So far in my career I have always had more requests coming in than implementations going out. If I can go 3 or 10 times faster, than I will still have plenty of work. Especially for the slew of ideas that are never even considered to put towards a dev, because it's already considered to be too low value to have it even be considered to be build. Or the ideas that are so far fetched they were never considered feasible. I am not worried work will dry up.
What I believe is going to be interesting is what happens when non-engineers adopt building with agentic AI. Maybe 70 or 80% of their needs will be met without anyone else directly involved. My suspicion is that it will just create more work: making those generated apps work in a trustworthy manner, giving the agents more access to build context and make decisions, turning those one off generated apps into something maintainable, etc.
Our public transportation infrastructure is so badly managed that many jobs will ask you if you have reliable transportation and fire you if you find yourself without it. If your car breaks here it's often not really a option to save up for a bit first.
The US is considered to be a flawed democracy for about 10 years now[1]. Europe, especially the powerful west, has the most healthy democracies.
It's absolutely not a given that the European democracies will survive, people here need to step up in strengthening it against illiberal forces as well, but it's in a much better starting position.
Example: in the Netherlands there was a government with an illiberal far right party (Wilder's PVV). They didn't achieve much, but there was a year of stagnation and the far right talking points have become even more normalized. Other democratic institutions, like judges had to be more on the defense. However, nothing fundamental is broken.
One flaw we have in Germany in particular is that the chancellor is allowed to stay in power indefinitely if people vote for that person, which potentially gives a lot of time to rebuild the society. It worked out with Merkel who is the anti-thesis of an authorization figure, but that might have been luck.
I don't know how resistant the German constitution and democracy is. I believe it's robust but that's also what people thought about the US with that "checks and balances" that turned out being fake for the most part.
General warrants (the sort of thing being done here) are explicitly listed as one of the things motivating independence from england in the declaration of independence.
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put the album on.
And I do see the cost as a feature, somewhat. It feels like I got something for my money, in a way that paying for a zip doesn't.
Vinyl is big, which makes for a nice display of album art. 50% of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. People play their convenience and high quality digital music, while displaying the vinyl albums as decorations.
I just released an album on cassette and definitely has _not_ poor audio quality. Anyway I remember a lot of releases with poor audio quality too, but this is more the problem of the production and not the cassette itself. All studio recordings back in the days were made with the same tape material, ferro oxid, sames as a Type I cassette.
Vinyl is nowhere near as inconvenient as tapes and sounds way better. And I say this as someone who used to lug around big bags of 12" records as a DJ! It's pretty annoying, but it's still better than having to rewind, and deal with the appalling durability of cassettes!
Nothing has managed to capture the mixtape model. A tangible object made with care you could give as a gift and was unique and valuable. CDs got close but people didn’t have the gear to make them until mp3s had arrived and overshadowed them. Plus CDs with handwritten tracklists didn’t feel as nice as tapes and blank CDs were invariably ugly.
Music as an object is a thing and playlists are in no way the same. You can’t even control the music on a playlist as it’s in the gift of the streamer.
I think the qualities of a cassette mentioned have clearly helped with the mixtape model. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't also a product of that particular era.
It certainly depends on geographical zones, too, but I remember people burning audio cds for quite a while, and taking them on the go with portable players. This was quite widespread before portable mp3 players became common.
Hell, where I grew up, cassettes were still in regular use until the end of the 90s, and mixtapes had grown increasingly rare.
The Dutch government just explicitly denied any foreign involvement, while at the same time acknowledging that a few years ago the export restrictions for ASML were implemented because of US involvement.
Tbh, I don't know what the truth is. I'm a Dutch citizen and what is happening now is unheard of. I don't know what the motivation is and it seems to have happened out of the blue. Maybe the motivation literally is protecting the European semiconductor industry.
I seriously doubt it is aimed against China. Europe is not looking for a trade war, especially now that the US is an unpredictable ally (if they still are) and basically the whole geopolitical situation is shifting. China is also not a topic for Dutch politicians, so it's not winning anyone votes.
Newly published court proceedings reveal that the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry and a U.S. government bureau that protects U.S. critical technology met in June to talk about Nexperia, the Dutch-based chipmaker owned by Chinese technology group Wingtech.
In the meeting, U.S. officials said the removal of the CEO, Wingtech founder Zhang Xuezheng, would be necessary to exempt the company from U.S. export controls.
You can read the judgment here: https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:GHAMS:2... It looks like the CEO engaged in self-dealing, tried to revoke the CFO's bank authorization to transfer it to other people and after the CLO argued that this was legally inadvisable, tried to fire the CFO, CLO and COO. It's not explained how the Ministry of Economic Affairs got involved, but presumably one of those people alerted them to what was going on.
I think your assumption that Dutch politicians defend the interests of Dutch citizens, if only for winning votes, is wrong. European politician respond first (or only?) to the US. As a EU citizen, I take no pleasure in saying this.
One thing that I don't see mentioned but that does bug me: data engineers often use a lot of Python and SQL, even the ones that have heavily adopted software engineering best practices. Yet both languages are not great for this.
Python is dynamically typed, which you can patch a bit with type hints, but it's still easy to go to production with incompatible types, leading to panics in prod. It's uncompiled nature also makes it very slow.
SQL is pretty much impossible to unit test, yet often you will end up with logic that you want to test. E.g. to optimize a query.
For SQL I don't have a solution. It's a 50 year old language that lacks a lot of features you would expect. It's also the defacto standard for database access.
For Python I would say that we should start adopting statically typed compiled languages. Rust has polars as dataframe package, but the language itself isn't that easy to pick up. Go is very easy to learn, but has no serious dataframe package, so you end up doing a lot of that work yourself in goroutines. Maybe there are better options out there.
When I was most recently at Google (2021-ish) my team owned a bunch of SQL Pipelines that had fairly effective SQL tests. Not my favorite thing to work on, but it was a productive way to transform data. There are lots of open source versions of the same idea, but I have yet to see them accompanied with ergonomic testing. Any recommendations or pointers to open source SQL testing frameworks?
Could you describe what made those tests effective? I just wrote some tools to write concise tests for some analytics queries, and some principles I stumbled on are:
- input data should be pseudorandom, so the chance of a test being “accidentally correct” is minimized
- you need a way to verify only part of the result set. Or, at the very least, a way to write tests so that if you add a column to the result set, your test doesn’t automatically break
In addition, I added CSV exports so you can verify the results by hand, and hot-reload for queries with CTEs — if you change a .sql file then it will immediately rerun each CTE incrementally and show you which ones’ output changed.
The two most helpful things with SQL are (1) always use set-based operations (never a cursor) and (2) break up your queries into smallest possible reusable chunks (CTEs). Sprinkle in tests to taste. Without some discipline SQL can get out of hand. This is what made dbt popular.
Can you share more detail? Every pain point I've seen can be handled by a more suitable/performant/flexible DB and/or software that makes working with SQL less painful.
Last time I worked with Databricks you could just create branches in their interface. PRs etc happened in your git provider, which for us was azure devops back then. We also managed some CI/CD.
You're still dealing with notebooks. Back then there was a tool to connect your IDE to a Databricks cluster. That got killed, not sure if they have something new.
In the Netherlands there was a brief spike of inflation, but that was due to rounding up, definitely not converting 1 NLG to 1 EUR.
The inflation did correct itself the years after (aka lower than usual). The perception with many people still is that the euro made everything more expensive, but that's only based on feelings. The inflation numbers tell a different story.
All EU countries are required to join the euro. This was agreed in the 1992 Maastricht treaty when the EU was founded (and the EMU, which was the starting point of the euro). Only Denmark and the UK negotiated an opt-out at the time.
Only problem is that there are no deadlines and it's up to the country to make a plan for adopting the euro.
Are you sure it's in Maastricht? I think the automatic requirements met -> has to join were added in the Lisbon treaty, Maastricht just established the requirements but didn't force joining, which is why some older eu countries which would meet them haven't joined yet.
what? the ECB is buying state bonds. maybe thats the reason the ECB is its own state, no authorities allowed to enter the building. wondering how they will audit the ECB. ahh right, they wont. :)
What I believe is going to be interesting is what happens when non-engineers adopt building with agentic AI. Maybe 70 or 80% of their needs will be met without anyone else directly involved. My suspicion is that it will just create more work: making those generated apps work in a trustworthy manner, giving the agents more access to build context and make decisions, turning those one off generated apps into something maintainable, etc.
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