lesser23

I understand the sentiment and agree but the practicality is a different story.

Not many people pay in cash (though, for now, it's still possible). 99.9% of people carry a tracking device in their pocket, and it's a junior engineer level task to correlate transaction data to an ID via any number of methods.

So while it's not "built in" at a movie theater it's child's play to figure out who's watching what, when. Effectively, it's the same thing as requiring an ID to watch porn in that light. Similarly Google has shown (repeatedly) it's absolutely trivial to figure out who a person is via tracking. Then, it's absolutely trivial to determine a person and their porn preferences.

I can see both sides. The parents are ultimately responsible for their child's media consumption. But, a company also has a duty to ensure they're not violating any rules. The "Are you over 18" pop ups are there for legal reasons. I think that this ruling simply codifies what has already existed and provides a way to make it harder to bypass (without a VPN).

Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation?

Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain.

Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” is rent seeking, innovation stifling behavior that extends far beyond simple NES games.

Further, why shouldn’t I be allowed to share a game I rightfully own? If I do not own it, then I lease it. If I was not made aware of that then it is fraud. The ethics are simple: When buying is not owning, piracy is not theft. Simple as that.

“AI” can’t use X so we have to dumb it down to the point a next token predictor can figure it out. Every day it seems like we are using spicy autocomplete as a measure of understandability which seems entirely silly to me. My own employer has ascribed some sort of spiritual status to prompts. The difference between prompting an LLM and a seance with psychedelics is getting smaller and smaller.

The next AI winter is going to be brutal and highly profitable for actual skilled devs.

The term is helicopter parenting. Studies have shown children born after 1995 are significantly more stunted (they grow up more “slowly”) due to this. There are interesting consequences like, for example, the condition of college campuses and identity politics. There are also laws that punish parents for allowing their children unstructured, safe, adult-free time (the expansion of the definition of “neglect”). A great book called “The Coddling of the American Mind” covers this and more in great detail. These days, we have more than ever replaced the physical helicopter parent with devices.

Maybe I’m just suffering from Stockholm syndrome but I haven’t really had trouble using most libraries in Python. I do agree however that Python makes it harder to write reusable code.

To quote Bjarne Stroustrup there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses :).

Having been around for a long time I liken it to PERL. Post-PERL it also looks a lot like Ruby. I remember everything being re-written in Ruby. Yet PERL still stands!

Anyway, Python is a nice language for small-ish (< 1000 lines or so) projects. It starts to get very unruly after that and without a type system of any kind your brain becomes the type system... and the compiler. MyPy tries it's best but it really isn't sufficient and requires developer buy-in...hard to get in a language so well designed for throw-away code.

Python 3's syntax is actually quite nice and you can write some very expressive code in it. My opinion, of course, but I also find it to be one of the "lowest common denominator" languages like Go. Python doesn't require much to get started and it's syntax and semantics are relatively easy for even a mediocre programmer to understand. Of course it has a terrible (mostly non-existent ABI) that relies on "consenting adults" as the contract and an awful package system. Yet another reason it's really only practical for (relatively) small projects.

Rarely is anything in Python about raw performance - imo. Of the things that are (NumPy, Pandas, various ML libraries) they call down to C handle most of it. For things that require true parallelism it's not uncommon to see `exec` calls to binaries. That being said in a lot of places (FastAPI based applications, etc) you can get quite a lot of perf out of Python before it becomes a problem.

However, what makes it super nice is how easy it is to hack something together in it. As it turns out most of ML is just hacking things together in a few files or a Jupyter notebook. What a perfect language for such purpose. This is not unlike PERL. I still remember all the random PERL scripts I hacked together for various tasks because it was so simple. It is no wonder it is as popular as it is.

> I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the industry after being in it so long but this struck me. I haven’t felt this way about any company, good or bad, in a long time. After surviving probably my 10th layoff across 5 different companies I can’t imagine ever being loyal, considering anyone at a company a “friend”, and most certainly not “family”.

I agree with your feeling that remote has really made me more productive. But I believe that’s because of the opposite of what you stated. I loved the ability to get a bunch of stuff done and then zone out the rest of the day. Without the constant interruptions, open office, etc I was able to get one giant burst of productivity and then check out. I was on paper “10x” and just omitted the fact I was only working 2/3 time.

Recently with RTO and myself being remote only I’ve been led to burnout. The company I am at has changed the merit equation from good work to showing up to the office. As a result, I end up picking up more slack during my workday as my coworkers get lunches, game rooms, parties, etc. I am still expected to grind and they are not. I sure do miss the remote first days.

Many places are quite literally forcing their software engineers to use LLMs. Complete with cursor/copilot is the ability to see usage statistics and surely at these companies these statistics will eventually be used as firing criteria.

I gave them a fair shake. However, I do not like them for many reasons. Code quality is one major reason. I have found that after around a month of being forced to use them I felt my skill atrophy at an accelerated rate. It became like a drug where instead of thinking through the solution and coming up with something parsimonious I would just go to the LLM and offload all my thinking. For simple things it worked okay but it’s very easy to get stuck in a loop. I don’t feel any more productive but at my company they’ve used it as justification to increase sprint load significantly.

There has been almost a religious quality associated to LLMs. This seems especially true among the worst quality developers and the non-technical morons at the top. There are significant security concerns that extend beyond simple bad code.

To me we have all the indicators of the maximum of the hype cycle. Go visit LinkedIn for confirmation. Unless the big AI companies begin to build nuclear power it will eventually become too expensive and unprofitable to run these models. They will continue to exist as turbo autocomplete but no further. The transformer model has fundamental limitations and much like neural networks in the 80s it’ll become more niche and die everywhere else. Like its cousins WYSIWIG and NoCode in 30 more years it’ll rise again like a phoenix to bring “unemployment” to developers once more. It will be interesting to see who among us was swimming without clothes when the water goes out.

The bullet points and some of the edge definitely smell like LLM assistance.

Other than that I take the other side. I’ve read (and subsequently never finished) dozens of programming books because they are so god awfully boring. This writing style, perhaps dialed back a little, helps keep my interest. I like the feel of a zine where it’s as technical as a professional write up but far less formal.

I often find learning through analogy useful anyway and the humor helps a lot too.

What I find interesting is that despite, as you said, FAANG doesn't really have the "genius appeal" it used to have they still demand it. You would sort of expect a company that is in the glacial stages of movement to have more capital and more leeway. If anything, the competition for these positions has gotten even worse despite the work not being anything close to revolutionary or novel at all.

I have spoken to a few people in the "recruiting industry". In particular, one CEO of one. Both were rather frank discussions. Both told me that it is a complete waste of time to submit resumes and do follow up calls. Rather shocking. Indeed, they both suggested that networking and/or being nepo-hired is basically the only way you'll get in somewhere. That isn't a "big company with big goals" somewhere. This is a trend in almost every sector of software. If you're like a lot of people and need remote work due to not living in one of the 3-4 major tech hubs it's even harder.

I do remember a time when projects mattered. I believe my open source work 12 years ago was what got me the job even after I failed their coding test miserably.

It probably won't get better for a long time. I've been casually looking around for a new gig and even with over a decade of experience in software across the backend stack (bare metal and up) I don't fit a lot of the requirements. They want junior engineer grind, mid level pay, and staff+ level knowledge. As expected, it's a employer market now, and we're probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.

Fastmail these days with a custom domain.

I was on protonmail for years. But I found the integrations were not compatible with my ideal workflow. Their iPhone app also crashed all the time for me and you can’t use regular mail clients. For PCs you can use the bridge with a client but I found nothing like that for the phone.

WRT proton I think it was overkill for my use case. If I need complete secrecy I can use GPG over email.

I find Fastmail to be cheaper, faster, and more compatible for every day use. I also really like the email alias feature which I use all the time. Fastmail and a standalone VPN was significantly cheaper than protons offerings as well.

At the end of the day as long as you use a custom domain it doesn’t really matter where you go. Even Gmail works fine here. To me it just matters where you will compromise on usability for secrecy.

The other form of malicious compliance is my preferred malicious compliance. If the meeting is for 15 minutes I leave at the 15 minute mark after excusing myself.

The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me:

1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today.

2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update.

I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.

The post is somewhat strange but I think the point of it is clear. Projects aren’t what land jobs. This is contrary to age-old advice of “build a portfolio to show off” which has been repeated for as long as I remember. At least since 2010 or so.

Instead the writer discovered what we all inevitably do. Companies don’t really care about what you’re capable of. They care strictly if you’ll bend over backwards, give up everything, and grind leetcode to make it through their arbitrary and demeaning hiring process. At least you can somewhat justify it at FAANG given you need an “efficient” way to weed out 80% of the 30,000 applicants you get a year. But this rot goes all the way down to the mom and pop e-commerce startup anymore.

It’s no surprise. I suppose if the writer was a major contributor to a larger project their experience might be different (as you could probably fool ATS and HR using them as experience on a resume). But indeed, no one cares about your toy implementation of a linter.

It’ll only get worse in the age of AI slop, AI slop brained company leadership, and leetcode supremacy.