mrdlm

linkedin is now just chatgpt to talking to other chatgpts

@HelloVyom This is not as difficult as you think it is, but you do have to spend some time studying it

Saw a breakdown of an OpenAI SWE interview and wow… They’re really out here asking candidates to design an in-memory database with SQL support, optimize JOINs, and then casually dive into transactions, WAL, MVCC like it’s nothing. This isn’t “leetcode grind” hard, this is actual systems research-level grilling. Honestly, the salaries these labs are paying? Completely justified. If anything, still underrated. If you can survive that level of deep, relentless questioning where every answer spawns two more… yeah, you’ve earned it.

its 2018 in SoMa. you're a SWE. you pour yourself some kombucha from the tap and walk over to the company ballpit. you review a PR that renames ‘dummy var’ to ‘placeholder’ per the inclusive language policy. it absolutely bricks your CI/CD. you have no idea how good you have it

@TuckerCarlson okay he's not good at this

I rarely read the filth you publish, and have never responded to it, for the same reason I avoid pornography. It’s unhealthy and I don’t want to encourage it. But in this specific case I understand exactly what you’re doing and I’d like to stop it now. I have never said or suggested that “everyone needs to know where their local Chabad is,” or anything remotely like it. I didn’t attack or even criticize Chabad, an organization I’ve mentioned precisely once in my life. Last week I said I believed that IDF soldiers in Israel have received third temple patches for their uniforms from Chabad. I believe that’s true. Please let me know if I’m wrong, not that you care. The point of your post is to blame me preemptively for violent attacks on American Jews that you believe are coming. This is an absurd slander of course. I abhor violence against innocents, which is why I am disgusted by what Israel has done in Gaza and why I argued against the current war in Iran. As a Christian and an American I also vehemently oppose punishing anyone on the basis of bloodline. The concept of “Amalek” has no place in Western civilization and certainly not in my country. I am therefore strongly opposed to anti-Semitism, precisely as much as I am to the anti-Arab hate you promote or the anti-white bias embedded in the US government and our largest institutions. It’s all immoral and indefensible. I believe in the inherent rights of the individual because I believe in God. What you’re doing divides this country more than you likely understand. I hope you will stop.

@WhiteHouse @DeptofWar You bloody fucking cowards. You just sank an unsuspecting Iranian warship returning from an international naval exercise about 2500 nautical miles from the combat zone. You just became the new Nazi Germany of naval "battles."

@PriyRanjan96 this entire centaur ecosystem is a transitionary phase, it won't be where we settle. leverage from having technical skills will peak and then fall rapidly. but in the meantime... you're right

@naval spoken like a true junior

It’s not about junior vs senior, it’s about “good with AI” vs “not good with AI.”

@navbenny claude code can theoretically take care of the tech debt, but it can't offload the cognitive debt. engineers still need fresh mental models of the full system to be effective.

Watch out, the exponential leverage that claude code gets you can easily spiral into exponential technical debt if you are not too careful.

@MattWalshBlog will you suck every ape's dick if it would benefit the united states?

I supported the Venezuela operation and I’m on board with acquiring Greenland because they both pass the only litmus test I care about: Will it be a net benefit to the United States? Venezuela and Greenland are low risk, high reward. Big wins for our people. We gain much and lose little or nothing. Easy call, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not actually an isolationist. I’m just an America First conservative in the strictest sense of the term. Does the benefit for America outweigh the cost? It must, or it’s a bad policy. This is one of my absolute core political principles, and always has been. With this Iran thing, I don’t see how the math works in our favor. Or at least it seems highly unlikely that it will work in our favor. And so I’m against it. If that puts me at odds with the administration, and with much of the conservative commentariat, so be it. I have to stick to what I believe. People who have followed my work for a long time are not remotely surprised by my stance on this.

@navbenny @naval yeah, true, hopefully there are enough risk-takers in society that these opportunities open up more and more

@VioletStraFish @naval The limitation of specialised AI is verifiable training data. If we have enough of it, it can be automated. But as long as general intelligence is unsolved, humans operate on the frontier where new knowledge & systems need to be created bc no data exists. That is agentic engg.

Is Traditional Software Engineering Dead? “Does this mean that traditional software engineering is dead? Absolutely not. Software engineers—even the ones who are not necessarily tuning or training AI models—these are now among the most leveraged people on earth. Sure, the guys who are training and tuning models are even more leveraged because they’re building the tool set that software engineers are using. But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know what’s going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes. It’s going to have bugs. It’s going to have suboptimal architecture. So it’s not going to be quite right. And someone who understands what’s going on underneath will be able to plug the leaks as they occur. So if you want to build a well-architected application, if you want to be able to even specify a well-architected application, if you want to be able to make it run at high performance, if you want it to do its best, if you want to catch the bugs early, then you’re going to want to have a software engineering background. The traditional software engineer is going to be able to use these tools much better. And there are still many kinds of problems in software engineering that are out of scope for these AI programs today. The easiest way to think about those is problems that are outside of their data distribution. For example, if they need to do a binary sort or reverse a linked list, they’ve seen countless examples of that, so they’re extremely good at it. But when you start getting out of their domain—where you have to write very high-performance code, when you’re running on architectures that are novel or brand new, when you’re actually creating new things or solving new problems, then you still need to get in there and hand code it. At least until either there are so many of those examples that new models can be trained on them, or until these models can sufficiently reason at even higher levels of abstraction and crack it on their own… And remember: there is no demand for average. The average app—nobody wants it, at least as long as it’s not filling some niche that is filled by a superior app. The app that is better will win essentially a hundred percent of the market. Maybe there’s some small percentage that will bleed off to the second-best app because it does some little niche feature better than the main app, or it’s cheaper, or something of the sort. But generally speaking, people only want the best of anything. So the bad news is there’s no point in being number two or number three—like in the famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene where Alec Baldwin says, “First place gets a Cadillac Eldorado, second place gets a set of steak knives, and third place you’re fired.” That’s absolutely true in these winner-take-all markets. That’s the bad news: You have to be the best at something if you want to win. However, the set of things you can be best at is infinite. You can always find some niche that is perfect for you, and you can be the best at that thing. This goes back to an old tweet of mine where I said, “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” And I think that still applies in this age of AI.”

@navbenny @naval the problem with ai is not that there's some category of technical work that we're better at (like architecture) but that it's just not reliable rn. but every few months we make a leap on that front.

@navbenny @naval for design within a single repo, it actually does pretty well already imo

@serfluxos @paraschopra i understand that in humans thinking is phenomenological; there's a felt sense of what it is like to be thinking, in words or images or whatever. that distinction is not relevant however to whether AI can "think" productively enough to solve every problem we can

@serfluxos @paraschopra thinking is purely informational, that was the whole point of the turing test (can a computer think?) on a different note, if it can predict any output of *real* thinking, then who cares what you call it, amirite?

I think it’s safe to assume that the value of human cognitive labor will likely rapidly decline to zero. In such a world, what skills should you hone? My bet is that any skill that requires showing up in person and taking responsibility will still be in demand. Think sales, politics, leadership, care giving, coaching, teaching, surgery. Humans are highly attuned to attending to other people in a physical setting, and even the best humanoids won’t be able match that in near future.

@yash_what @paraschopra yea it needs rizz

@VioletStraFish @paraschopra Oh such a smart thing that is

@serfluxos @paraschopra looks to me like if it's a purely informational problem (like thinking) AI would be able to do it, sooner or later

@VioletStraFish @paraschopra why yes?

@DanielGPT2022 @paraschopra why? why wouldn't AI be better than us at climbing the abstraction ladder? why would it just halt at some sub-human level?

@paraschopra I think cognitive labor will move to a new layer of abstraction and will play a major role in selecting whatever generative AI outputs.