ludicity

I feel obliged to say that this isn't true of Ed at all. He does a lot more "real journalism" than most of the journalists I've interacted, and grills the people he's interviewing on technical details more than anyone else I've seen in the field.

I had a stressful five minutes this morning talking about using floating point numbers being weird for some financial applications because he wouldn't accept a shoddy answer.

Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.

(And I've seen hospitals do some horrible things that probably demonstrably killed people through funding misallocation and reporting mistakes, which were at least partially caused by the AI bubble. So I think it's fair to say that some AI applications can be unimpressive while the net effect is disastrous.)

Others have pointed out a few "real" tech companies, but the economy is also surprisingly large. There are a ton of little data science jobs available on the market, though they're mostly on initiatives that will never plausibly work.

Tecto AI is my favourite, as it forms the "AI for AI" ouroboros. Outrove also sounds confusing, because doesn't Salesforce already purport to have their own native AI features? And when I look them up, it seems they're just AI for recruiting, which is also what VoiceOS purports to do.

Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).

From my own time in psychology, the thrust of the book might be good, but that specific point about Protestant work ethic sounds exactly like all the other "just so" studies that didn't replicate.

But lots of otherwise good books have these little mistakes on them, so I find it best to gloss over them and see if the point stands without them.

I am 99.99% sure that less than 20% of Australian graduates could do this, and honestly I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the actual answer is <1%.

I was studying at Monash, which is considered a solid university here, and holy moly are the standards low. I had classmates in the second year of my machine learning postgrad asking me things like "What is machine learning?", and they all graduated and found jobs anyway.

I've interacted with a lot of reasonably randomly selected companies after starting a consultancy last year, and honestly yes, 80% of software developers are incompetent.

It's honestly a stretch to say they're software developers as you're probably imagining, but if you walk into a random office, most people with that title won't use version control, won't ever ship, and are generally a bit concussed.

It can be hard to imagine because many times, when we find competent teams, many of the members have never directly experienced a truly average team, as the culture one acquires on those teams makes it hard to ever be accepted on a good team (frequently the weaker developers don't even understand there's anything lacking in their skillset).

I'm more sympathetic now than I was a year ago, but it's also pretty unacceptable when you remember they work at hospitals and the government!

I've only given talks to small audiences but they were very well-received. I often focus on humour, partially because I don't really have the background to deep-dive technical material hard enough for that to be interesting in-and-of-itself (maybe this is imposter syndrome).

It is very important though. It's very easy to lose an audience, and the truth is a lot of the speakers before you will likely range from slightly boring to extremely boring. The audience can be primed to totally clock out if you don't grab them immediately and keep them for the whole thing.

Yeah. I'm from Malaysia, and while we definitely benefited in many ways, to state that we do not still have massive and pervasive social issues as a result of colonization is insane. I'm glad you posted the link above and spoke up. I didn't even know where to start, but was worried someone might take the original comment seriously.

I think they've been fully converged in most strong practitioners for a long time.

There's a specific type of "data engineer" (quotes to indicate this is what they're called by the business, not to contest their legitimacy) that just writes lots of SQL, but they're usually a bad hire for businesses. They're approximately as expensive as what people call platform engineers, but platform engineers in the data space can usually do modelling as well.

When organizations split teams up by the most SWE-type DEs and the pure SQL ones, the latter all jockey to join the former team which causes a lot of drama too.

Everything Comeau puts out is so goddamn good. I paid for his CSS course a year ago and the effort that went into the pedagogy is just spectacular.

Putting aside all of the discussion on whether IQ is a valid construct, IQ tests are designed for humans and make a lot of assumptions in this direction. Having a computer score well on them is better than the computer scoring poorly, but probably does not mean anything close to what the same result means in a human.

Companies don't like recruiters either, and they're the ones willing to pay me!

I took a run at recruiting recently and it's so easy to outperform recruiters that it's honestly depressing. Just replying to emails at the times I promised made candidates self-report that I'm the best recruiter they've ever worked with.

One of my favourite musicians of all times. All I can say is that I can't wait to introduce my children to his work one day.

It's not so bad in Elixir for various reasons. Firstly, they're doing some work on set-theoretic types.

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/gradual-set-theoretic-types.h...

There's also tooling like dialyzer, and a good LSP catches a lot too. The language itself has some characteristics that catch errors too, like pattern matching and guard clauses.

With all that said, I'm still very keen for static typing. In the data world we mostly start with Python without mypy, and it's pretty hard to go back.

Even people inside Salesforce don't know where this number is coming from. I asked some of my blog readers to give me insider intel on this and I only received information that there's no evidence to be seen despite multiple staff asking for clarification internally.

Most of this stuff is very, very transparently a lie.

I was agreeing with this, gave it a bit of a think, then it occurred to me that surely cigarettes and the technical discoveries used to facilitate gambling addiction qualify as technology.

(But I broadly agree.)

That's fair, but I'm talking about the complete certainty that it won't reduce the demand for labor! It's the opposite of the fallacy you've highlighted being committed by posturing leaders.

I incidentally get the inside scoop on what's going on internally at these organizations through the blog, and they definitely need a lot less Devin and much better hiring practices.

I always have a lot of fun looking up the executives saying this stuff: https://www.goldmansachs.com/our-firm/our-people-and-leaders...

CIO at Goldman Sachs, multiple "AWS businesses" started spanning "mobile, serverless computing, Internet of Things, and augmented and virtual reality". AWS businesses? What does that even mean? And the spread of sectors looks like it was precisely calibrated to be a Thought Leader.

Or consider this piece: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/fortune-we-mu...

Everyone grifter I know in Australia is publishing pieces like this. It's simultaneously all-in on AI hype while trying to have it both ways by insisting the human will always be central. No matter what you believe about AI, the set of assumptions you have to accept to confidently state that humans will absolutely remain central is so specific that you would only say this if you were a smiling conman.

If someone wants to believe it'll remove all jobs, fine, whatever. If someone wants to believe it'll do nothing, sure, okay. If you want to believe that it's the most revolutionary technology in human history and no one's going to lose their jobs, you're just transparently pretending to be trendy while simultaneously pretending to be human-oriented.

I was joking but maybe I really should do this. I'm lacking a lot of Linux fundamentals, let alone NixOS fundamentals, but I also love my setup so much. Here's the commit that made my wallpaper an animated hobbit house!

https://github.com/Nikhil-Suresh/nixos-configuration/commit/...

I didn't use Nixvim or any of that cool stuff though. I stole a little Bash project called Tilde from my friend Victor Engmark to keep all my dotfiles in a repository and then symlink them to .config/ on all the machines I use.

I actually have most of this. The blog defaults to the user's system font, I think, and it has an RSS feed + very little JS (maybe none, depends on how hosted Mataroa works), etc.

Unfortunately I don't self-host my email, so I must apologize profusely.

It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.

Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!

Yep, I even wrote in to Crawford to let him know how hard it slapped. I watched the whole thing with my brother and I'll treasure the experience forever, haha.

I've been reading Crawford for quite a few years now, and got into DS9 at his recommendation. I had to skip the last paragraph because I haven't finished his latest game, but I've quietly admired his weirdness and dedication to the craft. Some of his criticisms of storytelling in games have also been frequently opaque to me, but I still believe there's something behind even the statements I didn't understand.

Some of his reflections on growing old, remembering his first crush, and even just noodling about home improvement are incredibly beautiful too.

Those are all asides, but what I mean to say is that his other posts are worth reading.

McKenzie's advice has worked for me every single time. I've managed 10% to 20% at every job since graduating (sometimes with leadership bending a lot of rules for it).

This was before I started writing my blog.

There are jobs where I suspect I couldn't get a raise, but they're all roles where I would be unable to differentiate myself from a commodified ultra-scrub engineer (think the cheap labour you get from generic Azure consultancies).

Man, I had almost forgotten how much fun it was to read about ML projects of the variety I studied in university, before all the discourse shifted to plain English prompts.

I know of some government entities in Australia doing similar work, but the effectiveness/quality level of the author's work do make me despair for our government a bit. They're blowing years of Very Expensive Consultant spend and they can't even classify an entire parcel of land correctly, let alone count some little yurt-shaped blobs.

We swapped our Squarespace website out for a Phoenix application yesterday and it was such a delightful experience.

It isn't bad financially, but I make much less money than I did two years ago. If I had taken any of the jobs I was offered, I think it would have been a 30K to 100K raise. Also the number is slowly going up, and unlike a day job, no one will tell me I'm earning "enough". If I hit enough to salary myself 500K one day, there will be no social norms preventing HR from giving me that.

I am way, way happier. I've met some really amazing people from all over the world. I also have access to a level of technical mentorship that has totally changed the way I engineer -- but you get other people too. I've spent a lot of time with the mythical thoughtful CEO (can confirm that they are an outlier and the median CEO is as bullheaded as they appear), gotten the inside scoop on a lot of stuff that used to confuse the hell out of me, and last week got invited to a group of writers in Melbourne that are helping me get a book out! And it's also, for me, a special kind of awe-inspiring to meet people that have produced truly great literature. I'd never had had the opportunity before that.

That's like, roughly what you'll get at 100 to 200 people if you write things that repel the energy you don't like. At a few thousand subscribers it gets a bit hairier because you don't have time to talk to everyone. I'm also definitely someone that leans hard enough into the parasociality that it becomes regular sociality, which might not be for everyone, and perhaps I'll run into a real sicko one day and regret it.

Now I am the one that provides the shitty jobs! Back to work, peasants! And don't let me ever catch you not maximizing Jira velocity, or time with your family is being moved to the backlog!

Most of them hit #1 on Hackernews or close to it. That's usually between 100K and 300K hits, and they're pretty high-quality hits since it's usually non-trash software engineers, contrasted with the twelve year olds you'd get if it was 200K YouTube hits.