I am good at software. It turns out that isn’t sufficient, or alternatively stated, you have to be good at a number of other things than just churning code, even good code. So to me, the combination of being good at software, understanding complexity and ability articulate it concisely and precisely, when combined with the latest and greatest LLMs, is magic. I know people want to examples of success, I wish I could share what we are working on, but it is unbelievable how much more productive our team is, and I promise, we are solving novel problems, some that have not been tackled yet, at least not in any meaningful way. And I am having time of my life doing what I love, coding. This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.
> This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.
Someone on the page already quoted Dijkstra, recommend reading that, he was correct.
Prompt engineering isn't engineering at all, it's throwing words at a wall to see which ones stick then declaring success if the outcome looks at all recognizable. That isn't actually success.
I like it, a test so bad, it just might work! I think the trick is not the equal sign, trick is to keep it so simple and small that most qualified people will not try to short circuit it.
This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.
That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.
There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.
Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.
Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.
Wrong question. There is no reason to link the sort of dirty money with the type of laundering business. The process of laundering, and need thereof, are universal to criminal industries.
I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.
They were trained in a large and not insignificant part on reddit content. You only need to look at the kind of advice reddit gives for any kind of relationship questions to know this is asking for trouble.
All the ones I've seen are terrible. But that's likely because I don't subscribe to them and they are large enough to occasionally show up on Reddit's front page. Anything that shows up on the front page is crap.
The point, though, is that the LLM likely has a larger exposure to the larger subreddits than the better smaller ones, and perhaps is more likely to reflect the attitudes of the larger ones.
I am a software engineer in his 50s, with stints in big tech, big bank and fintech with domain expertise in payments, risk, performance engineering, and data. In addition I have led global teams of hundreds of engineers with outcomes that have transformed multiple Fortune 500. I have been unemployed for a year and a half with no light at the end of the tunnel. Most of my network of similarly older professionals and C level executives has either retired or suffering similarly. Thankfully I am rich and still getting deferred executive compensation checks from multiple Fortune 500 companies but I am bored and think I have more to offer. I am working on a couple things to allay my boredom, we shall see if something comes of it.
As an engineer also in his 50s, I can relate, based on one concept: "wanting to work" versus "needing to work". I'm definitely not rich, but I could probably retire if I wanted to. I just don't want to. I want to work; I enjoy it. Many of my friends have retired, and they all seem bored to me. However, many/most people need to work to pay the rent, put kids through college, etc. I never really grasped this concept when I was younger, because, back then, it was all need to work.
I feel like I'm a better employee now, because I feel like I can be more honest. If a manager says something stupid, I feel totally comfortable checking them on it. When I was younger that wasn't the case. I was always nervous about retribution. However, there's a flip-side to this: a lot of managers don't like to be checked. Also, there's exploitability. When I was younger, I never said no to any proposed work, regardless of how it impacted my "personal time". Now, my attitude is, "Work this weekend? Nope. Get a junior to do that. I'm going surfing this weekend." LOL
Have a good friend, a 68yo guy, with grown-up kids (as in having their own families, houses, careers, etc), just happily hacking away in SQL, Python, building dashboards in PowerBI, learning AWS and bunch of other stuff, as a consultant. He says he'd be bored out of his mind just sitting at home.
Who says you can't have role models in your 50s? :)
One of the _many_ reasons job statistics of all kinds is completely useless. According to these numbers you (and I as I was looking for a job for 1.5 years myself recently) are happily retired (according to analysis of employment figures that I read from time to time). Hence, "nobody wants to work" and all that.
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