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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I don’t think gate keeping engineering is bullshit, software or otherwise. In fact I think it is one of the few eminently important things to gatekeep.

    If computer systems have peoples lives depending on them, having accredited engineers that may be part of a chain of liability for their mistakes is a potentially life saving measure. It provides increased guarantee that someone will be held responsible, be it the firm, or in the case of bankruptcy, the individual engineer.

    This provides a significant incentive to only sign off on work that meets all relevant safety criteria.

    I’m not sure if that’s how it works in software engineering, but it certainly should.




  • Makes me think of a trend in FTP gaming, where there was a correlation between play time and $ spent, so gaming companies would try and optimise for time played. They’d psychologically manipulate their players to spend more time in game with daily quests, battle passes, etc, all in an effort to raise revenues.

    What they didn’t realise was that players spent time in game because it was fun, and they bought mtx because they enjoyed the game and wanted it to succeed. Optimising for play time had the opposite effect, and made the game a chore. Instead of raising revenues, they actually dropped.

    This is why you always have to be careful when chasing metrics. If you pick wrong, it can have the opposite effect that you want.


  • Replace AI in your argument with industrial machinery, and you’ll get your answer. People have always had similar concerns about automation. There are some problems, but it isn’t with the technology itself.

    The first problem is the concentration of wealth. Societal automation efforts need to start to be viewed as something belonging to everyone, and the profits generated need to go back in to supporting society. This’ll need to be solved to move forward peacefully.

    The second problem is failure to deal with externalities. The true cost of automation needs to be accounted for from cradle to grave including all externalities. This means the pollution caused by LLM energy use needs to be a part of the cost of running the LLM, for example.






  • Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.

    So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.






  • As a vegan, you’re absolutely right. A lot of people think the hard part is giving up meat or dairy or eggs, but it’s not. The hard part is dealing with the social implications. Explaining to your friends you aren’t willing to eat with them when they’re doing something you find thoroughly wrong. Having your mom disappointed you won’t eat her cooking.

    You have to be willing, at least somewhat, to pay the cost of maintaining your convictions, and nobody ever tells you that when you start.

    Social change is hard, and it takes time. But so many have already blazed a much harder path than I’ve had to endure, and every time someone else gets on board it makes it easier.

    Doing the right thing is rarely the easiest thing.