ken47

You're comparing a one-time-use resource in U235 vs. the land required for a solar plant, which will last indefinitely for all intents and purposes. Adding the "in a day" constraint is quite misleading in your comment when that is not the long-term limiting factor.

Let's not forget that the externalities of nuclear power are generally much more costly than solar / wind.

Amazon has been known to be a relatively undesirable place to work for those with options. So I’m not surprised at all by this article’s content. If it wasn’t part of the arbitrary FAANG acronym, they’d have a really hard time finding talent.

The issue is quite simple IMHO. The company has a motto that is almost completely PR. If they truly cared about doing the right thing, don’t be evil, to the extent they imply by making it their motto, then they would have an interview process which evaluates the ethics and morality of their candidates, even if only a little bit. It is well known that entry to Google is, at least for engineers, basically little more than a leetcode mastery test.

Both code review and documentation require architectural knowledge to execute properly for a large app. This is not within the reach of current AI, and won’t be for a long time.

It feels like this article was not written by a programmer, and it feels like a number of the commenters are not professional engineers. What part of a programmer jobs can AI realistically replace in the near term?

For the sake of argument, let’s say it could replace the coding part cost effectively. Can it still do all the other parts? Take ambiguous requirements and seek clarity from design, product, etc. (instructing an AI to a sufficient degree to build a complex feature could almost be a coding task itself). Code reviews. Deal with random build failures. Properly document the functionality so that other programmers and stakeholders can understand. Debug and fix production issues. And that’s just a subset.

Realistically, in the future there will be a long phase of programmers leveraging AI to be more efficient before there’s any chance that AI can effectively replace a decent programmer.

This will be an advantage to engineers who think on the more abstract side of the spectrum. The “lower level” programming tasks will be consumed first.

Fastest at what?

Titles like this irk me. It’s likely the fastest growing because it’s fringe.

Safety is certainly a huge concern with this class of vehicles. But by programming these cars to drive extremely conservatively, they cause disproportionate congestion as well. This seems to be underplayed in approval discussions around these vehicles, but is a major cost.

The problem is that so many people are "CEO" nowadays. Anyone can become a CEO tomorrow by registering a corporation for a few thousand dollars or less. The businesses that produce great value, and may reflect well on their CEO's abilities, are in the minority.

My understanding is that the CEO's in question are not even remotely comparable to Lebron James's stature in basketball.

Until very recently, AMD was struggling for survival. Rather than making the big bet on AI, they went for the sure thing by banking on revolutionary CPU tech. I'm sure if they were in a better financial position 5 years ago, they would have gone bigger on AI.

You're stating something that should be obvious. How are there so many software and software-adjacent people who take headlines at face value?

Every job could eventually become unnecessary.

Our jobs are safe for now. That's not my takeaway. Our jobs will eventually be "unsafe."

The promise of globalization was primarily about improving economic efficiencies, not liberalization. Has it succeeded in that regard?

Given the extremely myopic system under which our largest corporations (in America) operate, they've engaged in globalization in a way that largely maximized short-term benefit (to them) without regard for the long-term externalities. It's a shame that globalization had to be given a bad name by being executed poorly.

And/or find a developer who makes your other developers better. I've been on many teams now where basic principles of establishing positive team dynamics are ignored so that people can gratify their insatiable egos.

Perhaps you're thinking about empires that were primarily held together by military force. Those are inherently unstable. As it pertains to globalization, the more relevant trend over time is the formation of nation states that primarily exist for any other reason.

Nations have clearly been trending larger over history, on average. Unless there's a good reason for this trend to stop after thousands of years, globalization will be the end result. But the process will happen organically, and slowly -- perhaps slower than some would like.

The top chess engine was ELO rated at 3546 in 2021. The top rated player ever was Magnus at 2882. To put that ELO difference in context, even if Magnus gets the first move, the chess engine is expected to win 0.979934616 of the time. Within that gap, there are many moves that can be played that are superior to human moves by varying degrees.

It would be very hard to detect a sophisticated cheater solely by examining their moves in a vacuum. They could pick moves that appear to be "human" e.g. moves that appear to be chosen based on the common heuristics that strong human players tend to rely upon, rather than moves based on very deep brute force calculations, where we could never match the strongest chess engines.

The giveaway is usually in the time required for each move. Humans will tend to spend varying amounts of time on each move, with significantly more time spent at critical moments in a game. A computer will pretty much spend the same amount of time for each move. But even here, a sophisticated cheater could disguise this side effect by only using computer assistance at critical moments.

[1] https://wismuth.com/elo/calculator.html#rating1=3546&rating2...

Time spent at the keyboard is definitely not the mark of an effective coder. Code is just the implementation of a design. For any nontrivial module, the design should take up the majority of your time. If you're designing as you're writing code, you're probably doing it wrong.

I see other people's points that these quotes aren't the best reflection of these leaders, but I'd give them some benefit of the doubt in that we're lacking context. We're just getting the sensational headlines and quotes. There is something to be said for managing company morale, so we'll see how FB's employees handle the very blunt message they received...

That being said, even though the message itself is bitter, I would strongly prefer that leadership communicate such difficulties openly rather than surprising the company out of the blue with layoffs, pay cuts, etc. Then, employees have an opportunity to make a decision about how much harder they want to work, or whether they want to leave for different pastures.

Well, we're viewing these messages without context. Absent of context, I would say that Zuckerberg's messaging is too aggressive, and many otherwise decent employees would find it toxic. Now, if there was a proper build-up of messaging to this level of aggression, perhaps that context justifies it to a certain extent. But it looks quite bad in isolation.

Pichai's messaging is more reasonable, even without context. He's just saying the company needs people to work harder. I'm fine with that.

They theoretically facilitate capital allocation by increasing liquidity and hence aid in price discovery, if they operate strictly within the market maker role. Whether it plays out like this in practice has been debated elsewhere.

No group of people, Republican or Democrat, can stop the perpetual cycles of human history. At best, we can only delay the inevitable.

Within its statistical boundaries, the scientific method is absolutely trustworthy. Humans though? Not so much.

This is the worst kind of publicity for ZURU. They thought it was difficult to hire employees because of a handful of critical reviews on Glassdoor? It's about to get a lot harder. The company should have spent those extra resources researching how to make their employees happier (and hence, more productive).

This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted.

I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.

And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...

If you ever read these comics, I think you'd understand that it would be extremely odd to see these characters in an ad for e.g. coca cola or some such. Calvin and Hobbes have very well-defined characters that would seem very out of place in a profit-oriented environment.

I find the title a little bit strange. Japan, the country, did not propose anything. Specific entities within Japan did. Perhaps I'm too post-nationalistic for this article's title.

What is the point of university rankings? To gratify the human need for someone to dumb down a complex system to a simplistic measure, just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another?

Once everyone starts optimizing for a metric, that metric ceases to be useful. It's only a matter of how long it takes people to realize that this has happened.