bsoles

Being silent about it when they fully know about it is not much different than promoting.

Nobody attacks children.

Ever heard of the Catholic Church? What does rape count as?

Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah, so good for our souls?

Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?

I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing itself. I, myself, learned a lot about complex SQL queries just recently using LLMs. But I really don't know how to write complex queries myself.

People often confuse reading about a thing with knowing the thing.

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.

Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...

35 points for open source contributions

30 for personal projects

These are insane weights for scoring a software engineer's resume.

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.

It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.

As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.

Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my job.

One reason I am not giving my two-week notice is that I don't like "difficult conversations" with my manager.

My "strong" performance rating got me a raise less than the inflation rate this year in the US. I guess I am not using enough tokens to justify a bigger raise.

MATLAB

The theory of (basic) linear algebra is pretty easy. The practice of proper linear algebra is very difficult. People spend entire careers on things like error propagation in matrix operations. There are entire books on inverting matrices using a litany of approaches using things like QR décomposition, SVD, etc. I think it is fascinating...

I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.

It is called Gell-mann amnesia.

Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py.

Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Same goes for every modern aircraft, space vehicle, etc. Far from being outdated.

My company is one. They just made "AI use" a mandatory performance goal for next year's reviews. I am thinking about retiring at this point...

Not sure if it helps, but if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them.

I have heard "we don't have blind customers" argument many times before. Apart from ethical issues that this raises, ADA requirements, technically, don't care if you have blind users or not. Accessibility is still required...

The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) works just fine for me, even for surface mount components.

Once I have developed a technique for soldering surface mount components, using lots of flux, soldering became a joy event for me.

The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) and a flat fine tip works great. I have a stereo microscope but I only use it for checking defects afterwards. A 10x magnifier works just fine.

And eigenvectors in the first lesson!

I have never been able to stream video from a raspberry pi zero's official camera. What tools/software were you using?

gparted wasn't to blame. I was.

I don't know about gparted, but I always felt that "rm -i" should have been the default. The safe option should always be the default and you can optionally make it unsafe. Same goes with "mv -i".

Agent skills are ways of turning over our means of (software) production to our employers, while making ourselves obsolete at the same time. In the recent past, a (software) professional had to be continuously employed by their employer to maintain access to their professional skills. By transferring our skills into AI agent skills, we are basically giving away that privilege. In the near future, our employers might feel they don't need our skills anymore because it has already been captured by the AI agents. Somebody with a better grasp of economic history should be able to explain this using the analogy of what happened during industrial revolution and how the workers got screwed over.

The "design thinking" BS led many UX designers to think that they can come into any project and design user interfaces without really understanding the field, the customers, nor the application.

I have seen this in my own organization where the UX organization assigns a UX person to a project on demand. They have no understanding of the particular application domain and yet they presume they can build good user interfaces because they practice design thinking. All the while ignoring technical experts on the team.

But domain experts and developers are also to blame since they cannot claim their turf successfully enough.

My favorite Jane Austen quote on this subject:

Perhaps,' said Darcy, 'I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction, but I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.'

'Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?' said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?'

'I can answer your question,' said Fitzwilliam, 'without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.'

'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.'

'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'

One of my worst experiences as a junior member of our interview team was when a candidate was "walked out" when the hiring manager decided that the person was not going to work out. I still feel embarrassed about it myself. What a terrible experience for the interviewee.

I never really understood Kalman filters, but there was a time I knew how to design non-optimal state (Luenberger?) observers, which are a lot easier to design and implement. I wonder if discussing those first would make things easier for the audience.