LinuxAmbulance

Sure, but Google is a very unique environment and the advice is unlikely to work at the majority of employers.

I get the sense that Lalit wants to do the work and get paid while avoiding the career meta game. The appeal of that is understandable, but having been in this situation in the past, it's not all its cracked up to be.

The number of tech companies where you can stay employed for a solid decade without falling victim to layoffs or re-orgs are very rare in my experience, even more so ones that offer competitive pay.

If you find yourself looking for a new job and want to move up in title and pay, doing the same sort of unglamorous work for years can be a detriment to that.

I'm surprised at how many years the plane went without having that part inspected. It looks like the failure was due to fatigue cracks, but the last time the part was inspected was in 2001?

Coming from a small company like iD, it must have been quite the shock.

I put a framed picture of the leadership principles on my desk for much the same reason, with a similar reaction.

As corporate principles in general go, they were decent, but frequently they were used to excuse poor behavior, so... Yeah.

Another way of looking at it would be adding some personality to the corporate drone existence.

What's the issue with drug discovery? AI/ML assisted drug discovery is one of the better examples of successful AI utilization out there.

Very nice work. Might not hurt to throw in a few more pictures that illustrate the steps in the build process.

It's getting harder and harder to distinguish between AIs and humans! If AI wasn't mentioned, I'd be here thinking it was caused by one of my former coworkers.

"When the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure." Something something something.

Forwards looking earnings guidance is also a pet peeve of mine - I've had plenty of stocks take a significant decline because a given company was a few or even a single percentage point shy of what they'd predicted from the previous quarter.

Assuming accurate predictions can be made is foolhardy, and if a company actively makes changes to meet the prediction that are at the cost of long term profits, it doesn't help anyone but day traders, the worst of the worst.

I think the majority of coders out there write the same CRUD app over and over again in different flavors. That's what the majority of businesses seem to pay for.

If a business needs the equivalent of a Toyota Corolla, why be upset about the factory workers making the millionth Toyota Corolla?

34 million developers? That number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. Are there 34 million people that have Xcode installed? That I can believe.

This is hilarious, I love it.

And the advice looks pretty decent at first glance too.

There's truth to that, but the vast majority of people can figure out that a movie is bad, no matter what they had for dinner or what's going on in their lives.

We're not looking for the Platonic form of the movie review, but just a simple "Is this movie trash? Is it amazing?" aggregated reaction from viewers.

Yeah, the whole AI thing has very unpleasant similarities to the dot com bubble that burst to the massive detriment of the careers of the people that were working back then.

> I don’t understand why there’s this focus on juniors as the people who know AI best.

Because junior engineers have no problem with wholeheartedly embracing AI - they don't have enough experience to know what doesn't work yet.

In my personal experience, engineers who have experience are much more hesitant to embrace AI and learn everything about it, because they've seen that there are no magic bullets out there. Or they're just set in their ways.

To management that's AI obsessed, they want those juniors over anyone that would say "Maybe AI isn't everything it's cracked up to be." And it really, really helps that junior engineers are the cheapest to hire.

It's already exploding.

The hype train is going to keep on moving for a while yet though.

There's what AWS leadership says and then there's what actually sticks.

There's an endless series of one pagers with this idea or that idea, but from what I witnessed first hand, the ones that stuck were the ones that made money.

Jassy was a decent guy when I was there, but that was a decade ago. A CEO is a PR machine more than anything else, and the AI hype train has been so strong that if you do anything other than saying AI is the truth, the light and the way, you lose market share to competitors.

AI, much like automation in general, does allow fewer people to do more, but in my experience, customer desires expand to fill a vacuum and if fewer people can do more, they'll want more to the point that they'll keep on hiring more and more people.

I always thought of plotters as legacy tech, but considering the variety of marking tools you can attach to the head, I'm wondering if I should get one.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive plotter you can buy or build?

Which country is that?

Businesses are overly optimistic about AI replacing people.

For very simple jobs, like working in a call center? Sure.

But the vast majority of all jobs aren't ones that AI can replace. Anything that requires any amount of context sensitive human decision making, for example.

There's no way that AI can deliver on the hype we have now, and it's going to crash. The only question is how hard - a whimper or a bang?

In general, licensure is a great tool to hold the pool of practitioners to a high standard, few if any areas being more important than medicine.

But if someone has saved 6,500 children from dying, it doesn't make any sense to get hung up on it, especially if other doctors are working with him and have no issues with his methods and ability.

Those that are obsessed with process over results make my head hurt. Might as well declare all self-taught programmers as useless when it's clear they're a massive benefit.

A better question to ask is "What jobs can AI replace without a drop in the quality of the user experience?"

Generating clip art is definitely one of them.

Any others?

Ah, the optimism of 1997.

The article is super focused on the hardware side of things, and to a point, that makes sense. Your hardware has to be able to handle what you're simulating.

But it's not the hardware that's the difficult problem. We're nowhere close to hitting the limits of scaling hardware capability, and every time people declare that we are, they're proven wrong in just a few years, and sometimes even in just a few months.

It's the software. And we're so far away from being able to construct anything that could think like a human being that the beginning of it isn't even in sight.

LLMs are fantastic, but they're not a path to building something more intelligent than a human being, "Superintelligence". I would have a negative amount of surprise if LLMs are an evolutionary dead end as far as building superintelligence goes.

Is modeling neuron interactions the only way to achieve it? No idea. But even doing that for the number of neurons in a human brain is currently in fantasy land and most likely will be for at least a few decades, if not longer.

If I had to characterize the current state of things, we're like Leonardo Da Vinci and his aerial screw. We know what a helicopter could be and have ideas about how it could work, but the supporting things required to make it happen are a long, long way off.

The fact that for profit medicine is holding up some of the most advanced medical treatments in history is really disturbing. As a society, there will be a significant benefit, especially once it's cost optimized. But we'll never get there if beancounters hold it up, preferring short term profits above all else.

I'd love to know if anyone knows what a solution to this problem might look like.

Don't feel down on yourself in the least. Two to three years is a good run in the tech industry.

If I'm not learning new things that will get me the next better job that's a rung up the ladder, there's no point in staying. I've never had a job where that's the case three years in.

Except if you want to do level design for existing AAA FPS games other than Counter-Strike, the days where user maps and modding were allowed have come and gone long ago.

There's nothing out there like there was for Counter-Strike 1.6.

AGI might not be achievable in our lifetime, and possibly not in the next several.

There's nothing out there at the moment that can even begin to describe the necessary things for consciousness to exist, let alone self-awareness.

I don't think it's an impossible problem by any means, but I strongly suspect it's far more difficult than just about anyone gives it credit for.

I'm just confused by the number of people on this site that are adamant that their phones cannot possibly be listening in on them 24/7 and sending data back to Apple or Google on what they overhear.

"We'd notice the bandwidth usage!"

"The CPU would spike and it'd be obvious!"

As it turns out, it was not obvious.

For anyone who believes that phone companies would never listen to daily conversations without consent, this is a wakeup call.