In my own experience this is 180 degrees from reality. As a generalist, feeling out the depths of a single domain (something I've been forced to do at least 50 times in my career, to the point that I'm probably a global expert in at least 2-3 things I don't actually care about, but are poorly documented and not especially lucrative on their own) is something that's basically a bunch of Google searches, reading source code, and writing/running tests manually, none of which I really care about short of getting to "the right solution."
Meanwhile, as a generalist who has a basic understanding of general things, everything from how to design efficient network protocols, to how cache lines affect the performance of sorting algorithms, without being a real expert in any of those things, I act as a constant course correction for AI agents doing work on my behalf, in a way that LLM context windows simply cannot replicate.
To give a concrete example, I recently used agents to build a specialized sync protocol that broadly resembles Dropbox. It's nowhere near as efficient in terms of how blocks are synced (because it entirely happens on a LAN and the cost difference is minimal), but I constantly had to make objectively more valuable course corrections on how the sync actually traversed the participating nodes. If I'd just let the LLM drive, it would have come up with a reasonably efficient algorithm (better than I probably would have done on my first try in the same timeframe) that would have had an obvious (to me) single bottleneck.
As someone who built a custom serial cable (not my idea, greetz to the original designer) to load assembly programs on TI-85s for all my friends, the “approved for exams” shit is so funny
Personally, I make a lot more "out of hour" commits than I used to because I'll batch up low priority tasks throughout the day and let the computer chug on them at night when I'm elsewhere. Commits are coming in at all hours, but I'm not actually looking at them until the next morning.
As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
As a security conscious dev that has worked in various highly regulated spaces I want to say we really appreciate people like you, because they’re super rare
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives
With a mass market electric sharpener and a reasonable knife I spend maybe 15 minutes/yr on sharpening and the knife + sharpener costs less than half this product
The marketing video seems to try to head people like me off, but it also seems to wildly overstate the level of commitment required to have sharp knives
(I do think the tech is cool tho. I just wouldn’t pay $400 for an 8 inch chef’s knife no matter how good it is)
I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible
If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny
My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky
It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app
Using them side by side made it really obvious tho
BlackSky seems to be run by a competent dev with a high enough profile that I see his posts regularly without following him directly
Based on his progress posts it seems that ATproto is intentionally moving in the right direction and BlackSky has progressed to the point he’s asking for volunteers to move off Bluesky and try out his implementations
"Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us
I agree with your first paragraph, but there are lots of basically-broke people who live on boats
Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself
Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque