dughnut

The reason might be that union members give a percentage of their income to a governing body which is barely distinct from organized crime in which they have no say in. The federal government already exists. You really want more boots on your neck?

Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely.

Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.

Yes

This is why civil design software has not meaningfully improved in 20 years and is indistinguishable from its state 10 years ago. We’re living in a Dark Age. We just don’t realize it.

I am an engineer at an AEC firm you would probably recognize. I think there are a few competing products in this space. Owners don’t care how you do CEI or have their own absurd rituals pioneered in the 60s or 80s. DOTs are the worst offenders and their project delivery practices are largely 80+ years old.

My unsolicited advice is I would expect Owner-side administrators (IT people) to direct sales decisions, and they don’t care about users or working products. I have only ever met one CTO in the AEC space who even considered end user benefit. Unfortunately, this means your product quality and utility is not actually important as evidenced by the whole Bentley product line, but integration with existing products is. Nobody seems to make big money in tech for white-collar AEC unless Bentley or Autodesk buy your IP. Then they will crudely bolt it onto their garbage software and their missionaries embedded in large companies disguised as technologists and CAD managers will sell it.

My opinion is con-tech is totally broken for very complicated reasons with the private market (commercial architecture) being the only small voice of sanity since they compete on price sometimes.

We probably should just stop enforcing copyright. “Stealing” my idea doesn’t deprive me of its use. Think about what the US market might look like if scaling and efficiency were rewarded rather than legal capture of markets. That large companies can buy and bury technology IP to maintain a market position is a tremendous loss for the rest of us.

My employer is tightening the screws. I get it. RTO externalizes costs and privatizes benefit. The incentives are not aligned for remote work, and it’s a publicly traded firm with an obligation to maximize shareholder value. I get it. While middle management should know if line of business employees are actually producing useful work, regardless of location, expecting 40 or 50-somethings to be engaged at work and not spend their day running personal errands is not realistic. So physical presence is the shareholders’ only option.

I see it as a pay cut where commute and prep hours are uncompensated, and I adjust my valuation of the job accordingly.

“And will deliver them with far greater stability and polish”

Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.

Impressive. Very nice. Now let’s see AI pastiches of Studio Ghibli’s work.

What is the model? That the US government launders them money through “ad revenue” for unlawful surveillance?

OpenAI is probably already getting dark money for AI products of dubious worth.

I feel the appeal of your argument, but people just aren’t fungible, and the incentives in a public in private identity are completely different.

I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.

I read that headline in Danny DeVito’s voice. Always Sunny does musicals better than Broadway.

A bridge engineer would need to know how to design a structure based on first principles of physics, nationally recognized reference documents, state agency published standards, state agency unpublished standards, agency project manager preferences, internal management preferences, and do so within a complicated project delivery protocol. These don’t all agree. Oh, and you can be sued and lose license to practice if you’re wrong.

A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails.

Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.

I think OSINT makes it sound like a serious military operation, but I think political opposition research is a much more accurate term for this sort of thing.

I don’t know about you, but my takeaway is that the author is doing damage control but inadvertently tipped a hand that OpenAI is probably running an elaborate con job on the DoD.

“Yes, we have a super secret model, for your eyes only, general. This one is definitely not indistinguishable from everyone else’s model and it doesn’t produce bullshit because we pinky promise. So we need $1T.”

I love LLMs, but OpenAI’s marketing tactics are shameful.

Personally, I think training someone on the client’s dime is pretty unethical.

I would be more patient with an AI that only costs me a fraction of a cent an hour.

I think what’s happening backstage in this magic show are desperate moves to recapitalize the country. Foreign and domestic investors are pledging to spend trillions, probably under duress. Stocks are being crashed to create a flight to treasuries. Dollars are partially anchored to crypto by so-called stable coins. Federal assets are getting dumped and operating costs cut.

Maybe we will get out of this without having to survive on cat food, but I’m not holding my breath.

If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?

I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.

Refactoring to taste may be under specified.

- dump old weapon systems to justify procuring new ones

- put a fig leaf over Victoria Nuland’s hubris and ineptitude

- create a political football

- make a productive peace with Russia impossible for another century

Who knows. Victory is not a goal. I don’t think it’s possible if it were.

Copilot is the only authorized AI at my company (50K FTE). I would be cautious to make any assumptions about how well anyone is doing in the AI space without some real numbers. My cynical opinion on enterprise software sales is that procurement decisions have absolutely nothing to do with product cost, performance, or value.

Can you comment on the business case here? I think there was a Blender add on that uses Solvespace under the hood to give it CAD-like functionality.

I don’t know any pros using Solvespace by itself, and my own opinion is that CAD is the wrong paradigm for most of the things it’s used for anyway (like highway design).

We already have highly inflationary monetary policy that makes capital accumulation for middle class people impossible outside of high risk vehicles like stock or property. We also already have a complicated network of grants, tax breaks, statutes, and pressure organizations to incentivize or ramrod through housing as long as the expected inhabitants are any demographic that is reliably expected to vote for “our democracy”. I just really don’t know what more you want here. Confiscate everyone’s bank anccount and liquidate it to build housing projects?

The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.