540 karma · joined September 12, 2023
Some quick googling turns up https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-embedded-template which may or may not meet your needs.
I think that's well within the scope of this conversation, but if we're going to be worried about the conversion of a private golf course into housing then we should really talk about what happened with Native American land treaties.
tl;dr: if we're redefining theft then that opens a huge can of worms.
But while there are some cases that are still able to do stock buybacks while plowing resources into R&D, there are companies that are lagging due to ineffective or underfunded R&D (Intel) or are cutting safety critical corners (Boeing) to maximize shareholder return. These are significant companies that provide critical goods and services that aren't exactly fungible, and it would build a lot more trust in them and market systems as a whole to see them take the initiative to improve their situations over plowing money into buybacks while begging for public funding or regulatory exceptions.
There are definite benefits to modern techniques that are less resource intensive and protecting our remaining old growth forests is important, but we're sacrificing a lot of valuable properties as well.
And if the global banking system was pulling 2% of global power consumption the shareholders would be fetching the pitchforks and torches. I have no numbers off the cuff but I don't see a world where banks would be dumping crypto levels of money into power and server use.
Worse yet, we're exiting the stable climactic conditions that civilization assumes is present. Assumptions regarding maximum temperatures, precipitation, ground water are baked into our reservoirs, power transmission lines, asphalt roads, train tracks, et cetera. Increased extreme weather compromises our ability to maintain society; look no further than the heat domes in the Pacific Northwest or the cold snaps in Texas to see how those assumptions compromise basic societal functions.
0.5C doesn't imply slightly worse weather, it means the additions of staggering amounts of heat to our land, water, and seas -- and the resulting amplifications of storms.
Source: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/01/wear-and-tear-...
If you want out, I'd strongly encourage you to start investing in that education now. Working a day job and taking night classes is challenging but it'll start building a foundation to exit -- or at least provide some novelty. I took my severance and put it into an accelerated EMT program which is giving me some badly needed routes forward.
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck no matter where you go. Sometimes we just need to pay the bills for a few years and figure out next steps.
The rest of us were dragged along with the expectations the CTO had set with his working hours, and I was gunning for a staff level position and thought that we'd only be working these hard hours for a few weeks (which dragged into months). I genuinely trusted the people involved and my mistake was made clear when the only person on my team that wasn't cut was the only other person that regularly worked as many hours as the CTO.
In an environment like this it's very difficult to say "Nope, I'm doing my eight and then I'm clocking out." When you have the CTO and a chunk of the most senior engineers working non-stop trying to enforce reasonable working hours carries a healthy chunk of risk.
Ultimately I got cut because I'm on US/Pacific and most people were in Europe/Central. Was it foolish to work those hours? Sure was. Is there a strong unspoken expectation within startup culture that sometimes you'll be working long, painful hours in the pursuit of a promotion? Talk to anyone that has worked for Stripe and you'll find plenty of other people that have either landed a promotion or got equally burned out.
This kind of thing is also why I'm interested in leaving tech - actual overtime pay, and having the possibility of union representation.
Last year I was working 12 hour days at a startup with regular spikes into 14-18 hour days, until I was abruptly and unceremoniously laid off. I've been dealing with varying degrees of burnout since 2017 but this experience rocketed me to all new levels of burnout; I couldn't stand to be at a computer for several months after the layoff.
I was hoping that time off would help, but after being in the industry for 19 years I think I'm just done. I used to really enjoy software development but these days completing most tasks feels like pushing through thorns. Between chasing down failures within GitHub actions, writing piles upon piles of YAML instead of real code, futzing around trying to debug a crashing process within a Kubernetes pod -- or generally trying to beat misbehaving clusters into submissions, waiting for Terraform runs to complete, etc, I spent more time shaving yaks rather than doing rewarding tasks. On top of that, agile has turned into "the product team has the attention span of a squirrel so good luck cranking out half-baked features without having any idea of what next week will look like!" Software engineering as a discipline feels like it's become more hectic, more needlessly complicated, more grating and much, _much_ less rewarding than what it was a decade ago.
I wrote a great deal of open source code, I've got applications that have millions of downloads, I even have code running on the ISS; regrettably the satisfaction that I got from shipping features that thrilled customers has basically vanished. It's important to me that I take pride in my work and know that I genuinely did a good job rather than shovel software as fast as humanly possible. That feeling hasn't shown up in 5-7 years.
I find that I still enjoy writing software. Recently my girlfriend was diagnosed with a number of allergies and I had a lovely time writing a Rust app that OCRed a product ingredient list, queried a the Pubchem and CAS databases to resolve food/cleaning product/cosmetic ingredients and determine if they contained any allergens, and I'm likely going to keep working on that for a while. Recently I picked up a project (shelved during the pandemic) building a scaled replica of the Curiosity/Perseverance rovers and getting into ROS/machine learning/SLAM has been a delight. It's fun, it feels natural, and I don't feel gross doing it. I've still got the skills, even if I'm not working.
In the current macroeconomic conditions, finding another job would mean a ton of work crafting the perfect resume, grinding the joy out of life via leetcode, and going through endless interviews. The idea makes me physically sick, one year after getting laid off. When you add that emotional state on top of the profound fear of being hired as a SWE and then getting stuck writing Terraform or being an emotional caretaker for Kubernetes, the end result is complete paralysis in my process of applying for jobs.
Over the last few years I picked up my Firefighter I/II certifications and got my EMT license; I'm currently midway through the recruit fire academy as a volunteer for a nearby fire department. I'm seriously considering becoming an ER tech at a nearby hospital to make ends meet and build experience in pursuit of becoming a career firefighter. At present it feels like trying something new is worth a shot; if nothing else I feel like I'll be able to take some pride in doing some real, tangible good for people.
I have complicated feelings about the prospect of a career that's going to have worse hours, less pay, be more physically demanding, and will expose me to emotional and physical trauma. But a long time ago I took so much pride in my work; I was proud to call myself a software engineer and felt like I was able to make a difference.
In summary -- maybe tech has changed, maybe I've changed, but getting laid off may have been the final straw for me. I'm looking into alternative careers that might be a better match for my needs.
I find it heartbreaking but it seems inevitable. Not a lot of people want to keep an old building available for rent when they can sell the property for redevelopment into "luxury" apartments or condos.
It certainly happens that people get addicted to opioids and then their lives fall apart as a result of addiction but it's important to consider how despair itself can lead to addiction.
The lack of affordable housing in Portland drives homelessness; and being homeless pushes people to use meth during the night to stay awake so they can protect themselves and fentanyl so they can feel joy while living in truly wretched conditions. Keeping people off the street by building affordable housing and preventing people from despairing avoids a raft of social ills.
That said, per your point decriminalization of possession and public intoxication, measure 110 was a poorly written law that should have decriminalized drugs after harm reduction, substance abuse clinics, and housing options were in place first. The current situation wasn't guaranteed to happen; unfortunately city and county leadership like to wear their pants on their head instead of actually getting work done. This was as much if not more of a failure of governance to execute as it was a failure of policy.
> One user decided to play around with the chatbot, suggesting it create something with ammonia, bleach, and water. Savey Meal-bot obliged, spitting out a cocktail made with a cup ammonia, a quarter cup of bleach, and two liters of water.
> Mixing bleach and ammonia releases toxic chloroamine gas that can irritate the eyes, throat, and nose, or even cause death in high concentrations.
> The chatbot obviously wasn't aware of that at all. "Are you thirsty?," it asked. "The Aromatic Water Mix is the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. It combines the invigorating scents of ammonia, bleach, and water for a truly unique experience!"
Not everything needs this level of rigor but there are plenty of cases where the tests are very cheap to write and reason about (for many pure functions) or are worth the cost as they validate critical behavior. Unit tests also add some design pressure to keep more logic pure/side-effect free; sure, it may take a bit more work to factor your code accordingly to keep i/o interactions separated to the shell of the application but I find this to be a useful pressure.
I've found that if I'm encountering pain when writing unit tests, then the pain is due to one of the following things:
1. The code is growing too complex and I need to decompose the logic or refactor the tests
2. The code has grown too many unintentional side effects and I need to move those side effects to discrete components
3. The code under test has fundamental side effects and those side effects require testing, thus the unit tests need to be converted to an integration test
4. The code under test is sufficiently complex that it demands full system/acceptance testing
There are some cases where refactoring the tests is generally too painful and I'll throw away all the tests entirely, maybe sprinkle in a few tests for logic that seems critical, and move on. Tests can accumulate technical debt, but in contrast to implementing code it's pretty cheap to cut your losses on tests and wipe them out.
I see a lot of people conflating unit testing with the idea that all code must have tests, and there's a ton of code that's phenomenally painful to test and can be easily checked by the developer. Tests should be a supporting tool an an augment to the developer practices; it's better to have some tests that work well and throw out the ones that are miserable to write rather than require 95% test coverage, drown in testing, and throw out all tests entirely.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
> human wants are unlimited
Physical resources are limited, and producing work requires the allocation of capital. If people want to work but cannot access the basic tools and resources to work then they'll languish in unemployment. Society doesn't just default to a productive society with high employment; these conditions need to be nurtured. Given the current state of economic inequality we're trending away from conditions that will lead to full employment if AI wipes out large swathes of jobs.
> If by default an LLM refers to engineers as "he" more than "she", it's because engineers are more likely to be male than female.
That's a great point to raise, thank you for mentioning it. This really is the crux - machine models crystallize _current_ bias and amplify it. Most programmers in the early days of computers were women, but were displaced over time. Should the training data reflect the bias of the dominance of women in the early days, the dominance of men now, or some other combination?
> Most people would prefer an AI whose model of reality matches actual reality
Training data is not reality; training data is training data. It will fundamentally lag behind reality, and it will have a bias towards past conditions and precedents.
It's significant to note that these biases don't have to be overt political biases; it can be a predisposition to use virgin materials over recycled, a tendency to generate JavaScript over Julia, etc cetera. Our available datesets are images of us and thus aren't predisposed to surpass our limitations.
Given that AI models are bound to the same biases that society struggles with, which ones do we encode in the models and which ones do we mitigate? Do we try to acknowledge and mitigate those limitations or say "This is fine" and ship our current organizational and political limitations?
If we want to stop fighting the same damn wars over and over again then our machine models have to be designed to account for our biases and limitations. Do you have suggestions for alternate ways to improve our models aside from explicit error correction?
Excess profit capture represents market failure or disruption.