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RogerL
Joined 3,136 karma

  1. You assume they were talking about a single product. at my job there is essentially endless amounts of small tasks. We have many products and clients we have many internal needs, but can't really justify the human capital. Like I might write 20 to 50 Python scripts in a week just to visualize the output of my code. Dead boring stuff like making yet another matplotlib plot, simple stats, etc. Sometimes some simple animations. there is no monstrosity being built, this is not evidence of tagging on features or whatever you think must be happening, it's just a lot of work that doesn't justify paying a bay area principal engineer salary to do in the face of a board that thinks the path to riches is laying off the people actually making things and turning the screws on the remaining people struggling to keep up with the workflow.

    Work is finite, but there can be vastly more available than there are employees to do it for many reasons, not just my personal case.

  2. I grew up in the 70s. The hand wringing then was calculators. No one was going to be able to do math anymore! And then wrist watches with calculators came out. Everyone is going to cheat on exams, oh no!

    Everything turned out fine. Turns out you don't really need to be able to perform long division by hand. Sure, you should still understand the algorithm at some level, esp. if you work in STEM, but otherwise, not so much.

    There were losses. I recall my AP physics professors was one of the old school types (retired from industry to teach). He could find the answer to essentially any problem to about 1-2 digits of precision in his head nearly instantly. Sometimes he'd have to reach for his slide rule for harder things or to get a few more digits. Ain't no one that can do that now (for reasonable values of "no one"). And, it is a loss, in that he could catch errors nearly instantly. Good skill to have. A better skill is to be able to set up a problem for finite element analysis, write kernels for operations, find an analytic solution using Mathematica (we don't need to do integrals by hand anymore for the mot part), unleash R to validate your statistics, and so on. The latter are more valuable than the former, and so we willingly pay the cost. Our ability to crank out integrals isn't what it was, but our ability to crank out better jet engines, efficient cars, computer vision models has exploded. Worth the trade off.

    Recently watched an Alan Guth interview, and he made a throwaway comment, paraphrased: "I proved X in this book, well, Mathematica proved...". The point being that the proof was multiple pages per step, and while he could keep track of all the sub/superscripts and perform the Einstein sums on all the tensors correctly, why??? I'd rather he use his brain to think up new solutions to problems, not manipulate GR equations by hand.

    I'm ignoring AGI/singularity type events, just opining about the current tooling.

    Yah, the transition will be bumpy. But we will learn the skills we need for the new tools, and the old skills just won't matter as much. When they do, yah, it'll be a bit more painful, but so what, we gained so much efficiency we can afford the losses.

  3. The article and the press release it was derived from says nothing about "more efficient", just smaller.

    https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...

  4. I'm not a physicist but every definition of dark matter that I read says it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation hence it is invisible, and rocks are not that dark matter (wiki. NASA, etc)
  5. Hire, then train them for a long period of time? That is an apprenticeship. It's what they do in the trades already. There aren't enough slots (union or not).

    e.g. http://www.calapprenticeship.org/programs/electrician_appren...

    You need a diploma, a smattering of algebra, a driver's license, and the physical ability to do the work. Everything else you will be taught on the job, while being paid.

  6. The oil can coat the pasta, reducing the ability of the sauce to penetrate the pasta when you cook them together.
  7. Hard water will boil at a higher temperature, but it's only a degree or two.
  8. Or because their kid or dog is in the car. Or because they have difficulty walking. Or because they just want to decompress and scroll their phone or listen to the news for 10 minutes. Or they hate crowds. Or they are immune compromised and don't want to be mingling with a bunch of people around a counter. Or they have social anxiety. Or they have a cold and just don't feel like getting out of their car. Or they are expecting a call from the baby sitter. Or they are having a fight with their spouse which they don't want to export into the public.

    IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.

    Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.

  9. Go check out VxWorks or the like. only 20K a seat, build tools at a similar price, and then oh joy, runtime licenses required to deploy the sw you wrote.

    Which are reasonable prices when lives are at risk.

    Yes, I know RTOS are not general purpose, this is NOT apples to apples, but that is what that kind of reliability, testing, safety certification, etc. costs.

  10. My inbox is filled with never asked for sales pitches, most having no concept of what we do or what pain points we have. And I'm a principal IC, but still IC, so mostly wasted effort on their part. Every last email gets deleted unread after I report it as spam to our spam filters. I'm sure I've deleted at least one email that could have actually been something worth investigating, but who has the time for all that? And realistically, I know what my pain points are, we talk about them all the time and actively search for solutions, but budget, reluctance of decision makers, etc often gets in the way, or the solution is too expensive compared to the actual difficulties. Not that something revolutionary can't come along, but ya, its essentially all spam.

    I also do the same with anyone that cold emails or calls me - 99% look to be a waste of time. When we still worked in an office you'd hear the telephones ring across the office one by one, as the robocaller worked through the extensions. Many ended up turning the ringer off, because otherwise it is an onslaught that is far more disruptive than whatever pain point they might actually be able to solve. So "Get in front" of someone sounds good, but I would guess it is hard.

  11. > really hard to convince yourself to work 60 hour weeks

    Good!

  12. It's a life endeavor that you will never master. start at age 4 playing minuet in G, at age of 90 you'll still be learning new things. The music is beyond us, yet ourselves, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. All we can do is enjoy the ride.
  13. You also need selection, not just mutation (I know you are being silly, so am I)
  14. That's not the point, the point is the ordering is inverted, not that history shouldn't be learned.
  15. The tiniest amount of vacuum stops sound as abruptly as non transparent matter stops light. furthermore, there was no amount of sound which can overcome the vacuum, whereas enough photons at enough energy will destroy the matter in its path.

    edit: yes, an explosion will expel matter through a vacuum, so in some sense enough noise will travel through a vacuum, but you are probably not going to be complaining about the "noise" if you are showered with enough matter to hear it from a massive explosion as your sudden disassembly will (briefly) capture your full attention. Whereas light trivially crosses the universe, as well as through some matter.

  16. And that is true for the foreseeable future, which unfortunately, if my math is correct, is around 17 hours.

    In 2 (time units) we'll be doing computer analysis of lens distortion or something to try to suss out the AI. At which point it won't matter for the stock image use case, of course it matters for legal matters and such. And then in 1-2 more units we're going to need public/private key signing implemented in 'cameras of record', because detection will be practically, if not actually impossible.

    Is that 'unit' days or years? Dunno, but I bet it is a lot closer to the former.

  17. It's like a person in the 60s saying "computers will eat everything". Were they in every device at the time, in every home, on your wrist, in your pocket? No, capability wasn't quite there yet, but it would be. Today we get uncanny valley, but I mean today, as in there are images coming out that are far better than uncanny valley, and it is obvious to all that this is (at least very very likely)a surmountable problem in the very near future. I think if you can put what you want the photo to be in words, stock photos are largely (not entire) dead.

    "give me an elephant under a tree" "make it later in the afternoon". "not that late". "emphasize eyes just a scooch and make it look sad and pensive". "Not quite that much". "Clouds could be a bit whispier" Like you'd talk to a photographer, but with instant updates and no retorts like "great, are you going to pay me to camp out for days waiting for the clouds to move in the sky and then somehow hoping the elephant revisits this tree?"

    Beats scouring a huge catalog (which, sure, will have AI powered search, but still), and suddenly, it isn't stock anymore, it is very particular to your specific needs. Custom to your needs, faster than getting a stock photo, and so, so much cheaper.

  18. > having wealth is a social responsibility in itself

    Warren Buffet has said that every dollar he owns is an IOU that he owes to society - somebody worked hard, produced value, he is in custody of it for the time being, but it has to be paid back by him.

  19. It was "cooked up" by people like Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, et al, who I'm going to guess understand what is going on, and adopted by the rest of the field.

    https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.173/

  20. return [key, value]

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