built on top of it. Besides of the abstractions and functions programmed into it ChatGPT only has probabilities of symbols being related to other symbols (and the rules implied by that), but it cannot reason about these symbols and cannot form creative thought. Its „intelligence“ is limited to a finite order/level of abstraction (the features and parameters that define the model and allow it, for example, to capture shading and geometry, but not the concept of a human hand) while yours is basically limitless. You can always put another abstraction on top of what you just thought or experienced. The magic of deep learning was basically increasing the order of abstraction a neural net can capture, but it’s still limited.

On the other hand, I have my pet theory that the weirdness of dreams or psychedelics arises from the brain basically sampling the connections in the brain / piping random noise through its neural net (as a side effect of all the reorganization it’s doing).

We actually use tests like that to verify the development of children. I still remember that I had to draw a human and they checked whether I thought of drawing and neck and whatnot when it was time to decide if I’m ready for school.

While you are wrong in the sense that we know it’s not intelligent because we built it and know how it works, you mention an important philosophical question: There is no way for you to know if anyone or anything else besides you is truly conscious.