falkensmaize

Thanks OP for posting this enjoyable read. It’s always fun when my first love - music, and film music in particular - somehow leaks into my world of software engineering.

If the price keeps going down, how are they ever going to be able to make back all the money they’re spending? If the price stays high, how are they going to undercut the cost of labor?

I assume they already have access to all that information via IRS records, right?

My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system.

The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.

If your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school.

You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.

It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.

That’s fine because an enforced TLD system would default to them being allowed to access social networks and parents having an easy way to block them. It makes it easier for parents to do their jobs and doesn’t affect everyone else. Want your kids to have access to social media? Just…do nothing.

One very simple way to give parents control over what their children see and participate in without violating everyone else’s privacy is to create adult and social TLDs and require these sites to migrate to them. So instagram.com becomes instagram.social, etc. Then mandate that all consumer network equipment mfrs and internet providers provide easily accessible ways to block these TLDs. Maybe combine that with some public education materials to teach less savvy parents how to do this.

Now you’ve given every parent a way to easily mass block all adult/social sites/apps if they want and no one’s privacy need be compromised.

Like a lot of tech trends, home automation tends to be a solution looking for a problem. Video doorbells are a useful exception, but light switches, kitchen appliances and thermostats just aren’t something I need to be connected to the internet.

Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.

The problem is that code it spits out on the fly is untested and untrustworthy. Identify the parts of your workflow that could be accomplished with regular code - write and unit test that code, with LLM help if you want, and use the llm as the orchestrator only.

I’m a bootcamp grad (although it was an intense 5-night a week, year long bootcamp, not some 6-week build-a-demo class). I have a college degree but it’s in the arts.

I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.

What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?

"get obsolete in months"

If you mean obsolete in the sense of "no longer fit for purpose" I don't think that's true. They may become obsolete in terms of "can't do hottest new thing" but that's true of pretty much any technology. A capable local model that can do X will always be able to do X, it just may not be able to do Y. But if X is good enough to solve your problem, why is a newer better model needed?

I think if we were able to achieve ~Opus 4.6 level quality in a local model that would probably be "good enough" for a vast number of tasks. I think it's debatable whether newer models are always better - 4.7 seems to be somewhat of a regression for example.

I mean...yeah?

If your child says they've learned their multiplication tables but they can't actually multiply any numbers you give them do they actually know how to do multiplication? I would say no.

Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.

There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.

I guess the point I’m making is that a lot of popular JavaScript libraries were created to address deficiencies in the core api that don’t exist anymore, but we keep using these libraries mostly because of entropy and familiarity.

The fetch api has been widely available in browsers for a decade now. And in node since 18. A competent developer could whip up a more axios-like library with fetch in a day easily. You can do all the cool things like interceptors with fetch too.

Yet most developers I work with just use it reflexively. This seems like one of the biggest issues with the npm ecosystem - the complete lack of motivation to write even trivial things yourself.

I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.

They are not intelligent. Full stop. Very sophisticated next word prediction is not intelligence. LLMs don’t comprehend or understand things. They don’t think, feel or comprehend things. That’s just not how they work.

That said, very sophisticated next word predictors can and sometimes do write good code. It’s amazing some of the things they get right and then can turn around and make the weirdest dumbest mistakes.

It’s a tool. Sometimes it’s the right tool, sometimes it’s not.

What the people excited about the race to the bottom scenario don’t seem to understand is that it doesn’t mean low skill people will suddenly be more employable, it means fewer high skill people will be employable.

No one will be eager to employ “ai-natives” who don’t understand what the llm is pumping out, they’ll just keep the seasoned engineers who can manage and tame the output properly. Similarly, no one is going to hire a bunch of prompt engineers to replace their accountants, they’ll hire fewer seasoned accountants who can confidently review llm output.

They will still be turning out the same problematic code in a few years that they do now, because they aren’t intelligent and won’t be intelligent unless there is a fundamental paradigm shift in how an LLM works.

I use LLMs with best practices to program professionally in an enterprise every day, and even Opus 4.6 still consistently makes some of the dumbest architectural decisions, even with full context, complete access to the codebase and me asking very specific questions that should point it in the right direction.

I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that this is discriminatory. Certainly it’s not something I would tolerate as a consumer. I suspect there will be heavy pressure to regulate this practice out of existence if it catches on.

I suspect casual users are MUCH more likely to either cancel their account or switch providers on a whim.

There's a lot of people who think the only thing keeping us out of a serious recession or even depression is AI investment.

I too, want to hear details about what this person did that they could be replaced completely with LLMs.

Management has made it very clear that we’re still responsible for the code we push even if the llm wrote it. So there will be no blaming Claude when things fall apart.

Thinking carefully about the details of implementation MATTERS. Even with crud apps. Getting something “built” fast isn’t and should not be the only consideration.

I can go to a junkyard and assemble the parts to build a car. It may run, but for a thousand tiny reasons it will be worse than a car built by a team of designers and engineers who have thought carefully about every aspect of its construction.

Absurdly high markups? They just released a very good laptop for $599. The Galaxy S26 Ultra is $1299. The OnePlus 15 is $999. A Dell XPS 16 with 32gb ram is over $2000.

I won’t argue that they charge a premium for memory and nvme, but I have never felt like I overpaid for my MacBooks or iPhones, in part because they last so long.

I always wondered - were the huge fines applicable because they shared the files, or because they downloaded the files? The two things were always conflated and poorly understood in media reports at the time.

Seems like it would be impossible to prove substantial damages from one individual downloading an album, because you have only lost the potential single sale. No different than a kid stealing a single CD in terms of lost revenue.

Sharing the song on Kazaa or Limewire or Napster however means that they could have potentially illicitly provided the album to thousands or even millions of potential customers, more akin to stealing a truckload or even a whole store full of cds. In that case, it does seem plausible that you could prove (or at least convince a judge/jury) significant damages more in line with the exorbitant punitive sums.

Since they “caught” you by setting up fake peers that recorded your ip when sharing, I always assumed it was the latter that actually got people in trouble.