somekyle2

We seemingly have very different experiences with rent. All rent I've paid was agreed upon prior to me being charged it, and guns were never involved. The people I rented from did the work of owning/managing the building and providing it for my use. Maybe this isn't a noble way to earn money, but I found it to be a really useful service, and it seems not dramatically different than most services I pay for (how much incremental work is Netflix doing for my behalf? what work is the bank doing to earn my loan?).

It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.

100%. I think there are some clear distinctions between AI training and human learning in practice that compound this. Humans learning requires individual investment and doesn't scale that efficiently. If someone invests the time to consume all of my published work and learn from it, I feel good about that. That feels like impact, especially if we interact and even more if I help them. They can perhaps reproduce anything I could've done, and that's cool.

If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad. And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.

If it doesn't work, it's an annoyance and you have to argue with it. If it does work, it's one more case where maybe with the right MCP plumbing and/or a slightly better model you might not be needed as part of this process. Feels a bit lose-lose.

Certainly not my intention. Some of my post is projection: I don't like the implications of the AI enthusiast stance, and I know I want "actually, AI can't fully take over the task of programming" to be true even though my recent experience with uses it to handle even moderately complex implementation has been quite successful. I've also seen the opposition narrow in scope but not firmness over the last year from some coworkers while watching others outsource nearly all of their actual code interaction, and I think some of the difference is how invested they are in the craft of programming vs being able to ship something. So, if you like the part AI is expected to take over and see it as part of your value, it makes sense that your threshold are higher for accepting that outcome as accurate. Seems like typical psychology rather than an attack.

I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it.

"The skillset you've spend decades developing and expected to continue having a career selling? The parts of it that aren't high level product management and systems architecture are quickly becoming irrelevant, and it's your job to speed that process along" isn't an easy pill to swallow.

"force" seems a bit strong, as I remember it.

I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.

Anecdotally, lots of people in SF tech hate AI too. _Most_ people out of tech do. But, enough of the people in tech have their future tied to AI that there are lot of vocal boosters.

Yeah, it makes sense that going from a decade or so where SWE was one of the best possible career paths if you have any aptitude to a period where tech cos were staffing up aggressively (I recall reading ~60% growth), there's gonna be a hangover. The educational pipeline probably still has a few years of oversupply to work through, and all of the people laid off post covid still need to work. Even in a world where AI being able to automate some of the key skills required for SWE has no negative impact on employment, we'd expect a few more years of rough job prospects.

Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.

Oh, that explains a thing. A decade or so ago, I was a well regarded engineer at a FAANG who got an offer from a startup. I told my manager I was probably going to take it, as it sounded fun. He and his lead tried to talk me into staying, showed me other departments I might find more fun. Really, they could've offered me a trivial raise and I probably would've stayed, but I was too meek to ask for money, and they didn't bring up money at all.

That always struck me as very strange; I assumed it was either a mistake, or a "if they're going somewhere that is a pay cut, clearly it isn't money, and if you offer them money they'll leave in 6mo anyway". But, if they don't have that level to pull, that's a much simpler answer.

Thanks for Picol! I saw it as a young engineer, and found the simplicity inspiring. It inspired me to write Tcl interpreters as starter projects in the next languages I was picking up, and I learned a lot by trying to push performance , functionality, and correctness. Your little project ended up inspiring cumulative months of joyful hacking.

Some of the problem in the conversation around this is that many people take "1x engineer" to mean "not particularly competent engineer" and some take it to mean "baseline, solid contributor who isn't exceptional", and the bar for what we regard as exceptional can differ drastically. I've been on teams where everyone is pretty good and felt like I was a genius, I've been on teams with really remarkable people and felt unworthy. Nobody knows or agrees what 'x' is or that it can even be reasonably measured, so all conversations about 'x' multipliers tend to be unproductive.

I marvel at this every single time i see their billboards. It does mean I read all of their billboards, I guess.

If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.

It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.

Quite true! Having been fairly instrumental in a few areas that I'd eventually moved on from, it was always interesting to see some of my trademark accomplishments become The Old Thing We're Trying To Replace (or even just The Big Thing We Have To Maintain); gave me a lot of empathy for prior contributors of code I ended up inheriting. I tend to assume that the old thing seems dumb because of the constraints when it was written and changing requirements over time; if a tool made by one person in a few weeks seems hopelessly naive to the medium sized team investing a few quarters in replacing it a few years later, that seems to be a rousing success for the original author.

This seems generally true in my experience. Another aspect of this, from personal experience: while it may be easy to move around in a large organization, you risk losing reputational capital. I had a habit of building reputation in some team/platform, then after I no longer found it engaging or there was enough turnover/focus shift, I'd ask to transition to a wildly different team for a new challenge. It _is_ fun, but if you opt to start as an IC and work your way up, you're sorta letting the ratchet slip, and if you do it every couple years you may have broad experience, but your reputation (and likely level) will be well below where it could be.

Thus, unless you can ramp to expertise really quickly to leverage your skills developed elsewhere, I'd recommend (perhaps obviously) to try to move to peripheral teams where your skills and relationships transfer as much as possible.

who is saying this on the behalf of western society?

Grover Norquist, prominent conservative voice and head of Americans For Tax Reform has talked about the danger of government provided filing services, namely that he believes it leads ultimately to increased taxes. The idea is that if the govt is saying how much you made, how much you owe, and just giving you a place to click "OK", it's on the tax payer to do the math to disagree, and the govt has incentive to find you owe more. And, taxes are less visible and easier, so if taxes go up or policies change, all the americans just confirming and hitting "Pay" aren't going to notice or be mad. Or, something like that.

Daycare was an anti-perk for Google, practically speaking. It was a huge waiting list to have a chance, and a small fraction got to use it, so most parents just got to be somewhat frustrated by it.

Lots of perks aren't widely used, but mostly by choice; a perk I could potentially use is still a perk, and it feels good to have that option.

Pushing toward remote work or asking someone to work on a different campus also makes the on-prem daycare a bit weird.

But yeah, a company day care that has enough spots to serve most interested parents would be a pretty nice perk. But, I think for most parents, a daycare near home is much better, especially those not working from office every day.

what does the expression "let them have cake" mean?

If they brought in some trustworthy skeptical folks with some tools and enough background to know what compelling nothing looks like, and they came out saying, "Oh man. oh wow. I'm trying to come up with another explanation, but it really seems like they have it." I'd start taking it seriously. "Guy who seems trustworthy said it's real and he saw the proof" is so very normal, for aliens, ghosts, various religious phenomena. "Someone was convinced" isn't compelling to me. "The specific trustworthy non-believers who were given access to the evidence were convinced" would shake me. That moves it from "might be a delusion or hoax" to "if it's a hoax/fraud, it's a very good one".

Although, "specific physical / recorded evidence made publicly available for study" would be even better if the evidence is strong. Once you're at "if it's a hoax/fraud, the perpetrator has advanced science we don't" it's a world-changing thing; maybe it's not an alien, but whatever it is it's amazing.

I'm healthy and enjoy a good walk, but I wouldn't really want to bring luggage a mile from an airport, especially not if the weather isn't nice; it seems rare for foot traffic out of airports to be particularly easy.

Yes, the output always feels to me like a reasonably clever and informed person just bullshitting; as someone prone, it's familiar. But, good-sounding shallow thinking is still pretty dang useful.

I've been on teams responsible for components written in more niche, powerful languages by previous employees who were deep in that particular language community. The author was really smart, the code was good. It was a big headache. First off, different build setup, different runtime, couldn't use most of our standard libs, so it was an island. It being in a language most people didn't know well meant it mostly only got updated as necessary; we certainly had people who could read the code and make tweaks with some comfort, but it was mostly just tweaks because nobody had the depth to really engage with the high level design idioms. It being a niche lang/community, it moved fast, so after a year or so our tool was apparently using deprecated practices; in our supported languages, teams did large-scale fixup across repos for new versions, but this being a special lang/toolchain, it was on us. Eventually, I believe it got rewritten, somewhat simpler, in one of our supported languages, and it was fine.

Maybe this is a success story: someone made a useful tool in a weird language and we used it successfully for at least a year. Maybe it wouldn't have been made or would've been worse or more expensive if they'd been forced to write it in a supported language. Maybe it would've needed to be rewritten anyway.

My view is a simple one; as one of the leads responsible for it, it was a special case bit of code, something people tried to avoid touching. Nothing about it required a niche language technically, so the added difficulty of working around that was friction and risk. It wasn't that people couldn't learn the language; they could, we had lang PhDs. It's just better if you can keep people where they have existing expertise, and spend your learning points on solving problems users care about.

If the 2021 encyclopedia is outdated, so is almost every fact in my head about the broader world.

I think it may be an uncomfortable truth for many language enthusiasts that with a decent compiler/runtime and a reasonably skilled team, you can write very good software reasonably efficiently in even a mediocre language. Language design absolutely matters in terms of what can be expressed efficiently, what classes of mistakes are hard to make, what performance you can expect in normal code, but rough memory safety, some static typing, and basic abstraction gives you a lot of the value there, and you can close a lot of the remaining gap in language capability with some discipline and process. Naturally, ideally we'd still only use perfect languages, and not allow errors that could be avoided or suboptimal code, but not all PL power is free and personal taste/experience isn't irrelevant, so I'm not too surprised that some people prefer a tool that to me seems worse, because empirically it often works out quite well.

It is not all the sudden as far as I can tell. There's a long history of Go hate, and it makes sense to me. Go is a new(ish) and fairly popular language, which already guarantees some level of hate. More substantially, it is an implicit argument against most things language enthusiasts like about programming languages; it's lack of static features and dynamic capability, it's non-focus on optimality in any domain, there's no attempt at uniform elegance or a motivating theory, it's just a kinda mundane procedural language that tries to solve some problems C enthusiasts had while avoiding the things that bugged them about Java and C++ (to oversimplify). A language such as that succeeding socially and practically is borderline offensive to folks who love clever language and runtime design, who love things that can push the boundaries of performance or verifiability.

Something so apparently mundane and poorly thought getting traction is a regression in the world of software engineering, supported by a Big Evil Corp that many folks dislike.

I've also personally seen a social meta-effect of this, where in a particular space all of the language aficionados would make a point of dumping on Go whenever Go was discussed (or even when a dig at Go could be shoe-horned into another discussion), and at a certain point there are only negative discussions of it, and the snobbery (justified or not) is a form of social bonding.

Of course, there are loads of legitimate criticism to be applied to the language design, the runtime, the rollout, the marketing, the framings of the authors, but there's a persistence, a snarl, to some of the critics that seems to me to go beyond an observation of the real issues. For reasons listed above, some people seem to take hating Go quite personally.

what makes someone who uses that feature a "fool"? Some users don't particularly mind being tracked.