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idank

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I'll be more forgiving: I found it gets confused easily when it extracts text from a PDF because datasheets tend to be written in a not so parseable way for a machine. But 1) if you tell it to take screenshots of said datasheet, it'll have greater success. 2) We're in year n<5 (depends how you count) of the age of LLMs, this will get better over time. Either on the LLM side or the thing you feed to it.

The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.

Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.

They give out the subscription by default, and if they find your use case interesting enough they'll give you credits. Not sure if there's an upper limit, but I would be surprised if it's more than a few hundred dollars a month.

(no internal knowledge, this is based on my experience with explainshell.com, thanks OAI!)

Anyone know what Matt Mackall is up to these days? He started Mercurial and got people involved early on with a lot of enthusiasm, you could tell he cared about what he created and the people who joined him ("hg crew"). I learned a lot from him on how to think like an engineer and saw him manage different personalities in the project in a kind and sincere way (I think this was around ~2010).

Humans will not win in court with a "but the agent did it, I had no idea" argument. Just look at how the cases against OAI are going, and that's where families lose a loved one. There's not going to be any sympathy when your agent committed fraud on your behalf.

And it's not like pro agent companies have a reason to self regulate. They're not going to absorb that liability voluntarily, they'll push it onto users contractually (most of them already do). This is just another channel to bring in customers. They will capitalize ruthlessly to increase their bottom line.

The recipe for these model wrapper companies is 1. enter a space before the big ones do, 2. provide a nice enough wrapper that gets you customers, 3. survive until a bigger fish comes and asks you to join them (or eat you and you die).

Just look at Cursor who is probably the best example you can find. They might have a good outcome in the end, but most get eaten.

Not very much. There's an interview lead that is supposed to make sure no question overlaps happen. They will sometimes comment on the chosen question (e.g. asking an unrelated question to someone interviewing for a research position). In general I think this is pretty rare as it requires folks to care about their interview before it starts. :)

Yes exactly. This device is a mini exercise bicycle, it has half a dozen buttons and LEDs with a UART enabled chip that orchestrates everything. I'd like to make it controllable via Bluetooth (e.g. on/off, set speed) and have it send stats like current speed, etc.

Would something like circuitpython not be easier to work with?

is Zephyr a good option in a project that aims to expose a UART device through BLE using an nrf52x chip? At a glance it seems pretty low level, capable and possibly overkill. If not, what's more suitable?

Hopefully that makes sense, I'm new to all of this.

It's pretty hard to learn a new keyboard layout on a regular keyboard, let alone replace the typing experience with chords (multiply this by the number of languages you use). The real difficulty for me was putting in the time every day to practice, while maintaining a job. You have to be pretty dedicated to pull this off.

Nice, but tools are only one thing to miss about development at Google (or any other of the FAANGs).

I found the more meaningful thing is the ecosystem of smart engineers, and the ability to find others who face similar problems, exchange ideas and solutions. It's a skill of its own to find these people and learn their "language", but once you do, it's a huge multiplier that is hard to find elsewhere.

The cynicism towards the folks who worked on this at Google is a bit over the top in this thread. While most of the criticism is justified, I'd like to point out something that might not be obvious to folks who never worked at a megacorp: not every person who worked on this (or any other thing you have a problem with in tech) is a mindless zombie that makes change for the sake of change, whose only goal in life is to get promoted.

This redesign likely took several human-years to get out. It's not perfect. It might even be plain bad in your world, and that's fine. But the idea that we're always smarter than the person next to us is just not a healthy place to be in my opinion.

Assume good intent, you'll feel better about yourself and it'll spread to those around you as well.

The title the author chose does a bit of injustice to the contents of the post.

The post uses a lot of words to describe an understanding that experienced engineers and managers should have. Technical debt is a trade off. It exists in nearly all software of decent size as it's being developed. It is vital both for management and engineers alike to keep it at a reasonable amount, or you'll wake up one day with something that can't release new features, function, scale or be maintained.

It is also worth stating that tech debt can have little to no siginifcance to the success of a startup.

Google's search results were great even before they knew your every move on the web. Some would argue it got worse.