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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • In my personal experience given that’s how I general manage to shortcut a lot of labour intensive intellectual tasks, using intuition to guess possible answers/results and then working backwards from them to determine which one is right and even prove it, is generally faster (I guess how often it’s so depends on how good one’s intuition is in a given field, which in turn correlates with experience in it) because it’s usually faster to show that a result is correct than to arrive at it (and if it’s not, you just do it the old fashion way).

    That said, it’s far from guaranteed faster and for those things with more than one solution might yield working but sub-optimal ones.

    Further, merelly just the intuition step does not yield a result that can be trusted without validation.

    Maybe by being used as intuition is in this process, LLMs can help accelerate the search for results in subjects one has not enough experience in to have good intuition on but has enough experience (or there are ways or tools to do it inherent to that domain) to do the “validation of possible results” part.




  • As I explained somebody else the other day, software development follows a 90/10 rule in that 90% of the work that needs doing is in the last 10% of the result and these guys have been stuck for years at the “almost there” stage.

    It’s perfectly possible to hack your way for the first easy 90% of the result but that software development “method” won’t get you up to the 99.999% levels of reliability (or whatever number of nines the regulations demand) needed for a FSD system to be certified as autonomous.

    So no amount of people showing full self drive working without problems sometimes or even most of the time (or as you say, “practically”) will show that Testla has the capability of doing the last 10% (which, remember, is most of the work), whilst them having been stuck at pretty much the current level for years is a good indication that they’re probably stuck down a dead-end that will never lead to something that can achieve the necessary reliability to be certified as an autonomous system.

    Also, in my professional opinion as a very senior software engineer, looking from the outside and judging by many software and UI design choices in their vehicles, they’re unlikelly to actually be competent enough to pull it off and seem to be following a Tech Startup model (and I can tell you from experience in that Industry and others, that Startups are usually amateur hour, every hour of the day, every day of the week, every week of the year compared to all of the rest) hence me mentioning above the possibility that they’ve might have “hacked” (i.e. mainly gone at it by trial and error) their way up the first 90%.


  • They value the job getting done efficiently with the minimum amount of confusion and risk, which is what good senior types will do and enable others to do (when doing something big or new, a team with only more junior types will fall into every pitfall and end up in every programming dead-end imaginable, but much less so if there’s a senior person around, mainly because such people already went through similar things and often recognize certain kinds of potential problems before they’re actual problems)

    That said, plenty of managers in plenty of companies often don’t know what they have until they lose it, and I expect B2C companies and larger B2C - which as you point out are mainly Brand driven - are less likely to value predictable delivery which is much closer to what’s actually needed on the first release than smaller B2B, consultancies or in-house development were it’s a lot harder to shove inadequate shit out and then convince the paying customers or the business side (if doing in-house development) that’s what they want.

    Certainly that’s my own experience.

    IMHO, as long as the senior types in these companies aren’t fixated in staying in B2C, they’ll have no problem finding new jobs and may even enjoy it more, so as I wrote in the previous post, it’s easier for them to leave.


  • Senior professionals in high demand area are very hard to find and hire - when I worked as a freelance very senior software designer-developer some years ago were I was paid big bucks for it, in most of my contracts they had ended up hiring an expensive freelancer like me because the company simply could not find anybody with that level of seniority willing to either become a permanent employee or move jobs (it’s funny ´cause they almost invariably though it was temporary and they would find somebody and then generally I ended up working 2 years or so for them and eventually I would choose to leave because I was getting bored).

    These people are also older and have families, not naive young men that will work crazy hours and take any shit.

    This is IT, not some kind of early 20th century industry filled with employees for life who have “seniority” because merelly of how long they’ve working in the same company: they’re senior in the sence of their domain expertise being very advanced, not in the sense of being old (though such expertise usually requires one to be older because it takes time to accumulate, being older does not guarantee such expertise and always working for the same company actually makes it harder to keep on evolving as a domain expert into the most senior levels because all you know is one way of doing things)

    So it makes a lot more sense to me that the executives in these companies which have a tradition of over-exploiting bright young naive techies, didn’t account for their most experienced staff (who are not only are past the age and insecurity about their skills that they will simply lie down and take shit but can also much more easilly find a job somewhere else than the less experienced ones) not just taking it and getting used to it and instead endind up prompted by these RTO policies to start looking for something else and eventually leave because, I repeat, it’s much more easy for them to find a place to leave to.


  • Yeah, I found it wierd too when I started designing PCBs (as hobby) that “mill” actually stood for thousanth of an inch.

    Probably for historical reasons, there are tons of things in the older domains within electronics that are based on inches rather than metric units: for example the spacing between the legs of a microchip in the older chip package formats (so called DIP, the ones with legs that go into holes) is exactly 0.1"

    The sizes in more modern electronics isn’t usually based on inches anymore, but circuit boards are old tech (even if done with new materials) so there are still a number of measures in there which are based on inches.



  • Copyright is an artificial, government given Monopoly.

    Market Mechanisms don’t work when faced with a Monopoly or work badly in situations distorted by the presence of a Monopoly (which is more this case, since Stack Overflow has a monopoly in the reproduction of each post in that website but the same user could post the same answer elsewhere thus creating an equivalent work).

    Pretty much in every situation where Intellectual Property is involved you see the market failing miserably: just notice the current situation with streaming services which would be completelly different if there was no copyright and hence no possibility of exclusivity of distribution of any titles (and hence streaming services would have to compete in terms of quality of service).

    The idea that the Free Market is something that works everywhere (or even in most cases) is Politically-driven Magic thinking, not Economics.