I choose every single job according to my values. I'd easily pick jobs where I earn less solely due to the company operating on ethical grounds. I did that throughout both of my careers (retail & tech) and will continue to do so.
Easiest choice of my life. How can one live with themselves knowing you fuck over people?
I see, I go the VPS route as well atm.
I was just wondering about apps that might outscale a VPS but probably I can just connect application nodes via multiple VPS, afaik Elixir makes that pretty manageable.
The goal is to eradicate the common man. Turns out you dont need a lot of energy, food, water, space if there aren't 8 billion humans to supply. It's the tech billionaires dream, replacing humans with robotic servants. Corporations do not care about the common man.
I can choose whatever stack I see fitting. Our current app runs on an old Laravel version and an old Vue version. Its a monolith. Privately I have built microservices too, but this architecture only really makes sense with bigger teams.
I have spent about 70% if 2025 learning Elixir and I'd love building some real life things with it.
> A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.
I am a solo developer at a startup and at some point I'd like to be able to develop a full software product on my own, that entails code and infrastructure. My apps right now were all B2B apps which worked perfectly fine. The "biggest" app I've built was a cashless app for a festival with ~6k visitors and that went perfectly fine with a single server.
I never worked in an environment where infrastructure was handled by a dedicated person.
Ill take this advice to heart once I work for bigger companies again though.
> There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it.
Any sources on that? Except for some big tech companies I dont see that happening at all. While not empirical most devs I know try to avoid it like the plague. I cant imagine that many devs actually jumped on the hype train to replace themselves...
This is what I also see. AI is used sparingly. Mostly for information lookup and autocomplete. It's just not good enough for other things. I could use it to write code if I really babysit it and triple check everything it does? Cool cool, maybe sometime later.
Who does typical code sweat shops churning out one smallish app at a time and quickly moving on? Certainly not your typical company-hired permanent dev, they (us) drown in tons of complex legacy code that keeps working for past 10-20 years and company sees no reason to throw it away.
Those folks that do churn out such apps, for them its great & horrible long term. For folks like me development is maybe 10% of my work, and by far the best part - creative, problem-solving, stimulating, actually learning myself. Why would I want to mildly optimize that 10% and loose all the good stuff, while speed wouldn't visibly even improve?
To really improve speed in bigger orgs, the change would have to happen in processes, office politics, management priorities and so on. No help of llms there, if anything trend-chasing managers just introduce more chaos with negative consequences.
Nice concept, why flask though? Just for iteration speed? Because Python in almost 2026 is probably one of the worst choices for a web server, right after Javascript...
So quick iterations and rebuild once the SaaS has to scale I guess?
If you want to validate a product or run with a few K users (which I think this is helping), I really think that flask is a proven WS framework that just works.
Python is having a moment right now, between the AI ecosystem, Astral tooling and a huge talent pool. I think calling it the worst choice is a stretch :)
The real question is not raw speed. It's how fast you ship, how many users you need before performance matters and whether you actually own your stack. Most modern solutions push you toward third party auth. This gives you full self hosted auth out of the box.
For 99% of the SaaS teams, low latency becomes an issue later unless the product itself needs to be catering with that feature. Focus with kits like this is to get everything running on day 0.
Its not about low latency but memory consumption too. If you have unlimited money to throw at Fly.io or AWS its no issue sure, but other than that you might wanna be mindful with the resources you waste due to using the wrong tool for the problem.
If your app goes viral for some reason and has to scale within hours its not easy to rebuild for performance in that timeframe. Then if u use stuff like AWS and your app has a shit payment model that allows free tier users to just waste resources, good luck paying off that invoice.
Also it's not fun to play catch-up due to performance issues, because popularity will trigger competition from other corporations and they are unlikely to pick dynamic languages with reputation issues regarding things like latency.
Whether the information in the paper can be trusted is an entirely separate concern.
Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.
You are totally correct that hallucinated citations do not invalidate the paper. The paper sans citations might be great too (I mean the LLM could generate great stuff, it's possible).
But the author(s) of the paper is almost by definition a bad scientist (or whatever field they are in). When a researcher writes a paper for publication, if they're not expected to write the thing themselves, at least they should be responsible for checking the accuracy of the contents, and citations are part of the paper...
Problem is that most ML papers today are not independently verifiable proofs - in most, you have to trust the scientist didn't fraudulently produce their results.
There is so much BS being submitted to conferences and decreasing the amount of BS they see would result in less skimpy reviews and also less apathy
Not really true nowadays. Stuff in whitepapers needs to be verifiable which is kinda difficult with hallucinations.
Whether the students directly used LLMs or just read content online that was produced with them and cited after just shows how difficult these things made gathering information that's verifiable.
> and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June:
Yea nah not worth reading as its just advertisement.
People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]". People cant accept that the issues they have might just be not special at all and are mere human issues all of us have. Its the result of aggressive sensationalism and the desire to stand out from the crowd.
Yeah, of course. When a "normal" person asks for a reasonable accommodation--like being able to wear a smooth cotton polo alternative they bought with their own money rather than the piqué fabric one assigned by the company--they get "wow you want to be so special and unique, no you need to wear the shirt assigned by the company and get over it." Is it any surprise that someone would want to go get an autism diagnosis or whatever else so they can... just wear the damn shirt that doesn't make them half-grimace at all the customers?
They're going to be accused of wanting the special and unique stamp in either case, but at least in the second one they can feel somewhat comfortable.
People will, of course, conjure up an unreasonable accommodation (in an attempt to paint all accommodations as unreasonable) in their head to try to justify why this sort of request can't be accommodated, which just increases the fuel for the desire to get the autism diagnosis.
Put another way, if people were a little more accepting, less only-slightly-weird people would be seeking these diagnoses.
> People nowadays are just desperate to have a diagnosis. Everybody wants to be special and unique
I've never managed to understand this when it comes to autism. Autism used to be considered something as extreme as a severe disability (e.g. Rain Man), and latterly with the inclusion of Asperger's into the spectrum, at the very least a collection of undesirable behavioural characteristics. Do people really want to be diagnosed with something wrong with them, or has the perception of autism shifted to at least neutral (if not positive)?
I think it's useful to look at the alternative. It is still socially acceptable, even among progressives, to viciously mock people who are socially awkward and simply write them off as undeserving of help. At least with autism many people extend some degree of sympathy and willingness to help.
At the risk of offending some people, I think it's similar to why people lie about their dog being a "service dog".
It may genuinely be that their dog is their emotional support, but it's ultimately a bit of selfishness and wanting to be treated preferentially in a world that feels crowded and rigid.
> Everybody wants to be special and unique, everybody wants a stamp on their forehead that says "I have [x]" "I am [x]".
Spend a moderate amount of time with some humans-- e.g., war veterans-- and you'll find that denial of a diagnosis is common enough to trivially disprove this statement.
Upon realizing "I just have anxiety" and there's "nothing wrong with me" it initially reduced my anxiety... then I wondered why I'm so fixated on some mirage of "normal" and my anxiety flared up again thinking about it way too much.
Anxiety with intrusive and obsessive thoughts is definitely a real phenomena, but nowadays it's just a sign I'm getting fussy and need a break or a nap.
People are desperate for an identity. It has always been that people would latch on to things that seem fitting for them - maybe they put a lot of stock in their identity as a soldier, or as a fan of a band, or maybe as a member of a group like skateboarders. And, interestingly, most of these historic manifestations also have an aspect of "stamp on their forehead advertising their identity" - patches, shirts, other identifying aesthetics from their community.
I think it's less a result of a desire to be special and more a result of the way that late stage capitalism will throw away anyone who doesn't fit into its narrow mold of what makes an "ideal employee". When only a small number of career paths provide a good quality of life and employeers can fire people at will, then any divergence from the ideal becomes a disability.
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