That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles. When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors.
This implies that writing code by hand will remain the best way to create software.
The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.
Maybe people will become more of generalists rather than specialists.
Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code. The thing is that I have experience to judge my work. Greenhorns can’t and this will lead to crapification of the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice. Sometimes it’s very useful, sometimes it’s complete hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive exact solution. But that comes from my previous experience. Without experience it’s a macabre guessing game.
> The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools.
That’s putting it mildly. I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world. I think these people will have close to no understanding of how computing works on a fundamental level. Sort of like the difference between Gen-X/millenial (and earlier) developers who grew up having to interact with computers primarily through CLIs (e.g., DOS), having to at least have some understanding of memory management, low-level programming, etc. versus the Gen-Z developers who’ve only ever known computers through extremely high level interfaces like iPads.
> I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when an entire generation of software developers who’ve only ever known “just ask the LLM to do it” are unleashed on the world.
we only have to look today at how different software quality is compared to the "old days" - when compilers were not as good, and people wrote in assembly by hand.
Old software were fast and optimized. Hand written assembly used minimal resources. Today, people write bloated electron webapps packaged into a bundle.
And yet, look who is surviving in the competitive land of software darwinian natural selection?
I barely know how assembly, CPUs, GPUs, compilers, networking work. Yet, software that I've designed and written have been used by hundreds of millions of people.
Sure, maybe you would have caught the bug if you wrote assembly instead of C. But the C programmer still released much better software than you faster. By the time you shipped v1 in assembly, the C program has already iterated 100 times and found product market fit.
Casey Muratori says that every programmer should understand how computers work and if you don't understand how computers work you can't be a good programmer.
Maybe in the future, yea. Most likely not because creating books is much easier now but total reading time can't increase nearly as fast. More books chasing the same amount of reading time.
Take the reports with a grain of salt. Tesla does not mandate maintenance. The cars in the reports are the ones who left factory and get checked after 3 years of intensive use without any maintenance. Check the light alignment, check rust in the brakes and check the suspension and the inspection will be fine. Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers. Plus Tesla has published repair manual which is very strong advantage for me. I am poor and maintain my cars by myself. Maybe I like it too.
Teslas have too much play in bearings and steering column (from new) and unlike every other manufacture out there they refuse to follow the standards and says it is how it is supposed to be. This forces owners to pay to get a factory problem fixed with zero help from Tesla, otherwise their car will not pass inspections.
Also, it isn't normal for a 3-year-old car to risk dropping a wheel. You should read some more about this before you defend them.
EDIT: Here is a reddit thread about the problem (and an article in Norwegian):
>"Almost half of all Tesla Y fail mandatory tech inspection in Denmark and make headlines for it; similar numbers in Tesla-country Norway."
>"The most common issue remains slack in the wheel alignment and suspension, found in 22% of TMY's, as opposed to .1% of ID4's."
Mercedes does this yearly. It’s running gag from all the car influencers when they show the 800-1000€ service invoice of the EQS after first year. Imho it’s definitely a scam.
Almost 30 years old. Old good times without BGAs and modern barely visible components. While some basics are still applicable the modern problems are not covered at all.
Provided you have good eyesight and steady hands, I've mostly found what happens as you get smaller is:
- Heating becomes easier. There's no large sinks to take the heat away. It's also easier to overheat things.
- You need finer tweezers, and don't drop them because if you do the tips will bend.
- The solder's surface tension does more of the work. It feels a lot more like sticking together things with tiny droplets of glue. Having the correct amount of solder in the right place is critical.
- Solder and flux become two separate things you have to care about individually
- It is easier to burn yourself
- learning how to brace your hand against something in a way that gives you very fine control. One reason soldering with an iron can be difficult is because your hand is so far away from the tip, like trying to write with a pen held by the end.
When I started my first job a coworker encouraged me to learn how to solder SMDs and do "microsoldering". Like most people I thought I was going to need high precision and a much steadier hand. Probably like most people that learned I was impressed at how quick I picked it up. I think the hardest thing was learning about part "tombstoning" but that's not that difficult to deal with. I'm not going to say it is easier than soldering through-hole components, but I think for most people the mental barrier is much higher than the actual barrier.
I now highly recommend learning it to anyone doing electronics. It's well worth the (small) time investment and makes things a lot easier, opening lots of doors. Even for a hobbyist you immediately get benefits. Everything becomes more compact, 2 sided boards are much more usable, and, of course, it opens up a lot of repairability (and recycling. Are you really a hobbyist if you aren't desoldering and reclaiming parts?).
> Are you really a hobbyist if you aren't desoldering and reclaiming parts?
Fun memory from who-knows-how-many years ago:
While installing a Playstation mod chip, I accidentally dislodged a nearby surface mount resistor, pulling off one of its metal contacts in the process. (Is that what happens when you overheat them?) I didn't think that was fixable, and since it was Sunday, the local electronics shop was closed. I ended up disassembling an old junk digital camera that hadn't yet been taken to the e-waste recycling drop, and finding inside it a resistor that seemed close enough to maybe work. The transplant was a success, and the Playstation ran great thereafter. Very satisfying.
I recently got rid of a lot of components that I have salvaged and hoarded over the years. If I need a doodad for something I'll just buy it. I'm done storing all this junk I will never use
Agree that SMD hand assembly is easier than it looks, at least down to 0603 imperial. If I can wait the week for boards to arrive, I’ll often skip the breadboard step and go straight to a proto PCB, especially since most parts aren’t available in throughhole without waiting on dev boards anyway.
When you hand someone a board with 0603s on it that you hand-assembled, it seems like magic to people who stop to think about it.
It's worth noting that the longest one there is already much shorter than the classic mid-century unregulated irons, and all of those can be held like a pencil.
> The solder's surface tension does more of the work. It feels a lot more like sticking together things with tiny droplets of glue. Having the correct amount of solder in the right place is critical.
I believe this is why I have an easier time hand-soldering BGA than QF[np]: I can't screw up solder amount/evenness.
What tools do you use for BGA soldering? I’ve seen people (well, dosdude1) using board preheaters and hot air stations, but I could never justify the expense for the amount of board rework I actually do.
I have Chinese hot air station and I am super happy with it. Airflow is nice, temperature constant. Simple manual control. The device has writing 998D on it. This device also has soldering iron attached, but it is very bad, does not have enough power for usual soldering tasks.
Important caveat: The downside to this is you can't inspect it (without an x-ray machine), and if you screw up, you're going to need a new chip (Re-balling does not look approachable/time-efficient)
Reballing isn't too difficult. It's mostly about buying all the special tools and supplies. You need a specific template for each BGA pad layout and jars of the right size solder balls.
Some people also just put solder paste on the PCB with a stencil and reflow that into solder bumps that you then solder the chip to. I find that method suspect but if it works it works
Thank makes sense, thank you! Is there a rule of thumb for how high you set the hot plate? I’d be worried about SMD components on the side in contact with the hotplate.
You're right that that is a concern. I think I set mine for 190C? Don't remember. But as you infer, my goal is to get it slightly below melting temperature so the the other components' solder doesn't melt. (Disaster if they do, then the board gets jostled or you knock a component with tweezers). Then when you hit it with the air, just that component melts.
Also, it seems to not melt if you don't flux the pads prior. Not really sure why.
How are you burning yourself? I've only ever worked with one person who burned himself soldering when working on a SMT PCBs, and it was while desoldering a through-hole connector, when a desoldering station was long past its cleaning interval and it dripped some solder onto a metal ring he was wearing. This was a guy who would lick a soldering iron to see if it was hot and touch the molten solder in the wave solder machine. The Leidenfrost effect goes a long way.
My #1 way is from impatiently touching the board to see if it's cool enough to touch yet. That sounds dumb and it is.
More generally, with iron soldering only the iron and the last couple joints are hot. For SMD, there's more places for the heat to go; sometimes the entire board can be hot. Sometimes, you might need to balance being close enough in to get a good grip on the tiny parts, but far enough to not get burnt. You will feel the heat when SMD soldering - it's not always dangerous but another thing to pay attention to.
I have been impatient, and pulled a board out of the reflow oven while it's hot enough to burn, but it's fiberglass and resin, so it has very low heat transfer, giving enough time to put it down, without getting burnt.
I do a lot of soldering at my day job to bodge boards, tune networks, etc. I burn myself on the time because when I'm working through the microscope I seemingly forget I have hands or lose track of them and bump the iron into them when pulling it away from the work. Not sure why, but it's really easy for me to get into this mode where the view through the scope is the only thing in the world
I don't think that modern boards are really repairable at all beyond component replacement- 4+ layer stackups being the big reason. If there's a way to do anything to those boards besides total replacement I'd be super interested to know.
The techniques here are also way beyond basics I think- like, you look at most guides for repair and it's "idk just solder some bodge wires on there, here's what a good joint should look like"
Andrew Zonenberg posted a Twitter thread a year or two ago where he fixed a missing PCB trace some layers down a PCB, with a stereo microscope, precision mill and very steady hands.
Edit: here's the thread. It's a 6 layer PCB with a short on L5 that needs to be fixed from the L1 side.
If you enjoy that sort of thing, check out this guy's videos. Lots of trace repairs (including below the surface), pad replacements, etc. Quite impressive to see it done.
For boards with a bunch of layers and BGA/LGA packages, that have internal manufacturing errors or damage (e.g from overflexing), repairs can be untenable.
If the parts all have pads on their perimeter, then a jumper wire can replace internal traces. If the pads are underneath the part, and the trace is only internal, than a jumper may not be feasible, unless the damage happens from the surface in, in which case each layer can be jumpered at the damage.
nope, people still repair >8 layers boards like it's nothing. Some even do "chip repairing", literally remove the expoxy of the IC to fix bonding wire, or remove the security key/module on the chip.
There are a surprising number of Indian cell phone repair shops with YouTube channels that do feats of soldering, like repairing torn flat-flex cables… I bow down at their craft. If I ever get a sabbatical I’ll go to India and ask to be an apprentice.
I need three new phones in close future for the family and I think I will go with Google Pixels and GrapheneOS. There is foldable phone available! It’s cheaper, I can deduct phones in full in the same year since the phones are <800€ before taxes (relevant probably only in Germany). And imho Apple’s premium promise is gone with glass design. Too many small errors.
Because your first comment is inflammatory, and wrong.
Ukraine is far from being a "weaker neighbor" – it's proven to have more of a backbone than all of NATO.
And that "loosing land" part which seems so compelling: those are strategic withdrawals, forcing russians to haemorrhage men and equipment for Pyrrhic advances. Right now, those advances are being reversed: AFU is making significant gains around Zaporizhzhia, and massing troops near Kharkiv for possibly another major offensive.
1. Ukraine is merely a manforce provider. NATO does everything else.
2. Loosing land is pure math. About 500 sq.km per month, often more. Ukrainian advances remain to be an illusion.
Just one thing: the western semiconductors went illegally to Soviet Union through German Democratic Republic. That’s why area about Dresden is called Silicon Saxony and from my viewpoint is doing fine right now. There was no Intel in Soviet Union. No Traitorous eight. Only talented guys trying to copy last generation western parts or working on workarounds while the west was innovating. The backwardness accumulated in Soviet Union over time in semiconductor design and manufacturing areas and the whole industry became obsolete. You couldn’t see it in the other side of the pond or Iron Curtain. Many novel Soviet things were happening outside of current russia. I think, Ukraine was big in ship and plane building, but that’s not my domain.
The camera is absolutely doable for 150€. Just look what raspberry Pi costs. The cut all the corners, take ancient ddr2 memory, ancient processor, optimize every piece for manufacturing and it’s done. Of course, CE testing and regulatory nonsense is not included. But would you buy 150€ camera or the same camera with proper certification for 200€?
I would speculate about volume. My employer can provide bsp for 5000 sold devices with thin profit. With 1000000 sold cameras it’s different equity and probably enough for not that fancy app.
Have about 20 emails daily, 6000 a year… obviously for 1.4 million emails more than one person is needed. And much more than one when I see all the other activities day and night going on in parallel.
My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.
It’s not the cure. It’s temporary suppression. I re-sold few times monthly dose of Mounjaro and the buyers catapulted to same bad habits in no time when the last dose stopped working.
Like any medicine, it's something that is intended to be prescribed by doctors to be used under supervision, rather than just taken by people ad-hoc at a random dosage hoping for a miracle.
And as for cure rather than suppression - yes, according to that definition, no medicine that is intended to be taken indefinitely to manage a condition is a cure. But nevertheless, high blood pressure medicine, statins, anti-inflamatories, HIV antiretroviral therapy, and many other drugs have saved many millions of people from an early death. We should keep looking for one-off "cures" for all conditions, but let's not limit ourselves to them.
Same here when I start/stop Mounjaro except I continue to enjoy exercise. Though I'm probably just kidding myself that the exercise is undoing the naughty food
The only way I found to reduce cravings is to be a hermit because there is food absolutely everywhere all the time
This is exactly my experience. The only time I’ve been able to consistently lose weight was during the pandemic, when I could both work and socialize from home and strictly regulate what food came into my apartment, and when I’ve been on tirzepatide.
Relying on exercise expenditure to outrun dietary intake is a losing strategy because exercise is not an effective way to create a caloric deficit. However, it may be one of the most effective ways to defend one.
This is why on paper nobody is prescribed these drugs until they have followed a program to change lifestyle things like diet. You mention "re-selling Mounjaro" - which implies they just took the drugs without the programs, is that correct? Did you expect anything else?
But for many it's considered a shortcut and there's a big network of dubious online shops and weight loss clinics that sell it. It's not unlike crash / fad diets in that regard.
Most people would already benefit from lifestyle adjustments, but those are hard to do for most people - for starters, most people don't even have regular eating habits to begin with, no baseline to even make adjustments to.
The buyers used it as crash diet aceelerator… Lose 6 kg before vacation to look better on the pictures. I know I doctor who prescribes it for these cases too. Looks like, that this medicine is heavily abused.
Why? Statins are one of the most well studied drugs in existence. Most people have no side effects, and the long-term benefits are incredibly straightforward - on par with blood pressure medication.
Blood pressure is a often a side effect of being overweight. But only one side effect of many. Losing weight gets rid of all side effects, not just one.
Temporary suppression is a great way to learn how to regulate yourself though.
I quite smoking with cytisine, a drug that basically makes nicotine useless by taking it's place. The pitch is that it's just easier to quite cytisine than nicotine, because unlike nicotine it leaves your system easily.
Wouldn't the same principle work with Mounjaro? Ease off the drug evenly, so you would wouldn't have to overcome big bad addiction all at once, instead you face just a bit of addiction one at the time.
"diet" implies a temporary change to achieve a certain goal. However, "changing your diet" has long term permanence in it. But this is hard for a lot of people because they don't have a fixed diet to begin with, instead just eating whatever whenever they're hungry. Same with exercise, people need to make that into a habit.
But forming habits / making lifestyle changes is hard. And when people hear they can just take an injection instead of make lifestyle changes they're like oo, easy!
The injection doesn't mean you don't make lifestyle changes. People have this delusion that GLP-1s just make you lose weight.
They don't. People on GLP-1s lose weight the same as you or I, through diet and exercise. It just makes it easier to build those habits.
Which I think reveals the obvious. Diet and exercise ARE NOT root cause solutions. Meaning, the root cause of obesity IS NOT eating too much. Rather, it's a propensity to eat too much. And, in that regard, GLP-1s are a root cause solutions, whereas diet necessarily is not.
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