I'm self-taught and had a job in the autonmous vehicle industry writing software that included safety-critical functionality.
I had about 12 YoE at the time, and my manager didn't realize I didn't have a degree until after I was hired. Apparently it hadn't affected my offer, and he was more impressed than anything.
You say:
> SE is the set of techniques, practices, tools that we have collected over decades for producing multi-versioned software that meets a certain reliability rating. Not all of these is freely available online.
The same way there's no single guide on the internet on how to be the kind of engineer who builds reliable or extensible software, I don't think there's a guide hiding in the average CS curriculum.
Most of it consists of getting repetitions building software that involves the least predictable building block in all of software engineering (people), in all its various forms: from users, to other developers, to yourself (in the future), to "stakeholders", etc.
Learning how to predict and account for the unpredictability in all the people who will intersect with some facet of your software is the closest I've seen to a "universal method" for creating software that meets the criteria you defined.
And honestly I'd be concerned if someone told me you can just be taught some blessed set of tools and practices to get around it... that sounds a lot like not having actually internalized why they work in the first place, and the "why" is arguably more valuable than the tools and practices themselves.
this is a challenging point of view.. on one side, a "a job in the autonmous (sic) vehicle industry writing safety critical software" sounds like one of the most slave-ish jobs in the world. This person had a 100 other people checking every tiny result, plus automated testing frameworks and hundreds of pages of "guidelines" .. in other words, the least creative and most guard-checked software possible.
On the other hand, an open and level playing field does not exist in the thirty-some odd years of open markets software development. No one since Seymour Cray has done complete systems design, really.. it is turtles all the way down. You have to get hardware to run on, and the software environment is going to have been defined for that.. CPU architectures and programming languages. People who write whole systems generally do it in teams.
The arrogant and self-satisfied tone of the corporate worker-bee says that there is no such thing as real software engineering skills?
like defining "health" or other broad topics.. the closer the topic is examined, the more holes in the arguments. I am glad I never punched a time clock for Elon Musk, however, all things considered.
Do accredited investor regulations not apply to this market? Is the crypto token a registered security since it apparently represents stock in a company?
I’m turned off because it sounds like the company wants to play fast and loose with money in a way that is more than just “move fast and break things”.
If someone scraped those for the sites that are posted and arranged based on number of submissions, comments, upvotes etc. and layer on a bit of ML to classify then you'd have a reasonable blog directory. OP would probably benefit if people posted their OPML files but that does feel a bit personal.
A counter perspective by the maker of amfora (which appears to be in maintenance mode)
> After a lot of thinking, I’ve realized there is one main reason I don’t keep coming back to Gemini: it offers no advantage over how I already use the Web.
That may be true if you routinely use a text mode web browser and get all your content from RSS feeds, I've certainly moved more in that direction to avoid the sensory overload of the modern web.
I still find Gemini great for reading long-form content though, I appreciate Gemtext is the important factor in this and if web browsers would render it over HTTPS then great, but I'm not aware of any that do.
I also like to use Gemini on vintage hardware that really struggle on the modern web, some of that hardware isn't even that old anymore, low-end devices from just 10 years ago with 2-4GB RAM will have a hard time nowadays.
Are you sure this class of people don’t implicitly do spaces repetition via:
- “reading books” (coming across the same ideas in different books, tying new ideas to old books)
- “discuss and debate” (remembering and being reminded of previously learned things)
- “study their subjects” (?) (presumably restating the previous two? - Maybe original research, which is finding new facts or reinforcing old ones)
- “work hard” (??)
I also wonder if there’s something about the mental process of people who seem to “just get it” - is their mind subconsciously turning over stuff they’ve learned in the same way an external spaced repetition regimen would? They may be getting the benefit of spaced repetition, but from the outside it doesn’t look like they follow a study plan.
I have a good use case for them: Communication with the bureaucracy of my country. I tell my LLM of choice to write a letter to $whoever about $whatever, then I print it out (yes, we still have to do this as email don't get accepted) and send if off. I don't even need to proof read it because if there's a mistake the bureaucracy will tell me in another letter. So the burden of correctness checking is on some bureaucrat which saves me time and mental resources.
I wouldn't ever use a LLM for anything where correctness matters (code) because I'd spend the same amount of time checking the generated code as writing it myself. But a letter to my tax office? Heck, why not. If something goes really wrong I can always say "gee, I made a mistake let's try it again".
So what, you use it to spam and waste other people's time? I know, dealing government bureaucracy and corruption is soul leeching but spam was always one of the golden usecases for generated AI.
Sending official letters to the local government isn't spam, and generally not a waste of time.
People with cognitive issues, issues typing, language or presentation issues, LLMs provide a massive improvement in how they are percieved and recieved by the other side. Also, immigrants or people with langauge issues aren't quite as disadvantaged and don't need to use excess time translating or risking an embarrasing misstatement. It's a night or day accommodation tool in the right circumstances.
No, I don't just send them random letters. I reply to mail I get from them or when I need them to do something (like adjust my tax pre-pay).
Also one could argue that bureaucracies only exist to create bullshit jobs and waste citizens' time. So I wouldn't even feel bad about spamming those assholes.
The fact that this is seemingly the top comment shows how entrenched HN’s typical user is in making money off the predatory practices articulated thoroughly in the article.
Thing is, I’ve never met someone in software with a professional license.
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