This is probably bait but FYI it’s not normal to send thank you emails in much of the world following an interview so perhaps consider that not everyone thinks like you and it’s not a slight to receive no thank you emails. Where I live a thank you email would be seen as a strange way for someone to sneakily try to persuade you to hire them outside of the proper interview process. If you don’t get an email you may just be dealing with someone not from your culture.
Note it’s all nationally significant infrastructure, not just data centres. And thank god because this country can’t even build a rail line without having to fight every minor concern by anyone who feels like complaining. It makes big projects impossible and the whole country suffers. Infrastructure is vital.
With a harness you could feed the code to a linter and if there are errors feed that to a model automatically. It’s amazing that the models are good enough that I haven’t bothered doing this
The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.
I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them.
This essay has several: Sentence structures, heading phrasing, and yes, dashes. I expect people know to start steering LLMs away from em dashes at this point though.
Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.
> Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost.
Countries like Sweden and Norway have equal non-transferable paternity leaves and "free" daycare/education/healthcare. They birth rates are still nowhere near replacement levels. The hard truth seems to be that majority of women with education and opportunities don't want to spend their best years on children and bear the cost to their health from multiple child births.
> Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future.
Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
> Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
This argument is rather one dimensional. If you're trying to solve the problem in modern developed society, you can't look to what happens at a more primal level, you need to address the actual concerns people are living with.
We have more choice and visibility into options and unfair power structures now, and unless your solution is to remove choice again, then looking back to a time when people depended on children for survival and safety isn't going to offer much relevant insight. Instead it's going to lock you into positions with no way out.
Perhaps the engineer could sit down for 8 hours a day during the work week. The Silicon Valley obsession with having no life and working weekends is so endemic.
Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.
>> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines.
I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.
The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.
Barnes & Nobles and Borders were both the ultimate in retail bookstores and also the beginning of the end of retail book stores. They killed local bookstores, and then Amazon killed them.
But none of what you're describing actually happened. The big chains didn't kill local bookstores at all -- mom-and-pop bookstores are still ubiquitous -- and many of them are actually doing better than they used to due to the ability to list their inventory on Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.
And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.
Maybe in some places. Growing up there was no bookstore. We had a library, and a mall far away, and there were some small book stores at the mall that continued to do just fine as B&N and Borders grew. And while everyone says Amazon killed bookstores… maybe some. But what I saw were malls dying anyway, and downtown rents growing to the point where selling just books wasn’t enough to cover costs.
They didn't, you're right, but book stores themselves are on the decline [1]. Borders brick and mortar footprint is gone in the U.S. and they used to be the #2 bookseller. Barnes and Noble is holding on, thankfully. I love physical books and just the quiet ambience of a good bookstore.
