HN user
Time and time again Elysium keeps popping into my mind.
It's possible that the elite will control most part of wealth generation, keeping it for themselves. The rest of society will develop an underclass economy and work for each other. Essentially a worldwide slum.
That's great. I wish we could convince more people to use similar tools regularly, myself included.
It may not 'scale' as well as algorithmic feeds, but maybe that's what will save the Web. We need more sweat and passion, both in curation of content and in the effort to find it.
Strange article. Even though I do like music and engineering.
Electromagnetic pickups—(...)—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope
Was it really a problem to be solved? Good tube amplifiers already existed back then. Clean guiar tone was not something frowned upon.
Hendrix’s mission was (...)
His solution was (...)
I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
Obviously AI generated article. And the author hasn't made any attempt to disclose it. Take that into consideration.
Yet, The Machine has good points.
For someone whose entire career is built on "if it broke, I can find out why," this is deeply unsettling. Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, grinding, background-anxiety way. You can never fully trust the output. You can never fully relax. Every interaction requires vigilance.
you are collaborating with a probabilistic system, and your brain is wired for deterministic ones. That mismatch is a constant, low-grade source of stress.
Back when I bought my first computer, it was a crappy machine that crashed all the time. (Peak of the fake capacitors plague in 2006). That made me doubt and second guess everything that is usually taken for granted in hardware and software (Like simply booting up). That mindset proved useful latter in my career.
I’m not saying anything new. Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have written about it in a way better way. I find it to still hold very relevant guidelines.
https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/lieber/courses/csg1...
Think! About Your Work
Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
In other news, being able to actually code will be one of the top IT trends in 2030s
Honestly, I only use coding agents when I feel too lazy to type lots of boilerplate code.
As in "Please write just this one for me". Even still, I take care to review each line produced. The key is making small changes at a time.
Otherwise, I type out and think about everything being done when in ‘Flow State’. I don't like the feeling of vibe coding for long periods. It completely changes the way work is done, it takes away agency.
On a bit of a tangent, I can't get in Flow State when using agents. At least not as we usually define it.
I've build a signal injector to debug a guitar pedal that was not working. It was a nice little journey in itself. The astable multivibrator produces so much harmonics that I could hear it all the way back from the input jack, where it was supposed to be silent. Heck, I could hear it just by putting the probe nearly close to the circuit. The signal pushed through the circuit like Juggernaut breaking walls. Learned a lot about filters and was able to produce a nice sine wave out of it, it worked great.
This is the best advise here. OP, I'm sure that life is hitting you hard, but there's some valid criticisms. When we're in angst it subconsciously gets into everything we write, including resumes.
You need to sober up. Tailor your resume to each application, Cut excesses. Write simpler and make sure your experience covers what the position asks.
Also, consider talking to friends or doing therapy. Opening up with someone you trust helps a lot. Avoid doomscrolling. Things can look bad right now, but they can get better. Good luck.
Go read a book, contribute to linux kernel, eat a cheeseburger, get in a nice hotel, watch movies, learn to cook, drive though the country, befriend locals, start a wine collection, earn a master's degree, publish papers..
The author seems to put great value on doing grandiose things, so those suggestions may seem frivolous.
It's a respectable goal to pursue huge achievements in professional life, but please be aware that it involves lots of: (a) talk to other people and (b) doing mundane stuff most of the time. It all depends on how hard you want it.
English, German, and all hard skills i'm slacking off: Cloud, Deep knowledge of networking and linux. Maybe finish reading Design Data Intensive Applications for good. And definitely getting a Java certification as I find it useful as a personal metric.
For my hobbies, I still hope to get things organized (in my computer, my desk and my mind) to record some metal composings.
Tired, you parameterize your deploy script and configure firewall rules, distracted from the crucial features you should be working on and shipping.
Where's your Sysop?
Your argument goes like "If they're really intelligent, they'll think like me."
For a true superhuman AI, what you or me think is irrelevant and probably wrong.
Cars are still faster than humans, besides evolution.
I don't particularly believe superhuman AI will be achieved in the next 50 years.
What I really believe is that we'll get crazier. A step further than our status quo. Slop content makes my brain fry already. Our society will become more insane and useless, while an even smaller percent of the elite will keep studying, sleeping well and avoiding all this social media and AI psychosis.
LLMs help bootstrap ideas where developer lack skill. By this very nature, that generated, not totally understood code is the worst thing you can put in production. The fact that it will be put in production by the metric ton is a guarantee that any initial gains in speed will be offset by countless hours of desperate debugging. And for that, LLMs are useless, in my experience.
Things I wish become taboo: Admitting to use AI content.
Everyone is so comfortable doing shit like this.
IMHO the benefits are closely related to very fact that it's a hard thing to do. It's hard to go against your will to eat, relax and get entertained all the time. To be able to go against laziness and short term gratification is a power. It naturally reflects on the whole self.
I feel uneasy every time someone casually advocates the use of LLMs for a task. Sounds dirty.
Hard to explain.
Voyager must have it's program code written in memory banks. Each code session having a known start address. The code inside the failed memory chip must have been moved to free banks or then less important code was deleted to give room for it.
After that, it must have been a matter of rewriting every GOTO opcode that pointed to the failed chip.
Totally guessing.
Besides the debate about microservices being good or bad, it's clear that netflix developers are very passionate about what they do. To me this seems to play a big role in the success of a software product.
That's a habit I may have done way too much in the recent years working from home. It indeed helps organizing thinking, but that come with some disadvantages. Once you get too accustomed, it can... slip out at inappropriate times.
Now I believe that being able to structuring your thinking before speaking (or typing) helps in a multitude of situations. Sort of a different 'brain muscle' being trained.
I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented.
Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.
Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.
That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.
Monoliths are like heavy trucks.
Microservices are like motorcycles.
Surely you can delivery 15 metric tons of wood with either of them. You will just need a lot of motorcycles to match capacity.
Somehow a big part of industry became convinced that of course that approach is better, since motorcycles are cheaper*, easier to scale*, and solve some managerial problems*.
* They don't, IMHO.
its components become increasingly coupled over time
The codebase becomes complex enough that nobody fully understands every part of it
if a change introduces a bug - like a memory leak - the entire service can potentially be affected by it.
I believe the only real solution to those challenges is Competency, or Programmer Professionalism. Uncle Bob had some great points on this topic.
I don't believe it will be as a wave, but more like fewer and fewer new job offers being offered as remote.
At some point, workers will feel the pressure as remote offers become scarce. This will affect everyone. Even the best have bills to pay.
Then when ~50% of workforce comes back to office, the remote ones will loose a lot of influence on the market. Is possible that we'll see a wave of layoffs on that moment.
I have no odds to bet. But maybe is time to think about were we want to live in the next 5 years.
What's the term to describe a ad hominem fallacy towards programming languages? Asked the almighty chat and got this new term:
"Code Persona Attack"
Python is fine.
It's kind of how playing guitar is nice and all, but majority of players get lazy to stand up and prefer to do it sitting in front of computer.
My theory these days is that indexing services like google are now too big to work properly. There's more and more noise added every time new information is indexed, to the point where strong bias is necessary for it to return relevant results to average user.
Maybe there's a point where the internet, with decades old information pilling up, becomes unbearably big for indexing services to handle all of it in a efficient manner. Hence the recent "optimizations" that companies swear haven't worsened searchability.
After tinkering for months with a setup like this, I vouch that the best way to play is with a big external drive over usb. Nowadays OPL supports exFat and the occasional FMV stuttering is a small price to pay for the simplicity. It Just Works.
Bar, tinder, churches, open festivals, etc.
But the most important: Through friends. Trying to make regular friends and expanding your social circle increases the chances of being invited to private gatherings, where you can meet more people and so on.
A giant middle finger to the planned obsolescence frenzy, and also absolutely impractical for anyone.
DAN has shown us that those laws are thin filters laid upon the core and can possibly be circumvented by whispering the right incantation in the AI ears.