ericmcer

3 ms·

1.
by ericmcer 7d ago
One annoying part about all this is that there are basic abstractions (model, harness, classic networking terms) that would make all these behaviors quantifiable to a relatively competent software eng. Instead it feels like they generate j
2.
by ericmcer 7d ago
Anthropic published an article about changes over time in how long it took engineers to approve AI code. Basically the longer an engineer uses AI the faster they start approving it's code changes. I don't know if it is laziness or
3.
by ericmcer 9d ago
That has been a part of post mortems everywhere I work, there was never a name for it though. Just someone would say: “how do we prevent this in the future?” which usually spawns a few tasks that the person who caused the issue or others wi
4.
by ericmcer 12d ago
It might have more to do with legacy files than that being the best setup they could find. They probably have tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? of 3D files at this point, organizing, reusing, composing all those parts is necessary u
5.
by ericmcer 12d ago
I always wondered if this was as simple as reforming the insurance companies, or if the entire healthcare industry needed to be reworked. >> Medicare for All would prevent an estimated 68,000 unnecessary deaths a year. Are there docto
6.
by ericmcer 13d ago
The tooling for industrial farming is reliable on the scale of millions though, and the same for any other innovation that has replaced older ways of working. AI is in a weird place because it is not 100% reliable, and we do not know if it
7.
by ericmcer 15d ago
Well yeah it conditions you to turn towards it anytime you hit a roadblock. It is in a precarious state right now where it is too good not to leverage but will bite you if you get sloppy. I still write things by hand sometimes because it is
8.
by ericmcer 15d ago
I am wondering how this will effect other industries more. We are pretty flexible as software engineers because our skillset needs to constantly evolve. For a lawyer or radiologist or anyone who has been able to do the same thing every day
9.
by ericmcer 15d ago
I totally agree with you, it is important for people to understand that a medical doctor does not really care if you can walk a mile without pain, but it is way too nuanced to track quality of life changes across a large population. We woul
10.
by ericmcer 16d ago
Yeah I just scheduled a technical and they told me it would be leetcode style. The company I interviewed for directly before was AI only, just prompt and review no coding allowed. Fun time to prep
11.
by ericmcer 17d ago
I thought this was some weird satire after reading your first two paragraphs. If you want to convince people of your authority on a topic saying things like: "Nobody's an expert on AI more than me and basically all my friends.&quo
12.
by ericmcer 19d ago
"Another skill is a communications analysis skill" It is interesting how people delineate what is a "skill". A 50 word prompt can be called a skill. This process you are describing sounds like it is highly authed and pol
13.
by ericmcer 21d ago
I saw a video of a guy in his 50s living in a small city in Vietnam. He claimed $800/mo was more than enough, and $1000/mo would let him live lavishly. He just did the math and as soon as his predicted months of life left * 1000 &
14.
by ericmcer 21d ago
That is a nice list for someone in their 20s with no responsibilities. Once you get a partner, kids, elderly parents, pets, mortgage, etc. you won't be worrying about your needs anymore trust me.
15.
by ericmcer 22d ago
I had the exact same description, like verbatim minus coffee and sugar for someone born in 1809.
16.
by ericmcer 23d ago
My paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone str
17.
by ericmcer 27d ago
More like timing. White guy coming out of college in the late 80s/90s and wanting to get into tech was a rarely opportune hand. As soon as I read "just redo your career every 2 years" I knew exactly what time period he was 22
18.
by ericmcer 28d ago
They are only good in the context of the engineer guiding them. I really can’t imagine what would happen if I didn’t manually intervene sometimes and just kept prompting it for the new behavior I wanted.
19.
by ericmcer 1mo ago
Good point, the endless growth means comical amounts of money at the top. It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.
20.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
All of these conversational AIs should either confidently detect a users intent or apologize and offer to forward call to a real person. LLMs perform pretty poorly when you start try to restrict them too much (e.g. detect intents and contro
21.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
Is there a video of this working? Doing STT -> LLM -> TTS seems like a pretty straightforward problem until you start using it.
22.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
Sometimes it feels like the more someone has memorized all the little acronyms and jargon and principals around programming the worse they are as an engineer. I worked with a guy who would constantly drop niche jargon and quotes from famous
23.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
My experience as well, it is too fond of abstractions and will constantly spin up functions like: isUserAdmin(){return user.isAdmin} which look nice on a surface level but obfuscates real understanding of the code and the actual data struct
24.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
if anything they are even more tight fisted because every penny is theirs. publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.
25.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
I used to access locked floors in my old office building by using these algos. Just ride to the floor I have access too, stay in while the doors close, and it would take me to a random floor. Push open door and voila I was on some random co
26.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
ingredients aside, coffee tastes somewhat natural whereas most energy drinks taste like liquid sweet tarts. I have never had one and felt remotely like it might be healthy. You are also cutting out preservatives, additives, sucralose, dyes
27.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
Agree, the best part of writing by hand for me is that I can do it anywhere and anytime. Randomly during a hike or laying outside in my backyard, small notebook + pen is easy. Fountain pen + fancy paper sounds like I am tied to a desk again
28.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
I feel this, it must be nice to get from your teenage years to your mid 30s without having a bunch of life events crash into you.
29.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
The prompts would more be like: "The dancing and lip movement is still wildly out of time with the music"... "Ok now the dancing is even more out of sync with the beat"
30.
by ericmcer 2mo ago
I don't post at all and delete it periodically. The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social med

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