BobbyTables2

For decades, people ran word processors and graphics editors locally.

Now it’s in the cloud on a damn webpage.

With recent RAM and storage price disruptions, I feel like we’ll go to go back to an equivalent of everyone having a dumb Wyze terminal with the real “computer” in the cloud… Only difference is the dumb terminal will have color, be wireless, and portable.

And I really hope I’m wrong…

I’m just amazed there are companies actively grooming employees to be promoted.

In my experience, rarely an individual contributor ends up being promoted to a manager (because the latter retired/layoff/etc).

At the higher levels, they are filled with executives in acquired companies or hired from the outside. (CEO of LittleCo becomes VP of BiggerCo)

Although I have seen 2-3 unicorn cases where someone goes from janitor to director in 3 years - far faster than a high performing junior engineer with demonstrated accomplishments can become a senior engineer… Always assumed the former was flat out nepotism.

I feel like any company whose products have RESTful interfaces are already there…

One wants to turn on an indicator on a remote device. A simple Boolean value. But we need networking, TLS, authentication plugins, certificate validation, distributed logging, containers, orchestration, HTTP client/server, interprocess communication, daemon dependency management, …

Sure, one can say each of these layers and abstractions has an important and justifiable purpose. But one can also step back and start wondering - what the hell are we really doing???

At some level, it seems like each layer of abstraction has to manage others, only simply because they exist.

Imagine the simplicity of 1800s telegraph signaling - no software!

Too often we build systems with Fortune-50 style hierarchies when a 5-person team could do the whole job.

It’s also a quite a shock as the property value doubles over a short time (which happened in the past few years).

Counties are very aggressive at updating appraisal values.

Property tax used to be deductible for Federal income tax purposes but effectively no longer — from a bizarre effort to spite the “blue” states.

For a long time, the movie “War Games” while entertaining, also seemed a bit absurd.

Doesn’t seem so absurd anymore…

TLDR: For almost 1/6 of a century, the C++ standards broke the simplest infinite loop and only just recently fixed it.

Idiots!

Don’t they really that people write real programs to solve real problems? This isn’t a theoretical academic exercise!

We’ll circle back, launch our go to market strategy, and chase the lightning for a win…

I had a former colleague who would put a “retry 10x with sleeps” in each of A, B, C, D.

None of these were even expected to fail. But the code was buggy as well, so after D being retried 10000 times, it’d eventually give up. Managed to convert a sub-second operation into a half hour affair.

Suspect it’s far more than $80/month - I was paying that much for a small unit about 30 years ago! (In a LCOL area too!)

But can you put dishes with food on them in the dish washer?

I detect SPAM.

You realize there was a time when decent GPUs used to be much cheaper than decent CPUs?

And for a time, it even seems true as long as the natural disasters that impact various customer offices happen to not impact that one particular data center…

I even wonder if the frontier AI models are really as capable as they claim or if the companies behind them have just special cases all the “hard” questions.

For example, the earlier generative LLMs couldn’t correctly answer ‘how many r’s in “strawberry”?’ due to the underlying nature of the tokens.

If they get it correct today, how do they do it? It feels like we’re being deceived by the Wizard of Oz…

As a non-Australian, I’d say your country’s own immigration policy is fairly unwelcoming.

I get no country wants to accept a wave of 80 year olds that will be a burden to its social welfare systems.

But I find it strange one would automatically deny seasoned working professionals in excellent health with knowledge, experience, and finances to offer — just because they were born before the premier of Good Morning Australia in 1981.

If you saw what goes on in middle school classrooms of native English speakers, I’d think you’d be in for a surprise…

Tell a kernel developer that spin locks aren’t for production code.

Bring a wind turbine with you because the laughing will be quite intense…

I don’t think lack of regulation is necessarily it.

If I build a robot that murders my neighbor, I’m still at fault.

We don’t absolve drivers of responsibility because of cruise control.

In that sense, AI is nothing new. If it is abused to cause harm, the person behind it should be liable.

That’s really cool! Neat cross of the old tank game with the wireframe graphics and asteroids!

That’s just under 300kg of gold…

Would be darkly hilarious if they were using the speaker or rear defroster as a cellular antenna.

(Yeah, technically horrible but I’m sure someone will find a way)

How is Europe similar then?

I’d expect the US spends vastly more energy on transportation (individual vehicles) and housing (larger, more AC, etc)

I suspect they know exactly what they are doing.

And the non-techies who have seen Terminator and other movies blindly line up behind them…

If AI wasn’t a thing would Nvidia be worth 1/10th is current value?

Gaming is lucrative but not THAT lucrative…

The first “computers” were humans…

How is it possible for particles (with mass) to exceed the speed of (massless) photons in a medium?

I don’t mean in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum. Just seems weird that something with mass could outpace something without… Why are the photons so slow?

We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.

Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…

I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.

Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?

Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?

Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?

Agreed. It would actually be a fairly perverse argument to claim that most AI output is somehow NOT owned by the AI provider…

Why wouldn’t they claim ownership of the AI output? They likely already claim ownership of the “transformation” (AI training) of the (pirated) input data.

Agreed. Companies don’t like trade secrets and proprietary information potentially being laundered to their competitors…

The AI not being human doesn’t escape ethical consideration - OpenAI employees are culpable for what they build.

This was academic research. Could just have easily been trade secrets and proprietary data.