FLT8

I'm sure I'm going to offend a bunch of people with this, but my experience has been similar to yours, and it reminds me of something "Uncle" Bob Martin once mentioned: the number of software developers is roughly doubling every two years, which means that at any given time half of the developer population has less than two years experience.

If you're an experienced dev, having a peer that enthusiastically suggests a bunch of plausible but subtly wrong things probably net-net slows you down and annoys you. If you're more junior, it's more like being shown a world of possibilities that opens your mind and seems much more useful.

Anyway, I think the reason we see so much enthusiasm for LLM coding assistants right now is the overall skew of developers to being more junior. I'm sure these tools will eventually get better, at least I hope they do because there's going to be a whole lot of enthusiastically written but questionable code out there soon that will need to be fixed and there probably won't be enough human capacity to fix it all.

I tried it, I guess I'm your target market, I'm relatively new to keyboard, trying to learn, and do happen to have a Bluetooth MIDI adapter.

A few notes and observations from a quick trial run below:

- the app crashed out a few times when connecting to my MIDI controller (a Yamaha MD-BT01 dongle that plugs into the old school MIDI plugs on the keyboard). Not sure what's going on there, but it happened a few times. - the feedback given seemed quite helpful, I like that wrong notes were highlighted, and it seemed to do well at ignoring a false-start that I made while trying it out. - I would have liked if the playback functionality supported MIDI too; I play with headphones on and it's a bit weird (and annoying for other people in the house) if the playback comes out of the iPad. - I would also like the ability to start from a bar of my choice and maybe even evaluate a one or two bar section at a time rather than having to play the whole piece

On the whole though I think it's a good app, and I intend to use it more. I don't share the concerns of others about the price of the sheet music, I think your pricing is reasonable, and assume it takes some effort for you to translate into a form that can be used.

Well done, thanks for sharing.

Or... given Australia is heading down the path of acquiring nuclear submarines, maybe it makes some sense to bootstrap a nuclear industry in advance of that?

We use Jekyll for this at work, build the site using GitHub actions, and host through GitHub pages. Works a treat. Supports mermaid diagrams, mathml, ...

Maybe add to that: try to stay long enough in a role to really feel the consequences of your actions. Even better if you're on pager for a while too. I know it's not trendy to stay in a job for long these days, and conventional wisdom is it's not great for your salary either, but one thing it will do is allow you to understand whether decisions you made were actually good or not.

There are roles I've been in where it's only been years later that the true impact of decisions made was actually apparent. I'm glad I hung around long enough to experience that.

40% is the marginal rate. Only a very small proportion of people will be paying that, and vanishingly few will be paying that on a substantial proportion of their earnings. The average rate of taxes paid will be much more reasonable.

I was under the impression that we primarily ground one side to prevent atmospheric charge and/or things like lightning strikes causing large voltage differentials to occur between power lines and grounded objects (it's probably a bit of a fire and safety risk if the wires coming into your house could be sitting many kV above earth potential).

I left a well paid gig in the finance industry, where I'd been supporting a team of ~15 through a large restructure. I was getting fed up with the pointlessness of it all - there was more distraction than value creation going on and it was the kind of place that succeeded despite itself. I was stressed-by-proxy for my team who had all been told they needed to reapply for their jobs, and I needed a change. I left, and went to work for a small government agency, I think it was around 1/2 the pay. The work was ultimately much more meaningful and fulfilling, and I could make a bigger difference in the smaller team, but believe it or not the small-office politics and personalities there ended up getting to me, and I decided that if I was going to have to deal with that kind of BS anyway, I might as well do it for more money. I'm back in a large org now, but with a different perspective, which has made it easier mentally to deal with things. I pick my battles, try to help improve things as much as I can for my team, and let a lot more things wash over me. I'm still not completely fulfilled, but I'll be able to retire earlier here than I could otherwise and that thought keeps me going.

> who will be able to afford a robot?

How about capitalists/investors wanting to own an army of cheap-to-run blue collar workers? Your barista, hair dresser, mechanic, plumber, sparky, builder, bodyguard .. eventually one robot can probably do all of those jobs and more. Why would the AI revolution stop with knowledge workers?

I would have also thought:

3. It lets users get software on to the ipad without going through the App Store (thereby escaping apples ability to clip the ticket on the way through).

Why would anyone want to have kids today? Most couples in the western world can barely support themselves while getting into home ownership, let alone trying to support multiple kids and put them through college while saving for retirement. The amount of capacity left in life for good child rearing is minimal. Add to that the fact that it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going, and even if there were jobs, previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up, and a surveillance advertising driven economy that's increasingly difficult to escape. Toxic social media driving toxic expectations etc. It just seems cruel bringing kids into a world like that.

All three are also superficially easy to learn to use, hence they're able to sucker people in initially with the learning curve, then keep them there with the sunk cost fallacy.

There are other reasons to be logged into iCloud. For example, "find my device" relies on this. Just because you want to be able to find a stolen device doesn't mean you also want your data exfiltrated.

My first introduction to urushiol was as a kid... there was a Japanese rhus tree [1] near my local bus stop and I happened to play with some of the seed pods while waiting for a bus one day. I ended up looking like the elephant man for a few days, and it took a bit of time to figure out what was going on.

It turns out that Urushiol shows up in some surprising places, including mango skin, which I discovered later in life after peeling a bunch of mangoes to make a mango salad. Apparently the husks of cashew nuts are notoriously bad for the workers who deal with them too (although the nuts themselves are perfectly safe)..

I don't think I'm likely to deliberately eat anything with urushiol in it, but I must admit, the idea of being able to train my immune system to deal with it is kind of appealing.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicodendron_succedaneum

Haha... I'm surprised to learn my wife and I aren't the only people playing the "Getz" game! We started around 15-20 years ago, when every second hire car in Queensland was a Getz.. they're a little harder to come by now, but I still get a little thrill from calling one before she's seen it :)

Also related: C64 booting Linux by emulating a RISC-V processor:

https://hackaday.com/2023/08/27/linux-on-a-commodore-64/

The C64 breaking was almost certainly not your fault.. they had a bunch of commonly occurring faults, and a number of the chips, especially those which commodore fabbed themselves were notorious for giving up eventually. The PLA failing was a particularly common occurrence, but RAM and other glue logic sometimes fails too. These days there's a vibrant hobbyist community and a lot of the chips have modern replacements available. I'm still grateful for having grown up with a C64, it was a fun way to learn the ropes.

In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much.

IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.

As far as I remember things, newspapers used to carry a lot of advertising. And the face value of a newspaper was more-or-less a nominal amount, I suspect largely to support the distribution network.

I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper lying around with ads cut out or scribbled over - which I guess is a simplistic analog of the ad-blockers and such that modern news outlets are up against. You can understand the push to maintain revenue that's needed to support quality journalism.

At the same time, as a consumer of news, print ads would not be centrally and intrusively tracking your every thought either, so the desire to block modern ads is entirely rational.

Modern advertising methods have broken the social contract that used to exist to help keep things in balance.

I feel this even in my profession as software engineer. It used to be that I could focus on writing good software. Studying the domain, finding abstractions, picking the best language/approach for the problem at hand, designing domain models... Over time the expectations on developers have become greater. We're software builders, and testers. A lot of us have trained to become UNIX/windows/network/infrastructure engineers, often across multiple cloud environments. We're DBA's across multiple relational and NoSQL DB's. We're designers who need to understand the intricacies of accessibility. We're business experts too. And taking on all of these things has made us less focused. Less capable at our core jobs.

There's a bridge in Melbourne, Australia, called the Montague St bridge that's so (in)famous it has its own website. The average streak without a strike is currently sitting at 42 days. They've even tried putting up tons of signage and low hanging dangly rattle things that trucks will hit before they get squished under the bridge, but it seems to have little effect.

1. https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com/

Interoperating? Is the iMessage spec public? Can I use iMessage on an android phone without hacky workarounds like using a mac computer?

Come to think of it, the same lack of interop openness applies to airdrop, use of the on-phone NFC chipset (for uses other than apple-pay), and a bunch of other such things.

I understand that things are often more nuanced than they may appear, and in questions of moral judgement there will always be room for fuzziness. Personally I think the idea of compromising security for everyone in order to make life a little easier for the TLA's is not something I'd feel comfortable doing. I consider an individuals right to privacy paramount, something without which we risk unbounded tyrannical rule. Others will probably feel differently when presented with 'think of the children' style arguments. I'm glad to hear though that you were at least conflicted enough to be asking questions.

It's perhaps not 'critical' in the sense that losing it would matter much, but it is worth caring about because of the number of people who are affected if/when things go wrong.

Nah, I've met enough amoral people over the course of my career to know that's not the case. However, the overwhelming majority of people I've worked with are people who do have morals and do care about the outcomes they're creating, and that gives me great hope.

You simply legislate that if a company is building anything that will be used regularly by more than eg. a few thousand people, then the work must be designed and/or signed off by a licensed engineer, who will a) be subject to a code of ethics and b) be professionally liable for any failures causing loss or damage to the public.

We seem to be able to manage this with bridges, planes, electrical & hydro installations etc. No reason it shouldn't be the same for critical software infrastructure.

I also hope that any ethically minded engineers inside Meta take a stand against this BS. The only way stuff like this happens is because engineers working on these projects decide that they can set aside whatever morals they may have had for the price of a big fat FAANG pay cheque. It's about time our profession adopted a code of ethics, like that of the ACM[1]. To the engineers who _have_ walked away despite the obvious pressures, I salute you.

1. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

It doesn't seem out of the question that the U.S. or allied nations might want to be involved in the development effort around these CPUs. Even if initially it's just to build some credibility for this account so future adversarial patches are accepted with less suspicion? If you think that's implausible, I'm interested why?

And a dystopian vision for the future that can make profitable use of the above ...

> “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us,”

If you've ever tried building an additive synth, this probably seems obvious. If you play two tones with exact ratios together, the brain has a tendency to interpret them as a single tone with a different timbre. By making the ratios slightly off (don't have to be by much at all), or by making the ratios vary a little over time (eg. Subtle vibrato), the brain is able to pick out the "consonance" as a chord, and it sounds far more interesting.