tharne

If anything it's easier for folks to goof off in the office vs. working from home. In the office, you have the appearance of being "at work". When working from home, you tend to be judged much more on your output rather than when you start and end your day.

Rust is a promising language, but it's being hobbled by the culture of it's "community".

> Ted Tso'o accusing the speaker of wanting to convert people to the "religion promulgated by Rust"

Given the online temper tantrum thrown by marcan, Ted Tso'o's comment seems totally reasonable, regardless of one's opinion of Rust in the Linux kernel.

> Or the mission critical systems powering this airplane you're flying next week... to pretend like this will all be handled by LLMs is so insanely out of touch with reality.

Found the guy who's never worked for a large publicly-traded company :) Do you know what's out of touch with reality? Thinking that $BIG_CORP execs who are compensated based on the last three months of stock performance will do anything other than take shortcuts and cut corners given the chance.

> Remember what we all see now is the worst LLMs will ever be

This is exactly right. I could imagine a bunch of horse trainers looking at early gas-powered automobiles in the late 1800's and thinking, "This 'automobile' thing isn't going to change much. Sure it's interesting, but they're so much slower and less reliable than a horse".

> What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.

Theses are bullet points expressing general rules of thumb, not legal treatises. You're reading far too much into these.

> What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

Two main things I've seen:

1. Recommendations are a heck of a lot more important

2. Internal applicants are suddenly at a big advantage

> In other countries and cities insulated from these changes, the criticisms fall flat.

Yes and no. Much of the world does a better job with their cities than the U.S., and as a result there is a little more demand for that type of development.

But overall, preferences are shockingly similar across cultures.

Anywhere people have the means to afford automobiles, they tend to buy them and increasingly embrace a suburban life style, at least at an aggregate level. If you look at new construction in places like Western Europe or China, a lot of new development is very similar to what you see in the U.S., with a bit of local flavor thrown in.

> But, if you could work from anywhere, why wouldn't you want to be in the coolest city in the world?

Large cities are like black licorice. The people who like them, really like them, but most of us think they're kind of gross.

> If I had to think, I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.

Bingo

> For such a forgiving God, he certainly seems to hold a grudge.

Someone only read the first part of the book.

At least in the U.S., many students are paying upwards of a $100k for a four-year degree. That better be one hell of a "campus experience" and some next-level "skilled tutors".

Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think there's a better way out there.

Maybe so, but we shouldn't be doubling down on expensive and time consuming degrees in the name of ill-conceived credentialism. That hurts everyone except the universities profiting off of it.

> Most undergrad CS students want a practical/engineering curriculum.

If all someone wants is the practical benefits of programming and has no interest in the underlying theory, they shouldn't waste their their time and money on a CS degree. All the practical information is available for free or at very low cost.

It was just a joke, and perhaps a bad one, poking fun at the propensity of Rust fans to insist on rewriting anything and everything in Rust :)

That's a confusing title. I was under the impression that on Hacker news, every Rust rewrite is a successful rewrite.

> Even our best AIs don't really understand, they just mimic their training set.

That's true, but the same can be said about a large percentage of office workers.

> People have been predicting this possibility ever since H-bombs existed. It's been a common trope in fiction

First, this misses the point entirely. The H-bomb was just an example. The point is that technology allows an individual with access to the right tools the ability to scale their will, for good or evil, orders of magnitude beyond what they could do in a pre-industrial society.

Second, the H-bomb was only invented in 1952, so it's only been around a little over 70 years. Saying that nothing bad has happened yet as a result of the H-bomb, isn't saying much. Put another way, the H-Bomb is younger than the last two U.S. presidents.

> I think anti-machine-learning suffers a similar problem to anti-GMO in that animosity directed primarily towards the technology itself easily loses aim on opposing exploitative power structures, sometimes instead even achieving the opposite.

This misses how technology actually works. Technology is a lever, or amplifier of human will. There has always been a dark side to human nature, but the amount of damage a single human could do was historically capped by physical limitations to their power. For example, a crazy person in 1000 AD armed with a broad sword could not kill millions of people, regardless of their desire and intent. However, a crazy person in 2024 with access to a hydrogen bomb could theoretically kill billions.

The moral of the story here is that even the most moral among us have some level of darkness in their soul and technology gives us far more power than we have the ability to handle responsibly, given our innate human flaws.

People think we can somehow manage AI when we can't even manage social media effectively.

I've got bad news for you. I've worked in some of those those other disiplines, and the certifications/licenses/exams just make things worse. Instead of having a lot of unqualified people with big titles, you have unqualified people with big titles and it's now harder to recruit good talent because of the gatekeeping effect and expense of the certifications/licenses/exams.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing here. This always happens eventually in every industry under the sun and is going to keep happening.

Why? Because if you as an employer or manager don't inflate titles, you're eventually going to lose people. Sure, maybe the "right thing to do" is to resist title inflation, but when your good engineers with 5 or 10 years experience see people at other companies getting a Senior title with half the experience, they're going to want a similar title. Are you as an individual manager or company really going to die on that hill and lose good engineers just because it's "better for the industry", when you can keep them at no additional cost just by changing a few words in the HR system?

This may an annoying problem, but it's a pretty small one as far as problems go.

> The only acceptable "civilian casualty per targeted combatant ratio" is zero.

A lot of German civilians were killed during World War 2. Would you have preferred handing the Germans all of Europe to prevent that? As others have noted, reality is significantly more complex than theoretical ethics. Often times your choice is not between right and wrong, but between wrong and somewhat less wrong.

> Not taking sides on the attack, but, wow, you ommited half the text

Regarding anything Israel/Palestine related, nuance and good faith left the chat a long time ago.

> Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, said that the indiscriminate nature of these attacks makes him consider these attacks to be a form of terrorism:

This was the exact opposite of "indiscriminate". The Israelis blew up pagers belonging to members of a known terrorist organization.

People love to try an claim that they're anti-Israel and not antisemitic, but no other country in the world would be held to this kind of ridiculous standard in the face of constant terrorist attacks on a civilian population.

> She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.

Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".

What we normalize is not stopping the world every time someone gets the sniffles.

If you don't like a particular post or the comments on it, just don't read it. Sheesh, no need for the melodrama. Plenty of other great articles and posts on here.

Exactly. When people complain about not being able to afford a house in a place like the Bay Area or Manhattan, it's like saying you can't afford a car because Ferraris cost a fortune. Buy a different car.

> To put things in perspective, Sweden's 2022 homicide rate (according to Wikipedia) is 1.1 per 100k people, which puts it in the same range as Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, and Greece. The US sits at 6.4/100k, with the safest state (Rhodes Island) at 1.5/100k, still above Sweden.

At the rate Sweden is going, however, they're going to have a rate double that of Rhode Island by the 2030's and on par with the U.S. by the following decade.

I didn't see this comment when I first posted my own. Is that immigration and crime stat legit? How is that not bigger news? That's a worse increase than New York in the 70's or 80's when things were really going to hell.