jowea

That's because, from what I've seen to date, it'd take away my voice. And my voice -- the style in which I write -- is my value. It's the same as with art... Yes, AI tools can produce passable art, but it feels soulless and generic and bland. It lacks a voice.

:)

Was that a humam Freudian slip, or artificial one?

Yes, old software is often more reliable than new.

Honestly this feels like a true statement to me. It's obviously a new technology, but so much of the "non-deterministic === unusable" HN sentiment seems to ignore the last two years where LLMs have become 10x as reliable as the initial models.

right now we want it because we want the side-effect the the tinkerability, the data transfer, the cost-optimizaton (host it where it's cheap, or modify it if it's not cheap enough)

but users want their problem solved, they are extremely happy about an imperfect solution (deeply flawed delegation of the problem and responsibilities), they are willing to pay a lot for it, and their time-value discounting coefficients are atrocious. they want it now, and don't really care about tomorrow. (or next month when the free trial expires, when their credit card gets charged, when the price increases when their blessed business bamboozler becomes bankrupt - or worse a ruthless monopolist)

FOSS is an education problem, quite isomorphic to the problem of democracy (and climate change and other slow burn issues)

...

and of course it's a political problem too

but where's the coalition of friends of FOSS who pledge to spend/buy/support development of the missing components? where's my FOSS printer? where's my movement that encourages me to buy a shittier phone knowing it will help spin up the flywheel of FOSS?

... and where are the faithful pragmatists that don't get sidetracked by their own toenails?

It’s actually quite interesting to see these contradictory positions play out:

1. LLMs are useless and everyone is making a stupid bet on it. The users of llms are fooled into using it and the companies are fooled into betting on it

2. Llms are getting so cheap that the investments into data centers won’t pay off because apparently they will get good enough to run on your phone

3. Llms are bad and they are bad for environment, bad for the brain, bad because they displace workers and bad because they make rich people richer

4. AI is only kept up because there’s a conspiracy to keep it propped up by Nvidia, oracle, OpenAI (something something circular economy)

5. AI is so powerful that it should not be built or humanity would go extinct

An automated alert popped up warning that the doctors should consider Sepsis. That alert essentially then blocked progress, and the doctors ended up (essentially) ticking the 'not sepsis' box so that they could get on with their (reasonable) next step which was either ordering an x-ray or starting antibiotics. Then somehow after that, sepsis did not get re-considered.

https://archive.is/tJePt#selection-1465.0-1491.52

It was Banerjee’s task to document Sam’s care, and as he began to do so, a pop-up appeared on his computer screen. Sam’s fever and heart rate had triggered an automated warning for sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition in which the immune system has a dangerous reaction to an infection. It requires speedy intervention. To help the hospital comply with state-mandated sepsis regulations, the pop-up provides a checklist of tests and orders used to identify and treat sepsis.

Agyare had instructed Banerjee to hydrate Sam right away but to wait for the results of Sam’s lab work before ordering a chest X-ray or the strong antibiotics used to treat sepsis.

But Banerjee, a novice, got stuck. He couldn’t figure out how to navigate the template to make some but not all of the auto-populated orders. “This was my first patient that triggered the sepsis pathway,” he explained, in testimony. So he asked Connor Welsh, a third-year resident, for help.

At 8:50 p.m., Welsh showed Banerjee how. From his own computer, he clicked into a field on Sam’s chart to assert that sepsis was not likely: “Based on my evaluation,” the automated note said, “this patient does not meet clinical criteria for bacterial sepsis.” And then Welsh recorded what Banerjee said Agyare had said earlier: “Likely viral syndrome. Workup pending.” Welsh’s name appears on the note, but in his deposition he said he never interacted with Sam. Senior residents often help junior ones in this way, he said. “I signed this note based on the discussion with the provider, Dr. Banerjee, based on his evaluation and the medical management of Mr. Terblanche,” he testified.

...

Sam’s chart is 51 pages long, a catalog of billing codes and abbreviations, check-boxes and shorthand, updates and addenda. The record of the second visit contains numerous contradictions: Sam’s heart rate was documented at 126, yet Banerjee clicked the box “normal.” In one place it says Sam didn’t have a cough, while in another it says he did. The signatures of doctors who testified they never saw Sam — including one who was not in the hospital that night — accompany notes. Vital signs were ordered and not taken, as was an EKG.

"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."

-- https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-nothing-works-with-marc-d...

Many of us do frequently argue for something similar. Take a look at Casey Muratori’s performance aware programming series if you care about the arguments.

The fact that DSP is a CSE major requirement abroad, but optional in much of the US aside from ECE programs (but even they have now gated DSP to those ECEs who want to specialize in EE) highlights this issue.

Can't reply so replying here:

> There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff

Not to the same degree. The total number of CE graduates (from BS to PhD) is 19k per year in the US.

A large number of those were not introduced to table stakes CS classes like programming language design or theory of computation.

Conversely, for CS major, they are not introduced to intro circuits, digital logic design, DSP, comp arch, and in some cases even OS development because there was a pivot in how CS curricula for undergrads was designed over the past 10 years.

> in the context of adoption as opposed to frontier development.

For real world applications like military applications or dual use technology, frontier development is not relevant. It's important but it's not what wins wars or defines industries.

Being able to develop frontier models but being unable to productionize foundational models from scratch for sub-$2M like Deepseek did despite paying US level salaries highlights a major problem.

And this is the crux of the issue. The best engineers are those who recognize what is "good enough".

Americans who did their undergrad here over the past 10 years act more like "artists" who want to build to perfection irrespective of whether it actually meets tangible needs or is scalable.

> We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have

Which is the crux of my argument.

CS is an engineering discipline, and some of the best CS undergrad programs in the US like Stanford, Cal, MIT, and UCLA make sure to enforce Engineering requirements for CS majors.

The shift of CS from being a department within a "College of Engineering" to being offered as a BA/BS in the "College of Arts and Sciences" sans engineering requirements is a recentish change from what I've seen.

> Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.

Yep! Gotta love Information Theory and Optimization Theory. And a major reason I feel requiring a dual-use course like DSP for CS/CE majors is critical.

For these reasons I believe it is not a good idea. The kernel also sort of rejected Rust. The kernel is complex enough without adding a Haskell type system and a lisp-level macro system capable of obfuscating what code calls what code. serde code is so hard to spelunk for this reason. Contrast this with Go's Unmarshall, much easier to follow.

The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.

The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.

The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.

I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and append a simple index with the title, channel, thumbnail and date.

In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.

https://calnewport.com/does-work-life-balance-make-you-medio...

https://archive.is/VCAih

I’ve come across tropes about how Millennial discontent is based on figuring out that the idea of grinding through your 20s like it’s twenty years ago is a trap. Or something like that.

Seems like the idea is rearing its head again.

But the last paragraph of this post tells me that he’s aware that his optimism and will has its limits. “COVID came and went,” ta-huh!

If I like them (and the process was bearable), I would ask nothing. If I’m mildly annoyed, something “simple” yet patronizing like fizbuzz. If I’m REALLY annoyed then something wildly specific and pedantic.

Interviewer: “do you have any questions for me?”

Why yes, a chicken, fox and sack of flour need to cross a doubly linked list, how would you flip the list inside out from the middle while counting the number of pingpongballs that can fit into 747 VW Beatles.

This kind of language is fascinating/terrifying:

> I assume doing all this computationally is more processor-intensive than using pre-rendered monsters, but it’s very smooth for me on both desktop and phone, so it must not be too intensive. I guess I’ll hear from people if it’s choppy on their device.

I think the nature of our profession as coders is in process of shifting very rapidly, from "write code to do something useful" to "write code to do something useful, better than I could vibe code myself".

Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.

On the other hand, as someone who can code in certain domains (web, maps), I could definitely see myself vibe coding as a way to quickly create something in a domain where I have no expertise (eg, Unity).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_realism

It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.

It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...

When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)

Most people writing JavaScript code for employment cannot really program. It is not a result of intellectual impairment, but appears to be more a training and cultural deficit in the work force. The result is extreme anxiety at the mere idea of writing original code, even when trivial in size and scope. The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.

What's weird about this is that it is mostly limited to the employed workforce. Developers who are self-taught or spend as much time writing personal code on side projects don't have this anxiety. This is weird because the resulting hobby projects tend to be substantially more durable than products funded by employment that are otherwise better tested by paid QA staff.

As a proof ask any JavaScript team at your employment to build their next project without a large framework and just observe how they respond both verbally and non-verbally.

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Have a great day. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_...