I love his statement about trade-offs - there’s never an end all solution to things and we must be vigilant to what the tradeoffs are in the technologies we use. My belief is that our (including myself) instinct is to rush ahead with what’s shiny and new, monetize it and forget about the wake of destruction you’ve just left in your path. Looking at the results of social media, online shopping and AI makes me believe this is the case for them too. With the exception of say, 20% of its applications where it has made things genuinely “better” (there can be a whole different discussion what better means). It’s strange to me that this message about trade-offs is not discussed more often by engineers, who are trained to look at these as a habit. If this were true, it would be engineers who would be the first to assess what are the disadvantages of applying AI - either to the product or perhaps to society. Can we have a broader discussion about the things we lose out when we use AI in our cars? As our educators? As our girlfriends/boyfriends?
HN user
agomez314
* drone tech will heat up and find its "moment."
* Bitcoin will continue to increase in price and decrease in usability.
* Quantum will continue to improve and start to raise eyebrows in niche circles and paper headlines, leading to adoption in small parts of major tech companies.
* Markets will hit a record high by end of year.
* ADHD medications will also hit a record high.
* More people will opt out social media like they opt of out of "GMO" food and use it to virtue-signal.
* Tech hiring will continue to decrease and get tougher to find entry-level SWE jobs, leading to an uptick in other majors. Being an SWE will never be as cool again as it was in the 2010s.
* Is anyone still talking about climate change action goals?
* Starship will go orbital, Blue origin will go suborbital, Boeing will hit the ground.
* More laws regulating internet and social media use. Enforcement will be fuzzy and laughable at first but will become increasingly serious over time.
Is this a hit piece or does it raise valid concerns?
I thought great engineers reduce the amount of new code in a codebase?
I think, for most people, knowing the right person or arriving at the right workplace at the right time is more important than most of the advice outlined in this doc. How many talented people have been put down by a bad boss? Or extremely hardworking, smart engineers that cannot find a job in today's market? Yes, learn fundamentals (learn them deeply!), do projects, but don't expect to have a successful career just because you did these. One may follow the other, but it is never guaranteed - focus instead on trying to live a good life and be kind to others.
Can somebody add some GenAI to this to smoothen things out when it zooms in as well as add in some "parallax" effect so that it looks like we go past the closer galaxies to the further ones?
this is the best comment
I can't help but think how much this will continue the 'enshittification' of the internet. The problem with this tech is that people will release these 'podcasts' and drown out all the human-made content that most people want to listen to. It's not that this tech is bad in itself or that it doesn't have uses, it's that we have no social feedback mechanism for getting people to stop producing this kind of content!
You could securely exchange .env files using public key cryptography with a tool such as GPG. Broadly, you'd 1) generate a key-pair, 2) export and share the key to your co-worker, 3) import your co-worker's public key 4) encrypt your file 5) send the encrypted file via email or any channel to your co-worker 6) decrypt!
You can revoke access to that person by changing your .env file credentials and deleting your co-worker's key.
Apparently 1/3 of all software vulnerabilities represent design weaknesses which were introduced in the requirements phase. The MCAS flaw seems to belong to this category which you describe.
source: https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/a-tool-to-address-cybersec...
Done!
The software engineering institute or Pittsburgh HPC center might have something for you
What’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?
Archive link?
I liked the outcome of the article but disagree with the author’s misplaced anger.
“Capitalism” is not some entity that makes decisions, it’s people and groups who do. You want to blame someone? Blame the policies, programs, and choices (some intentional, others unintentional) of those who decided it was better to make things cheap than to make things well.
This is not a capitalist idea, it is a human decision.
“Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing.”
This is a ticking time bomb with greater impact that climate change...the social and financial institutions in the US assume a large, young working group supporting a smaller, older population - once this starts to reverse the result will be upheaval as gov'ts will attempt to "quickfix" this by taxation. “But above all he [the prince] must refrain from seizing the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.” I predict euthanasia will become more socially acceptable as people realize that they cannot support their elders.
There's so much more to this issue but one question i'd like to raise is that before birth control, people were "oppressed by nature" as it were in that they would have children whether they wanted or not (unless the baby was killed). Now, people can choose whether or not to have children - this is unheard of in the history of evolution and with profound consequences that our society has not grappled with seriously. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VAtXBEt0Ws
my takeaway is that our tech overlords praise science to the sky while making statements that are not scientific at all and bet their enormous resources on it.
“no one appears to have noticed that Project Maven fit into the grand tradition of many other high-tech weapons projects: ecstatic claims of prowess coupled with a disregard for real-world experience”
wow this list is super useful, thanks for sharing!
anyone have an archive link?
Having read "Now it can be told" by Groves, I can testify to other commenters on how much the Manhattan Project was an enormous logistical problem - Elon's manufacturing prowess pales in comparison to what Groves had to grapple with.
On a different note, I liked how the movie portrayed the world of quantum mechanics and somehow didn't try to make Oppenheimer a hero or something more than what he was.
Imagine someone combining this with the Apple Vision Pro...many people will simply opt out of reality and live in a digital world. Not that this is new, but I'll entice a lot more people than ever before.
This is not a true nor respectful comment. Saying religion is a mental illness is not only deeply offensive but factually incorrect when research shows the benefits of religion [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-re...
. Shortly thereafter, our species will disappear from Earth. Those who choose to live in artificial “habitats” such as belowground bunkers will experience an environment rich in ionizing radiation as nuclear power plants melt down uncontrollably, unstable local temperatures, increasing inability to secure clean water and healthy food, and other significant challenges to the continuation of human life.
bit of a downer ain't it? I disagree with the premise that the current change of the climate is irreversible (like, forever?). I would like to see more evidence to point to the current trajectory as bringing humanity and life on the planet on to the edge of extinction, or more mildly, for it to become unrecognizable to us today.
The kicker: "The update that caused the issue has been planned for years but repeatedly put on hold after unsuccessful test runs, some of the people said. Comerica moved forward in May, over the concerns of some employees who felt it still wasn’t ready, they said." Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p8wTOr8AbU&pp=ygURZGVwbG95I...
Can you give details on how you do “automatic tagging”?
Great resource! Forgive my ignorance but why do so many modern functional programming courses use Standard ML instead of a Lisp dialect? Is it because of its built-in type-checking, or is it just how it's always been taught?
Wow this read more like Frankenstein than anything I’ve read recently: A talented scientist is driven by curiosity to create ever more sophisticated creations, culminating in a monstrous entity that leads to the scientist’s downfall. But the scientist doesn’t realize this until too late.
Really, if our top tinkerers had a little more contextual knowledge of history and less naiveté about people we could save ourselves from ever more dangerous Frankenstein tragedies.
If a parent exits the workforce, and this happens at scale, wouldn’t it reduce the supply of labor and therefore increase salaries? Just a tenuous hypothesis