nameless912

The AI developer is as much a threat to jobs as the self driving car is a threat to truck drivers; a looming fear, always on the horizon but somehow paradoxically never getting closer. For my part, I'm going to keep doing work that is interesting and, as a bonus, extremely hard to replace with AI, and I'll cross this bridge when it gets here (Spoiler alert, I don't think that bridge is coming until long after I'm out of the industry, if ever).

uh...what?

Which is too bad, because those recordings are extremely useful for harassment cases, worker safety violations, etc.

My back of the napkin calculation for S3's glacier tier says that would cost roughly 50 grand a year.

That seems...reasonable?

IMO, at least however long the statute of limitations in that jurisdiction is for things like sexual harassment, physical/sexual assault, etc. Way too many of those types of cases go totally unpunished because there's no camera evidence, and it seems quite reasonable to me to retain that footage so that if an issue arises, the relevant evidence is available. I don't think you should have any reasonable expectation of privacy for committing crimes at work, and while yes that means that there would be a camera overhead recording my every move, I'm not the kind of person that necessarily sees that as a bad thing; that footage would both protect and bind all of us to a clear social contract, and that seems better than just throwing our hands in the air and saying "oopsies, the footage was overwritten! So sorry!"

This may be true, but I would expect Boeing, a titan of the industry and up until recently assumed leader of aviation safety, to retain footage for much, much longer for training and QA purposes.

Yes, I'm aware this opens them up to all kinds of liability, but corporate liability is worth so much less than data that could save human lives. I'm of the opinion that corporate retention policies are specifically encouraging companies to cover up mistakes rather than fixing them. It feels to me like, if we required companies to retain data for years rather than days, and then rewarded companies that use that data to fully cooperate with investigators, swiftly admit fault, and take corrective action when the screw up, with lower fines and penalties, that that would trump the perceived "danger" of retaining data for too long.

The fact that companies are actively encouraged to delete evidence of wrongdoing so that when a situation emerges where that data would be useful, the company can just shift blame on an asinine written policy is completely nuts to me, and shows that we've totally lost the f**ing plot when it comes to actually encouraging better safety practices.

90% of the comments in the codebase on the project I work on now are links to JIRA tickets and incident reports. AI can't and won't ever do that, and those comments are absolute gold. You can immediately read a seemingly less than optimal or overly defensive snippet of code, wonder "what moron wrote this!?" and then immediately read the referenced ticket and realize that it's "overly defensive" due to a caller that abused our API and caused it to fall over.

I honestly think the Hyperion series does a better job predicting the enshittification of everything at the hands of AI than anything Stephenson wrote. And as an added bonus, it throws in some really interesting thought experiments about what a sentient AI would logically conclude the "right thing" to do with humanity was.

Unending confidence and carefully curated reality distortion fields. Having watched the CEO at a previous job do it, it's infuriating and a gigantic pain in the ass for engineers to have a leader lie to investors and then have to deal with the fallout as deadlines approach.

Depending on the altitude, they could keep these within class G airspace, which means VFR's job is to see and avoid. I think that's a pretty defensible solution as a pilot who spends all of his time in VFR operating in Class E/G airspace.

In this aspect, Gygax is wrong :)

From where I sit in game platform tech, I didn't hear about a single layoff on the tech side of the company. Maybe a studio team got axed? That's a relatively regular occurrence and basically non-news in Hollywood.

"Mass Layoffs" seems...suspect. I haven't heard of a single person in my sphere of influence being hit by layoffs, and I work with a lot of folks. Where did you get your info OP?

I felt this article deep in my old creaky bones.

I hated math in middle school and high school. This is despite loving science, and enjoying math all the way through Algebra 1. However, when I started taking Algebra 2 and beyond, it seemed like we shifted away from why things work to solving ever larger polynomials and other tedious tasks, getting points taken off along the way for a flipped sign or digit or moving a decimal point, even when the entire rest of the calculation was correct. I ended up doing a degree in computer engineering, and every class that involved algorithm design or programming I excelled at, while every "hard math class" (for example, statistics, electromagnetism, etc.) I barely passed.

I didn't fall back in love with math until I took discrete mathematics and signal processing in the same semester, and then later a class on algorithms and formal models of computation. They showed me that math was actually beautiful and fascinating, an art form unto itself. These three classes showed me how amazing math can be; I remember particularly that the day we learned about FFT's my brain felt like it had ascended into another dimension. They truly felt magical. Same thing with learning about recurrence relations and finally "getting" dynamic programming.

Now I love math, and I am planning on taking this holiday break to finally crack open the Principia Mathematica and trying to really understand it (a personal goal of mine for several years). I can't wait to share the joy of mathematics with my kids when they're old enough. I just hope that they don't get bogged down in the mechanical, number crunching part like I did and manage to continue to see the beauty of the underlying ideas.

I think you're falling prey to Hanlon's Razor. What probably happened here is something approaching the following conversation:

$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?

$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--

$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?

$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--

$PM: So we can't monetize this?

$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.

$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!

$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.

Not to super rag on this person, but wow some of the other articles on their website...

They have an article on "cracking the hackerrank test" that straight up advocates for cheating on screeners companies are starting to do through hackerrank. I'm not about to claim that these tests are at all good at measuring your skill as a developer, but I would much rather a candidate engages with the process honestly than openly brags about cheating.

I feel like this is a veiled attempt to be extremely, grossly sexist, but at the risk of taking the bait, yes I'm absolutely sure she would.

AI has already hurt plenty of people though; we already have examples of biased "AI policing", artists and writers are getting their work stolen left and right, and I've heard tell of several instances of seriously vulnerable code making it to production and revealing folks' private information due to bugs introduced by AI assistants.

This regulation is almost certainly too far reaching and written by bureaucrats rather than experts, but the need for regulation is already there.

As someone who is mentoring a budding software engineer, let me offer you a different perspective.

I have a friend who got a fine arts degree in college and has spent the last several years working crappy odd jobs to make ends meet, and finally came to me earlier this year and said she wants to learn to be a web developer. I got her set up learning JavaScript in all of 10 minutes using Replit, and frankly it was exactly what I would hope for pedagogically. It's free for our purposes, dirt simple to set up, and has enough features to be helpful without being overwhelming.

We've gotten to a point now where we're introducing HTML and CSS and building real websites (after about 3 months of JS intensive) and I decided this was the right time to introduce coding locally rather than in Replit. She's a computer savvy person and was able to stumble her way through it in a couple of hours (she didn't want my help as this is how she learns stuff) but I can tell that the need to manage a locally running environment slows her down. This is a good thing in the long run of course, and I think pedagogically there's analogues to this in many disciplines (in learning piano, for example, moving from simple drills and method books for learners to "real" music feels as significant a leap), but the step function in complexity to do simple tasks is certainly there. It's important to jump that hurdle, but forcing it too early can discourage early learning and cause you to focus on the wrong things.

I had her shadow me working on a side project early on in her studies so she could see what the whole process looks like, and the sheer number of tools I was jumping between to do my work (AWS, Vim, the terminal, database query console, developer tools) was overwhelming. Replit allows you to focus on only the most important parts of the theory of programming, which is absolutely essential when starting out if you aren't immediately predisposed to doing complicated stuff on your computer. I think it adds a lot of value, so long as it's used responsibly in the context of a larger curriculum.

The problem is that there were lots of folks hired with the explicit promise that remote was here to stay. This is at best a rug-pull; IMO it's like your salary suddenly being slashed by 20% a few months after you started with no explanation. It's not technically illegal in most places, but it certainly feels really bad and makes me sure I never want to work there.

I see GPT and similar LLMs as basically like managing an over-eager intern. Have you ever tried to do that?

They're overflowing with ideas and knowledge and passion, and "all" you have to do is point them in the right direction. Except that when you review their code, you find that they didn't consider about a thousand different edge cases. Oh, and they didn't follow the style guide. Oh, and they are way over-focused on the wrong parts of the problem, prematurely optimizing performance in places where it doesn't matter. Oh, and their code is nigh-on unreadable. Oh, and they wrote a bunch of code that is already provided in libraries, but they just didn't know about it, and their implementation is probably full of subtle bugs so they should just use the library version. Oh, and they forgot to update the CI because now they need to pull in a new dependency to run their tests. Oh, and... the list goes on.

I don't ever see AI progressing past the regurgitation stage; you can give it as much knowledge as you want, and it can rearrange and reproduce and restate that knowledge in a thousand different ways; but we're so far from AI being able to handle all the details of our work, that as I said above, fully specifying the problem is going to be just as much work as doing the work yourself. And you'll still need expertise to do so, because our software systems are complex and full of nuance that can't be easily communicated to a machine.

AI doomers always strike me as people who have never had to try to corral interns; maybe that's an overly specific life experience to expect someone to have, but it's a really useful proxy for how much "more productive" we're going to get with AI. A really good intern can solve simple problems given exact constraints, but anything requiring lateral thinking will take them a lot of coaxing to get to the right solution. And that's okay! People can learn and get better. But I don't see AI getting better "enough" to take on anything beyond that first rung of the ladder of complexity.

How will you tell AI what you want to build? I'll take an example from my current work: I'm currently working on adding producing data to a kafka feed from an API server that will be aggregated downstream into a big huge in-memory datastore for fast access. That's a moderately sized problem, one that a reasonably competent engineer can solve in a week or two, but how much work will you have to do to tell the AI that this is what you want? And if you tell it at a higher level than this, how will it know what tools it has available? How will it deploy stuff?

There are some fairly intractable problems in the "AI writes software" space. I don't think they're getting solved any time soon.

AI will never write software for the same reason professional chefs will never be replaced by robots. Sure, certain parts of our jobs (the fast food equivalent work) will be assisted, and then replaced, with AI help. Ops is already benefitting from AI assistance with things like log correlation and managing incidents, and all of that is great! But the fact is that AI will still require the input of humans to solve problems, and specifying a problem completely enough that a machine can write the code for it is equivalent in effort to just writing the code yourself.

I see the introduction of AI to the SWE workforce as roughly equivalent to the introduction of digital kitchen scales, thermometers, etc. to professional kitchens. It's going to help us up our game, which is awesome! It's going to make a lot of the boring, mechanical stuff simpler so we can focus on the creative aspects of our jobs. But a burger flipping robot isn't replacing a michelin star chef anytime soon, and AI isn't replacing you anytime soon.

This is literally an episode of Big Mouth. I cannot believe this exists.

Aren't the humane folks a bunch of ex-Google/ex-Android execs?

Because capitalism doesn't provide enough of a punishment mechanism to discourage this type of behavior? Especially the protectionist crony capitalism that exists in most of the "free world".

My hope is that when my kiddo starts going to school that we can maintain eating relatively healthy stuff at our house by acknowledging that "junk" food (we're going to try to avoid that term so we don't assign morality to food) exists, and we can absolutely eat it, but that different foods make us feel differently, and eating too much of that kind of food can make you feel sick. I just hope it works.

> Toddlers can remain irrational longer than you can remain out of prison for starving them.

Can I get this on a t-shirt to buy for every mom in my partner's mom group?? Jesus there is so much "you're giving your kids poison" type shaming in that group and it drives me nuts. It just stresses her out and doesn't help us out at all; we're lucky our kiddo eats just about everything (he loves frozen pancakes and applesauce pouches, but what can ya do?), so we just try to give him whatever we're eating. And we get so much flak for it. So what if the kid decides he wants to eat spaghetti four days in a row? It's calories in his body, which he needs a lot more than he needs fancy free-range blueberries picked under a full moon.

That's a great plan, until you're exhausted at the grocery store and your kid sees another kid eating one and starts screaming that they want one.

Source: parent who swore up and down that they were going to make their own purees, and immediately caved when they realized just how much gddmn*d food a 9 month old goes through in a week. I was sure I was going to be a hyper-organic, make everything fresh type parent, and now we give him frozen pancakes and squeeze pouches. It turns out that getting kids calories is hard enough without having to make it all yourself.

> If it turns out that there's an undiscovered recessive gene for lead hyperaccumulation in the cinnamon tee and that tragedies like this are how it gets discovered

That's not what happens though, lead poisoning in spices is ~always shady actors adding pigment that's lead-heavy to make the spice (for example, cinnamon, turmeric, ground ginger, paprika) appear more vibrant in color. The Indian government did a whole bunch of work to fight against this a few years back; ultimately it's suppliers trying to adulterate their product to save money and make it look better than it is. This should absolutely be a serious crime, on the level of intentionally shipping any other dangerous product: jail time for executives, huge financial penalties for companies.