Scubabear68

I read it as 15 million tunnels too, was very confused. Thank you!

Do you really think the engineering teams pour over those contracts when implementing new features?

Every single time? I sincerely doubt it.

Whatever logical business firewalls Google has between orgs for this kind of purpose seems pretty frail and thin from what I have seen reported.

From memory when I worked there 10 years ago, all the Javascript based stuff was pretty slow in a very noticeable way. They've likely gotten better as they are using a well known Javascript and rendering engine, so they're getting many optimizations for free.

This is my fear on the car side, as smart features start leaking from isolated areas in automobiles into the larger CAN bus....

Completely off topic, but for some reason it irks me seeing all these articles on MartinFowler.com which aren’t by Martin.

It rubs me like “Tom Clancy” novels not written by Tom.

Like we would likley never see them or care if it weren’t for the name.

I was very disappointed that this is “interpreting” some tiny made up language.

This is not Python, or even within three orders of magnitude of Python.

Been there very recently. The very difficult tech job market makes this even more stressful now.

Concrete things that helped me:

- Prioritize savings if you haven’t already. Do everything you can to have a cash cushion. Not having a cushion will multiply all other stresses.

- Work your contacts and network, If you don’t have one, start building one. You may be surprised even faint acquaintances can help

- Prioritize self-care. Exercise, eat healthy, don’t fall into alcohol or drug traps. And if you do fall into them, forgive yourself and try again

- De-stress your current job to the extent you are able

- Take time out in your day to do something you perceive as positive

This probably sounds trite and easy, but when you’re in the thick of it it can be very hard. Get the body and savings account in shape, the mind will have a better foundation to heal.

Not just the high end stuff. The Neo is sold out until late September on the budget end, it seems like it is a smash for HS and college kids.

I hope Apple can take all this cash and do some stability releases like they used to do, bugs around things like Family Sharing, the painful "update" to Settings App, etc could all use a lot of love.

I appreciate the comment. I agree that LLMs can be a significant issue with new comers to the field, and their use in replace of foundational learning is causing real concerns for me and my company specifically.

I have found the LLMs work best where I have some knowledge already, and I can spot the gaffes and mistakes more quickly. It has to be rough on people flying them blind, as it were.

Unrelated but I have tried out LLMs on some legal research, and it has been appallingly bad. The LLMs get the gist of a lot of it, but falls down completely because the legal realm requires a certain amount of exactitude. Time and time again I will ask about laws in a certain U.S. State, and it will show me a law from Arizona or something which has no or limited applicability (you can try to cross reference other State laws in certain State courts, but usually that doesn't go very far unless it is a very novel argument).

You hit the nail on the head with the fancy outputs, I am guilty as charged there. The LLMs are frankly better at it then I am.

Who said I was "looking at walls of code [I] don't understand"? Really, you are reading a lot into this without context.

I've been working software development for close to 40 years now. I've worked in plenty of languages, software stacks, ecosystems, from assembler to VAXen to Unix (pre-dating Linux), to cloud stacks to...well, a lot of systems.

The software ecosystem has ballooned so tremendously in that time frame that no human can really be an expert in all of them, or even in a tiny subset of all of them. As I mentioned in another comment, I couldn't be bothered to keep up with the Javascript/Typescript/Web front end drama. I don't do rollercoasters, and that ride is enough to make even the staunchest stomach heave with distress from the endless loop-de-loops.

With LLMs, I can describe a little problem unique to my problem space, inspect the output, research it and even reverse engineer it, and see how well it fits (or doesn't). This is not unlike being a software engineering manager leading teams.

When I said being able to see the results was "cool", I did not mean or imply it was about me trying to "look cool". In fact, I really don't know where that is coming from. I do this for my day job and also on the side for a lot of different causes and personal projects, and no one could give a rats ass about how "cool" I am. Seriously.

People need to stop taking this all so personally. It's a tool. Maybe you all need to step back to my world in 1981 when I first started playing with code as a kid, and compare it to 2016. The advances from '81 to '16 are probably far more dramatic than what AI is doing now.

I often find that example code never covers my use cases, and I am left scratching my head over nuances not covered there.

With AI, I can describe my exact use case and see what it gives me. Sometimes it will just cough up a furball like a boilerplate example, but usually it gets pretty close, and I can see how my (maybe weird) edge case fits into the framework or API or whatever.

It may be that I approach problems in a weird way, and that is why examples are less helpful than with some, but AI generally does better here for me.

I am describing a problem and seeing how the LLM solves it (or how it goes off the rails). I am often exposed to techniques new to me. I call that learning.

To be clear, I am closing in on 60 years old. I’ve written a lot of code in a lot of languages. I have not bothered to check every fad that has come down in front end web and Javascript for the past umpteen years. Front end hasn’t been my thing. With current AI, I can leap frog a lot of bull crap I don’t care about and see what at least the AI thinks is good. I still retain a brain, I can still investigate what it did and form an opinion about it.

I treat the AI stuff as idiot savants that can make really nice stuff or go totally off in the weeds. But it is more than good enough to help me be a better me at what I do.

It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool.

Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better.

I can now (more) boldly go where I feared to tread before.

It can't be emphasized enough for me just how unpleasant side effects like heart palpitations, tachycardia and related conditions really are. For me at least, those kinds of conditions trigger something close to a panic attack which feels like a very deep seat primitive protective measure in our brains.

Laying in your bed trying to be restful and feeling your heart slamming away at 140 beats per minute with little you can do about it goes behind miserable into outright alarming, even if you are "used" to it.

This is a serious issue, but for a humorous sci fi take on this issue, go read The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore.

It deals with a small town psychiatrist who takes a whole town off of anti-depressants, and an ancient monster is summoned from the depths attracted by all the heightened emotions and terrorizes the town.

This is an important distinction, I hope the title can be changed.

I was really surprised when I first came across DuckDB at how good at it is for its target use cases. It is a game changer for me for the "local analytics" space, and its ability to scale up to a large degree helps a lot.

It is simply awesome to be able to point DuckDB at a mess of CSV and other files and have an instant database on top of it that I can run regular SQL over, and it is fast and just works.

Man I really miss Populous, the whole feel of that game was just so unique and fantastic.

Yeah, I was referring to the 3D release in 2004, not the original.

Wow, you just tickled a whole bunch of nostalgia centers in my brain.

Pirates! was a gift from my wife years ago, and I kind disappeared for a couple of weeks. The dancing was tedious though :-)

So in other words, a 12x increase - which is exactly that I already responded to.

A 12x increase in volume should not be world ending for Microsoft given that the number of developers in the world is a pretty small baseline number to start from.

First off, there aren’t that many developers in the world compared to consumers.

Taking every developer in the world and multiplying by 12x-24x is not a-lot compared to many consumer oriented sites.

Second, you can’t ignore the payloads, even an AI mostly text push is nothing compared to, say, 10 iPhone pictures or one moderate video.

The thing is Github’s core is git’s core plus extras, and thet core is fundamentally text wrangling.

Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots.

Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.

The ugly reality is consultants like Martin have little production coding experience. Martin has posts going back to the early 90s showing he had little understanding of how software teams work and deliver value.

From what I have seen, his ideas were formed in a vacuum divorced from real coding. You can see it in the small amounts of open source he has released. The kind of guy who will always prefer 50 classes to 5. Who clutches his pearls at an if statement.

I remember he was invited to give a talk at Bloomberg and the majority of us were simply disgusted that an obvious hack like him was lecturing a group of software engineers who had really been there and done that.

"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described".

This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.

I feel the same way, and treat AI the same. Very conservative use, and check everything possible.

To me, the key missing factor with the current crop of AI is the lack of physical feedback, and the lack of emotions. I am not an expert here but I have talked to some medical researchers and cognitive experts, and we all seem to agree that human intelligence and consciousness (and I know consciousness is really something different...) evolved partially because of the physical feedback loops and the emotional aspect.

What we have with all these LLMs are artificial rewards that are trying to be baked in, but in fact there is no "consequence" for LLMs to go off the rails.

I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the amount matters because it is invariably very, very small compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the impact the lobbying has.

It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.

That machine was my intro to computers too, and I was fascinated by “fast mode” blanking the screen and the interesting tradeoffs between hardware and software.

It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.

Very commonly in the U.S. are liabilities that "run with the land", not the owner. This is done intentionally.

Easements can be a huge headache too e.g. some utility may have an easement to come on your property at any time and do a whole list of activities to maintain a pipeline, or power line, or what have you.

My 2023 Mazda CX-5 uses knobs to control car play, it basically acts like using Tab key to walk through selectable UI elements.