I tend to think people shit on Musk more than they should, but holy shit does it bug me when a CEO talks about engineering problems with such bravado.

I agree. I think we elevated Computer Science’s importance early on in the industry, and that has stuck around. If you’re a University researcher trying to make a better compression algorithm or whatever, then yeah you’ve got a lot of overlap with mathematicians. But if you’re out in the industry building CRUD apps to fit some business use case, all that theory isn’t going to matter much in your day to day.

It’s still just one of those mostly-bureaucratic hurdles where you need a CS degree to get your first job, and you need to be good at math to get the CS degree.

That said, there are definitely crucial moments where regular projects can still hit scalability boundaries, and a solid understanding of math and CS fundamentals can get you through that. Every single developer doesn’t need to know that stuff, but it’s occasionally good to have access to somebody who does.

It doesn’t matter what browser you’re using. Everything Google was tracking here is the stuff all browsers send in incognito mode. This lawsuit was totally frivolous

Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above — but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview — we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf.

Yeah my company shot itself in the foot by replacing technical interviews with an online test and hiring a bunch of cheaters. After a while we started doing a zoom interview where we’d go over the code they supposedly wrote and ask them to explain it to us. Even that simple step made it obvious who had or hadn’t actually written the code they were talking about. I’m pretty sure a few candidates had somebody talking in one ear and/or typing to them on a separate screen.

Car manufacturers should get out of the dashboard design business. Just have an API standard for devices to control the car, and a USB port for users to plug in whichever device works best for them. You want a bunch of physical buttons? Cool, go down to AutoZone and buy a button panel that matches your needs. You want a big screen with carplay and a bunch of widgets? Mount your old iPad there.

The regulatory side would be the hard part. Devices would have to meet some safety standards and the car would have to refuse to drive unless an approved dashboard was connected, but it could be done.

Software receives update. INTERNET PANICS

Looks like lots of people’s year end bonuses were contingent on them releasing something related to AI by the end of the year.

I just want a game where I get to name my character after myself and the voice-acted NPCs use AI to dub my name into their lines instead of awkwardly avoiding using names.

I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.

Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.

Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more

This is one of the things I talk about when people ask what the difference is between junior and senior developers.

A lot of security is just box-checking. A lot of it is hypothetical and relies on attackers exploiting a chain of multiple bugs that they probably won’t ever find…. But you still gotta fix it.

There’s no point in being so proud of your code and dismissing security concerns because you’re arrogant enough to think it can’t happen to you. Just learn to fix it and move on with your life.

famously lack class consciousness

How much money do you suppose the average OpenAI employee makes? What class do you imagine they’re part of?

Social media is not to blame. The people using it are.

Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla’s addresses in Sweden.

It seems troubling that there aren’t regulations in place requiring postal workers to deliver mail indiscriminately.

What if the postal union decided not to deliver mail-in ballots they thought might support a policy they disagreed with, for example?

I use a “real name” domain. My last name ends in the letters “in”, so I bought a .in domain, such that the domain name is my last name with a dot in it.

Can’t honestly recommend that approach. It’s a cute gimmick, but when non-technical people ask for your email address and it doesn’t end in a TLD they recognize, their heads explode. I usually give out my gmail address.

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Didn’t Facebook try that for a while too?

Is it the employer’s responsibility to determine that somebody is or is not a spy? Like the scam here was to do the actual job and send money back, not to steal company information etc. companies have legal obligations to make sure people are authorized to work in the US etc, but the government sets those standards. If you’ve got convincing enough paperwork, it’s the governments job to enforce this stuff, not the employer.

That said, I’ve interviewed several remote people who were clearly using fake identities and also clearly didn’t have the skills for the job. Seems obvious their scam was to just collect a paycheck doing nothing, so if that’s the same group, then the employers bear some fault for hiring unqualified people… but on the other hand if the North Koreans were actually doing the jobs they were paid for, no reason the company should care.

Way too many other meetings. Meetings all the time.

There was a nice period where we had 2 meetings a week. One team meeting, then one social happy hour meeting with just the devs and no manager. (Mostly so we could complain about the manager, but general social bonding also). We also did plenty of ad-hoc meetings as needed, but generally the two regularly scheduled ones struck a good balance of getting things done without wasting time.

In hindsight, that manager could be a difficult person to work with, but the overall balance of trade-offs was way better with him than it is now. Very few, very efficient meetings, were one of the positive tradeoffs for sure.

How much does your SDK do? If it’s just wrapping calls to an HTTP API, use something like OpenAPI / Swagger to document the API, then auto-generate client libraries based on the OpenAPI specs.

Then if you add any language-specific niceties on top of the auto-generated code (i.e. accessor functions to set up user credentials etc) you have to write tests for those parts in that particular language. But the bulk of the API you can test in whichever language you prefer, then just assume the code generator is doing its job and creating a compatible API in the other languages.