jlarocco

As a cyclist, motorcyclist, and potential e-bike owner, I'd actually be in favor of making it any bicycle.

Anybody moving significantly faster than the flow of traffic is endangering the rest of the users.

> but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.

What a ridiculous statement.

I don't think there's any inherrent difference, but until the laws catch up the "powerful e-bikes" are clearly more dangerous. Riding a traditional motorcycle requires a license, passing a driving test, and following the rules of the road - none of which are true for e-bikes.

But I'd love to hear why you think the opposite.

I guess it depends on what "A", "B" and "C" means exactly.

But the problem with "C" managers is that they won't judge "A" work as "A" work, won't understand why some of the "A" work is important, and will get in the way of the "A" engineers, making them go down "C" paths.

A "C" level manager brings the whole team down to "C" level and destroys the morale of "A" and "B" workers while they're at it.

An "A" level manager can guide everybody towards "A" level work.

Yeah, I agree with you, and actually like OOP where it's appropriate.

Unfortunately there were so many bad examples from the old Java "every thing needs a dozen factories and thousands of interfaces" days that most people haven't seen the cases where it works well.

I had never heard of Bending Spoons before.

Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.

So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

Because it shows how much lock-in they have.

You know nobody is migrating off of AWS or Azure because of these.

Exactly. The elites hire experts to do it for them, while everybody else has to deal with the complex rules themselves.

It's like auditting tax returns of the rich - of course they didn't cheat, they already lobbied for the loopholes making their shenanigans legal.

What people thought about LLMs five years ago, and how close we are to AGI right now are unrelated, and it's not logially sound to say "We were close to LLMs then, so we are close to AGI now."

It's also a misleading view of the history. It's true "most people" weren't thinking about LLMs five years ago, but a lot of the underpinnings had been studied since the 70s and 80s. The ideas had been worked out, but the hardware wasn't able to handle the processing.

> True honesty requires acknowledging that we truly have no idea. Progress in AI is happening faster than ever before, but nobody has the slightest idea how much progress is needed to get to AGI.

Maybe, but don't tell that to OpenAI's investors.

Yeah, that's always how bribery works.

From Wikipedia: "Bribery is the corrupt solicitation, payment, or acceptance of a private favor (a bribe) in exchange for official action."

Why didn't they "vibe code" their own version?

I wonder how long it will be before the first EVs get bricked because the manufacturer doesn't want to ship software updates to the old hardware any more.

If it can happen to a $1500 phone or a $5k computer, I'm sure it will happen to a $20k car eventually.

Those complaints are really orthogonal to the EV vs ICE debate, though.

Somebody could claim driver aids and infotainment EVs are "degrading" in EVs in the exact same way - in fact they're even more integrated in EVs.

And although EVs don't have the same transmissions and exhaust gas systems, they have their own unique complexities and points of failure, like batteries and regenerative braking systems.

The hoverflies definitely have an advantage in that respect.

They're not consciously thinking about "the mission", just following their instincts.

> Anyone in the bay who's not a founder or working for a meaningless company easily clears $200k.

Maybe your attitude is why you can't find a job?

Nothing in your post indicates you're "in the bay", and in the other 99% of the country $150k is a decent salary.

I'm not a big fan of AI, but if it kills off online advertising and marketting, maybe there's a silver lining...

Is it? Companies like Google coddle users instead of teaching them how to browse smarter and detect phishing for themselves. Google wants people to stay ignorant so they can squeeze them for money instead of phishers.

Those are formulated as hypothetical statements and "what if" questions, but it already works that way in the United States.

So it's automating away the fun parts, and leaving the humans to rig up automated tests and setup continuous integration...

And unfortunately people who get to architect anything are a small subset of developers.

It helps that they can tell people to debug the problem themselves.

It actually sounds like you agree with the article quite a bit.

If your product doesn't solve problems on the difficult side of the "complexity cliff" then vibe coders will copy it and drive your profit to zero.

That's not how it works for most language standards, though. Most language standards are prescriptive, while Rust is descriptive.

Usually the standard comes first, compiler vendors implement it, and between releases of the spec the language is fixed. Using Ada as an example, there was Ada 95 and Ada 2003, but between 95 and 2003 there was only Ada 95. There was no in-progress version, the compiler vendors weren't making changes to the language, and an Ada95 compiler today compiles the same language as an Ada95 compiler 30 years ago.

Looking at the changelog for the Rust spec (https://rust-lang.github.io/fls/changelog.html), it's just the changelog of the language as each compiler verion is released, and there doesn't seem to be any intention of supporting previous versions. Would there be any point in an alternative compiler implementing "1.77.0" of the Rust spec?

And the alternative compiler implementation can't start implementing a compiler for version n+1 of the spec until that version of rustc is released because "the spec" is just "whatever rustc does", making the spec kind of pointless.

But there's a real risk that in the long term all of the "serious" AI hardware research will get done inside a few big companies, essentially shutting out smaller players with a hardware moat.

Unless they start selling the hardware, but in the current AI market nobody would do that because it's their special sauce.

On the other hand, maybe it's no different than any other hardware, and other makers will catch up eventually.

The article says the judge called them out for not doing enough due dilligence.

The fact that they didn't do enough research doesn't mean it's okay to scam them, though.

This is why I hate software engineering as a profession.

You're going to write the "stupid code" to get things out the door, get promoted and move on to another job, and then some future engineer has to come along and fix the mess you made.

But management and the rest of the org won't understand why those future engineers are having such a hard time, why there's so much tech debt, and why any substantial improvements require major rework and refactoring.

So the people writing the stupid code get promoted and look good, but the people who have to deal with the mess end up looking bad.

Honestly, "That's just not how that works" isn't a very convincing argument.

If you can't explain why it doesn't work that way, there's no reason anybody should believe you.

Definitely!

My understanding of knot theory is limited to having watched a few YouTube videos and reading the first introductory chapters of a book. A neat topic, but not one I'm going to dig too deeply into.

I'm with the OP on this one. Intuitively (to me, anyway) I wouldn't expect it to work in general.

I'm surprised it took so long to find a counterexample, but it doesn't surprise me at all to hear it doesn't work.

Aren't "local-first apps" in this context the ones where you vist "example.com", and it caches a bunch of HTML and Javascript and saves data locally using the "local storage" APIs? And then periodically makes requests back to "example.com" to check for updates, sync data, etc.?

As a user the simple answer is that I'll always use a regular application instead of a "local-first" web app when I have the ability.

"Local-first apps" are the worst of everything - crappy, dumbed down web UI; phoning home, telemetry, and other privacy violations; forced upgrades; closed source, etc.

At work, I don't have a choice, so it's Google Docs or Office 365 or whatever. And in that context it actually makes sense to have data stored on some server somewhere because it's not really my data but the company's. But at home I'll always choose the strictly offline application and share my data and files some other way.

Sure, but let's not pretend that doesn't kill diversity and entrench a few big players.