aleph_minus_one

> Yeah but writing detailed blog posts about the experience is usually a signal pointing toward the former group

Writing detailed blog posts about the experience is rather usually a signal that the person is an annoying self-promoter. :-(

> But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing.

I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.

The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.

TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.

> I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life.

I disagree: I have fond memories of my university time. I also do really like programming. The problem rather is that there are hardly any job where what you learned and loved at the university (and why you studied - in this case - computer science) is of much use. Keep in mind that your degree was a huge part why one was selected for the job.

I honestly ask myself quite often why employers are so fond of university degrees for programming jobs. If they put much less relevance on this criterion, employers would have a much bigger group of applicants among which they can select - and this means employers could use this to level down salaries.

This was a lot because of the technological restrictions of that time.

Also be aware that the world wide web was actually conceived by Tim Berners-Lee for the exchange of information between scientists.

> to share the load with every brain on the planet willing to give a try at science

This is what a lot of scientists love to tell themself or talk about in celebratory speeches.

The truth is: a lot of science is kept behind journal paywalls, so that only "officially approved" (in the sense of: working at a university or an governmental research institute) scientists can easily access it.

Be aware that currently the hardware costs and electric bill are two huge problems of modern LLMs.

If such AI models will deliver on their qualitative promises, and just the huge cost is the burden to overcome, custom ASIC might be a part of the solution.

If, on the other hand, AI models will still be unsuitable for many applications because of their qualitative issues, it is a much harder and different problem to solve - in this case, the AI bubble will plausibly burst.

> I love working with great people on problems just on the verge of the possible. This can be hard in large organizations, as large orgs tend to (unintentionally) avoid having too many good people on one team (the value for the large org is maximized by spreading out great people to guide many teams - so most teams will only have 1-2 great members).

The problem is in my opinion a little bit different: these good people would love to make the team in which they are working better, but are actually actively kept down by work colleagues and bosses. Thus, the organization does not profit from these good people, because is has no use for their greatness. Instead, this approach introduces a lot of (political) infights into the teams, where often the good people are treated as the evil troublemakers at the end.

In data center operations, GPUs have some specific lifetime. Because datacenter GPUs are currently so expensive and hard to get, they don't get dropped on the market at some point (even if a better replacement has arrived), but used as long as possible.

Even if the AI companies decide to use their own ASICs, they will rather slowly, but continuously introduce them, while removing GPUs that have reached their end of life.

> The specific reason for the retractions was copyright violation, so there was nothing wrong with the actual papers from a scientific standpoint.

There is a reason why the German portmanteau word "Zensurheberrecht" ("Zensur": censorship; "Urheberrecht": the related concept to copyright in German law) exists.

I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.

> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

I don't think so.

The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.

If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.

The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.

> > How do you stop a human from reading one of your files?

> Call the police!

Rather: Send the Marines.

With intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFvxqQTh3m4

Without intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc

> It seems oddly circular to me that the _exact hubris_ non-engineers have long accused engineers of - and we have indeed been too often guilty of - they themselves turn out to be JUST as guilty of!

I have hardly ever seen this kind of hubris among software developers. The only thing that was common was many software developers were - let's say - somewhat direct in their feedback towards people who are not willing to learn.

I thus rather have the feeling that this kind of accusation of hubris towards software developers rather originates in business people projecting their own overconfidence (hubris) onto software developers.

Just to give one class of examples:

Should a country implement some very nationalist policies that serve the interests of the not so well-off people in its own country, but will be against the interests of other countries and their people?

Think of the uprise of right-wing, nationalist parties in many European countries that often present themselves as "the new worker parties", i.e. they intend to implement policies that are good for the workers in their own country, but on the other hand make it very clear that they have not the interests of people of other EU countries in mind.

> The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. [...] Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?

I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.

> Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.

[emphasis mine]

I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not.

If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people):

Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money.

Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception).

This was the central reason why this plan failed.

> A Master's degree is hardly academia, is it?

In Germany, the master degree is considered as such. Basically the final test before you decide for or against "the whole brutal game of joining a doctoral study program".

A professor that I know clearly said: "In a master's thesis I expect something scientifically novel. It does not have to be something deep, but if you want 'a 1 before the comma' (in Germany, the grading at a uninversity goes from 1,0 to 5,0 where 5,0 means 'failed'), it has to be something scientifically novel. The number after the mark is to distinguish whether it is really a deep discovery or not."

Be also culturally aware that in practice, for a final thesis

- 1.0 means "good",

- 1.3 means "average",

- 1.7 means "bad",

- everything below (from 2.0 on) basically means "failure" (you get a degree, but are marked as failure).

So, the professor clearly stated that every grade for a master thesis that "is not in practice a failure grade" means "some novel scientific discovery". And every grade that is better than "in practice 'bad'" means "some very non-trivial scientific discovery".

I know that many professors think this way, though most of them would phrase this more diplomatically.

> I've seen many people who are quite competent under close supervision but completely clueless on their own.

Being able to work on complicated research topics on your own is what universities are centrally preparing for.

If you really need close supervision, you likely are not made for academia or often not even for a course of studies at a university.

Yes, this is a harsh truth, but academia is really a brutal game of sink or swim.

> in certain cases, to make it more difficult for a remote minor to use the identifier

Just offer the user some money if he installs some "trusted" app for age verification token sharing.

> The Fire Phone was Jeff Bezos' personal baby, and we know how that went.

I'd rather guess that Jeff Bezos' opinion on what makes a good phone is/was different on the opinion of many potential buyers.

> When people talk about burnout in open source, the conversation often centers on workload, too many issues, too many requests, too much responsibility.

Why not simply ignore all this stuff by the maxim "my software - my vision":

- If some request does not serve your vision for the software: close it.

- If you cannot handle the workload: work less on the program.

- If issues exist which you cannot fix very fast: take your time to fix it. Nobody is willing to pay you big money for fixing the issue, so a fix does not seem to be very urgent for the users.

- Too much responsibility: if the software was indeed such an important piece of infrastructure, people would pay you big money for you to maintain it.

> VLC on my Mac uses about 130 MB of RAM (as reported by Activity Monitor) to play a FLAC file, and about 300 MB to play a high-bitrate 1080p MP4 file. The audio file memory consumption frankly seems high, but it’s fine, and apparently 1/3 that of WMP.

Not without reason VLC is considered to be a memory hog.

> but then I am just as certain that there are many many humans who would proudly share their "dumb american" stories as if that is not every bit as prejudicial to those of us who do not fit the description as any other "weak french" or "commie russian" or "sister fucking indian" or whatever else.

Racism is about race (i.e. phenotypical or genotypical properties), while being US-American/French/Russian/Indian/... is about nationality. So, these stories are not about racism (since they are not about race), but about prejudices against other nations/nationalities.

> If you fail in the EU, that's the kiss of death. Your startup failed???

As a native German, I wouldn't say this is the case: the opinions of people rather differ quite a bit on this topic (there also exist quite a lot of people who are nearer to the US-American mentality here).

What I would rather claim is some kind of kiss of death, is if your startup failed because you made stupid mistakes. People don't like such unresponsible people (many people say that startup founders also have responsibility for their employees).

> In order to build competitive models, you need to offer competitive salaries and equity. Europe has very old and inadequate corporate law virtually everywhere but in UK.

It is a fact that a much smaller amount of money is available in the EU for startup investments.

But in which sense it the corporate law inadequate? As far as I am aware the laws allow quite a lot of freedom in setting up the corporate governance for many forms of companies.

> i feel likt there's likely more programmers who weren't aware of a 20yo (unfortunately) failed project

At that time, what should replace X11 was a heavily discussed topic, so people who were already interested in programming under GNU/Linux at this time typically remember intense discussions on the internet about the pro-s and con-s of lots of proposals to replace X11.

Proposals that I have in mind are:

- Y Window System

- Fresco: https://web.archive.org/web/20100729184325/http://fresco.org...

- Xynth: https://github.com/alperakcan/xynth

- Xfast: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xfast/ (here a German article about Xfast from 2008: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2008/11/ohne-x-tras/ )

- Mir (Ubuntu) as the main competitor to Wayland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)

- Wayland

- ... and very likely many, many more proposals.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Windowing_system&...

Very important for business customers:

- It is very "standardized" (i.e. there exist no distributions that do things differently from each other).

- It cares about binary backward compatibility: it is nearly always possible to run a binary from 30 years ago, and if you are willing to invest some own effort, eben running Win16 binaries can often be run. Compare this to GUI applications on GNU/Linux.

- The operating system and the applications are very separated. I can basically install every version of an application that I want:

If there exists a newer release of some software than what the "distribution" (which of course does not exist in the Windows world) provides that you want to try out: install it now, you don't have to wait for your distribution. There is also no nightmare that some shared library versions have to fit the ones provides by the distribution.

Similarly, I you want to stay with an older version of a software for a longer time: go for it.

It is a very common situation that for some pieces of software, you have very specific requirements which version you want: with Windows, this is very easy, while on GNU/Linux this is - in my experience - a nightmare for unexperienced users.

- If you build one software release on Windows, it will run on basically every Windows computer (the typical thing that you have to do at most is to additional install a runtime provided by Microsoft (e.g. for C++ or C#)). No consideration necessary how to handle each distribution.

People who have been programming for a long time often have very good memories of old projects and software in which they had a lot of hope, but which failed at the end.

That's why I wrote "existed" (simple past).

> P: I want to figure out the best mortgage terms given these parameters (...).

> C: Honestly, renting would be a better financial choice than buying.

> P: That's not what I asked. I'm not asking whether I should rent or buy—I'm asking about mortgage options.

> C: But you asked for the best option. If renting is better than buying under these circumstances, then a mortgage isn't the best option.

Thos rather sounds like the AI is gaslighting the user: the user asked for the best option on mortgage terms (given these parameters (...)). He never asked for the globally best option (which might also include non-mortgage options).