aleph_minus_one

> Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?

The cloud does scale that easily, the software doesn't. :-)

> The AI boom caught them napping though

Microsoft, who invested eyewatering sums into AI, even near to betting the whole company on an AI boom, is surprised about the AI boom?

> infra that scales with a button

That is how Microsoft markets Azure. :-)

> I wonder what made it so magic.

The conspiracy theories. :-)

> First, I didn't work with the right universities. Now the students I work with "didn't pay attention".

I can only say that my university-time experience was so much different, and I do observe a similar interest among younger students. So I am hypothesizing what could be the reasons.

But concerning your point, I would indeed claim that the hypotheses "wrong university" and "students did not pay attention" are positively correlated: I think a university where many students are not actually not very interested, excited and curious about the topics that are taught in the lectures does not form a good learning environment.

> My point is that most younger developers couldn't explain the difference between a mutex and a critical section, or how the OS handles a thread quantum, if their lives depended on it.

To my knowledge this is taught in some "Operating System" course, and typically students have to do a hands-on implementation of at least some central parts of an operating system. So I guess these students simply did not pay attention in the respective course. :-(

> Any ideas how this compares with Kerrisk's The Linux Programming Interface?

Unluckily, I don't know, but comparing the Table of Contents for both books

> https://man7.org/tlpi/toc-short.html

> https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux

I would claim that The Linux Programming Interface covers a broader range of topics, and I also think this book goes more in depth. On the other hand, System Programming in Linux seems to be more pedagogical, and is more targeted towards people who profit from doing exercises and programming projects to get their hands dirty.

> I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.

> I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.

I know quite a lot of such people (even in student age) who are interested in such topics. I really have a feeling that you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities.

Evidence for my point: rather recently, No Starch Press published quite a lot of about such topics - I am rather certain that a publisher knows quite well which kinds of books do or don't sell well at a given time:

- The Book of Debugging https://nostarch.com/book-of-debugging

- The Linux Memory Manager https://nostarch.com/linux-memory-manager

- The Art of 64-Bit Assembly, Volume 2 https://nostarch.com/art-64-bit-assembly-v2

- The Ghidra Book, 2nd Edition https://nostarch.com/ghidra-book-2e

- Building a Debugger https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger

- Microcontroller Exploits https://nostarch.com/microcontroller-exploits

- System Programming in Linux https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux

- The Art of ARM Assembly, Volume 1 https://nostarch.com/art-arm-assembly-volume-1

- Getting Started with FPGAs https://nostarch.com/gettingstartedwithfpgas

- The Book of I²C https://nostarch.com/book-i%C2%B2c

> I didn't say it was super dumb, it was more of a reflection on that's how much a wrapper is worth today.

Are you sure that the value is in the wrapper and not rather in the fact that investors who invested into OpenRouter also invested into companies that can buy OpenRouter? ;-)

(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330668 ).

> Stripe isn’t exactly a dumb company.

I guess hardly anybody claims that. I think the suspicion is rather about whether there exist some other "puppetmasters" (e.g. venture capitalists) who pressured Stripe into buying OpenRouter.

> This is nothing, wait until they see my proof of the Flibknopf Conjecture!

You mean the (Tait) Flyping Conjecture from knot theory?

> https://mathworld.wolfram.com/FlypingConjecture.html

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tait_conjectures#Flyping

This one has already been proved.

Great irony: the names under which the company which Vishal Garg was CEO of (Better Home & Finance Holding Company) does business are Better and Better.com [1]. :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better.com

I also studied mathematics, and I can tell you that this was not my experience.

Rather, if a problem is NP-complete/NP-hard it means that we cannot expect a general fast algorithms for exactly this problem (in other words: more mathematics is required, which mathematicians of course love).

But it is absolutely known that there exist other strategies:

- Develop algorithms that work well in practice and make understanding why they work so well in practice your career.

- Find out whether there exists something that makes the instances that occur in practice different from those instances that were used in the proof that the problem is NP-complete/-hard.

- For optimization problems: develop some fast algorithm which guarantees some approximation factor.

> Oh yes, let's grammar-nazi the nazis.

Using wrong letters and ligatures (in Fraktur) has barely anything to do with grammar; this is rather orthography.

> Today, far right-wing people in Germany use fraktur on shirts, cars etc. - even though it were the Nazis who abolished it.

And many of them use Fraktur wrongly (in particular: wrong usage of long vs round s; not using compulsory ligatures).

I would say that currently the German society is a very riven/divided one, with various groups being bitter enemies, each with their very own contradictory hiearchies with very different groups at the apex.

So, to find out which disciplines could be at the apex of prestige, I apply the criterion "What do you want your child to become when they grow up?" for various, very different social groups. I would claim that the following list consists of very plausible answers (again: be aware that each of these jobs can easily be a low-prestige or even fiercely hated one by a different social group):

- doctor, dentist

- pharmacist (be nevertheless aware that in opposite to former times, this is not a license to print money anymore)

- judge, prosecutor, notary (but rather not "Rechtsanwalt" [barrister?]; there exist war too many "Rechtsanwälte" [barristers?], so that the competition among them can be fierce)

- business consultant, "Wirtschaftsprüfer" [auditor]

- patent attorney

- don't study (too theoretical): get a vocational training in skilled crafts and trades instead

- high-ranking "Beamter" [civil servant]

- professor (be aware that it depends a lot on the social group whether or which discipline is considered to be prestigious or frowned upon)

--

Remark: concerning "engineer" (in the very classical sense of "special cases of physics" engineering discliplines; German law is very strict what an "Ingenieur" [engineer] is [1], [2]), I would claim that it is not considered to be an "apex of prestige" one, but depending on the social group a respected choice of study/job.

--

[1] https://www.ingenieur.de/karriere/arbeitsrecht/ingenieurgese...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ingenieur&oldid=2...

> However, MathLink is one of the few exceptions as it is deprecated by now.

As far as I know WSTP (Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol) is the replacement for MathLink. Is it supported?

> Most "computer scientists" are not scientists. They are engineers. They engineer (build) something abstract, software, but that doesn't make them scientists.

Engineering is also a scientific discipline; there is a reason why in German the umbrella term for all engineering disciplines is "Ingenieurwissenschaften".

While physics is about finding the laws that govern nature, engineering (say, mechanical or electrical engineering) is about accepting these laws as foundation, and using these laws to build or improve things. This is not less scientific than physics; (classic) engineers are just experts in a special, more applied sub-discipline of physics.

Similarly, software engineering is about applying the foundations that mathematics, electrical engineering or computer science brought in a similar scientific way.

On the other hand, many people who call themselves "software engineers" don't apply rigorous principles based on the mentioned foundations in a scientific way. Such people are not engineers, but scammers, and should be named this way. :-(

> Now, don't get me started on "data scientists"...

Data science is actually a serious science. It was based on the observation that statistics is just one part of the whole data workflow, so we need people who have a good knowledge about all of the phases of this workflow.

On the other hand, many people who call themselves "data scientists" are rather scammers, and should be named this way. :-(

> Computer scientists currently have a lot of prestige. [...] Now I’d say that computer science today is like economics at the beginning of the century or Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s in being at apex academic and social prestige and influence. Computer scientists, or computer-science-associated businessmen, are the new gurus, in a way that wasn’t the case before. Yes, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were culture heroes back in the 80s and 90s, but nobody was particularly interested in what they had to say outside of their narrow technological realms. Nowadays, many computer scientists and tech lords present themselves, and are often taken as, all-purpose pundits. (Many of the tech lords are actually tech investors; they’ve absorbed the prestige of information science through the transitive property of money.) As with the economists and Freudians of past eras, they are presented as having some special authority derived in part from their almost inhuman hyper-rationality, a willingness to tell uncomfortable truths.

This is an insanely US-centric perspective. In Germany, being a programmer is more like what is described in the song "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYodWEKCuGg

Update: Just to be clear: there exist tides when programmers are more vs less tolerated (during the dot-com bubble, the tolerance for programmers was larger), but programmers were always very far from the apex of any "prestige" (whatever you associate with this term) hierarchy.

> I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". [...] Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work?

Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.

> Is there a way in Wolfram to check whether all function names exist ?

There is a way to check whether a symbol has been defined:

  ValueQ[FunctionName, Method -> "SymbolDefinitionsPresent"]

See https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ValueQ.html

Replace FunctionName by the function name that you want to check.

USD 1,000 is just play money for Zuck, so I guess Zuck will pay this little bill for his captain.

> I think it is able to work well with it because:

> - It is a rather simple language - It has a lot of very useful libraries already built in.

> With just a single main.odin file you can do a heck of a lot stuff, which LLMs seem to like.

Also Wolfram/Mathematica has an insane amount of useful libraries already built in (there even exists the saying "Python is 'batteries included', Wolfram is 'spaceship included'"), and also there in a single file you can do a heck of a lot stuff.

On the other hand:

- LLMs tend to hallucinate non-existing function when you ask an LLM to code something in Wolfram that is not commonly done (concerning this point, nevertheless keep in mind that Wolfram is often used for "one-of-a-kind programs", i.e. for writing very specialized programs that have possibly never been done before).

- Wolfram code tends to be quite dense.

- If there is a small mistake in Wolfram code, the code typically simply won't work.

> No need to hack the law. Our FOSS code is constitutionally protected free speech and I would defend on those grounds.

"Der Proceß" [The Trial] by Franz Kafka is just a realistic description of the court system (Franz Kafka studied law).

> Dynamically typed languages generally have a lower LLM token cost than traditional statically typed languages because omitting explicit type declarations makes the code more compact.

If this was true, the programming languages that are very much on the left side of

> https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#non-math-ma...

> https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#overall-map

should be very ideal for LLMs, in particular if they are dynamically typed.

What I can tell you is: I experimented with AI prompts for generating Wolfram (Mathematica) code using some LLMs, and I can tell you that the results were very disappointing: in my experience LLMs have difficulties with programming languages that are

- very concise, and

- for which there is less code publicly available.

Wolfram (Mathematica) is a good example of such a programming language.

> A question on terminology, I come from bsd world so prefer i386, amd64, ia64(the itanium) whereas the linux side appears to prefer x86 x86-64 Nothing wrong with it(it describes the architecture fine) but I assume that x86-64 is intel face saving propaganda.

There exist two different (and slightly incompatible) implementations of 64-bit x86, which the respective CPU vendors call AMD64 and Intel 64 (previous names of the latter: EM64T and IA-32e).

So, what Intel implements is not AMD64, but something slightly different.

Concerning the small incompatibilities between AMD64 and Intel 64, see for example

> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29833938/what-is-the-com...

> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.

> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.

I think it is a little bit more complicated:

I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.

So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:

1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)

2. has a predisposition for narcissism

It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.

This is a really cool fact. :-)

> Say you have two assistant employees. One that reads the reports and one that uses AI to summarize the content. You are sitting in a high value meeting. You only can have one assistant with you in the meeting. Which one would you pick, the persons that read the reports or the person who only used AI?

I would take the person who only used AI.

Why?

Your fictional problem has the silent assumption that if you are in a high value meeting, you shall act more conservatively (i.e. reduce risk for reliability, even if you loose chances/opportunities). But this is rather a statement that the respective person acts on a risk-averse profile.

I rather have a risk-affine profile. Because it is likely that everybody else in the meeting has a risk-averse profile, it is very likely that if I act on the "non-conservative" choice and I am right, I will have a huge advantage. On the other hand, if I act on the conservative choice, I won't have any advantage over the other participants.

Since I am risk-affine person, I am willing to risk it. :-)

> Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve. Especially if you need to also oversee the execution of the strategy. So not only you have to predict what they want or know the domain deeply enough to understand what they say they want is not what they really want, you also have to come up with a plan for executing your solution in a corporate environment.

The really hard part of this does in my opinion not so much lie in the aspects that you describe, but rather in doing this without leaving scorched earth with most/all of the stakeholders involved.

In other words:

Doing what you described is in my opinion something that can be learned, and in my opinion a central reason why many programmers consider this to be difficult is that they never learned it, and/or (related to this) were never given the opportunity to be responsible for all of this, so they lack experience.

On the other hand, navigating the whole office politics, and running the political gauntlet that is collateral to it is hell on earth. The only way to survive this is to give a big "fuck you" to everyone, which I more politely described with "leaving scorched earth with most/all the stakeholders involved" above.