I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can emulate.
But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.
So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.
Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.
The best engineers do something besides "getting" requirements. They usually are able to re-interpret, contextualize and evolve them.
Surprisingly, a lot of times programmers are better bring in business experience from other organizations that the business people at the current one don't possess.
I am saying, having seen stuff implemented that simply does not make sense to anyone with an understanding of the actual situation on the ground, yes. And the funny thing is, it is not even an llm issue. This is a very, very human issue.
The actual work happens in the head. I suspect you know this. Now, there is a clear benefit to being able to flatten some of the issues related to coding, but do you really think, any of it can be done without those meetings and muddling through those requirements? At the very least, there needs to be one person that understands what is actually needed.
I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense, I half expect it. I will be very subtle, I don't believe the issue lies with the tooling ( AI or not ).
I spend an unusually small proportion of my life in meetings, probably an idiosyncratic feature of my job.
My impression is that the main reason most people have so many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking at everyone else with the expectation that they are working. But if you are not in a meeting, this expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at work and you don't need to work.
In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.
Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means someone could be watching you outside meetings, which causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises productivity.
I have seen people that cannot focus or are not confident enough about their ideas unless they are with someone. Yes, for me meetings are annoying, but for those people they reduces their anxiety (and tbh sometimes they do have bad ideas that are better shutdown).
On remote work, I do see an advantage of having people interact occasionally (I agree daily is probably too much) on work topics, besides the meeting. Spontaneous "can you have a look at" or "oh what is that program that you use". This will help much less the best performers (they know how to solve things, they look actively for new tools, etc.), but most companies have lots of profiles.
Someone in this thread was also complaining "management does not get engineering", which I feel is also made worse by working fully remotely - they will not get all topics in a meeting and if you have more informal talks, if they hear the discussions they might get (a bit) better.
During the 90’s economic crisis all drafters drawing building blueprints by hand disappeared from the Swedish construction industry. Engineers started using CAD instead
Just one example of how this has happened again and again.
What's the best way for a teenager to get involved in one of the projects you maintain? I've been trying to help my kid find an entry point into the industry, and I'm one of those annoying folks who relies on open source but rarely contributes.
Assuming they've got reasonable programming skills. They can simply find an open-source project they are passionate about. Spend time understanding the overall structure. Then pick up an issue raised by the community and prepare a fix as a pull request.
The first PR is unlikely to be merged the next day; however, it sparks lots of productive discussions with the rest of the community, allowing your kid to build a mental model of the project's best practices and sensitivities.
The more he contributes, the more integral he becomes to the community. After gaining enough experience through small issues, they can even consider working on a new feature.
As a byproduct, a great addition to the CV if they are also looking to go commercial.
This is my number 1 complaint with iphone, even above battery life with their new crappy 3d effects. I bet these issues have actually cost a bunch of lives, given that people type while driving, and this nonsense makes it far harder. It can't be that hard to do this.
The installation is straightforward, but the problem comes when you want to connect to the grid, because you have to get it approved by the utility. I'm sure getting a DYI installation approved by the utility is _possible_, but I wouldn't count on it. And, you may not know that you got disapproved until you've made the investment and are sort of screwed.
What I did was install solar with batteries and inverters that have the ability to never export power to the utility. That way I didn't have to tell them or seek their approval.
I can't help but wonder if it's a bit of self-aware humour about "scientific looksmaxing". Symmetry is involved in attractiveness but symmetry alone can only carry you so far.
yeah i mean i kind of realised that you cant really rate faces based on a bunch of mathematical params and expect it to still be very accurate; but maybe my opinion of attractiveness is skewed
lol no one has hacked the website, those are the real ratings for those photos from my algo. people have found "bad" faces that get good ratings but maybe they're js not that bad haha
i think the main problem is, i only rate their face structures, cos thats the thing you can explicitly calculate; but obviously that's not all there is to how good you look.
also btw one of my friend, whos near the top read your comment and sent it to me with a crying emoji haha
nono, i had only added like 10 images... i give people the option to add an instagram account but if they don't it defaults to the do_i_mog instagram account which is why most of the entries seem to come from do_i_mog
A lot of people _need_ the S&P to stay where it is to keep their standard of living stable. If it drops to a rational valuation (say, 2500-3000), there will be a lot of pain.
One thing that was unclear to me from the stats cited on the website is whether the quoted 52% reduction in crashes is when FSD is in use, or overall. This matters because people are much more likely to use FSD in situations where driving is easier. So, if the reduction is just during those times, I'm not even sure that would be better than a human driver.
As an example, let's say most people use FSD on straight US Interstate driving, which is very easy. That could artificially make FSD seem safer than it really is.
My prior on this is supervised FSD ought to be safer, so the 52% number kind of surprised me, however it's computed. I would have expected more like a 90-95% reduction in accidents.
I think this might be right, but it does two interesting things:
1) it let's lemonade reward you for taking safer driving routes (or living in a safer area to drive, whatever that means)
2) it (for better or worse) encourages drivers to use it more. This will improve Tesla's training data but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)
Do your kids randomly run into the road? I was worried about that but then mine just don’t run into the road for some reason, they are quite careful about it seemingly by default after having “getting bumped into by a car” explained to them. I’m not sure if this is something people are just paranoid about because the consequences are so bad or if some kids really do just run out into the road randomly.
Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. Other kids run in with a clear purpose, not at all randomly, and sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways. Kids are not cookie cutter copies that all behave the same way in the same circumstances (even with the same training).
> Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. ... sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways.
Just this week I was telling my law school contract-drafting class that part of our job as lawyers and drafters is to try to to "child-proof" our contracts, because sometimes clients' staff understandably don't fully appreciate the possible consequences of 'running into the street,' no matter how good an idea it might seem at the time.
I'm more worried about the Teslas hitting my kids when they're on bicycles or Teslas swerving off the road into the yards. Regardless, it sure would be nice if technology controlling multi-ton vehicles on public roads were subject to regulations, or at least had clearly define liability.
Kids will randomly run into the road. They might run behind a ball or a dog so that it doesn’t end up on the other side or runned over or are simply too excited to remember your stern road safety talk.
The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.
Yes it does happen. Otherwise smart kids will do dumb stuff sometimes. Like see their friend across the road, but at that moment someone on a motorcycle is accelerating out of their driveway, kid runs across, dead
Same way you opt out of having drunk drivers drive home along your street and pass out while driving, or drivers getting a stroke or other blood clot while driving and crashing into parked cars.
If you're familiar with the technical specs, I'd be interested in hearing what size of objects the star trackers can sense and at what range. In theory the fancier star trackers can see objects around 10 cm diameter hundreds of kilometers away, without needing to worry about a pesky atmosphere [1], but I don't know how sensitive the sensors on Starlink's current generation satellites are, and this web site isn't saying.
They're mostly touting the improvement in latency over existing tracking, from delays measured in hours to ones measured in minutes. Which is very nice, of course, but the lack of other technical detail is mildly frustrating.
Note from analysis in the paper: (CST = Commercial Star Tracker, for which they model several common ones flown on satellites)
>From Fig. 1, it is clear that many typical CSTs can be used to detect debris with characteristic length less than
10 cm at distances as far as roughly 50 km. These same sensors have the potential to detect debris as small as 1 cm
in diameter as far as 5 km away. Even space-limited CubeSats using nanosatellite-class CSTs can detect 10-cm-class
debris at roughly 25 km away or 1-cm-class debris at a distance of 2.5 km. Higher-performing imagers like the MOST
telescope can further characterize orbital debris of 10 cm diameter as far as 400 km away or be used to characterize
orbital debris smaller than 1 cm at ranges not exceeding 40 km.
I was just thinking about that the other day while relaxing in my Hyperloop pod from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was reminiscing about how I'd avoided all the traffic in LA by using the Boring Company's tunnels in my second-generation Tesla Roadster. I'd been in LA for a conference about the hugely successful Starship space launch system, which has revolutionized cost to orbit with fully reusable second stages. When I got to San Francisco, I hopped in a Tesla fully self-driving robotaxi, and when I got home, my Optimus robot served me tea after I instructed it to do so using my Neuralink probe. I then sent a video voicemail to my parents, who live in a city of 1 million people on Mars, which has recently been terraformed. I flipped on CNN and was gratified to see that, for the first time in 25 years, the US government was operating at a surplus, thanks to the $2T of annual savings delivered by DOGE.
Good-faith products that launched, were bad ideas, and failed. Musk is absolutely unique in world history for the sheer number of fake products he's used to garner investment (mostly from the government if we're being honest) and then line his own pockets. If Trump is Darth Vader, Musk is The Emperor.
Starship is iterating fast and flying in another 5 weeks. Boring company is executing slowly but steadily, the Vegas tunnel is progressing. Unsupervised robotaxis has started in Austin. Optimus started a few years ago only, it is disingenuous to expect it to be available immediately. Neuralink has 18 patients now. Mars is happening, Elon never promised it will be possible this decade.
Your comment makes it seem that Elon's companies have done nothing. I know you are being disingenuous, but I am trying my luck to respond.
> New video evidence shows that Tesla’s supposedly “unsupervised” Robotaxis in Austin are being closely followed by black Tesla trailing cars with safety monitors inside. Tesla didn’t remove the safety monitors – it just moved them to a different vehicle.
Lol. So a fully self driving car with a following car is not impressive? Elon over promised, no doubt. But don't tell me their tech is not amazing. Pure vision general purpose autonomy. It's going to be a game changer. It could be late but inevitable.
Remember when it was supervised FSD? They have come a long way.
Consider this: What tech might we have if the entire world economy weren't infested with termites like Musk who lie continuously to pull in investment that could have gone elsewhere?
Tesla's high-priced sports cars are the wrong product. The right product is a low-cost car like the BYD cars that aren't legally allowed to be sold in the US. The US has probably already lost the EV war, and Tesla is principally responsible. Everything Musk touches turns to garbage.
But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.
So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.
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