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I think interest rates have a lot to do with that mindset. If you view a Jr engineer as a long term investment (in 18 months you get an SDE 2 who knows your business), that's much …

> LLMs get endlessly confused: they assume the code they wrote actually works; when test fail, they are left guessing as to whether to fix the code or the tests; and when it gets f…

I think Target isn't the right comparison here - the skills required for this project are worth much more than minimum wage bagging groceries. If you assume something like $50 an h…

There's no incentive for an engineer to do that. Saying yes and delivering crap gets you a bonus, hard truths get you shuffled around or made redundant. There's no real consequence…

I don't usually write in fiction, but with nonfiction and especially technical writing (like O'Reilly books) I find taking notes helpful, and the book itself is the most convenient…

I've heard that the Kanji make Japanese and Chinese much easier to scan quickly once you're fluent.

Hi! I'm that person! Senior engineer, decade of experience. I've used debuggers in the past, both for running code and looking at core dumps, but I really don't find them to be cos…

I agree. IMO, Java-style OOP conflates 2 different concepts, polymorphism and inheritance. Polymorphism (including dynamic dispatch and duck typing) is a game changer, in that it e…

I saw a similar effect teaching at a coding school for adults: one of our strongest predictors for success was whether or not the student had someone close to them who was in tech.…

I will occasionally file bug reports or even submit fixes to open source projects as part of doing my job. As an engineer, one of my responsibilities is to maintain the commons - w…

> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. Excuse me? The "silent majority" was the set of American…

That depends heavily on the shape of your data, what your workload looks like, what sort of consistency guarantees you need, etc. I recommend Designing Data Intensive Applications …

I write software at a fintech, and the CFPB regulations are super important for protecting the customer. They also give important guidance on how the customer needs to be taken car…

I've seen variations in published cookbooks too! Maybe not this much, but easily in the 150-250 range. It's a real problem, not just a Google one.

Semi professional musician here. Repetition goes way beyond what the author mentions: - Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with …

The types of error made by the model in the article are exactly the sort of error that I (senior engineer / decade of experience) would make if asked to describe how something work…

A buddy of mine works at a startup doing exactly this: https://www.advocat.ai/ Unsure if they use GPT-3 specifically, but the core idea is the same.

> But there's no way to train the transformer-based high-probability-next-word AIs to be superhumanly good at fooling you into doing something, on the grounds of lack of training d…

I love this idea. I bet you could get surprisingly useful results just using a language model like GPT-3.

Free except for you've written 3x as much code and it's 10x harder to understand.

Perhaps "break up your book into chapters" is a better metaphor for microservices. Breaking a chapter into paragraphs makes me think more of OO design or functional decomposition.

Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limi…

Rust is fantastic for some problems, poor for others. If your alternative is C++, or you're doing something where you need to compile high performance code to wasm, go for it. If y…

I've heard that DLC has made this less of a problem in recent years. Since there's a stable, predictable revenue stream and delivery channel for new content, iit's much easier to j…

IIRC the banks of the canal aren't very high above the water level.