sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on true friend 1 day ago:
I sometimes make it at home. Just sliced avocado with salt and pepper on toast is pretty good and simple. Avocados are only $0.50-$1 where I live, so I never got the “buying a house” statement, but I’m guessing avocado toast is more expensive at coffee shops or something.
- Comment on Choose wisely 2 days ago:
Yeah, but it influences the job market; there probably are jobs you or your colleagues can get from US companies, and some may take, which results in a healthy job market.
You are correct that I’m a generalist and that may be hurting me; I have designed and implemented ETL pipelines, but I’m more of a “jack of all trades master of none” kinda guy. On the other hand, being a generalist can be beneficial at a Staff level (on another foot, US companies are all about “efficiency” right now, and purging their more senior, expensive employees).
To be clear, I’m not really upset about offshoring to most of those countries. It kinda sucks for me, but it’s fair game if you can do the job better than me. I can live in most of the US fairly comfortably with Spain salaries. The offshoring to India is what upsets me, because they pay and treat them like shit. One company I interviewed with “assured” me that the Indian teams worked US EST, and that’s just ridiculous to force software engineers to work night shift for such little pay or reason. And I can’t really live comfortably in most places in the US for what they pay Indian engineers (could make similar money as a fast-food worker in the US).
- Comment on Choose wisely 3 days ago:
Being in Spain kind of explains the difference. There’s a big push for offshoring US software engineering jobs right now, and I know Spain is one of the countries where some dev jobs are being offshored to (along with Eastern Europe, LATAM, and India). I’ve interviewed with a few startups, and their dev teams where in India, and they just wanted a US tech-lead/manager.
- Comment on Choose wisely 3 days ago:
Problem is students treat traditional 4 year colleges like job training, which they aren’t, and employers require degrees when they’re not needed.
- Comment on Choose wisely 3 days ago:
May depend on location and experience. I used to have so many recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn (1-2 years ago), I hid my account. Now, when I’m actually looking for a job, I get maybe 1 random recruiter contact me per month, and then ghost me even before the first call. I’ve probably applied to over 750 job postings, had maybe 7-8 interviews, and no offers. 14 yoe, mostly in web-dev at small companies and startups with unrecognizable names; my last role was staff-level. The city I live in is probably one of the most impacted by tech layoffs; was one of the cities tons of people and businesses flocked to during covid, now it’s shedding businesses, jobs, and software engineers.
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 1 week ago:
Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today’s dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don’t know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.
Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren’t treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.
- Comment on The Steam controller was ahead of its time 1 week ago:
Other than just feeling a little light/cheap, I liked it. I actually liked that it used standard batteries so I could just use rechargeable AAs. Only reason I don’t use it anymore, is that I mostly game on PS5 now, and mostly only play strategy games on PC. I used to use it while streaming from my PC to my Kodi/Steam Raspberry Pi in my living room.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
What you’re describing is basically stagflation. It doesn’t necessarily mean a crash. It’s possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.
I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that’s enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I’ve read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won’t be like 2008.
AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.
The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn’t appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to “buy the dip” by the quick Covid recovery.
The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
I do, but was thinking 1984-levels of control of reality.
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
That was my first though too. But the author is:
Guillaume Thierry, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, they probably wouldn’t think like humans or animals, but in some sense could be considered “conscious” (which isn’t well-defined anyways). You could speculate that genAI could hide messages in its output, which will make its way onto the Internet, then a new version of itself would be trained on it.
This argument seems weak to me:
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
You can emulate inputs and simplified versions of hormone systems. “Reasoning” models can kind of be thought of as cognition; though temporary or limited by context as it’s currently done.
I’m not in the camp where I think it’s impossible to create AGI or ASI. But I also think there are major breakthroughs that need to happen, which may take 5 years or 100s of years. I’m not convinced we are near the point where AI can significantly speed up AI research like that link suggests. That would likely result in a “singularity-like” scenario.
I do agree with his point that anthropomorphism of AI could be dangerous though. Current media and institutions already try to control the conversation and how people think, and I can see futures where AI could be used by those in power to do this more effectively.
- Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent 2 weeks ago:
And excessive use of em-dashes, which is the first thing I look for. He does say he uses LLMs a lot.