GianFabien

Natural language is full of nuances and implicit cultural and domain specific connotations. LLMs work because they have been trained on massive corpus of materials that encode some (but not all) of those hidden meanings.

With specification driven development, the prompts need to be very detailed in order to produce exactly what is required.

It took a couple of million years of evolution for some humans to attain the competence you describe. A couple of years of engineering is not going to catch up anytime soon.

Copyright laws didn't even pause the Big AI companies from hoovering up all material to train their systems. With their financial and thus legal resources they would be very expensive to sue for patent infringement.

Not very personal when it probably takes two persons to load it into a rack.

Heading should be edited - its not a PC and not a workstation.

Here we go again! 2020 deja vu! Just in time for USA elections.

Early Reuters and Bloomberg terminals had a text-centric aesthetic.

AFAIK on a PC, when booted into text-only mode, you are still using a bit-mapped framebuffer. From my experiments you can mix graphics and text.

It's the nanny state dynamic. Parents are avoiding responsibility for their own children, instead demanding that the schools, teachers and government take on the unpleasant, confronting and often difficult role.

I've tried this approach, but I found that most email providers aggressively filter out all incoming messages that don't come from validated sources. No matter what I tried deliverability of emails remained very spotty. I did configure DKIM, DMARC, SPIF, etc as suggested. But minimal improvements. Eventually ended up going with AWS SES.

All the data centres I worked in had Halon and in recent times its replacements as fire suppression system. Unlike water, these systems suffocate the fire and once vented the equipment is undamaged. Water, computers and high electrical currents are a very bad combination.

After I read the first paragraph, I could guess the rest. It is typical for the legacy enterprise system space.

My diagnosis is that you care too much. The enterprise IT space is kabuki theatre.

So what if it takes 6 months to accomplish what should take 2 weeks? Explain to the customers that their needs are so special and particular that it takes your highly trained and experienced staff 8 months to accomplish the high quality results that you demand. Every line of code is carefully written and rechecked, etc. No AI slop is allowed anywhere near your exacting group. You are delivering Saab fighter jet plane quality software, not some cheap and nasty jeep software from Cuba.

Of course, the real challenge is to say stuff like that with a straight face. If necessary, take improv acting lessons. After all it is all an absurdist theatre production.

... and keep sending out resumes, etc.

No job is worth jeopardising your mental health.

Technology and automation have never gotten in the way of people pursuing and enjoying hobbies. Painters still paint, woodworkers still make bespoke furniture, etc, etc.

Isn't getting a good night's sleep essential for health reasons?

Every "wasted $" ended up in some parasitical grifter's pocket.

Whilst these sorts of analyses are informative, they lack answers to the who profits? question.

There is an interesting tell, they sent the old presidential plane. But then Trump flew onwards from England on the new one. The two planes are sufficiently different that they can't be mistaken for one another.

Nah, all those defaults are features. Of course, there are contexts where those defaults are unsuitable which means: Use a Different RDBMS!

I have easily read thousands of personal development books and blog posts. Alex's post is easily the most revealing, inspiring to date. Thank you Alex.

I'm a textbook case introvert. Yet at some (only very few) networking events I comfortably act like an extrovert and have a enjoyable and productive time. Used to confuse me -- pretend extrovert? Now I can see I haven't taking the corners by not reading the road and the mountain. Spent too much time on the gravel pointing the wrong way, wondering what the hell had just happened.

I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.

After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.

That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.

Like all engineering answers: It depends

If you want money, status symbols and no life = Amazon. Oh, you might gain some experience that is near useless in a non-FAANG org.

If you value life, freedom, keeping your mind active, living up to your full potential then Cambridge.

In my experience, the hedonic treadmill is the biggest trap. But I only arrived at that conclusion after running furiously for decades and having little to show for it, well except for a burnt out husk.

Have worked with Sabre and early GUI interfaces for travel agents. It has only taken 30 years for WebJet to deliver something consumers could use and has displaced swathes of travel agents.

It would be more useful to determine why insurance premiums are rising faster than almost every other homeowner expense. At the same time noting that insurance companies are making massive profits and squandering millions on executive salaries and advertising.

I think the more critical question is how well compiler writers can update the heuristics which identify the instruction sequences that benefit from the architectural features. Last I looked, Intel has several thousand intrinsics which must be explicitly invoked to make use of specific features.

I suspect that heavily optimised code either uses intrinsics or carefully written assembler code.

I get the impression you are not technically challenged at your work. Not an uncommon dynamic when working for a company for which software is a means to an end.

In order to dig deep into one area, you might need to take on a "hobby" project that forces you to deep dive in a chosen area. Looking at your current areas of experience, I would choose either GPU or DSP programming. By being CPU adjacent areas, specialist skills are more likely help your career.

My jaded view is that many over-enthusiastic people are surrendering their autonomy technology. We've seen the impact of delegating our self-esteem to social media. Now having a machine think for us?

Yank out the power cord. Go outside and experience the reality of nature. It is more humane paced.

My move? Get the f** out of the office, away from keyboards, screens and cubicles, take up tools and get apprenticed in a trade.

Here we go again ...

Company A buys company B. A's management decrees the henceforth B's aqcuihired team must comply with company A's standards.

Second system effect kicks in. Bugs multiply.

Half of original company B devs leave.

I'm investigating whether future projects should revert to using Deno.

An amazing effort and result. Shame watching the video gave me motion sickness.

Yes, tenants can be a pain. The laws have increasingly become less investor friendly. In my experience having a good managing agents provides a valuable buffer. The real money is made when you cash out and collect the capital gains. Of course, you need to tax accountant to make sure you don't give the government most of your gains.

I think it is due to the wide disparity between potential members.

For example, consider an agricultural co-op, e.g. wheat growers. The members of the co-op have farms of differing sizes, use similar techniques, have more or less comparable conditions. They produce grain which has a commodity level set price. The main differentiator between members of the co-op is the volume of grain they produce. But on the basis of the commodity pricing it is a relatively level playing field.

Now consider any tech company. Products have vastly different pricing - ranging from free to millions of $ (or whatever your currency) for enterprise levels. The "producers" vary in capability from newbies to rock-star programmers. Plus you need management to facilitate communications, etc. Everywhere you look, you find disparity.

The closest you get to a tech co-op is a startup with a small group of people who respect one another's contribution and follow a shared vision. Unfortunately as soon as you introduce outside investors inequality seeps in.

Not in SV, not even in the USA. So my experience is probably different. Whilst I was pulling down a good salary, invested in apartments to rent out. Banks are happy to lend if you have a steady income from a job. When I reached critical mass, sold them off one by one, quit the job and living a good life. Not IC level, but zero stress.

A good income is a hedonistic trap if you spend it on booze, cars, babes and parties.