ible

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.

The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.

If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.

It may not be obvious if you are in the US but the reaction of Canadians to Trump’s 51st state garbage is extremely strong in Canada.

The tariffs are one thing, and pissed people off, but the rhetoric is what has really done the damage.

It’s viewed as a complete betrayal, and as a real and serious threat to Canadian sovereignty.

I work for an American company from Canada, and have changed my financial planning because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep doing that.

When I see a 70% drop I’m surprised it isn’t more.

That product name sucks for Veo the AI sports video camera company who literally makes a product called the Veo 2. (https://www.veo.co)

I tried it and it was laughably bad. The auto park was worse than it was years ago, leaving me a foot out from the curb in an easy spot. Trying to use the self driving on city streets resulted in it stuttering and stopping immediately. The only thing that worked decently was highway driving, which it does without the self driving package anyway.

Given its performance I wouldn't dare trust it with any of my daily driving even if it was free.

Even on a law and implementation effort like this with such large impact there are maybe 10,000 people in the world involved who actually understand it in any significant sense, and they all have a strong reason not to post about it on a public forum, or even a private one.

And even those people will only understand a limited aspect or perspective.

So the people commenting can only comment based on their outside impressions and emotions about generalities and how the specific implementation details seem to affect they as an end user.

I try to take anything said with that in mind. There is information in the comments about user experience but anything else is at the level of bullshitting at the bar with your friends, and not to be taken personally.

> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.

This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc.

This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because most of the feedback is nonsense, that all of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values.

I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it.

In my context I try to understand why someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it.

(If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)

Automation and/or higher pay tends to make that not a problem.

This is actually a great argument for a strong social democracy/welfare state.

Though based on dasickis comment, it seems there may not have been bad behaviour in the first place.

I don't think that analogy applies. Both parties in this story did things in a 'work' context.

If I go on a work forum and describe my bad behaviour, behaviour that is harmful to others, and advocate for others to do it, I'm going to get in trouble, and possibly fired.

If I publicly discuss private work information, I'll definitely get fired.

If I mention the bad behaviour of someone at work publicly, without naming names, I might get a talking to, but probably won't be fired.

How a group reacts to those different things over time defines the norms and culture of the group.

What an excellent demonstration of what values/norms a group really cares about.

Biggar violated the all time favourite in-group rule: Don't talk out of school. Don't talk about fight club. Don't snitch.

The other founders violated a norm against pushing yourself ahead and taking advantage of others that doesn't even seem to hold in many groups, especially upper class/wealthy ones.

Other issues aside, "A is just a complicated B, so apply the same rules to A as B" is not a formula for good decision making.

It's a common way to make bad mistakes though.

Trying to design for many unknown futures is expensive.

Changing in the future costs something.

Designing for future changes up front makes sense if cost(future change) > cost(future proofing)

SAAS? Do virtually no future proofing.

IOT, do some.

Space probe? Do lots.

Also, if you haven't built quite a few relatively similar systems, don't do future proofing without talking to people who have.

It must be uncomfortable being a google engineer on these products.

Having your work cancelled and thrown away is one of the most disheartening things as a developer.

It has to be back of mind for them when they are building. When it gets released they get to come see all the comments better on how long until Google kills it, and the people who won’t try it because of that risk.

I'm in the Yaletown office, as are the positions I posted. There are definitely open positions in the off Burrard office as well.

The yaletown office has maybe 60 or 70 engineers? The other location is larger I believe (and has a better view), but don't hold that against us!

Apple | Vancouver BC, Cupertino CA, | ONSITE (well, WFH at the moment) | Full time |

We're still actively interviewing, all interviews over video at the moment. Positions below are in my org, there are more active openings in Vancouver, and of course Cupertino.

Are you passionate about developing large scale software systems to tackle real world problems in Fraud detection and prevention? Do you have experience with ingesting, analyzing and processing large amounts of data for use in real time systems? Are you looking for the chance to engineer solutions from the initial design process to the deployment of the system into production and witness the real-world impact of your hard work? If so, this is most definitely the job for you.

See https://jobs.apple.com/en-ca/details/200136847/software-engi...

We're hiring a top-tier security software engineer to take on these features that will help protect all our customers, no matter how they access our services. The role spans the breadth of the Apple ecosystem, from iOS to web implementation to back-end servers. The role requires you to have a strong background and interest in information, product and system security, a rich experience in SW development and technologies, and to be used to working both autonomously and in close multi-functional collaboration. You will also understand the odds of implementation robustness and security, and will relish the happiness of improving the lives of millions with every commit. You will have the opportunity to lead change at multiple levels of the organization and in procedures and protocols as well as technical implementation.

See https://jobs.apple.com/en-ca/details/200145908/software-engi...

I don't know what 'cortical representations' are exactly, but it seems generally true that experts in a domain build up gradually higher level pattern recognition in their area of expertise. Whether it is driving a car, playing a sport or game, or writing software.

As a beginning programmer I had to consciously think about fundamental concepts all the time, or grapple with my limited knowledge of a programming language, instead of thinking about the problem.

As an experienced programmer I think in higher level concepts and abstractions, and the fine code details happen without me consciously thinking about them particularly.

This actually makes learning a new programming language or IDE more painful now than it was when I was new. It probably takes me less time to get to an equal level of skill in language X than a beginner, but getting to the level of fluency where the low level details don't require conscious thought takes time and practice. Being slowed down so much while getting to that point is deeply frustrating.

The Shanghai subway system is a good example. Construction started in 1986, first 28 stations opened in 1993.

It now has 413 stations and is the largest subways system by length (676 km) in the world.

I'm still not sure I made the right decision turning them down. On the one hand spending $5000 per month on rent feels crazy in Vancouver. On the other hand it is an incredible deal.

In the end what kept me from renting it is the likelihood of needing to move in a year or so. I prefer a bit more stability for my kids.

As far as I can tell most mansions are being rented out to high income locals, not to groups of college kids.

I toured a few of these in the last couple months and the nice ones had a parade of high income couples going through who would be perfectly happy to rent a $6,000,000 house for $5000 per month.

All the ones I saw explicitly disallowed subletting/group tenancies in the rental agreements.

Talk about shipping the org chart.

Apple | Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer | Vancouver, BC | Onsite

Come help protect Apple and its customers from fraud at our Yaletown office in Vancouver.

Scala/Java. Spark and other big data experience useful.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-ca/details/200004288/software-engi...

I'm not clear on why you would use redis to get transactions. Wouldn't sending a single message to kafka that represents the whole transaction with acks=all have the same effect? Then instead of pulling from redis like it is a queue, you can just do that from kafka.

My (second hand) understanding is that if you get put on a PIP at Amazon it blocks you from doing an internal transfer. So if you have a manager who doesn't like you and you try to transfer out they can put you on a PIP and effectively you're done at Amazon, even if you had someone else who wanted you internally.

Cops and robbers really means something different these days.

The plan has been similar for years, and translink has been trying to get funding for it. The referendum is the last ditch attempt to actually get funding. In the event of a no vote it is unlikely that anything but road expansion will occur for the next five to ten years.

I recently went on a trip to Paris (~250BC). Finding commercial flights (1969) and good hotels took minutes and I didn't need to talk to anyone (hipmunk(2010)/tripadvisor(2001)). I checked out the area around the hotel (1950) on Google street view (2007). My family kept up to date on where I was via find my friends (2011) on my iPhone (2007). My phone showed me where I was through Google Maps (2005) and directed my with a built in compass (2009?). I used city mapper (2011) to figure out how to get around efficiently on the Paris metro (1900). The trip was noticably different from my last one. Last time to take decent pictures I carried a consumer affordable DSLR (2007), this time I carried my iPhone 5. In 2007 I tried to take panoramas and had to very carefully take individual shots and stitch them together laboriously in software afterwards that took hours to run. This time I took one on my phone and shared it with my family 30 seconds later. I took hand held time lapse videos. I live translated signs with WordLens (2010) after failing to learn much French with DuoLingo (2011). I could go on and on like this about all the changes. Many in the last 10 years or less.

Yes I could have done basically everything I did this time last time. Maps and compasses aren't new. There were tour guides available, and smart phones, and language classes. But the experience was qualitatively different.

If I was feeling early adopter instead of like relaxing maybe I could've done some things that weren't possible last time, like driven in an electric car that is among the best performance cars in the world, tested self stopping or self parking or self driving cars, toured with a consumer VR rig, taken a video with a self-piloting quadracopter, or gotten my genome sequenced, or watched a streaming video from the space station, or....

That's what I could come up with in a few minutes while writing this comment and searching on wikipedia. If you can't get excited about all the innovations happening right now oh boy are you doing it wrong.