Maintaining and updating your own hardware comes with so much operational overhead compared to magically spinning up and down resources as needed. I don’t think this really needs to be said.
It’s absolutely not a one time cost. Once you have it you need to hire people full time to maintain it and eventually upgrade it. Hardware fails constantly
I mean its fair to say that its deliberately on the nose. However, I would argue that despite being definitionally correct, Palantir still represents a misinterpretation by discarding the works in their whole. I brought it up because postmodern does correctly imply a reaction to what is "modern", but its also a body of work in its own right.
This is not to say that Tolkien's authorial intent is final, nor necessarily discernible, but we are obligated to examine the palantirs' presentation as not just a passive object with certain, defined qualities, but as devices that have their own consequential histories within the narrative. Thiel naming his company after a tool presented textually as fallible, misleading, and myopic (in addition to its obvious power) with ostensibly no desire to attach such connotations to the company requires, in my mind, at least a superficial reading. We can even disregard the fact that these were mostly tools for an evil opposed by Tolkien, and not make the (valid) argument that their presentation within the text is could be considered direct argument in opposition to their creation. I personally think that to build a company and name it after a work that argues against that company's mission/purpose requires misinterpretation of the reference material, both in terms of poor comprehension of metaphor and as a poor response to the text and the body of discourse that surrounds and infuses it.
Hosting a developer environment remotely that you SSH into is very common. That’s how you would approach working with a monorepo that has any serious size to it.
It seems that UBI arguments are all about "fairness". So it naturally should extend to other countries it seems. Otherwise you are just creating another greedy / protected group.
Of course people usually try to draw the UBI Venn diagram such that they are a net receiver of funds.
What would be absurd about a global UBI? It's amazing how fast people jump off the high horse of equality when you point out that on a global scale they are incredibly rich and privileged.
Equality to them means them getting more material goods, not them giving up more material goods.
It's about impracticality, not morality. It doesn't make feasible sense to fix the whole world's economy in one go. And we shouldn't let imperfection get in the way of progress.
It is hard to say "I want UBI because inequality" and then fail to recognize this.
What they are really saying is "I don't want anyone to be richer than I am but fine with people being poorer". So the default human position on things.
Atlassian is well positioned to release a coding agent. If they leverage the integration with the rest of their cloud ecosystem it could turn out to be a very cohesive dev loop.
What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.
Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.
However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.
I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.
Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.
For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.
It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.
If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?
I love Cline and Copilot. If you carefully specify your task, provide context for uncommon APIs, and keep the scope limited, then the results are often very good. It’s code completion for whole classes and methods or whole utility scripts for common use cases.
"If you asked a junior developer to refactor a rust program to be more idiomatic, how long would you expect that to take? Would you expect the work to compile on the first try?"
The purpose of giving that task to a junior dev isn't to get the task done, it's to teach them -- I will almost always be at least an order order of magnitude faster than a junior for any given task. I don't expect juniors to be similarly productive to me, I expect them to learn.
The parent comment also referred to a 'competent pair programmer', not a junior dev.
My point was that for the tasks that I wanted to use the LLM, frequently there was no amount of specificity that could help the model solve it -- I tried for a long time, and generally if the task wasn't obvious to me, the model generally could not solve it. I'd end up in a game of trying to do nondeterministic/fuzzy programming in English instead of just writing some code to solve the problem.
Again I agree that there is significant value here, because there is a ton of SWE work that is technically trivial, boring, and just eats up time. It's also super helpful as a natural-language info-lookup interface.
I (like a very large plurality, maybe even a majority, of devs) do not work for a consulting firm. There is no client.
I've done consulting work in the past, though. Any leader who does not take into account (at least to some degree) relative educational value of assignments when staffing projects is invariably a bad leader.
All work is training for a junior. In this context, the idea that you can't ethically train a junior "on a client's dime" is exactly equivalent to saying that you can't ever ethically staff juniors on a consulting project -- that's a ridiculous notion. The work is going to get done, but a junior obviously isn't going to be as fast as I am at any task.
What matters here is the communication overhead not how long between responses. If I’m indefinitely spending more time handholding a jr dev than they save me eventually I just fire em, same with code gen.
A big difference is that the jr. dev is learning compared to the AI who is stuck at whatever competence was baked in from the factory. You might be more patient with the jr if you saw positive signs that the handholding was paying off.
That was my point, though I may not have been clear.
Most people do get better over time, but for those who don’t (or LLM’s) it’s just a question of if their current skills are a net benefit.
I do expect future AI to improve. My expectation is it’s going to be a long slow slog just like with self driving cars etc, but novel approaches regularly turn extremely difficult problems into seemingly trivial exercises.
What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint "request for access" notifications in my email for some presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've opened it up to the entire org.
Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.
Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.
> If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.
They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
I would think policies should also be updated every X years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and losing data because of that.
Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.
You know tech savvy was not really a thing back then for the everyday uneducated person, right? You kind of had to have been a geek to have known this stuff. There are a number of dead-simple cloud solutions today, but you cannot just scold, say, WB for not using a company cloud back in checks Wikipedia 1993!
Ok but preserving media seems like a thing Warner Brothers should be really good at. Why did Warner Brothers have an everyday uneducated person in charge of archival?
Why would an archivist back then happen to know computers that intimately? I'd be surprised if the average archivist knew much more than how to do data entry... and I wouldn't even hold it against them if they happened not to know how to do data entry.
You don't need to be an expert in the technology to ask a few relevant questions like "where is the information stored?" and "what temperature and humidity does it prefer?" Of course WB is famously bad at storing film too so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, the typical setup with OneDrive in MS365, is that the overworked manager get’s an email when an employee account is deactivated. The manager has 90 days to search through their OneDrive and copy anything out that they think is needed, possibly to the central SharePoint or to their own OneDrive. I’m sure there are similar policies and procedures in place for enterprise dropbox, box.net, and Google Drive. So typically employee leaves and the manager never gets around to copying data out, 6-9 months later they need something that employee had, and yell at IT to recover it. IT laughs and laughs and then cries.
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