Context windows are a natural improvement, but new architectures are completely speculative and it’s unclear we can make any sort of predictable progress with new, better architectures. Most progress has been made on essentially the same architecture paradigms, although we did move from dense models to MoE at some point.
You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engineer or doctor in the future? What does it even mean to be the best engineer, and how do you test that?
Depends on the team — managing can be quite a bit more scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations for that role. You have broader ownership of technical outcomes over time, even aside from the extra responsibility for growing a team. Managers have all the responsibility of a senior engineer plus more. In that way manager feels to me like a clear promotion to me. Manager vs staff eng, maybe not though.
Management not being a promotion doesn’t mean that managers aren’t (usually—I’ve both been at equal and higher levels than my managers at times) higher levels than their reports. It means that switching to a management role from IC is never a promotion itself (ie always L6 -> M1 in Google/Meta levels) and it never comes with any difference in compensation.
I haven't been a manager, but my understanding is that the higher IC roles assume you're competent enough to do some management-like things if needed ("responsibility without control"), and I also assume that being a manager helps with compensation because they actually teach you how the review process works and let you into the calibration meetings.
I don’t agree with that though, plenty of places practice agile well. Maybe big corporations don’t practice it well, but startups often do agile correctly and understand the philosophy.
I think the primary benefit of LLMs for me is as an entrypoint into an area I know nothing about. For instance, if I’m building a new kind of system which I haven’t built before, then I’m missing lots of information about it — like what are the most common ways to approach this problem, is there academic research I should read, what are the common terms/paradigms/etc. For this kind of thing LLMs are good because they just need to be approximately correct to be useful, and they can also provide links to enough primary sources that you can verify what they say. It’s similar if I’m using a new library I haven’t used before, or something like that. I use LLMs much less for things that I am already an expert in.
Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing.
The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.
What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better you just don’t pay any mind to these negative things.
It’s probably also the case that being physically fit and healthy helps one think more clearly. Carlsen notably spends a lot of time on physical health in addition to prep.
Doesn’t that imply an interface is necessary though, so you can compile (and potentially release) the components separately? I don’t use .net but this sounds quite similar to pulling things into separate crates in Rust or different compilation units in C, which is frequently good practice.
Definitely that could imply the necessity of an interface, but often it's simply done, because everyone working in a project blindly follows an already established poor convention.
by "it's common in the .Net world" I mean that it seems to be an antipattern that's blindly followed. If there's only ever one implementation, it is the interface, imo
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