ZaoLahma

Love it.

Also needs to simulate getting responsibility without authority, with weekly meetings to follow up on your progress.

Was thinking the exact same thing - build real world real experience, and learn how to deal with other humans, perhaps with different goals than yours, at the same time.

Tech and the stuff around it is just one small dimension of the software engineering space.

> What are they even counting as a 'computer' to get to 70?

When I worked in the industry, we had four different CPUs of different architectures on one small (fit in your hand) circuit board, each running its own software and communicating with each other via buses on the board. This was for controlling one single function in the car.

Strictly speaking, I would say that single circuit board was 4 separate computers. It quickly adds up.

And when that macro controller computer eventually (inevitably?) dies, it will hurt the wallet immensely.

It's about defining and solving small problems all the way, and avoiding trying to solve big problems.

If you manage to restrict yourself to only solving small problems (THIS is the true challenge with software engineering, in my humble opinion), then you won't ever have wasted too much time if (when) you need to reset.

> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written

Nah.

I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you're coding, you stumble across something that makes you go "oh f me, that would NEVER work", which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently.

Quite often you also have eureka moments with better solutions that just would not have happened unless you had code in front of you, which again makes you approach the problem entirely differently.

That's a fantastic way to get the attention of and end up getting the stick from the US, so I think (hope) the EU would have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down tariff evasion strategies that would involve just relabeling goods.

What irks me is how LLMs won't just say "no, it won't work" or "it's beyond my capabilities" and instead just give you "solutions" that are wrong.

Codeium for example will absolutely bend over backwards to provide you with solutions to requests that can't be satisfied, producing more and more garbage for every attempt. I don't think I've ever seen it just say no.

ChatGPT is marginally better and will sometimes tell you straight up that an algorithm can't be rewritten as you suggest, because of ... But sometimes it too will produce garbage in its attempts at doing something impossible that you ask it to do.

Indeed. It's a shame that Sentry Studios never transitioned into a "proper" game development studio. They were at least 10 years ahead of the curve.

But it's good that the games industry caught up so the infiltration-itch can be scratched in other ways.

The base game was fantastic. Never could say no to a game on dm-morpheus. But what really made it great for me were the total conversion mods.

I spent probably thousands of hours playing Infiltration back in the day. I can't imagine how much time and energy must have been poured into completely re-doing a game like that.

On ice skates I (left handed and left footed) find it easier to come to a prompt stop with the left foot forward, and I naturally slide across ice and such with my left foot forward so, naturally, I thought I'd have the left foot forward while snowboarding.

Everything felt absolutely right, UNTIL I gained some real speed for the first time. Nope! Suddenly everything felt wrong, and I instinctively turned so I had my right foot forward.

So weirdly goofy it is.

Yes, but up until now it's been (very) rare. At least for games.

I fear that companies will view a change like this as a door opening wider to remove digital content as they please. Or perhaps worse, only offer strictly time-limited access with a "well, you're getting exactly what you asked for" view of it.

Mentally it's not too difficult to throw $60 at a digital "Buy" button, but it's much harder to throw those $60 at a "Get access" button. I wholly welcome a change like this, even if it's just wording on the button.

One thing to worry about, perhaps, is how it might make it easier for companies to remove things that we have "Gotten access" to as it would be explicitly stated that we don't actually buy anything.

> Also, imagine all the dollars wasted. Dollars wasted on generating the stuff, dollars wasted to accommodate the traffic, there has got to be some incentive to stop the slop.

This is what I'm curious about. Someone, a rather large amount of "someones", must be making bank from the AI generated content that is flooding the platforms. Some metric somewhere must be misinterpreted in some way that someone willingly pays for the AI content that no one(?) consumes. The question is where the money ends up and who is paying it.

The "general purpose" / digital junk food platforms were absolutely ruined 4-5 years ago.

Facebook as a prime example of this started having a large amount of non-user garbage content, which drove the users away, which made the garbage even more prevalent. I can't even categorize the garbage. Just random junk being presented as "content".

> ... to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.

Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.

And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.

... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.

I really like the avoidance (elimination) of one-way-door decisions by turning them into several small(er) two-way-door decisions. I guess the software development interpretation of it is clearly defined boundaries of responsibility, and avoiding to leak implementation details beyond those?

I once interviewed (and got the job) for a java dev position with a mostly C/C++ background.

One of the issues to solve during the tech interview was fixing a bug in a fairly involved web app with a java backend. Long story short, it boiled down to "==" being used to compare two strings instead of ".equals" somewhere deep in their class hierarchy.

I found it and fixed it, even though I was not familiar with the reference vs value equality difference in java. General debugging skills acquired over years should allow you to track down exactly where things go more wrong than expected, and then help you reason about why it goes wrong.

It seems this is a common problem with larger organizations, that everything turns (corrupts) into a process. I've even seen processes for following processes.

To make the problem worse, nobody dares to remove from a process as that would mean they would be accountable for the consequences of the "missing steps", and at the same time adding to a process is almost always safe - another step in a process to clarify or verify can't really fail and having contributed to the process work in a process driven organization looks fantastic on your yearly review. So we get more and more processes that are perpetually growing in scope.

The long term damage that heavy processes do, what I've seen first hand, is extreme stagnation. Even simple and straight forward improvements are avoided if it means that you need to produce ridiculous documentation that nobody will ever need, or seek approval from a (very busy) group of people who contribute nothing other than checking that you followed the processes.

It's scary headlines like this that make me push more of my money into index funds (can't be bothered to deal in stocks with the increased effort required).

But... the problem with being on lower incomes / net worth is that there is a highly increased risk that you're forced to pull money out of stocks / funds when they are low because you have little or nothing else to take from to cover unexpected expenses (and you will have a lot more of those when you can't afford to act and instead always react). So if you're living anywhere close to the limit of your income, you really are better off with a savings account.

I guess some solo dev engineers hope to implement a novel idea, curate the implementation into a somewhat successful business (have a firm grip on the market) and then sell it all off to a bigger fish and make bank.

I don't think many people actually want to run a business (long term), but most of us wouldn't mind suddenly being paid a good chunk of money for having solved or worked on an interesting problem.

This is all sadly too true, which is why I think we should do our best to declutter as we age. Ideally when our time comes, we should only have things of immediate use and value to us left, and pretty much none of "might be good to have one day".

I've seen instances where people couldn't get rid of things due to grief and decided to keep it all tucked away for several decades, leaving the decluttering to the following generation(s). Better then to be a bit proactive.

How do you figure?

I guess if money wasn't such a limiting factor, more of us would be productive in different ways later in life. Instead of implementing already invented ideas, we could invent now that we are at the peak of our knowledge and mental capabilities.

It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.

I doubt any of the famous three letter US agencies would need (or want!) such a wide open door as a "specific URL" and logging in with an administrator account acquired from the firmware itself. I would think that they would want a door that couldn't be opened by someone who happened to spot it, to not give anyone else the same advantage.

No, this is more likely the result of a test or some annoying procedure during development that needed more access than the device would normally provide - I've seen it before, and I think most people who work with embedded systems at least at some point in their career have done something that would be bad if it ended up in production units.

> I think that posting at least one commit per day is an incredible low goal. A commit can be anything, from a major refactoring to fixing a typo.

This is an easy goal in some companies / projects, while in others (usually bigger companies / projects) it's unreasonable and will even be counter productive.

You might need hours of execution time in a test cluster, then need code reviews from several peers (who are busy working on prioritized items), and if your commit is later integrated with commits from other organizations and tested as a whole which results in failures, you put extra load on those who are tasked with finding and sorting out the offending commits.

In principle I do absolutely agree with you that ideally it should be encouraged to spontaneously fix and commit, but in practice "it depends". I've found that larger companies / projects have a certain cadence, and trying to deviate from that cadence too much just results in grinding gears on all levels.

What I hinted at was more granularity in how we treat different types of data, or other accesses, in response to the idea of being forced to turn on "Advanced Data Protection on iCloud".

Rather than putting all of our personal data and accesses under a thick virtual fire blanket, perhaps it is perfectly fine if some of it isn't protected at all, or is protected in ways that could be easily circumvented with just a tiny bit of finagling.

This is now how I'm approaching my own digital foot print, that some not secret things are nowadays wide open, unencrypted and you just need to know where to look to access all of it.

As someone who has to help my father with his personal tech as his mental health deteriorates (several brain tumors), I'm thrilled every time I find something that ISN'T locked down behind pin codes, passwords or other authentication methods that he no longer remembers or can communicate.

His current state really has made me think about my own tech, about what should be locked down and what really should not be - things that we lock down out of habit (or by force) rather than out of necessity.

Ah yes, that old reliable determinism will save the day.

I doubt trust fund babies would spend their days hacking an old NES game.

No idea of who would do it though. My best guess is young-ish brilliant engineers in the beginning of their careers, before they've taken on too much responsibility at and outside of work. Those who still have a lot of excitement for the field with a lot of time on their hands.