thewillowcat

This is what computers are for.

I agree. It's one thing to think her action was riskier than you would like for your own child. It's another to think it should be a crime.

This was my reaction exactly. I was surprised by the diagram of a "normal" linked list.

Even if we concede that it is irresponsible, which would very much depend on the individual child, it should not be a crime.

It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane.

The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.

It's rare, but if it happens it is catastrophic. You will be paying a lawyer 10's of thousands of dollars and if you do have to plead out, the charges you plead to may look very bad on paper on a background check.

For example, many kinds of biopsy can result in serious infection or other surgical complications.

This doesn't seem to account for the outcome that someone receives testing and treatment for a problem found by the MRI, and is injured in the process, despite the fact that non-treatment would have been harmless; a not-uncommon outcome in the real world.

I've been thinking about formal verification a lot, recently. I've dabbled in it before, but it was clear that it was only used by a small research community, and the effort required to verify anything larger than toy code would be immense. I agree with the author that there is enormous potential to use AI to automate the annoying parts of the verification process. What's more, the current security environment, in which the tiniest security flaw can quickly be exploited, suggests that provably secure code might be the future.

Others are correct to point out that formal verification is too difficult to apply to many types of application code. But there are domains where it is applicable today, and the main reason it is not used there is that developers lack the time and know-how. For example, many file format parsers are exploitable, but they are simple enough that they could be formally verified.

These companies aren't coming in, buying property at market rates, and developing it with existing infrastructure under current zoning laws. They usually want tax breaks, major infrastructure changes, and other accommodations and guarantees. It's completely reasonable for people to want a dialog with their representatives before those kinds of arrangements are made with a company on their behalf. And it's entirely reasonable for them to vote out reps that are overly accommodating.

I live in an historic district. I had to attend a public meeting a couple years ago to get approval to change a lamp post. It is perfectly reasonable to ask tech companies to show up and defend massive projects to the public.

I can tell you, based on local examples, that politicians are setting up deals to bring in data centers without trying to build community support first. Not only that, they are often signing NDAs that prohibit them from telling voters what they have agreed to. It's no way to operate in a democracy, and voters are right to be angry.

I would love to pay and manage parking from my phone if the apps actually worked intuitively, but they rarely do. It was easier when all I had to do was have a roll of quarters in my car.

C-level does not seem uniformly convinced, and they have a lot of reasons to tell that story, even if it isn't really true.

I don't see an uptick. Demand has been steady for the past two years after falling from the post-pandemic frenzy. That fits with my personal experience of the tech industry over the past several years.

People are right to point out that hiring is nothing like the post-pandemic years, but it's not clear that it's any tougher out there than, say, 2018. This is from the perspective of someone with a lot of industry experience, though. I can't speak directly to the experience of junior engineers.

I think the pandemic broke the feeling most Americans had that we were all in the same boat and we could work together to solve our problems. Liberals stopped seeing Trump's election as a fluke but an indication that conservatives were living by a fundamentally different set of values. Conservatives started to see liberal policies as a threat to the basic fabric of American life.

When I was younger, it was unusual for people to think they couldn't have friends with different politics, but now it's almost taken for granted in some circles. The current political environment is absolutely corrosive.

Even though I am personally agnostic, I do structure my life around the traditionally meaningful things you're talking about, and I do see the cultural mood a kind of spiritual crisis.

What's less clear to me is why the actual fall in happiness happened so rapidly with the pandemic. People were living spiritually vacant lives well before that!

This is mostly true, but things were almost universally worse in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was a similar feeling of anomie, stagflation, and a sense that the country was on the wrong track. But people still reported themselves as happier than now.

Engineers, I am so sorry. They are still going to be your bosses.

Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition.

This calculator says that the median household in my county is not making a living wage, which is ridiculous on its face.

You're telling me this car insurance drives itself?

I was so lonely in this opinion for so long, and it is great to see it becoming mainstream. GHA is terrible.

The vast majority of engineers aren't refusing to use AI until it can do 100% of their job. They are just sick of being told it already can, when their direct experience contradicts that claim.

These posts are never, never made by someone who is responsible for shipping production code in a large, heavily used application. It's always someone at a director+ level who stopped production coding years ago, if they ever did, and is tired of their engineers trying to explain why something will take more than an hour.