Similarly, most of the programmers skeptical about AI---me included---don't really do so out of a threat to a domain we've mastered. The problem is, models, to this day, need supervision so they understand requirements, so they know where to properly look for prior art, so that they "understand" the existing architecture. That includes you, Claude. Our kung fu has been six months away from obsolescence since roundabouts 2022 and in 2026 they even rehired a bunch of out-of-touch kung fu masters.

Eh? Martial arts has always been a mix of utility and cultural artifact.

Greco-Roman wrestling flourished in a/alongside of military utility. Greeks and Romans had swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Boxing also traces its history all the way back to the Greeks.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese arts developed in a society with, also, swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Notably these cultures often included weapons training ("kobudo" in Japanese) in their curriculum but that did not phase out the empty-handed aspect of the art.

Catch wrestling developed among sailors who would not be strangers to guns and rifles.

BJJ developed, well, today.

There has always been a component of sportsmanship and self-improvement in martial arts. Carmack misreads this introduction, methinks.

In Germany I don't think that counts. "Software Engineering" as a title isn't regulated (as kcexn is asking for). The German term "Softwareentwickler" more literally translates to "Software Developer" (as opposed to "Ingenieur") but I don't see companies having problems translating that in job posts and even contracts to "Software Engineer". I've never seen "Softwareingenieur" used tbf.

Getting into Germany as a Software Engineer (for app development) is also as relatively frictionless as it gets in comparison to more-traditional engineering fields.

Verdi is the German trade union so they have to make these kinds of distinctions about which professions they can represent. Don't quote me on this one but I think Verdi represents very little of the modern "app development" software engineers. I guess those who work for more traditional German industries like auto-manufacturing can fall under their umbrella.

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[LESS INACCURATE EDIT AND MY THOUGHTS IN LESS WORDS:]

In Germany "Ingenieur" (Engineer) is a loaded term with legal implications so "Software Engineer" is "Softwareentiwickler" (Software Developer) instead. But really this is an HR sleight-of-hand trick. At the end of the day, getting into professional Softwareentwicklung is the same in Germany as in elsewhere that calls it "Software Engineering" (and IMO is what kcexn was asking about anyway).

Anecdata time...

There was once a scrappy start-up who, like all scrappy start-ups, was taking on the heavyweight incumbent gorilla of the industry. They started poaching the small customers from the gorilla, just enough for the gorilla to notice. These customers often cited how "fast and lightweight" the start-up's platform was compared to the gorilla.

The claim wasn't really supported by Grafana. The numbers weren't bad; in fact they were very average. For some metrics, the gorilla was actually still the gold standard the scrappy start-up targeted. The engineers suspected "fast and lightweight" had more to do with the user experience (they had smoothly-animated loading screens) than actual server performance. Still, it's not a complaint so they took that as a win.

After a couple of years of steady growth poaching from the gorilla, they started getting bug reports of slow performance. The customers have been seeing more and more of the smooth loading screen animations and less of the data they actually need to work on. And this time, the claims were supported by Grafana! There was no way to massage the statistics to even claim the reports are outliers or to pass the blame on to the unreliable ISPs.

The problem, it turns out, was that they were sending emails as notifications for a bunch of user actions and at that point there were about 2-3 such user actions per minute. While they could async some of those, there were a bunch whose succeeding states assumed that the notifications have been sent.

After three weeks of profiling and going through the whole performance optimization playbook, the fix boiled down to a one-liner in SQLAlchemy that offloaded loading notification mailing lists to Postgres cursors rather than loading whole lists into memory in one go.

Moral of the story: no one is asking you to build a racecar but that doesn't mean performance is not table stakes. A good senior engineer knows just where the balance is to still deliver business value. That is the salary you are paying for.

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

Even if the authors died immediately after publication there is no way the copyright has expired.

"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.

From https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.

Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.

I was considering whether OP's complaint is an engineer's thing. My conclusion, based on my own experience is, the more your user base tends toward power-users/highly-skilled use cases, the more deterministic your search should be.

A random guy might try to look for a kid's novel series about wizards that sounds like "Happy Fathers". That's when you need Google-level fuzzy search to bridge that gap and suggest "Harry Potter". As a general search engine, Google encounters this a lot.

Same guy asks a librarian, the librarian would instantly know what he's talking about. The Librarian searches the catalog for "Harry Potter" but might misspell it "Harry Poter" or search for "the philosopher's stone" in a US catalog. These cases can be fairly covered by deterministic search methods/classic indexing.

I'd say close to 90% of my daily searches could be served with exact matching. The next 8-9% could be solved by a little more deterministic sophistication (e.g., edit distance, equivalence classes for synonyms). Then the last 1-2% is when I really need some fuzzy magic; mostly to give me an idea what to do with obscure programming-related problems.

Coaches get in the face of the officials already anyway. This just gives the action a chance at being productive rather than an opportunity to get a red card.

Yes, this is based on the derided review system of Olympic Taekwondo. It's horrible in a fight sport but football is a ball game; somebody tell Paredes and Paraguay please.

I ask in earnest. I'm not American. I know there's a huuugggee buzz on who gets to do the Superbowl half-time show. But they all look the same to me: overly-polished extravagant pop performances. That can be an insult or a compliment depending on your mood but I say that as a fact. That description applies to the WC half-time show too so I don't see what makes it bad. Maybe you can accuse it of being even more over-the-top and garishly extravagant but does that make it bad?

Bad Bunny's half-time show seems to be generally considered good. Well, he's a good performer definitely and performed his show well. But what makes that different from the universally-panned WC one?

For the record, Bad Bunny isn't even in my daily playlist. I do have Coldplay but Chris Martin was so peripheral to the WC spectacle I didn't even notice him during the live broadcast.

It feels to me there's something else merited here other than just the performance itself. Bad Bunny, given his background and off-stage activism, was largely seen as a political statement. The WC show just seems too foreign for the core non-Northern American market.

I watched the WC final in a noisy bar. During the halftime the bar had its own entertainment while a muted Justin Bieber playing his guitar emoted on the big screen. I've since watched it in Youtube and I still don't get the universal disdain for it. Maybe they should've called in a bunch of Eurovision performers?

If everyone did it, welcome to 1984 beyond Orwell's wildest imagination, where the Flock cameras have legs and look human. Who needs an elaborate entrapment operation when you can observe up close how someone twitches upon mention of Dear Leader's name?

You are thinking of a very shallow America's Funniest Home Videos scenario without considering that there is a lot of daily-life scenarios that rely on the assumption that you are not being filmed by some rando.

- In a lot of places where there is still stigma on various health issues, this kind of implicit privacy could be the difference between people seeking help or not.

- We give off a lot of small but probably "confidential" signals just because we can reasonably assume we are not being recorded. From simple allusions during casual conversation to maybe a quick still frame of someone's notes. What would've been an innocuous statement could become NDA violations when recorded at the fidelity usually reserved for deposition hearings.

- And speaking of innocuous, as anyone who's spent any length of time in the internet would know, it's so easy to take thirty seconds of a two-hour conversation out of context. Now you are giving everyone an eat-all-you-can buffet of your life to take out of context. Company valuations have been decided from less.

All in all, these perv glasses would make society more guarded and less open, and that in an age when people already have a hard time forming relationships.

Someone filming/shooting in a park with a kit 18-55mm lens is fine. Swap that with a bulky 300mm or more and you are bound to get some questions asked.

A content creator casually shooting content in a mall is fine but if you start interviewing people, aiming your camera directly at them, it's at least common courtesy if not legal requirement to ask for permission.

Personally speaking, I wouldn't mind someone wearing these creeper specs in public but if they talk to me or if we eat at the same table, I would expect the courtesy of them putting the glasses away.

Regarding (a): I know that AI funding came and went (i.e., there's no AI winter to speak of if there wasn't a hot summer of funding in the first place) but that funding, to my knowledge, came mostly from government grants, not investors seeking an IPO payday. They were in it for the military superiority (e.g., being able to decrypt Russian comms on the fly without need for a trained translator) which leads us to...

Regarding (b): Way I see it, AI advancements in the 70s and even the 2000s (when I first got into computers) or the big-data boom of the early 2010s (when I got into this industry) could not raise the existential crisis narrative of post-GPT3 companies because they were not generative[1] nor agentic. Post-GPT3 LLMs are the first class of AI agents/algorithms which could've credibly triggered this narrative.

(Not a judgment on whether the HF incident is true or not. Just the fact that we're even discussing this implies "credible trigger".)

Thinking about it, I guess jackb4040 is making a reference to the beginning of TFA but all that claims is that Microsoft invested more into OpenAI after they made similar claims about GPT2 but sorry I don't consider Microsoft as "investors in general"; as a big tech company/monopoly they are actually in the business of making moonshots one way or another in things that advance computing. I'm talking more about VC firms, who are maybe slightly more into investing in a future-profitable unicorn than advancing computing.

Sorry for babbling; I don't have my brevity flag on at the moment, among other human failings. All I'm saying is, at the time of GPT2, OpenAI was still cosplaying as a non-profit so it was hardly in the "general investor market".

[1] I mean, okay, we've had Mark V. Shaney, and No Man's Sky is a handful of years pre-GPT3 but, again, they could not sustain this kind of narrative at scale.

Can you elaborate/refresh my memory? IIRC before ChatGPT 3 there wasn't really an investor market for AI models, rather crypto. I remember playing with the likes of Stable Diffusion pre-ChatGPT 3 but only the likes of Altman and Musk were talking about AI too powerful to be controlled (which is notably the rationale of OpenAI's original charter); still investors in general were hardly invested at the time.

It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.

> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!

Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!

I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.

I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.

It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.

I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.

Amen! Code is never written in a vacuum. Code is never shaped only by engineering but by business and organizational compromises as well. I hate those guys who declare we absolutely must do sweeping changes to the codebase/architecture so that we are in line with the latest best practices after spending an hour with the codebase. As if the guys who spent the last 3+ years staring and building on said codebase didn't know any better (unless of course you were hired specifically because you ought to know better!).

Then I looked at the numbers.

TFA: $189M so far for 2026.

CNBC: $119M so far for 2024.

TFA has already surpassed the numbers for 2024! I don't know what to make of that other than a magnification of the ills in the American political system. And yeah, I'm sad crypto still has money even with all the snAIk oil going around. Turns out I don't really understand how money works at this scale.

Caveat lector: there's of course probably some explanation I missed. Like maybe we're counting firms that has double-dipped in crypto and AI.