I'm not familiar with the Maryland power grid, but I've observed in other places that putting data centers in places with older / inadequate grids can / will require upgrades to handle the new load.
Big fan of him - but I also want to throw out the most obvious name in this space: Sal Khan
Hard to imagine now, but back when he started out, there were really no (to very few!) accessible math tutoring vids on the video platforms. Most of the times you had some universities, like MIT, putting out long-form vids from lectures - but actually having easily digestible 5 min vids like those Khan put out, just wasn't a thing.
Many followers of cyberlibertarianism see themselves as potential cyberlords, who can rule over their fiefdoms, but still under the protection of the king (state/government).
The hypocrisy becomes apparent when these entities grow large, and suddenly need state help to suppress competition.
Phase 1: Skirt laws, move fast and break things. Regulations should be abolished. Steal as much as you can, if it means growth.
Phase 2: Lobby politicians, beg for certain regulations to keep out competitors when you've become a monopoly.
The vast, vast majority of students going into higher education this fall will not contribute much to science until 4-5 years down the road (should they do research). Realistically 6-7 when they're in full swing with their Ph.D.
If we look where these models were 5-7 years ago...the existential threat of the Ph.D. was not even on the radar back then. The people finishing up their doctorate now are the first that can truly leverage these tools.
Now, if these to-be researcher students feel defeated (enough to quit), or completely lean on AI models the work for them, we're going to have a problem. Same with the funding of those Ph.D. positions. If we move away from "funding to produce researchers" to "funding to achieve results", will money that was usually spent to fund Ph.D. students start to flow towards compute?
If we look at it a bit cynically: Some researcher will be able to pump out a lot more papers by spending money on compute, than a couple of years of training students.
Interesting times. But also so much uncertainty. I feel terrible for the students that will have to decide now what they want to do, with all this knowledge.
> Now, if these to-be researcher students feel defeated (enough to quit), or completely lean on AI models the work for them, we're going to have a problem. [..] If we look at it a bit cynically: Some researcher will be able to pump out a lot more papers by spending money on compute, than a couple of years of training students.
Obviously this is already happening and will accelerate. Outside of grad work, you could already just buy a degree. Certainly in the softer disciplines, you can currently just buy a phd thesis and a good publication history. If you're in industry instead of academics, you can even buy a promotion. If your employer gives an AI budget to all workers then you quietly double that budget out of your own pocket for as long as it takes to get a promotion, then stop and just enjoy a bigger paycheck.
PhD students are already using AI models to work for them. Most of the PhD candidates I know have $200 Claude Max plan which they use to their fullest.
I see that they are able to do researches that they were not previously able to do. And although I see that using AI has certainly diminished their ability to code some stuff up, I see it the same way as someone using scikit-learn or Pytorch to code their ML models -- indeed the underlying details is abstracted away from you, and without AI, you won't be able to do much, but the research that you do is indeed happening because of you and wouldn't have happened with just the AI doing the research.
I watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important:
Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or launch AI-first products.
You are not rewarded for building extremely robust and fast systems - the goal right now is to essentially build ETL and data piping systems as fast as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, and being able to add as many features as possible. The quality of the software is of less importance.
And, yes, senior engineers with other priorities are being overshadowed - even left in the dust - if they don't use tools to enhance their speed. As the article states, there are novice coders, even non-coders that are pushing out features like you wouldn't believe it. As long as these yield the right output, and don't crash the systems, that's a gold star.
Of course there are still many companies whose products do not fall under that, and very much rely on robust engineering - but at least in the startup space there's overwhelmingly many whose product is to gather data (external, internal), add agents, and do some action for the client.
You need extremely competent, and critically thinking technical leaders on the top to tackle this problem. But we're also in the age where people with somewhat limited technical experience are becoming CTOs or highly-ranked technical workers in an org, for no other reason than that they know how to use modern AI systems, and likely have a recent history of being extremely productive.
I've simply not seen this at all. As someone with 10 YOE who was in the job market from November to early April going for senior software engineer roles, quality and architecture seemed to be the thing every org cared about. The bar not only to secure and interview, but to get hired was unbelievably high.
Some of the interviews I were getting were at AI startups and all of them were either doing architectural questions or multiple rounds of architectural, behavioural and leetcode problems.
Only one of the orgs was hiring junior engineers and the director of technology mentioned to me he didn't want to as they were "incapable", but it was a quota given to him by the board.
I also got told by multiple recruitment agents that I wasn't experienced enough, and some hiring managers were demanding 15 YOE for a senior role.
15 YOE, here: Well, I just interviewed between October - Decemeber of last year, and since then, the company I joined has gone full vibe-coding and is changing to AI interviews. So...
GP is talking about what they [the companies in question] accept/expect as work product. That has always differed from what they look for in a job candidate. Not surprising that AI psychosis amplifies the discrepancy.
If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me.
Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds.
Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality.
The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about performative quality. Everything was verbose and had to be by the book, even when it didn't make sense from an engineering or product point of view.
Different opinions were simply not accepted.
It was the age of bloat, of thousands of dependencies, of nitpicks, of infinite meetings, of quality in paper but not in practice, of doing overtime, of being on a fucking pager, of having CI/CD that took 10 hours to merge, and all the stress it comes with.
I would be totally ok if all those “professional” engineers from that generation were to be replaced with hackers, both old and new.
That's the crazy thing about criticizing the industry in general: you can't really get away with it without someone calling you incompetent, point blank! :D
What I am describing here is FAANG (two of them) and every startup (two YC) or enterprise (a big Fintech) that copied it.
If you happen to "like it", perhaps it's time to think about accepting how other people don't.
That was a low effort comment, I agree with you and I downvoted theirs. HN rules specify comments should drive the conversation forward. They used n=1 anecdata and called your employers bad places, oversimplifying the complexities into a simplistic 3 letter word.
Let’s keep the short caustic comments to ourselves people. The world is crazy enough without making other peoples days worse with drivel!
I recognise it from regularly talking with fellow programmers at the local tech meet-ups. At least in my area, the work places with result-oriented policies were and still are in the clear majority, and only big companies with likewise big financial reserves could afford to pursue the economically wasteful route of process-oriented policies.
Come on now. Even I know exactly what he's talking about and I have worked far and beyond all the craze of the real world, having mainly dedicated time to small dev shops in the past 2 decades.
No man, it's because of their poor ability to pick jobs, not because the other commenter was in a different niche or whatever than they are. It's absolutely not possible for 2 people to have a different experience, as there are at most 5 programmers in the entire world.
I literally can't picture someone who simultaneously 1) has been managing to land great jobs in small shops, 2) browses HN and 3) doesn't empathize with complaints of bloat, dependencies, pager duty and meetings.
You have described exactly the situation of almost all of my clients. And in some way it is good to see our business model validated as we help steer organisations at this level, also technically. I would only add that the quality of software has improved significantly. From my perspective, the bar for quality at most organisations like this is low, extremely low.
Companies that don't fall under that rubric are established and have actual money on the line if their software shits the bed. Software that handles actual logistics and transactions can't be treated to lots of LLM updates without some serious problems arising. Startups and B2B ones especially have always been cheap, cut corners, screwed up and apologized later, and most importantly just created hype and fluff to get investment that's rarely spent on building solid foundations. There's not much crap AI is writing for them now, as code or marketing material, that wasn't already just as junky when it was written by humans. That's been the mutually agreed upon game that startups and VC have played since the 90s. LLMs just distill the douchery and the flawed logic, and it's pleasant to watch their artifacts go down in flames.
Most of the software engineering field ain't no startups, however distorted the most vocal representation on HN could be.
Neither are they code sweat shops churing one quick templated eshop/company site after another (knew some people in that space, even 20 years ago 1 individual churned out easily 2-3 full sites in a week depending on complexity).
Typical companies, this includes banks btw, see these llms as production boosters, to cut off expensive saas offerings and do more inhouse, rather than head count cutting tool par excellence. Not everybody is as dumb and pennypinching-greedy as ie amazon is. There, quality of output is still massively more important than volume of it or speed. CTOs are not all bunch of shortsighted idiots. But these dont make catchy headlines, do they.
I am somewhat relieved to be working in a regulated industry where deterministic outputs are still needed. Maybe when someone has a validated AI model there will be trouble ...
Conway's Law still holds true. Software applications will resemble the communication structure of the companies that build them. If the companies are comprised of 90% overly verbose bullshit, so too will be the fragile slop monstrosities that they build.
Even though this is a now 18 year old article, you still see the same type of elitism in the various metropolitan areas, where these people gather to work in finance/consulting/tech/law.
I've heard people be completely open about only wanting to mingle and network with "peers", where they'll immediately ditch people at networking events / parties / etc. if they're not up to the snuff. They'll ask what school you went to, or where you work(ed), and bow out if its not a target school or top-tier firm.
But people like that are a minority in my experience. I went to a good business school, and many people there had the same background stories - especially the type of undergrad schools they went to.
(With that said, I'm pushing 40, and every now and then I do meet new people that within 2 mins will ask or probe what school I went to. Always feels a bit weird to me to bring up alma mater when it's almost half a lifetime ago...especially if those asking are even older than me.)
There is also that idea of surrounding yourself with "good people" or like minded, people you want to be.
I was friendly to everyone and one guy he just drank all the time, reeked of alcohol, no prospects in life, no ambition. Am I supposed to force myself to be around this person just to be nice/equal terms. I want to be around ambitious people.
No one wants to be around an alcoholic. But it's not to be nice, but to understand them, their struggles, and their perspectives.
Anecdote - I was at a concert with my brother, outside in the smoking area. A homeless woman came by, didn't say anything but was kinda just looking around. My brother is the only one who spoke to her, he offered his cigarette butt. Which is exactly what she was looking for.
Never would have occured to me- but I would guess it made her feel more seen and human.
LOL. My dad told me I was bored by baseball because I didn't understand it.
I played little league baseball as a kid. I was sure bored, as most of the time was spent standing or sitting around. The only reason "Bad News Bears" was a good movie is they cut about 98% of the baseball game play.
Car racing is a bit better. But still, you just watch as the cars go around a circle until they crash, run out of fuel, or win.
But I don't mind if you find baseh ball been berry berry good. Just don't tax me for your stadium!
>theater and had no idea why people liked it. Didn't make sense, boring, long, generally stupid. Then I decided to get over myself and see what the fuss was about. Now I get it
I'm a techie by choice but I was raised lit'rary. I love the idea of theater, but the actuality, no thanks, attention seeking narcissists strut and fret their hour upon the stage: I only wish they were heard no more.
I am a fan of coffee shops, though, but coffee shops in theater districts: bring name-dropping cancelling headphones.
I'm not a sports guy either, sucks since a lot of women are into it too, I'll see it on their dating profile like ooh man... I'm not gonna be at a stadium watching people run back and forward on a field.
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