Nothing says "this product is useful" quite like forcing people to use it and punishing people who don't. If it was that good, there'd be organic demand to use it. People would be begging to use it, going around their boss's back to use it.
The fact that companies have to force you to use it with quotas and threats is damning.
The demonization of "flip-flopping" is so stupid. Bro, I want my politicians to change their minds when new facts arise or when public sentiment changes. The last thing we need is more dogmatic my-way-or-the-highway politicians that refuse to change their minds about anything.
Reminds me of Stephen Colbert's roast of George W. Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner:
> The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.
1) People don't really vote based on logic and sound reasoning. They vote based on what sounds right to them. If they're unhappy with something, they vote for somebody who also claims to be unhappy about it, regardless if he has any actual solutions.
2) Even for the minority who wants to vote based on sound principles, it's very hard to push information back to them. If the politician changes his mind, he has to explain it to his voters. Are there really platforms which allow in-depth conversations in political debates?
Every university classroom has a whiteboard and a projector. Because you need to draw graphs, diagrams, etc. You need to explain the general structure and then focus on the details without losing track of the whole.
Is there a single country where politicians use either when talking to each other or voters?
While I agree with you, I find it hard to argue against the view that politicians are elected for the views they held during their campaign. They may change their mind after being elected, but their constituents that voted for them will not all change their mind simultaneously. To the ones that don't change their mind, it does appear to be a betrayal of their principles. A rational politician would not want to gain that kind of reputation out of pure self-interest.
I would be much more inclined to continue voting for a politician who could explain their policy position as it changes in an open and sensible way. Politicians putting on a speech that sounds truthful and honest and like a discussion is happening between adults is so rare - it seems that very few people want that. I do though.
> People in the business world seems to only know business, and that's the limit of what they care about.
You’d think these people would go off and be executives at a ball bearing manufacturing company or something and leave the arts alone, but it never happens that way.
The wheels would fall off of modern society if ball bearings had quality issues like this.
I know that you are joking, but well-made BBs are incredibly important to just about any modern machine that moves, and indirectly, all the non-moving ones too.
Hell, Albert Speer, Nazi in charge of BBs and other manufacturing, said that the US bombing offensive would have had a huge impact on the war if they had just kept at it with bombing the BB factories instead of giving up.
> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT.
The answer to this (throughout the ages) should be the same: read the authoritative source of information. The official API docs, the official language specification, the man page, the textbook, the published paper, and so on.
Maybe I am showing my age, but one of the more frustrating parts of being a senior mentoring a junior is when they come with a question or problem, and when I ask: “what does the official documentation say?” I get a blank stare. We have moved from consulting the primary source of information to using secondary sources (like O’Reilly, blogs and tutorials), now to tertiary sources like LLMs.
[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.]
I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting.
One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that."
Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu."
So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come up with an answer, then you could legitimately ask for a senior mentor's time. Otherwise, the answer from the greybeards would have been "Get out of my face, kid. Go RTFM."
That system that used to exist is totally broken now. When reading and understanding technical documentation is viewed as "old school", then you know we have a big problem.
I like your sentiment about "first principles" of documents -- go to the root source. But for most young technologists (myself included, long long ago), the official docs (man pages for POSIX, MSDN for Win32 etc.) are way too complex. For years, when I was in university, I tried to grasp GUI programming by writing C and using the Win32 API. It was insane, and I did little more than type in code from a "big book of Win32 programming". Only when I finally tried Qt with C++ did the door of understanding finally open. Why? It was the number of simple examples that Qt docs provided they really helped me understand GUI (event-driven) programming. Another 10 years went by when I knew enough about Win32 that I was able to write small, but useful GUIs in pure C using the Win32 API. The very reason that StackOverflow was so popular: People read the official docs and still don't understand... so they ask a question. The best questions include a snip of code and ask about it.
To this day, I normally search on Google first, then try an LLM... the last place that I look is the official docs if my question is about POSIX or Win32. They are just too complex and require too much base knowledge about the ecosystem. As an interesting aside, when I first learned Python, Java, and C#, I thought their docs were as approachable as Qt. It was very easy to get started with "console" programming and later expand to GUI programming.
Despite my pro-documentation comment above, I think there is a legit criticism that a lot of official documentation is a mess. Take man pages, for instance. I don't think it's a good look for greybeards to say "just go read the man page, kid." Many of those man pages are so out of date. You can't legitimately adopt a position of smug superiority by pointing juniors to outdated docs.
If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not.
The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible.
[shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!
Yea a lot software developers I’ve worked with, across the full spectrum of skill levels, didn’t have a strong preference about what code they were writing. If there is a preference, it’s usually the parts they’ve already worked on, because they’re already ramped up. Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.
What I'm talking about is like asking "do you want a turkey sandwich or a ham sandwich" and getting the response "I don't care" - about everything. Pick something! Make a choice! Take some ownership of the work you're doing!
I didn’t say anything about career direction. I’m talking about what project or part of the project. I have worked with developers who insist that they only want to work on this very narrow section of the code, and won’t consider branching out somewhere else, and that kind of attitude often comes from people who are difficult in other ways to work with.
>Strong desire to work on a specific piece of the code (or to not work on one) might even in some cases be a red flag.
I understand an engineer should compromise. But if you want to specialize in high performance computing and you're pigeonholed into 6 months of front end web, I can understand the frustration. They need to consider their career too. It's too easy for the manager to ignore you of you don't stand up for yourself. Some even count on it and plan around the turnover.
Of course, if they want nothing other than kernel programming as a junior and you simply need some easy but important work done for a month, it can be unreasonable. There needs to be a balance as a team.
Thanks to the AI industry, I don't even know what the word "safety" means anymore, it's been so thoroughly coopted. Safety used to mean hard hats, steel toed shoes, safety glasses, and so on--it used to be about preventing physical injury or harm. Now it's about... I have no idea. Something vaguely to do with censorship and filtering of acceptable ideas/topics? Safety has just become this weird euphemism that companies talk about in press releases but never go into much detail about.
Some of the time it's there to scare the suits into investing, and other times it's nerds scaring each other around the nerd campfire with the nerd equivalent of slasher stories. It's often unclear which, or if it's both.
I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.
No study should be good enough for HN. If a single non-obviously-flawed study is enough to convince you to something, then you can be convinced of anything and everything under the sun.
One study can find any effect it's looking for.
A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.
Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.
And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
No study is perfect – research is and has always been expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of reading and doing research.
And on top of that, I expect most of the complaints about all these studies are made by people who have never designed or run a study or research program of any kind in their entire life.
It's that common phenomenon where people think they can use general logic (which they generally are good at) to draw strong conclusions about something that isn't in their wheelhouse. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, sometimes.
It makes much more sense if you think of these threads as nerdsniping to support a preconcieved personal biases and addictions. Not very related to finding the truth.
LOL, maybe Sam Altman can fund those power plants. Let me guess: He'd rather the public pay for it, and for him to benefit/profit from the increased capacity.
Big tech is going to have to fund the plants and probably transmission. Because the energy utilities have a decades long planning horizon for investments.
Good discussion about this in recent Odd Lots podcast.
I've read a bunch of the opposite: a lot of secret deals between tech companies and utilities, where when details come out, we find that regular ratepayers are going to be paying a decent chunk of the cost.
Good discussion? This is a Bloomberg podcast with ads from Palantir explicitly telling us AI is not here to replace any of us. They do everything they can to avoid the topic of what the cost is to regular people.
Data centers are built in people's backyards without their permission, wreck the values of their home, and then utility companies jack up their price to compensate for the extra strain on the grid. So the residents have to pay for Big Tech but get no share of the profits. How this podcast does a whole episode on data centers and the electricity grid and doesn't talk about what's actually happening to people, well, that would be surprising if I didn't know where it came from.
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