There’s no way I’d have learnt everything I know now about software in today’s environment. So much of software development - debugging techniques, architectural decisions, structuring data etc is learned through trial and error. As the models get better is becoming easier and easier to just not look too closely at their output. I suspect it’s human nature.

Right now AI can probably do the buying part, but seems to be absolutely no where near the curation part. Maybe that’s a good thing for humans, so I’m not too fussed.

There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.

Meanwhile in x86 land you can just download a distro and boot it. Secure boot works out of the box. It's night and day.

They didn't do any interesting tests. What about brownouts, voltage ripples, timing the reset signal to see if there's any critical moments in the update process, corrupted update files, high EMC environment etc etc. That would be interesting.

I think the article is an advert for a testing platform that enables automating this sort of test. But weirdly they don't show how their platform does the automating, so it just looks like they're really pleased with themselves for doing really basic engineering.

I bounced around between Windows and Linux on my personal computers for the last 20 years. Generally I'd run Linux until something died or I needed Windows, and I'd return for a bit. I've been exclusively using Linux since 2019 or so. I don't think I'm going back.

When I worked on satellites we had some electronics which used a radiation hardened FPGA which cost something like $500k per chip. Carrying that around was nerve wracking.

The goal is that the water in the basin is the correct temperature, not the stream filling it - which means you need to compensate every time based on how much cold is already there before the hot water arrives. And that varies seasonally.

The time it takes for hot water to arrive tends to be a big proportion of the total time the tap is running, so you actually don't want controlled 40C water once hot water arrives. Perhaps if you had instant hot water, this would be useful.

I found it quite interesting. The guy isn't going to start a company around it. United aren't going to drop what they're doing. But now more people know about scikit-decide and that is a good outcome.

Rolling your own crypto is considered bad practice because there are countless battle proven open source alternatives. Where are the open source alternatives for aircraft route optimisation that the article could talk about instead? And it would be a totally different article if it was talking about how to use them. This is an article about using optimisation tools to target a specific problem. Aircraft routing is just the example.

Yeah, I can go and buy a pair of black Nikes in any shop today. But even though they make lots of variety, they never seem to make it in enough volume that I can buy it. I'm not interested in being a collector - I just want shoes that aren't black, white or grey.

So I shoes from companies that don't have as much weird hype around them.

This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.

However, many more people are "OK" at writing. But what their writing conveys is personality. Every comment here is written by someone who may not have grammatically perfect writing, but their writing conveys how they talk and think. It conveys what they think is important, and what they brush over. It conveys how much they care about the topic being discussed. Behind each comment is a person. Online forums and discussions are, at their heart, a shared experience of humanity.

LLMs write consistently in the same personality. If your writing is filtered through an LLM, your personality is stripped out. Unless the idea being conveyed is particularly novel or interesting, you might as well not have bothered. Imagine a niche forum where everyone discussing things was speaking through an LLM. It would be BORING.

A real lesson in how not to treat your customers. I would probably still be paying for it if they'd applied the new limits more softly.

This is a different problem. If a candidate said "I don't want to run the code you send me" it might be a good opportunity to talk through what it does. Maybe I'd set up a VM for them in the cloud, or we could find a mutually acceptable solution. If a candidate says "I don't own a general purpose computing device" then I would really be questioning that candidates interest in computers, and therefore ability to develop and test software for them.

> Why do you think the job posting doesn't explicitly mention "owning a PC" as a requirement?

The job description also doesn't say "owns clean clothes", but how the candidate presents themselves is certainly a consideration when hiring.

I'm sure there are outliers, but given the low cost of used ex-corporate laptops in the western world, and presumably the candidate's interest in computers and software development, it's a fairly low bar to expect a candidate to have some sort of PC (laptop, desktop, Linux, Windows, Mac - whatever). I wouldn't expect it to be modern or expensive (I do this for a job and barely spend any money on computers these days), but I'd be really surprised if a candidate had nothing available.