ehnto

Not sure I would put the age cap at millennials, they very much had PCs and laptops at home, uni etc and lived before smartphones were a thing.

I have been doing some embedded work and can agree, the challenges are very different. But the challenges tend to be real world, physical challenges and so feel more real and rewarding. Versus the self-made challenges of regular software.

I think a lot of things stick around because they have a good bespoke manufactoring industry and maintenance practices. Old infrastructure and automations that were built during the bubble era still work and you can still get parts made for them.

Did that hotel accept USD for some reason? Otherwise yes it would be pretty far-fetched for them to exchange money for you, that's not strange.

If you are a technologist/generalist, aiming for small companies is a good strategy. If you're not in SV even better, you may end up in a real grass roots business and a really interesting problem domain that is ostensibly Not Software.

I personally, cannot stand the software for software industry. You, me, we have all built such arbitrary bullshit machines that link together in a web of unnecessary business. We lambast redundant jobs and useless management, but a moment of reflection for our industry and just how much software we have built for entirely self-serving purposes. So many man hours spent on the ephemeral whims of software. Sorry for the cynicism.

Less cynically, I feel the smaller the company, self-funded, the more likely a generalist will thrive and the business domain will be real-world and impactful. If it's venture funded and can pivot to advertising, it probably will. If you move away from tech hubs the wages are lower, but you might find a more fulfilling role.

That's fair. I would love for this to be studied one day, it would be good to know with some accuracy what proportion of creative/software is slop-factory versus novel, interesting work.

It would seem Google account details have been compromised or otherwise correlated, with not a peep from Google, we are getting reports of scam calls to people's real phone numbers about the "business opportunity" available in their attached Youtube properties.

Another possibility is advertising shadow profiles are able to correlate logged in accounts across YouTube and other properties.

Why not have the engineers, or "implementors", known for systems thinking, build things with AI? A team of product managers building things is like saying I want my factory floor manager on the tools, running the machines. The evolution of that role just lands you at a team of implementors again, who still need a leader. You already have that.

In a sense, you're demoting your managers to implementors, and getting rid of their leadership role altogether. Simultaneously getting rid of your prior engineers and all the domain and tribal knowledge they had built up.

Its going to be wildly distributed and varied so hard to spot, but look for companies where the main output was commodity B2B assets and you can see a real impact. Marketing copy, images, graphic design in the low and mid tiers. Real businesses supplied that stuff and even adopting AI wouldn't help, since their customers could just do it in house now.

There's heaps of companies between small and conglomerate and the middle area is where the commodity asset companies lived. Generating low stakes copy, art, apps and websites for small companies.

Tools have no morality but they do have effects and outcomes. That's where we make our judgement call on whether you're good or bad for using them.

In general yes, resin and FDM printers both produce toxic VOCs.

But FormLabs for this printer and resin have focused on safetey and acquired a certification on their Alpha resins which show low VOCs that should be safe to print in an indoor room with low ventilation.

I still wouldn't, I would add ventilation and wear PPE, it's still going to be releasing some VOCs even if it comes under a tolerable limit. But I do appreciate what seems to be the first ever initiative in 3D printing to address the elephant in the room of VOCs directly at the material level.

It shouldn't be that your options are a corpo-phone or a dumbphone though. Currently you can run something like Graphene and will probably be fine, but in NSW specifically there is law that could be used against you if you're suspected of crime.

I did say "tucked neatly away", not "at the forefront of law enforcement".

Anyway, it's probably nothing. Let's ignore it until it becomes an issue.

At least most my ESP32s are off any net, and pretty low stakes applications.

The Dedicated Encrypted Criminal Communication Device Prohibition Orders Bill 2022 introduced law that says it is illegal to posess a modified communication device (ambiguous) that is encrypted (or otherwise impedes law enforcement from snooping). It has some nuance to who it applies to in that you need to already be under suspicion of a serious crime, but there is a great deal of other pretty trivial things that can put you under suspicion. It's ambiguous enough (in my opinion) that it could pretty easily be targeted at a regular joe by an eager enforcer. I did not feel then nor now, that the qualifiers were sufficient enough to protect against abuse.

Tucked away neatly in Australian law is the concept that a phone that is not iPhone or Android is a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks. Something like GrapheneOS. I forget the exact term they used but it wasn't "jailbroken". The act of refraining from corporate tracking as illegal is in that way already codified.

That's why I feel it's super important hardware developers get on board with open source OS support for mobile, much like some are for Linux already. It should be the norm to not be tracked by corporate entities and advert networks, it should be the weird option to opt into that.

You could out-type other prompters though. Words Per Minute might end up back on my resume yet!

Hopefully, but seeing some of the other American "trucks" hitting our pedestrians, sorry I mean hitting our roads, I wonder if anyone is really keeping that in check.

I think not-a-keyboard is probably the better use case. A modular plug and play, configurable keypad would be pretty useful for sim enthusiasts or various workstation uses. You could solve the "picking up" problem by putting the modules on a baseplate.

How small do CAN transceivers get?

Because enterprises have compliance and certification requirements, meaning the enterprise is essentially held hostage by providers on price.

You could argue it's worth that much because of the value that compliance brings the enterprise, but it's just another gouging excercise. Certainly nothing unique to AI companies.

It is surprising to me that in such a tightly controlled experience, they haven't attempted to displace brew already.

A person's intent can be the problem though, we can criticise that. We're not factory bots here (yet), the community aspect is human in nature not just output focused.

I don't really get worked up over it, but I do have a preference for original writing these days. If it's someone's pet project or something creative, I prefer the authenticity of the creative's actual writing. AI writing is just so boring and sterile out of the box. You lose nuance and personality.

It is a bit different with translation, in that case AI translation might get closer to the original intent than manual translation by the author. But otherwise I want the words from their brain meats, not layers removed and cleansed by system prompts and training.

Reminds me of a more recent parking lot error. I have a parking card with attached account, and credit card for automatic payments. I also had a specific car and it's plate attached so I didn't have to tap the card.

I had to cancel the credit card so automatic payments decline, and I don't always drive the same car in which case I have to tap the parking card.

The result of all this:

When I leave the parking lot in a different car after paying manually at the gate, the message displayed is "Payment Declined: Exit permitted"

I am pretty certain it was Global Illumination issues with their large always loaded world and the different indoor/outdoor transitions. They wouldn't have been using Unity or Unreal so it was probably trading off between one code only game library or writing their own, and yeah they probably just wanted to rather than fix the library.

He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.

There is a place for stories we don't agree with or that illustrate aspects of our world we might not be happy about, and the creator isn't necessarily complicit just for telling it. I feel we shouldn't hit the writers of those stories for telling them, as not everyone tells a story because they personally support it's message or the status quo it illustrates.

I also think the enlightened have a habit of underestimating how much of an audience the status quo has, and I think that's an ignorance of its own.

And because it's the internet I feel the need to subtext that this is by no means a supportive comment toward Blows personal beliefs. I don't know what they are!

I am a little curious if there any interplays between Global Illumination, rastering and shaders that they are exploiting on account of having complete engine control. Techniques that something special about their engine might be allowing.

I only wonder because I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals, and that specific feel and style I have never encountered quite like that in any other game.

A lot of that is down to art and direction, but there's a raw quality of the lighting that just feels different to any game I have played. You can often feel a game's engine out if it's one of the big ones, through the feeling of its lighting. I suspect since all engines have certain default approaches and settings in their lighting setups and devs only move the knobs as far as they need to meet their artistic goals, leaving much alone.

Will the productivity expectations drop with the AI budgets I wonder?

My key thought is this, many of us necessarily work in low-purpose, boring corporate development jobs. The code was the only thing making it enjoyable, because problem solving was the skill we enjoy exercising and you get that in spades with programming, even if the actual business is soul sucking. This is the reality for many professions not just software. The second part of that reality is that we have to work to pay the bills, and stability is an important pillar that many families rely on. I mention that to answer the inevitable question "why would you work there then?". There isn't an abundance of fulfilling purposeful jobs unfortunately.

That problem solving aspect is being replaced by AI, and that means anyone in a position like that is losing the piece of the job that they enjoyed. The more apt analogy is that the farrier worked in a farrier factory, and the horses were actually mass produced statue horses with no purpose but making money. He still enjoyed working with his hands, but now they have replaced that part of his job with a button to press. Now he presses the button in the horse statue factory. He still has a job but now no joy, and eventually they will automate the button too. The outlook IS bleak, and many of us will move on to totally new industries and that's fine. Some will stay because they have a rare job where they have agency to problem solve on the layer above code. Many still just press the button to feed their family.