_skel

What makes you think everyone is mega rich there? VC firms have a lot of employees making normal salaries just like every other company.

We don't need to resort to cultural tropes like "face" to explain this.

This is about power and control. The Communist party does not want any other centers of power or control to emerge which might challenge the party. Jack Ma, and the tech industry in general, was emerging as such a power. Now that problem has been taken care of.

Point 2 does not logically follow from point 1. That's the entire problem here.

Between point 1 and 2 there must be quite a few other steps, causally linked, otherwise it's just a massive imaginary leap based on assumptions that nobody is explaining.

The dismissals from Tyler Cohen and Pinker are mostly just relying on heuristics which are often right, but even if they're right 999 out of 1000 times, if that 1 in 1000 error is the end of humanity, that's pretty bad.

EY is not arguing that the end of humanity is merely possible. He is arguing that it is obviously the most likely outcome and will almost certainly happen a very short time after AGI is invented. That's a much harder case to make.

EY's arguments aren't really possible to engage with because they don't have much of a causal basis.

Nobody who says AI is likely to kill us all can demonstrate a plausible sequence of events, with logical causality linking the events together, that leads to mass extinction. It's all very handwavy.

Steven Pinker said it pretty well:

The AI-existential-threat discussions are unmoored from evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, real AI, sociology, the history of technology and other sources of knowledge outside the theater of the imagination. I think this points to a meta-problem. The AI-ET community shares a bad epistemic habit (not to mention membership) with parts of the Rationality and EA communities, at least since they jumped the shark from preventing malaria in the developing world to seeding the galaxy with supercomputers hosting trillions of consciousnesses from uploaded connectomes. They start with a couple of assumptions, and lay out a chain of abstract reasoning, throwing in one dubious assumption after another, till they end up way beyond the land of experience or plausibility. The whole deduction exponentiates our ignorance with each link in the chain of hypotheticals, and depends on blowing off the countless messy and unanticipatable nuisances of the human and physical world. It’s an occupational hazard of belonging to a “community” that distinguishes itself by raw brainpower. OK, enough for today – hope you find some of it interesting. (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/st...)

You know what's most likely to lead to human extinction, and has been for all of our lives? Nuclear war. EY argues that we should bomb "rogue" datacenters and that is obviously and immediately more dangerous than anything he has proven about AI. What does he think would happen if the US bombs a datacenter in China or Israel bombs one in Iran?

Even if it does, it will simply mimic the systems other companies have created and documented, because GPTs don't create anything new. They recombine what already exists.

Plus let's be honest, the technical problems are the tip of the iceberg for software architecture. If an AI ever manages to convince my director to pay for things I'd be happy for the help.

There is always going to be a chorus about something. Power users are impossible to please because they all have strong opinions but not the same opinions.

People will still want different screen resolutions, aspect ratios, keyboard layouts, etc. Now that AMD is available people will want particular CPU SKUs. It will never end.

I wish Framework luck, because they are targeting the pickiest userbase that exists.

Of course it is irrelevant to depositors, that is why the bank failed.

However, it also proves that holding bonds to maturity is different from selling them at market rates. It demonstrates the distinction between solvency and liquidity. Every financial publication has made this point when discussing SVB in order to educate their readership about the problems of duration risk and explain how a bank with enough assets to cover liabilities can still fail.

Now, the nice thing is, the government has time to wait for the bonds to mature. So the government can take the bonds, pay off the depositors, and get the money back when the bonds mature. The government won't lose money if they do it right -- just like they didn't lose money with TARP in 2008.

The whole subscription box industry consists of undifferentiated companies with zero moat. Look at any category: beauty products, men's grooming products, wine, watches, etc. and you'll see a bunch of companies that all look the same selling the same stuff.

On top of that, the first thing people cut when they have money problems are luxury subscriptions they don't really need.

I don't know why anyone would invest in any of these companies.

I suspect that if Linus had tried to actively contribute to BSD he might have gotten fed up and done his own thing anyway.

I don't think the upsides are worth all the work.

You can spend a lot of time getting databases and other stateful workloads to work -- mess around with StatefulSet and PVC on top of all the normal Kubernetes concepts, and what do you get in the end? Are you really better off than you would have been if you ran the database in EC2?

Plus, "herds not pets" kind of breaks down once you start using StatefulSets and PVCs. Those things exist to make Kubernetes more like a static environment for workloads that can't handle being run like ephemeral cattle. So why not just keep using your static environment?

If Kubernetes is the only workload management control plane you have, then I guess this makes sense. But if you are already able to deploy your databases with existing tools, and those existing tools don't really suck, it's probably not worth migrating. It would take a lot of time and introduce significant new risks and operational complexity without a compensating payoff.

The article is grouping things together that don't belong in the same categories.

OO, functional, imperative, declarative: these are ways of controlling dispatch.

Monoliths and microservices are both ways to organize codebases and teams of programmers and control whether dispatch is intermediated by the network or not. Either way, both of these options are implemented by some kind of language in the previous category (OO, functional, imperative, or declarative).

Service-oriented architecture applies to both monoliths and microservices, and very few programmers still working in the industry have really seen what an alternative to service-oriented architecture actually looks like.

I suspect the initial negative take on the license change was correct, and this is the dying gasp of the company.

It's just taking longer than expected to replace Docker Desktop. But I am seeing a lot of progress on Podman and Rancher and a few others, and some of the larger tech companies are also building in-house replacements. A lot of the people who had to scramble to find a replacement are not happy about it.

In a year or two I think some of the companies that paid for licenses to avoid migrating are going to rethink their license costs, because the free alternatives will be just as good as Docker Desktop. Then we will see whether this revenue increase was sustainable or simply the transient result of holding customers hostage when they had no alternatives but to pay.

Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production...

Why is software so special?

I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry, especially the older ones. And China, which is also often brought up as a society where individuality is not valued in business (due to "Confucianism" and similar tropes), is not held back by similar risk aversion and has a massive software industry that can compete internationally.

No amount of laws and regulations will make it possible to sustain jobs that the market participants are not willing to pay for -- not unless the government starts paying the wages of employees at uncompetitive firms to keep them from losing their jobs.

Everything about this case has been the system working as intended, and faster than normal.

If the conspiracy theorists had just sat back and relaxed, they would have seen the guy get arrested, extradited, and charged for a crime, which is exactly what was supposed to happen.

It's always sad to see people in the tech industry who are opposed to learning things. Quite a lot of the anti-Java, anti-abstraction, anti-complexity crowd seem to actually just be people who are one step above a sysadmin in their mental model of programming, don't see how large-scale programming is different from imperative scripting, don't understand that complex problems sometimes require complex/systematic solutions, and resist leaving their comfort zone.

There are certainly valid arguments against everything I just said, but quite often they are not the true motivation.

A competent Java programmer is not slower than a competent Python programmer. Time to market won't suffer.

There is definitely a higher barrier to entry with Java, and starting new projects involves a bit more setup, but that is never the bottleneck. You start a project once. You work on it every day after that. The time it takes to set up the build system is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the work. Maybe it will take your company a few more hours to get to market because of that? Big deal.

As an engineer, Java would be one of the languages I would choose for maintaining a large codebase over time. It is far better for that than most other popular languages.

People don't get convicted for doing bad things. They get convicted for breaking specific laws. In this case, the laws against defrauding investors were clearly broken, to the extent that a jury unanimously agreed they were broken. Whatever laws might have applied to the patients did not meet that bar.

I keep seeing a lot of "throw them in jail" posts here on HN and it's bad. It should be very hard for the state to jail someone. It should require extremely solid proof that they committed a crime which was defined in law. If we lose that principle, we revert from rule of law to rule of judges and mob rule. Some people like Holmes don't get punished in a way that satisfies everyone they hurt, and people like SBF might never get punished, and that's fine because lowering the burden of proof would only result in more injustice.

The problem is not lack of money. There is plenty of money and it's being wasted. The root of the problem is the political views of the people who run the city and the voters who put them there.

The problem with not updating dependencies for a long time is that it can force you to make sudden version jumps if something like a CVE is discovered.

At my company we had a real scramble to upgrade log4j when the CVE for that came out. A lot of software was many versions behind. Luckily for us, no breaking changes had been made, and it was simply a matter of bumping the version to the latest one.

That was a lucky break, because if that had been a library like Jersey or Spring it would have been an entirely different ballgame.

If you don't keep your builds up to date, you open yourself up to risks like that, which are unknown and to some extent unknowable.

With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed.

In 2022.

That is the kind of basic thing that does not work.

In addition to that, if you have a high-DPI laptop display and you want to plug it into a low-DPI desktop monitor (or vice-versa), good luck getting the scaling to work in a usable way.

Caltrain also has limited ability to route around accidents, and in some cases has to run trains the "wrong way" on the other side of the tracks to get past certain areas.

They also have no communication at all. Back when I had a Caltrain commute I would use Twitter to find out if there were accidents or delays, because the station signs were alway wrong and almost all of the stations are unstaffed. I would see posts on Twitter from people who were on a train that crashed into a car and the station signs would still say everything was on schedule.

Those courtyard-style apartments don't exist because of crime. They exist because it's nice to have a courtyard.

Most apartments in the Bay Area have no outdoor space other than a balcony or a small piece of land on the ground floor about the size of the balconies above. Many don't even have that.

People want quality public infra, but don't want to pay taxes. Sounds like a losing battle to me.

A lot of people don't really want quality public infra. If they can pay for their own needs themselves, in their gated communities etc., they would rather do that than pay taxes. The people described in this article are wealthy. They want quality private infra.

Debt is a useful tool for people who can control themselves.

Dave Ramsey caters to people who need unusually strict financial discipline to avoid getting in trouble. For everyone else, responsibly using debt is often better than paying cash.

For example, paying cash for a car is often worse than taking a low-interest loan. Liquidity is important -- locking up a bunch of money in a car means you can't use it for other things, like investments or emergency savings.

Another example: taking out a loan for a large purchase, rather than liquidating investments to pay cash, can cost less overall because the interest paid on the loan might be lower than the capital gains taxes on the investments.

Oddly this is actually nicer in macOS than Linux desktops, because Ctrl-A is normally reserved for "select all" on other OSes. Because macOS puts all the "normal" select/cut/copy/paste combos on the command key, the full set of Unixy movement keys is available on the control key.

It seems like these protests ought to be solvable by the police, using normal police powers, without resorting to emergency measures or doing things like freezing accounts and suspending truckers' licenses.

Why not do the obvious thing: send the police in to arrest people who won't leave. Tow their trucks. That worked at the border the other day -- why wouldn't it work in Ottawa too? It's not like the Canadian police haven't dealt with large protests in the capital before.

If that approach doesn't work, then it might make sense use emergency powers. But why go straight to emergency powers without trying to clear people out the normal way?

For me the main takeaway from the protests so far is that the Canadian police are either afraid to, or unwilling to, enforce the law, and the government at all levels is afraid to make the police do their jobs.

I know several people who left academia after achieving various levels of rank (grad student, postdoc, professor, etc.) and their thought processes were all similar. They all eventually wished they had left sooner, and what held them back was a misguided notion about what the outside world would think of them, because they were judging themselves by the standards of academia rather than by the standards of the outside world.

Some of them were amazed that nobody cared about certain aspects of academia. Things they felt incredibly stressed or embarrassed about, like failing to complete some research or publish, or failing to get tenure, simply didn't matter at all in the outside world.

When you are on the inside, the academic culture becomes your entire life. It seems like it's all that matters. After you leave, you'll find out that nobody on the outside knew or cared. In terms of an insular subculture with its own reality, I can't think of much else that compares, other than maybe the military, or prison gangs.

There is a lot of cynicism in this thread, including this from the OP:

This is also what Software Engineering has become: you memorize, regurgitate and participate in agile the masquerade. Creativity is shunned. Tried architectures/patterns are what is expected.

No, not really. Maybe some jobs are like that. Many are not. But even the jobs that are not like that will generally be gated by interviews that include Leetcode-style questions.

This happened in the software industry because credentials and experience often mean nothing, resume fraud is rampant, and the cost of hiring a bad engineer is very high.

How about a take-home assignment? Suggest that and many will respond, "I don't work for free" or "I don't have time to work after work, I have a family to take care of." How about just looking at prior experience, or credentials? Resume fraud prevents that, and a lot of companies prefer to hire generalists and find a team for them to work in, rather than hire specialists for a particular team. Outside of research-heavy fields like AI/ML, a university degree is no predictor of success.

So, we need to find a way to evaluate a candidate, in a short period of time, that gives a reasonable estimation of how they will do in the job. If there was a better way, and it was proved to be better, the industry would adopt it very quickly, and it would be a competitive advantage for the companies that realized it first. But that has not happened.

If you put aside the cheap cynicism that permeates threads about programming interviews, you'll realize it hasn't happened because none of the people who are hiring have figured out a more reliable way to hire, even though there are very smart people doing it and they have an enormous financial incentive to figure out how to do it better. A company that could find all the good programmers who can't Leetcode, and weed out the bad programmers who can't Leetcode, would get an enormous amount of talent that others overlooked.

This is just a hoop to jump through, and it's not nearly as difficult as getting a college degree or learning how to code in the first place. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's doable with time and practice. Most of your colleagues have done it at your current job and also at your future job. I can't do it at the drop of a hat either; I would need to practice like almost everyone else. You can do it too, if you approach it with the right mindset: you aren't supposed to enjoy it or find it intellectually interesting; it's just an obstacle to overcome and it's smaller than many other obstacles you've dealt with before.