Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is:
1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.
Easy money and cheap (foreign) labor are one and the same. Political parties that are not accountable for this are the upstream problem. In other words, it’s a failure of what we think of as our “democracy.” The will of the people doesn’t mean much when you can just swap out “the people” to get what you will.
Honest question: On what basis do people even trade crypto? Like, how would one even decide when to buy and when to sell? Is it just based on looking at the charts? Are there any "fundamentals" (like there are for actual companies) that can be used to make investment decisions? From an outsider's point of view, the whole thing looks like a casino where people bet on random price movements on underlying assets that have no actual value.
With most of these things, people are for state power until they are victimized by it. It's a common pattern.
:D
I've had property stolen. Cameras generally won't help, and didn't help. Limiting ingredient is often not knowing who did it in any case-- in most places most common crime is committed by a tiny number of regular characters. Go look at the mountains of threads online where someone had a tracker enabled object stolen and knew exactly who had it only to have law enforcement do nothing.
that doesn't seem to be the case always, given the data on crime reporting:
"Patterns in police reporting for property crime during 2020–2023 were similar to those for violent crime. A quarter (25%) of all property victimizations in urban areas were reported to police, which was lower than the percentages in suburban (33%) and rural (36%) areas (figure 2).
Similar to overall property victimization, a lower percentage of other theft victimizations were reported to police in urban areas (20%) compared to suburban (28%) and rural (31%) areas."
"For violent crimes, in 1997, 7% of victims
stated that “Police wouldn’t help” as the reason they did not call the police. This more than
doubled to 16% by 2021. For property crimes, the corresponding rates were 12% in 1997 and 18% in
2021"
Police work for the State. The State orders them to work for the Public when it interests the State. Intervening in violent crime and property crime can be seen, cynically, as a PR move.
To be beholden to the State for justice and protection is fine when the State is beholden to the Public for their consent. Today, in the West, the Public has been so thoroughly disarmed, and /disrobed/, that consent is a formality, consent can no longer be withheld.
Look no further than Flock and FISA for the ongoing crisis of consent.
When cops are released from the State apparatus, they'll be given the respect and admiration they deserve. Until then, it's difficult to separate them from their incentive structure.
Must be using some strange definition for tech or valuations, because last I'd heard tech was some huge percentage of the S&P 500, and the index has dropped like 10% from its ATH.
It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you?
I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too.
I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.
Even the SLS cost less than $50bn to develop, which is a lot, but only a fraction of what SpaceX is apparently worth.
Developing a new rocket like the Falcon 9, even a reusable one, would cost a private investor less than $10bn. It would take time, that is the hardest part. But in terms of cash, it is a fraction of this valuation.
Then a constellation like Starlink - again, we are talking $10-$15bn. Once you have the rocket, the satellite design is not going to cost much. The challenge is getting the regulatory approvals and getting the launch rate up.
Then developing something like Starship, again a few billions, certainly far less than $50 bn. A crew capsule too, that would be a few billion, but probable <$5 bn.
For a trillion dollars you could probably throw in a space station (the ISS was about $100bn), a few advanced orbiting telescopes, a human mission to Mars, and maybe an intensive exploration of Europa. Heck, why not land something on Pluto just for kicks.
Profitable remains to be seen, but it is undoubted that the potential resources in the solar system are (pun intended) astronomically valuable. Getting at them is "just" an engineering problem.
I generally agree that it's difficult and counterproductive to try to eliminate talented programmers who put together the core of systems and set up the patterns that things like LLMs can emulate.
But, the modal programmer at this point is some person who attended a front-end coding bootcamp for a few months and basically just knows how to chain together CSS selectors and React components. I do think these people are in big trouble.
So, while the core, say, 10% of people I think should remain in the system. This 90% periphery of pretty bad programmers will probably need to move on to other jobs.
Oh:D I have a feeling that the bad programmers won't move anywhere. There is one reason for it. Code part is probably the smallest piece while most of the stuff is in getting actual business requirements that worth a lick.
The best engineers do something besides "getting" requirements. They usually are able to re-interpret, contextualize and evolve them.
Surprisingly, a lot of times programmers are better bring in business experience from other organizations that the business people at the current one don't possess.
I am saying, having seen stuff implemented that simply does not make sense to anyone with an understanding of the actual situation on the ground, yes. And the funny thing is, it is not even an llm issue. This is a very, very human issue.
The actual work happens in the head. I suspect you know this. Now, there is a clear benefit to being able to flatten some of the issues related to coding, but do you really think, any of it can be done without those meetings and muddling through those requirements? At the very least, there needs to be one person that understands what is actually needed.
I mean.. I am ok with you saying saying yes. In a sense, I half expect it. I will be very subtle, I don't believe the issue lies with the tooling ( AI or not ).
I spend an unusually small proportion of my life in meetings, probably an idiosyncratic feature of my job.
My impression is that the main reason most people have so many meetings is because meetings are equated to work. If you are in a meeting, you are at work and you need to work. This is because, in a meeting, everyone is looking at everyone else with the expectation that they are working. But if you are not in a meeting, this expectation doesn't exist, so you are basically not at work and you don't need to work.
In particular, thinking only occurs during meetings. And if it didn't happen during a meeting, it didn't happen.
Call me cynical, but it explains immediately why the vast majority of companies don't tolerate remote work unless they're forced to by a pandemic. Office work means someone could be watching you outside meetings, which causes some work to happen outside of meetings and raises productivity.
I have seen people that cannot focus or are not confident enough about their ideas unless they are with someone. Yes, for me meetings are annoying, but for those people they reduces their anxiety (and tbh sometimes they do have bad ideas that are better shutdown).
On remote work, I do see an advantage of having people interact occasionally (I agree daily is probably too much) on work topics, besides the meeting. Spontaneous "can you have a look at" or "oh what is that program that you use". This will help much less the best performers (they know how to solve things, they look actively for new tools, etc.), but most companies have lots of profiles.
Someone in this thread was also complaining "management does not get engineering", which I feel is also made worse by working fully remotely - they will not get all topics in a meeting and if you have more informal talks, if they hear the discussions they might get (a bit) better.
During the 90’s economic crisis all drafters drawing building blueprints by hand disappeared from the Swedish construction industry. Engineers started using CAD instead
Just one example of how this has happened again and again.
What's the best way for a teenager to get involved in one of the projects you maintain? I've been trying to help my kid find an entry point into the industry, and I'm one of those annoying folks who relies on open source but rarely contributes.
Assuming they've got reasonable programming skills. They can simply find an open-source project they are passionate about. Spend time understanding the overall structure. Then pick up an issue raised by the community and prepare a fix as a pull request.
The first PR is unlikely to be merged the next day; however, it sparks lots of productive discussions with the rest of the community, allowing your kid to build a mental model of the project's best practices and sensitivities.
The more he contributes, the more integral he becomes to the community. After gaining enough experience through small issues, they can even consider working on a new feature.
As a byproduct, a great addition to the CV if they are also looking to go commercial.
reply