Cwizard

Merry Christmas, I hope this community can stay healthy for many years to come!

I am not saying AI will never replace my job, just not the current generation models.

Why do you think ChatGPT will effect employment for programmers? If ChatGPT makes a few more major leaps forward it might be able to make me more productive (it is not even close currently for my work), I don’t see how current AI models will ever be able to replace my job.

If it improves an order of magnitude it might be able to make me more productive and I will be able to charge more for my time.

I wouldn’t even begin to know how to ask ChatGPT to help me with some of the more complex problems I am dealing with on a day to day basis. As far as I understand these models don’t build up any understand and even their memory is an illusion, previous conversations is just reevaluated with every new question. I assume this limits the complexity of what it can do, and does not seem scalable to me.

I see it being helpful in generating function names etc, perhaps adding more context to autocompletion tools for better suggestions, better front-end to Google so search becomes more efficient. And hopefully it helps me write the boilerplate in every email.

I honestly hopes it improves a lot, I see only benefits for our jobs. But currently not ready for serious work. Although a very impressive feat of engineering.

I think you’re both right, just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Sure having office “friends” or social interactions at the office is a good thing but just make sure those aren’t your only social contacts.

Not relevant if you are interested in performance. This go only version is much slower than the cgo overhead. (At least it was a year ago, do your own benchmarks)

Have you tried pocketbase?

Most of these supply chains basically didn’t have backup parts and you think they would consider building whole backup factories?

The perceived decline in quality might just be caused by a very real increase in the quality of ‘amateur’ journalism.

I noticed this both during covid and Ukraine coverage. The quality of journalism that is now available online is in my opinion much greater than any news organisation can put out. Often because the amateur journalist are people covering event from on the ground as it is happening.

Isn’t it so that statistically lump-sum is better[0] but that you take on overvaluation risk? If you DCA you reduce that risk.

[0] don’t have a ref but I think it has been shown that if you have a lump sum of money, historically you would have made the most gains by investing everything immediately (in the S&P500, there are only a few periods were this wasn’t true (therefore there is a risk)

My complaint is that tech is still super strong and these articles are giving people a false sense of anxiety.

Unless perhaps the FANG type jobs, don’t really know about those.

But if you are looking to get a good tech job with a reasonable salary there are tons of open positions. We can’t hire enough people.

There didn’t need to be any freezes, just regular hiring. Facebook doubled in size since 2018, doubled!

That’s a stretch, Amazon has been known for bad quality for years. I have actively been trying to buy less from them since over a year now, I imagine others have as well and for longer. This trend was going to catch up with them eventually.

Not saying this is what happened but my theory has just as much evidence as yours.

What I don’t understand about all these doom and gloom articles of the end of tech is that net employee counts are still up compared to 2018-19. Would we have seen all these articles if over-hiring hadn’t happened? No we wouldn’t.

News companies get paid by getting attention. Reframe everything you read by someone who’s fulltime job is to make news and you will see a whole lot of these articles a whole lot differently.

Not really most contractors I know are just regular programmers, average in skill. Their rate is around 800eu/day, they all work in big bureaucratic enterprises. Hiring contractors is basically the only way a lot of those companies can get access to somewhat decent talent.

And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.

The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.

Why should it be illegal? (Serious question)

What makes you think that? Is Musk going to be CEO himself? I would expect him to very hands-on early on. Unless someone really talented wants to step in… but who wants to be CEO under Musk? At this point it would be a puppet role.

> It’s up seven percentage points from last month and is now at the highest pace this year, the survey showed.

> More than half say their rent is at least 10% higher than it was six months ago, and in seven say rents have increased at least 20%.

Amazon has been slowly trending down over the last 10 years for me (but in many ways also improving).

Amazon used to be a shop I trusted, products arrived in good condition, and their customer service was pleasant to deal with. Now it’s full of crap, product nearly always arrive damaged (I mostly buy books), and their customer service is significantly less helpful.

I live in central europe maybe things are better in the US.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the article but I learned a lot from video games and by extend the internet when I was a kid.

It thought me that if you work on something, you will get better at it, and you will be rewarded. This is not the case for a lot of other things in the life of a teenager. If you work hard at school you aren’t really rewarded, you just have to pass (binary outcome) and if you do an extra project it’s not like you get extra points. If you take a student job, you don’t get a raise when do a good job, you just get more work. If it wasn’t for video games the lessons I would have learned was that you should do the bare minimum not to fail/get fired. Which is a really sad attitude to have.

Idk its a very short video and doesn’t show any part of how to work is. Isn’t a bit like tacking a selfie. You take 10, pick the one that looks best, and you only take them when you are standing in the Grand Canyon.

I disagree. Growth is an attitude. I worked at startups and at mature companies. In a growth company you usually do not have to justify work in term of profitability but in terms of growth. Then when the company is sufficiently large different management is brought in and the company is made profitable. Budgets are put in place. If you want to get something done, you have to ask for budget, and justify the cost yearly.

At least from my experience.

Ok, I didn’t know. I sold most of my facebook stock late 2019. And haven’t really looked at the company since.

I am not saying Facebook should stop growing. It should just not keep dumping money in these unproven projects, and they should get some people on board to fix their cost structure.

Apple and Microsoft are much more mature companies than Facebook is. Microsoft had major restructuring a couple of years ago. And I think Apple also had some major reforms internally around 2015-16 to make its operations more efficient. Apple accumulated a massive amount of cash over that period.

I am not as much into it anymore as I sold most of my holdings near the end of the pandemic. So maybe things have changed since then.

Netflix is another company I have serious questions about. Not sure about their current situation but around 2017 when I looked into them, they were essentially a company that sells you a dollar for 99c. Their ratio internal content/external content was not high enough which meant they had massive recurring licensing costs which they funded by a mix of subscriptions revenue and debt (a lot of debt). The story was that that would be ok once they reached ‘scale’ as costs would be the same but they would have more subs. In my opinion that logic is flawed since presumably the cost of the licensing deals will also rise as more players entered the market and content holders got less money from traditional sources (because everyone uses those subscriptions services now). Netflix made sense when they were able to buy the content for cheap because they were niche.

My opinion of course. Im just a random dude on the internet.

After almost 20 years of doing business isn’t it about time that Facebook starts to position itself as a value company rather than a growth company?

Realistically they had one big growth avenue and that was acquisitions but the regulatory (or rather political) environment doesn’t allow for it.

I get that it is hard to let go of that growth mindset after 20 years of crazy growth but at some point the journey ends and you have to reorient the business (imo). I am not saying stop investing but scale it down a notch, set realistic budgets, pay a dividend or buyback stock. Maybe if they had shifted their mindset away from growth at all cost earlier they wouldn’t have gotten such a bad rep.

I feel the same about Google. I wonder how much money their non-ad, non-cloud stuff made of its life time and if it has been profitable.

In the end the goal of a company (whether you agree with it our not) is not to get as big as possible but to generate as much cash for its shareholders as possible. And I think Facebook over extended with going all in on Meta.

But perhaps I am looking at this with too much hindsight.

Do you have a link?

Is there a design yet for a power system that can run on fully on renewables in realistic conditions?

I looked into this in 2017 and at the time there was no realistic design, they all relied on Gas powered plants to provide on demand production. Because at the time battery technology was not at the point it could provide reliable baseload. Did this change?

From my research at the time, all the articles claiming renewables where improving to the point of being the most cost-effective where just taking the average production output of a solarpanel/windturbine, dividing that by cost and then extrapolating. Obviously this does not work beyond a certain percentage of production.

Could you elaborate why you chose Nim over other languages? The advantages need to be pretty strong when picking a niche language like this I would assume? Curious what the thought process was like.

Anyone here used Nim for a bigger project? What was your experience like?

Could someone explain to me in what why Kubernetes is complex and what alternatives are simpler? I’ve worked on non-k8s systems before and in my experience they all hang together with custom bash/python code which although line-for-line is ‘simpler’ it makes it harder to onboard new people and is less robust (excluding very simple deployments)

K8s is very modular in my experience so if you don’t need something you can easily ignore it and not pay a complexity cost. Nomad does not seem much simpler to me (especially because you basically have to pair it with Consul and Vault)

I am genuinely curious.

I'd much rather be evacuated (and live) than die from air pollution.