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They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.

It used to be there but a few releases ago the option disappeared.

I used to work in medical devices where it's all about documentation and even there nobody took the time or had time allocated by management to work on documentation. And most people aren't good at writing so the documents were terrible.

The real question is "How to keep a software design document up-to-date". I have never seen this done in an efficient way. The first version is ok and over time it deviates more and more from reality.

So far my best experience has been to feed the whole thing into AI and get an overview of the project. That together with a few quick bullet points about the overall purpose of the system is pretty workable.

I am glad that I just retired. I find AI super fascinating but navigating a SW development career in the next few years looks like a daunting task.

Seems Apple's first attempt AI failing two years ago is turning into a blessing. Now they can buy AI as a commodity from the cheapest supplier. Well played.

It's the same with the tariffs. My company has a huge "globalization" effort that expands offices and manufacturing facilities in countries with cheap labor and no/low tariffs. Instead of everything centering around the US, almost nobody gets hired in the US, except top management.

I am not gleeful at all about nuclear proliferation. Quite the opposite. It looks to me like the world order that has kept the western hemisphere peaceful and prosperous over the last 70 years is falling apart. And if AI and robotics take off, it's possible our capitalist model will also fall apart.

Re: nuclear weapons. If the US gives up the role of protecting other friendly nations and NATO isn't viewed as reliable anymore, it makes sense to develop nuclear weapons. As a German I am starting to wonder if we should develop our own just in case Putin gets some ideas. And I am sure Japan and South Korea are having similar thoughts.

What's with that name?

I think they are more motivated than ever and other countries will follow. North Korea shows that Trump will kiss the ass of countries that have nuclear weapons, no matter how bad they are. And he will kick around countries that don’t have them. If I were Iran, I would put every possible effort into obtaining nuclear weapons. Probably from Trump’s best friend Kim Jong Un.

How can other countries deal with Iran while Trump is in power and unilaterally cancels treaties and attacks countries without consulting others? It’s simply impossible.

That’s fast! It usually takes me decades, if ever, to figure out this stuff. One of the downsides being slightly autistic and taking everything too literal

"You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so."

The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.

The question is whether SV will do better than the prime contractors or just become another one.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe they will be more efficient than the usual defense contractors whose main goal is to charge as many hours as possible. Similar to SpaceX who have accelerated innovation while also lowering prices for launches.

On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.

The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.

Agreed. The swipe stuff has a horrible implementation.

There are lots of insane people though. They fall for the “cheaper than a cup of coffee”’trick repeatedly

None of the utilities for my house take credit card without surcharge.

One thing that drives me nuts for example is the indicator for remaining disk space. I have this icon on my desktop that says "Macintosh HD | 995 GB, 273 GB free". This used to work great until a few years ago. Copy 1 GB onto the disk and it displays 1 GB less free disk space.

But since a few years it goes up and down daily by 100 GB or more. Sometimes I have 350 GB, sometimes I have 100 GB. I think it has to do with Time Machine snapshots and purgeable space (whatever that means) but it's totally useless now. I can't tell for sure if I can copy 250 GB to my disk or not. It may fail now but work 2 hours later. How come nobody notices such a fundamental thing not working? Somehow the dogfooding doesn't seem to work. Or maybe the Apple people all have 8 TB disks so they don't care.

It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok.

I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.

That makes sense. Sounds similar to what I am usually doing. I let AI write a python script or similar, review it and then use the python script. I don't think I would let AI do anything important directly.

“ determinist harness around the agent ”

Can you explain what this means?

I feel the iPhone or ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming soon. Lots of different companies doing interesting things. What’s missing is somebody putting it together into a compelling package.

There are companies that are paying housewives in India to record all their activities. I assume laundry is part of that.

Same for recycling. A robot that could sort through trash would be phenomenal. You need computer vision, maybe other sensors and also dexterity. After visiting a recycling facility I think nobody should have to work there. It’s just horrible.

You can make some serious money working at nonprofits.

Sometimes I wonder if he would be willing to give up half of his wealth to make everybody as unhappy as himself.

Same for supporting issues. If the "other" party proposes something, people are automatically against. As soon as "their" party supports it, they are all in.

The MAHA movement is a good example. If democrats had said something about the problems with high sugar food or additives, republicans would have shouted "nanny state". Now that Kennedy is talking about it, they support it.

"People hate Congress but love their Congressperson. "

I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country. But the system has become totally dysfunctional making it basically impossible to really work on issues. The influence of money is just too much. To me this goes hand in hand with the rising inequality that gives a few people at the top outsized influence. Super PACs don't even have to deploy their money anymore. The simple threat is already enough to bring most Congress people in line if they want to keep their job.

When do they want to unpause it?