This is like looking into a mirror, only without the formal sheepskin and the associated big-company gigs.
Hell, back when I started I would have had to move 5hrs away from home just to get a degree in CS, and into a region where one needed twice minimum wage just to live away from parents. And I just wasn’t that fantastically wealthy. So I tried to bootstrap myself into web dev close to home, did decently, but my neuroatypical brain just never cottoned on to making any professional connections, either.
Networks are just so immensely difficult and laborious to maintain, in ways a normie is likely to never be able to fully understand. I can code for a solid 10-12hrs a day for days on end, zero problems even into my sixth decade on this rock. But even an hour’s worth of networking has me absolutely knackered for the next 24. If I could outsource my world+dog professional interactions in a reliable manner that faithfully reproduces my actual being, I absolutely would.
And there is just so much else with this article that strikes home, including whiteboard exercises in which the evaluators have totally lost the plot with why those even exist.
I swear, if I can’t find a way to build a SAAS or some other personal income stream, imma gonna put my woodworking skills to more profitable use.
Charged… with what?? Unless there is a warrant for the phone, specifically or inclusively with other electronic devices, there is no crime in wiping it. It’s your phone, to do with however you want.
THE GRAND JURY CHARGES THAT:
On or about January 24, 2025, in the Northern
District of Georgia, the defendant, SAMUEL
TUNICK, before and during the search for and
seizure of property by Customs and Border
Patrol Tactical Terrorism Response Team
Supervisory Officer L.C., a person authorized
to make such search and seizure, did knowingly
destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and
otherwise take any action to delete the
digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular
phone, for the purpose of preventing and
impairing the Government's lawful authority to
take said property into its custody and
control, in violation of Title 18, Untied
States Code, Section 2232(a).
IANAL, but this sounds like being charged for flushing your cocaine stash down the toilet while the cops are trying to bust down your door...except cocaine is illegal, whereas a cell phone isn't. So, beats me. I'd love to hear an actual lawyer's opinion.
> Then AI arrived, and overnight, our engineering velocity jumped by roughly 3–8x.
X Doubt
This flies in the face of all available scientific evidence collected to date, which shows an average company-wide slowdown of 20-50%, depending on industry, codebase, and a number of other factors being likely.
Only about 2% of all devs show an increased velocity after 12+ months of using AI, and for almost all of them, their “improvements” stayed stubbornly in the single digits. Plus, for the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that over 90% of them would never be faster with AI than without.
Pretty much 98% of all companies using AI have seen no material RoI, and the vast majority of them have remained deep in the red.
Honestly, I call bullshit on any numbers like the ones stated above, and would strongly advise anyone else with healthy, non-indoctrinated scepticism to demand evidence such as analytics and observability reports.
> I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology.
And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil? Most of the western world punched Nazis on purpose 80 years ago… that doesn’t get to stop, because authoritarianism never goes away.
>In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made.
Wow. Just… wow. To destroy a life simply because of greed and because a person’s passion of fighting evil made you uncomfortable.
You need to understand you are very much the bad guy, here.
> And… this wasn’t immediately seen as being deeply unethical and downright evil?
Oh, these people know it's evil - from the second they suggest it. The personality types associated with SV leadership are simply wired for rationalising evil as a means to any business end. It's just implicitly accepted that it's an appropriate tool to be wielded.
You're the weird one who "just doesn't get it" if you push back. Push back hard enough and you'll quickly find yourself on the receiving end.
Except… science has shown this to be true. Even after a year-plus of work, less than 2% of devs work faster or more efficiently with AI than without it. And for almost 90% of the remainder, regression analysis strongly indicated that none of them would ever be better with AI than without it, regardless of how much practice they had with it.
These general results have come up with study after study over the last few years, with very consistent patterns. And with AI becoming more hallucinatory and downright wrong with every generation - about 60-80% of all responses with the latest models, depending on model being examined - the proportion of devs being able to wrestle AI into creating functionally viable work faster than they could to it themselves has also decreased slightly.
> Essentially, the amount of human labour needed to identify and correct these AI hallucinations is greater than the human labour saved by deploying the AI. As such, AI isn’t even a widely viable option for augmentation, let alone automation.
I have been saying variations of this across all social media platforms for the last six months, and every time I get savaged by tech bros. The pro-AI ideology absolutely insane.
As nice as this app is, a subscription for something that has zero online components, and therefore has no ongoing costs that need covering, is what goes a step too far for me.
I have zero issue with a one-time payment, and have no problem justifying paying for major version updates. But a subscription just because?? Sorry, no. IMO that’s Adobe-level scummy.
I know you need a revenue stream. But the only justification I can accept for a subscription is a compelling online component that has out-of-pocket costs for you, directly. Even if there is a profit margin involved.
It’s why I pay Bitwarden for family syncing of passwords, and Sophos for the dashboard that can let me monitor up to 10 machines across the family, and Apple for that data insurance package they call iCloud that can cover up to 6 family members. These all have compelling online components that cost the provider serious money and which need ongoing revenue to cover.
I appreciate the feedback. The subscription model covers ongoing development, bug fixes, OS compatibility updates, new features, and yes, my time maintaining and improving the app. I understand the preference for one-time purchases, and it's something I'm considering for future pricing options. That said, the subscription model allows me to provide continuous improvements rather than holding features hostage for paid upgrades. I respect that it's not for everyone, and I appreciate you giving the app a try!
I actually don’t know how many books I have. I only know that it is somewhere north of 3,000, as I had hit some sort of buffer overrun within the BookCrawler iOS app somewhere just shy of 3,000 volumes.
Back in 2015.
Now, it still works just fine as a reference app to tell me what I have obtained, it’s only search and stats that have done a thorough dirt nap. And the scanner function, which can’t seem to handle iOS phones with zoom lenses like the 5× of the iPhone 15. It seems to be stuck on the 5× zoom and mis-reads almost all UPC codes regardless of lighting, spawning bad entries. I’m forced to enter all ISBN codes by hand.
But the exportable database… has more than doubled since things went sideways in 2015. So yeah. If there is a linear relationship there…
reads article
Holy f**ck, that’s funny.
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