koliber

In theory, you're right. But she talks about how it happens in practice. We can all sit around and talk about how this or that should work in theory, until one day we get a chance to do that one thing. And then most of us shut up because the real world is messy.

What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle?

Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?

When you are judging something you are judging the whole thing. If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book. Even if the rest was decent the chance of it being the best overall is small.

Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.

Vistulo | Sr. Java Backend / Sr. React Frontend / Sr. Network Engineer / Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer | REMOTE, must be based in Poland or Romania | $110k-$160k / year

All roles are for a large N. American bank working on or adjacent to trading systems for various asset classes (equities, FX, fixed income, commodities).

Looking for top-notch senior+ engineers. Must be a great engineer who understands their craft in-depth. Prefer people who strive to understand the business domain and don't merely follow verbatim Jira stories. Some roles require capital markets experience (details in job posts below). Long term engagements. 100% remote, but only for people based out of Poland or Romania.

Details at https://vistulo.com/roles/hn0607/ . Apply via link in job post. If you know someone who could be great for the role, referrals are welcome (see details in ad).

It would be relatively easy to build the logic for on-call rotations, and to build the API endpoints for consuming alerts. But add to that the work of also building mobile apps, working with SMS and email infra, and this becomes a non-trivial effort. For a company like Uber it might make sense to dedicate a tiny team to build an in-house solution. For small startup, it still is not worth the hassle to maintain a service like this in house.

Bonus question - how do you alert your team that your home-build PageDuty went down?

I was trying to make a different statement. Everyone will need to become a manager, even ICs. But in the past, many engineers shied away from management, for various reasons. Now, it will need to change.

Managing people is hard because of all the things that make us human. Managing AI will be simpler as we won't need to deal with some of those things.

Separately,

"By using AI we get all the benefits of workers but with none of the drawbacks of humans."

To be fair, I did not write that. You are projecting your thoughts on my post.

Anyone know of resources like this but for capital markets? Things that would allow engineers new to trading equities, options, FX, bonds, and commodities to learn about different flows, market structure, common architectures, and other things that normally you learn from years of experience.

Every software developer will be a manager of one or more AI agents. Managing AI agents will turn out to be surprisingly similar to managing people, except for the drama, illness, and tragedy.

No. The cost of one programmer’s hour of work compared to the increase in price of RAM is not very big. One is a variable cost one is fixed.

It’s a funny comparing commutes back then to commutes now. But it does not take a lot of imagination to see that back then people did not isolate themselves with newspapers while buying food at the grocery store, standing on the crosswalk or in a myriad of their situations where we have opportunity for micro interactions with other people. In other words, looking only at commutes is nit picking.

How much RAM did the local machine have?

I was not thinking about real $ costs, but rather the cost of the hours of the people who had to deal with this BS.

Over the past 9 months I've been advising one small client of mine on AI adoption, and engineering maturity in general. They have a team of 5 engineers. One very capable lead and 4 ICs. They did not use AI at all before.

It was a whirlwind of a ride as the company caught up on 10 years of engineering maturity and 3 years of AI usage progress in 9 months. The improvement in output has been noticeable, and the quality has not dropped. In short, cycle time and throughput rose and quality remained stable.

One of the things we are talking about is the future. As the team learns how to use AI well, the amount of code will grow at a faster pace. The focus is now on writing things we really need, and ensuring the quality does not degrade.

We are trying to get the engineering team to lean into understanding the product and business domain, and also adopting a QA mindset.

One of the engineers is not interested in the business domain. He loves typing code. I am afraid that within six months it will not make sense to have him around. He is relatively junior and wants well-specced tickets, and is reluctant to use AI. Right now, Opus writes better code than him, and solves business problems more acutely, with less time spent on writing careful specs.

If he gets fired, the budget will likely be re-allocated to AI.

In 7 months, it will be fair to say that we replace 20% of the team with AI. If that happens, it will have been a thoughtful process focused on upskilling willing employees, and not a boneheaded hype-driven decision. But it will be judged on the summary and not the process that went into it.

I'm being a little facetious when I write this, but bear with me:

Let's say I have daily backups, and get 10x done each day by being reckless and risking an "rm -rf", and let's say there's a 1% chance of an "rm -rf". I break even after 2 days of being reckless even if I get unlucky and on day 2 it wipes my drive. I spend day 3 and 4 recovering, and am still 6 days ahead based on the 10x work I got done on day 1.

What if I have a 50 day streak of not hitting an "rm -rf"? Early retirement?

I guess the work on day 1 should be to build a proper sandbox and drop the chance of an "rm -rf or worse" even down to 0.001%.

I wonder how much money this agent wasted on the DN42 side? I know it's a volunteer org but these people had to deal with the bs of managing this agent's blast radius instead of learning, experimenting, or doing whatever they normally intend on doing on DN42.

Tally it up and send a donation request to the agent operator.

The problems with inheritance tax is that they can be avoided through trust structures and insurance schemes. In theory it's a good tax, but in practice many wealthy people figured out how not to pay it.

I own a domain and have a catch all email. I routinely get emails from Microsoft and Google's official email addresses telling me that some account will be closed, or some other account notifications. I never created these accounts, and when I try to log into them or do a password reset, it does not go anywhere. It's been a minor mystery why I keep getting these emails for a while.

The Microsoft emails are coming from microsoft-noreply@microsoft.com so it's a bit different than in this article.

Supporting is a word that means many different things.

It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.

It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.

It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.

Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.

I’m not an accountant and what you’re saying is probably right. However, if you hire an engineer to do R&D, build systems, and take R&D tax credits, it “feels” like capex.

Replace “Claude code” with “programmers” and you get what we’ve had up until now. It’s all just moving quicker now.

You don’t need to teach anyone about this. The wealth tax should apply to extremely wealthy people, not everyone.

If you accumulated a fortune, there was some skill at play. There was also considerable luck and some exploitation. The wealth tax is a way of paying back for the luck and exploitation.

You will still be extremely wealthy.

Paul wants to play the fairness card. Life is not fair and those who accumulated massive fortunes won the lottery. Don’t let the massively rich conflate issues. Don’t get fooled.

Is it capex of training new models and hiring people for 250mln pay packages? Or is it opex running inference?

Absolutely right. I had a "math moment" myself. I was thinking margin instead of markup.

EDIT: [ IGNORE THIS COMMENT -- IT IS WRONG - I had a "bad math moment" myself ]

The math seems off. How is 7.8 million vs 4 million 95% more expensive. Article makes good points but I doubt the numbers as they don’t add up.

Still agree with the conclusion though.

You’re right and that’s intentional. Japanese companies don’t optimize for efficiently but for longevity. Sometimes those things go hand in hand. Sometimes they don’t.

The article makes a good point, but it's based on a polarized view that people make good judgement and AI is incapable of making good judgement.

I've worked with people who demonstrated below-average judgement, and I've seen cases of good judgement from AI. I think if a company can identify the poor performers and part wit them, there is a decent chance that the remaining people with AI in hand can more than make up the difference.

Now given the logic that you can't be dependent on any one service to run your SaaS, how does Railway convince its customers to run their SaaS on a single service?

You can have an offboarding doc even if you don’t have employees. It will apply in the future once/if you do. It will be silly and useless now, but you can check it off as a YES.

How will you know that it produced correct code if you don’t know how to write it yourself?

If a behavior is undefined, the theoretical answer to this could be anything, including -123, 500, or 0. We are just lucky that the compilers choose a more sane version of undefined behavior in practice.

I don't. But many others do. The only thing that let's banks and other companies know that you are dead is a piece of paper called a Death Certificate.