majesticglue

you are correct. Western news media wants it to be bigger than it is right now, because if you check the last month or so, the only people ever talking about 4B movement are western liberals and hmm i wonder why Western Media outlets are obsessed with talking about 4B since trump became into power. Dubious motives.

what are you talking about lmao. US is playing "who should we start war with next". I guess you watched too much mainstream media and cross checked information with media outlets outside US and independent journalists. To be fair it's normal to be ignorant like yourself when mainstream media is a lot more channels than people think.

lmao. these americans are hopeless arent they? "Rigged to explode" LOL. Not to mention China is catching up fast on chips.

American propaganda...one day Americans are going to wake up and realize, China has taken over in all areas of tech and Americans are going to be in such denial that they'll want war... sigh. China is already leading in many areas, not all of them yet, but they soon are

I'm glad people are getting it. China is not as war hungry as america is as it's being made out to be on MSM.

Someone's not privy to how fast China is progressing nowadays. Americans are so ignorant on Chinese technological prowess right now. Chinese EVs are dominating every market in the world aside from US which has basically banned it essentially, otherwise we'd have very affordable cars in America. America banned DJI drones which owns about 70-80% of the world market on drones. China recently unleashed an open source AI model (and this is with limited funding and compute because they put a ban on exports of US and Taiwan chips) that rivals openai o1 with a fraction of funding. Not to mention how China has always had the lead on manufacturing automation and robots.

Man Americans are oblivious to how fast China is progressing.

No. South Korea should be more alarmed about how US is treating their allies. Henry Kissinger quote: “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

Someone's been watching too much Western Media propaganda

what kind of nonsense are people in the comments mentioning. it shouldn't even be remotely considered.

wtf kind of BS to allow any remote semblance of programmers deserving consequences? if programmers received EXECUTIVE level pay then yes, they deserve the rammifications, but they do not, executive pay is ridiculous with their already inflated salary, ridiculous bonuses, and stock buybacks. whoever gets paid more is the one that deserves the consequences.

Thats the WHOLE GODDAM REASON THEY ARE IN THAT POSITION.

and you don't think they don't have some backdoor legislation that they are going through to benefit themselves while hiding their schemes in private?

i mean look at sam altman, using openai funds for what was originally a NONPROFIT, to fund areas with conflicts of interests.

At least when it's for profit it's out in the open.

Sam Altman is a businessman through and through based on his entire history. Chances are, he will have found an alternative means to make profit on OpenAI and he wouldn't do this on "charity". Just as how many CEOs say, I will "cut my salary" for example, they will never say "I cut my stocks or bonuses" which can be a lot more than their salary.

Either way based on many CEOs track records healthy skepticism should be involved and majority of them find ways to profit on it at some point or another.

None of that really matters. Look at Elon Musk, lots of weird spectacle. The man was lauded as one of the smartest man in the world...now he's kind of a bit of a loose cannon. People need to stop idol worship businessmen. They have a large motivation to make themselves into this human lovable charismatic person with no faults because it is very profitable to do so. Worse is when people buy into that.

i could not say that any better.

I had a feeling the man was a bit of a con, of course I won't say I know for sure. But some of his actions, like his notorious eye scanning crypto project, or the fact that he was 100% in support of UBI and wanted to advocate for it only to go to different governments wanting regulations (that only benefitted them)

People really really need to pay attention to their actions, not their words, jeezus. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk who was once idol worshipped as the incredibly "brilliant" man...turned out he does some stupid things too only now he amassed billions of dollars he can pay his way out of stupid things.

People never learn. Stop idolizing businessmen.

The dude is just a businessman through and through. Stop idol worshiping these businessman. We'll have another rogue Elon Musk. At least Elon Musk is exposing himself now for what he is, but he has so much money at this point it has no effect on him to do random weird nonsense. Sam Altman seemed quite slimy to me, with his actions, garnering support by talking about UBI and advocating for it, but then going to talk to US Congress to talk about regulations (because it benefits himself).

The man was starting to seem like a huge con and people just seem to not see through that.

100%. Man I was worried he'd be a worse, more slimy elon musk who'd constantly say one thing but his actions portray another story. People will be fooled again.

oh thank god. I distrusted Sam Altman with a passion. Granted who knows if the new CEO is much better though.

well there are easier solutions than "blaming consumers". stop it at the supply. Enforce regulations and demands of the companies importing those "new cloths" and make them responsible for the damage caused.

America loves to gaslit consumers but companies never EVER get the blame, even worse is the CEOs of the companies who make these decisions always get scot free.

I've heard of people who had terrible experiences with ex Amazon engineers. I've met a few of them, and not the greatest group of people to work with. Of course I'm stereotyping a very large company so take it with a grain of salt.

clearly there is a missing link in your experience of companies where you don't have control over a lot of the things you think is needed and companies want to push a product as fast as possible and cut as many corners as possible.

More and more companies will be like this to cut costs

this is the problem of believing things are "better".

it's better in terms of people not having to do brutal physical labor.

but it's worse it's ever been in terms of mental labor and mental health. For older folks they may not understand, and we as a society as a whole not understand, how much mental impact growing up with social media and endless amounts of stimulation has an affect on the entire generation. Social media is still incredibly new only several decades old, with every year getting more and more stimulating. We have no idea the consequences of such over a long term impact on mental health.

You may think "just don't go on it" but it's a whole different story for younger kids, when everyone in your peer group is on social media. If your entire social network is dependent on social media, "just don't use social media" becomes incredibly difficult, and you become exposed to algorithms designed to ceaselessly deliver dopamine to your brain.

On top of that work, has become a lot more and more mentally draining vs physically draining, making it way harder to factor how tiring it is. As someone who studied Neuroscience in undergrad, the biggest takeaway for me learning it was Neuroscience is still an extremely new science, and our understanding of the brain is very very limited, funnily enough despite how much advancements we made with ai. So understanding people's mental exhaustion is very difficult to measure.

Endless mental dopamine delivery, combined with rapid technological pace requiring younger individuals to learn more and more, faster and faster,

I argue, that "times are not as good" as people think they say. There is a different kind of pain involved from working long hours in more natural/stable but physically arduous tasks in the fields or whatnot, vs 8 hours in some confined space indoors of having to constantly learn something new of an ever-changing landscape of new technology without stability where you can be rendered useless in a span of a couple years (ie artists and ai image generation). The pain of being in some confined space is not new to the older generation, but it certainly is getting worse because of how faster automation is rendering certain knowledge and jobs useless much faster than it ever did.

> Does the author hold some resentment for senior engineers or something?

Sounds like it.

I worked at a company where some of my team leads were business persons (and had no coding experience) who just happened to start working on backend (before i started working there) and setup a codebase. It probably was beneficial at the time because they knew what to build and what type of value it could bring...

But of course, when the team started expanding, people realized the database had one of the absolute awful data modeling that was completely unworkable. No one can work on it because of all the complicated SQL queries (we are talking full page SQL queries) required to make any kind of changes.

They wanted a new version of the app, but no one wanted to touch that mess but they were literally stuck because they had valuable data formatted in this conglomerate mess. For example, the app would take like 5 seconds to load, and make 5-10 different api calls for what should be single api calls to the backend. Fortunately it was an internal app so performance wasn't as big an issue, but many people were using it. So there were so many bugs and requests of this app but no one can address them whatsoever, not even the person who built the app. And yes, it was THAT bad.

They wanted us to rebuild that same app, but not rework the backend because of how long it might take, and even 1-2 years later, the app looked better but...the bugs to address are still nearly impossible without a reworked backend. They may have gotten users...but I'm pretty sure they wasted more money on trying to maintain the thing than how much it benefitted the company.

Gotta love business people loving the "anyone can do it!". And code maintenance in the backburner like usual. As long as the app attracts "users", that's all that matters right?

for prototyping or building the actual product?

No-code/low-code tools are great for prototypes, but are awful for software that is large enough. for small businesses many will not get to that point because many businesses sink by that time, but absolutely unusable for many enterprise software. Those solutions slow down devs past a certain level of complexity (and that level isn't all that high) but no-code/low-code experts will either not know any better or won't tell you. I have legitimately tried using a few, but they become a pain to work it beyond the initial prototype. I put them in the similar territory as Wordpress because they remind me of the pain of maintaining them.

Non-devs always underestimate complexity of software at scale. Even devs do as well. It's not gatekeeping otherwise, devs would already be out of a job

maybe the idea of "proper agile" is too vague to even be useful?

"That's not agile"

Has become one of the most annoying arguments I've ever heard. As someone who experienced a corporate takeover of agile "consultants", I can tell you, it is one of the hardest things to try and deal with people who have their own idea about agile.

"Proper agile" is too "team specific" that maybe it shouldn't have been a "manifesto", just call it good "team practices" and maybe it wouldn't have become such a cult

definitely.

I just think for some, bottoms up learning has quite some disadvantages and was an approach that I've used for a long time with okay results. It would get me to where I wanted to be...but it takes way too long sometimes.

Of course there are people like you mentioned though who only do top down learning but just never go into learning the fundamentals ever, which is another problem in its own right.

I disagree. It's like telling someone who is somewhat interested in building cars to learn how an engine works before having them on the ground playing with the actual car parts. The issue becomes not whether they'll learn, it's about whether they WANT to continue to learn. Most people when they want to start coding, would rather want to build cool things. And then later on, they'll naturally be more interested in the fundamentals.

I argue that this is why schools are terrible for teaching. They try and teach fundamentals without making kids interested in the topic first. As someone who taught many kids, the struggle is always making them interested, not the rate at which they learn.

I remember when I started programming, the worst advice i got was on stack overflow, that I should learn from this thick c++ textbook as a start... Wasted couple months on that book, where the concepts went through one ear and out the other, became extremely disinterested. Only until someone told me to just learn Javascript and build things was when I progressed and learned rapidly. Took me only a year after that to get a job with me becoming interested very quickly on learning fundamentals from there. If I kept learning from a book, it would've taken me several years before I got to even building. It's silly to assume someone who learns from the top down can't learn the fundamentals at some point.

Now I've learned game development and currently learning ai on the side. I've tried bottoms up learning many times, but it is incredibly slow to get my goals. Top down and learning fundamentals after you get your hands dirty has been the absolute fastest way for me to learn new topics. With bottoms up, while you may learn many of the basics, you also happen to learn a bunch of extraneous information that you may never use, and will forget because you don't use it.

those think tanks really did a number. the climate denialists, have made moving goal of going from denial to climate change is not man made.

The amount of americans who can't stand that fact that they were wrong on the matter is incredible.

there's a lot you can still do before involving the pricey engineers. Having people just sit down and consider requirements, talking to users, and thinking about what the app should essentially do, while also incorporating a ux/designer as needed to create mocks prior to building an application is still way more cost effective than just telling a developer to "build me an app that ingests all the data at our company"...which is a lovely experience I've had (I'm exaggerating but I had a one page doc about a useless description about data ingestion with no description about users).

Heck I've even built hobby projects where I considered many of the details of requirements beforehand and saved myself a lot of time in developing features I wasn't sure about.

As someone who has privately tutored many rich kids vs poor kids for nearly a decade, I don't think I need to see a study to see how much more advantages they have. It's pretty apparent the advantages.

Yes a really "dumb" kid will still be "dumb" academically, but people here are severely underestimating what money can buy in education. I've seen really "dumb" kids be brought up to the level of "passably smart" simply because of resource access.

When you have teachers who are not overworked and are paid lovely salaries (ie 6 figure salaries), imagine every teacher you have actually cares and invested in your education? Imagine every class has recordings of every lecture as well as a curriculum that has a lot of forethought and time put into it? And imagine if the school has a lacking teacher, than the parents hire some ex-olympian, or ex-superstar coach or teacher to make up for that? I've seen parents hire ex-olympic athletes to get some untalented rich kid to close to olympic level.

Honestly, I think it's really understated how much educational spending can affect a kid. Most people will not see what I've seen, and even from someone who came from a middle class background who used to believe wealth does not matter when it came to education, even I was shocked by what money can buy in "academic success" and my opinion changed. I at this point, don't need to see a study because it was that drastic.

A lot of the comments here come from a place of ignorance...

I've had the unique experience of private tutoring many "elite" students in high school for math and physics for nearly a decade in Los Angeles a while back. Basically both rich kids and less fortunate kids who can only afford my tutoring rate every once in a while vs rich kids who can if they wanted to afford my help every day.

It's not simply "better textbooks" or "better schooling", the difference in education is VERY DRASTIC and being in LA I was able to see kids from drastically different backgrounds. Rich kids with having tutors for every class, maids for every other side chore so parents can actually pay attention to their kids, private high schools and middle schools that cost nearly $30-50k per year can buy you so many advantages most people can't even comprehend.

The biggest advantages I saw was better resources, better textbooks, curriculums that are ACTUALLY made with care and time, and most importantly teachers who were paid very very comfortable (ie, 6 figure salaries) who have the luxury to not be overworked, and can actually attend to their students as needed. Imagine every one of your teachers in middle school and high school, putting top notch effort into providing a great learning experience for you? Most people probably only had one teacher like that in their entire lifetime. And not to mention if the school was lacking in any area, many of the rich parents would hire their own private ex-olympian or ex-superstar specialist of whatever they desire.

People here are DRASTICALLY underestimating what extra educational resources can buy.

and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers do but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

Yeah, I work at a corporate office and have made it a mission to see what kind of work they do, and majority of the time...it's pointless meetings and meetings that involve pointing to IT workers and saying "do this". I check many of their daily schedules, and see what kind of stuff they talk about in meetings...just wow. Am I an "asshole"? Sure you can call me that, but I can call them useless in turn because I wonder how many more qualified people out there who can replace these workers.

of all the things mentioned in this whole thread, this resonates the most. from my take, everyone here mentions AI engineering as someone just plugging in LLM (ie OpenAI) into every software application. However I believe there is a nice burgeoning of the "AI Engineer" where it involves more of the data processing and specialized AI fine-tuning that engineers have a role in, but of course it requires more specialization than just learning LangChain and calling it a day.