Loic

This is the engineering approach in a factory. You always have multiple layers of security systems.

The analogy is that each layer is a slice of Emmental cheese. You end up with a bad event, only if all the holes in the slices align.

I hope they will learn from the success of the Brazilian PIX system.

You know that if you ask the LLM correctly you get top notch answers, because you have the experience to judge if the answer is top notch or not.

I spend a couple of hours per week teaching software architecture to a junior in my team, because he has not the experience to not only ask correctly but also assess the quality of the answer from the LLM.

3 kids, same honest conversations, 2 where it worked and works very well, 1 where it is a constant battle.

So sorry but no, the platforms are addictive and not all the kids can resist against an armada of statisticians ensuring the systems stay addictive only through honest conversations.

By the way, this would mean you could solve all the addiction issues if it would be working...

My personal experience: Electric toothbrush and razor. I especially hate the razors, you can replace the head, they could last a lifetime, but the battery is practically dead after two years. Toothbrushes are improving, the last one has 3 years of service and still work ok.

I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.

[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.

I wrote about the high energy, long life waste. The part really causing issues.

Long life, high activity nuclear waste represents less than 3500m3 (one Olympic swimming pool), and this, since the start of civil nuclear electrical production in the 50's. World wide.

Durable is really the French household name "par excellence".

La disparition[0], Georges Perec.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

Currently renovating our house, everything will be KNX based. Offline, no servers needed (even within the house) but nice for visualization, standard, 500+ vendors of compatible hardware. Highly recommended.

If you are retrofitting a complete house at the same time, look at KNX. If not, do not explore this rabbit hole.

Swiss like French have hundreds of different cheeses, so calling a specific cheese a Swiss cheese is like telling "Why does American car is powered by an electrical motor?", talking about a specific Tesla car while you have hundreds of other cars manufactured in the US.

Tracker systems with "hail stow"[0] mode. They bring the panels as vertical as possible.

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/femp/hail-damage-mitigation-solar-pho...

Off-Topic: Thank you for not only providing a stellar service with Fastmail, but also for contributing back to the OSS ecosystem and the specifications/RFC work. This takes a lot of time and we all benefit from this work. It helps many people/small IT shops to run a system outside of the "big ones". Again, thank you.

My kids are playing Fortnite on a PS4, it works, they are happy, I feel the rendering is really good (but I am an old guy) and normally, the only problem while playing is the stability of the Internet connection.

We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.

Do not worry, I am mentoring a young engineer in my team. It is painfully hard to get him to improve his code, because it works. It is badly structured, lot of small "impedance mismatches", lot of small security issues, all that in 3 Python files.

I have a team of 10 engineers, the quality of the code they produce together with the LLM of the day correlates even more with the experience.

My impression over the past 6 months - before we had no "official" access to LLM, is that they increase the gap between junior and experienced developers.

Note that this is my limited impression from a team of 10 engineers. This matches with Simon's feeling in a good way for you!

The economics changed, it is now cheaper to put more panels East/West than having tracking ones as the tracking hardware is expensive. The tracking panels have the advantage to be put vertically in case of heavy hail.

> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.

Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.

It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.

Because ChromeOS is not an open base?

Even my kids (full in the Apple ecosystem) are using Garmin watches because for sport, it looks like they are one level better than Apple. Especially the battery as they are often 48/72h without access to power.

Because they have money to burn?

I am French living in Germany, the amount of time Claude saves me every week by reviewing the emails I send to contractors, customers is incredible. It is very hard to write good idiomatic German while ensuring no grammar and spelling mistakes.

I second you, just for that, I would continue paying for a subscription, that I can also use it for coding, toying with ideas, quickly look for information, extract information out of documents, everything out of a simple chat interface is incredible. I am old, but I live in the future now :-)

10 years ago, OVH datacenter SBG1 was below 1.1 with a mixture of natural convection + liquid cooling. But I have not been following in the latest years.

French living in Germany, sometimes I am mixing up things. What is interesting is that the Swiss person (probably German speaking) did not notice. Thank you for allowing to laugh after the fact :-D

FYI, the rental skis, even if they look the same as the same skis you could buy retail are not the same. They have bigger edges and a dicker base. The bindings are not the same.

This is because they are built to go through the machine after each rental. Good retails skis have less "robust" but faster, thinner base, they would be dead after 3 months of rental.

Source: I spend way too many hours each season in a ski shop taking care of a mix of rental and competitive hardware.

The full advice:

My advice, for the moment:

- Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric.

- Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI—read widely and ask people you trust about what they’re seeing.

- Beyond that, however, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All of this is too new for anyone to really understand what they’re saying.

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

With that, it shows that he is not really using the AI tools, he would be using them he would have given this advice :

- try the tools and look where they can improve your life.

Take everything Cal Newport is talking about with a large grain of salt.

I don't know a single person with a bit of seniority, using Claude Code, who wants to go back to any IDE from 5 years ago.

Exactly right now, I am helping a big oil and gas company have a process simulation software to correctly converge on a big simulation. Full access to the source code, need to improve the Newton method in use with the right line search, validate the derivatives, etc.

I do think that for most of the people, you are right, you do not need to know a lot, but my philosophy was to always understand how the tool you use work (one level deeper), but now the tool is creating a new tool. How do you understand the tool which has been created by your Agent/AI tool?

I find this problem interesting, this is new to me and I will happily look at how our society and the engineering community evolve with these new capacities.

> What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.

Exactly my thinking, nearly 50, more than 30 years of experience in early every kind of programming, like you do, I can easily architect/control/adjust the agent to help me produce great code with a very robust architecture. By I do that out of my experience, both in modelling (science) and programming, I wonder how the junior devs will be able to build experience if everything comes cooked by the agent. Time will tell us.