What makes you believe that commercial pilot is safer from AI than software engineering?
Big commercial airplanes basically already fly themselves. But people feel safer with pilots on board just in case, I don’t think that’s going to change.
Readit NewsVolrath89 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
Volrath89 commented on Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs? · Posted by u/throwaway_43793
(10+ years of experience here) I will be starting training for commercial pilot license next year. The pay is much less than one of a software engineer but I think this job is already done for most of us, only the top 5% will survive. I don’t think I’m part of that top and don’t want to go to management or PO roles so I am done with tech
Volrath89 commented on Rewrite It in Rails dirkjonker.bearblog.dev/r... · Posted by u/WuxiFingerHold
Rails (and possibly Django and Laravel) are just light-years ahead of any other stack for building web apps. They have dealt with all the tedium, know all the requirements, and actually get out of your face when building an application. I have been developing web apps for 15 years now.
I have tried Meteor (back in the day), Remix, Nextjs, Node w/ Express, etc. Always talking about how much better they are. But in my mind web dev is a solved problem. The js stuff is mainly just developers wanking off, driven by a bunch of dollars from big companies.
Systems stuff, deployment infra, etc. is great for stuff like Rust & Go, but shoehorning into web dev makes no sense. I would love to just move on from this debate but it seems thats going to never be possible.
Dotnet is also very good for building web apps, it also includes static typing and a huge ecosystem.
I agree that web dev is basically a solved problem, I don’t know why stuff like next.js exists
Volrath89 commented on Rider is now free for non-commercial use jetbrains.com/rider/... · Posted by u/kretaceous
It's not that VS Code can't load a large project, that is table stakes. It's that the tools it provides to work with those large code bases are like fisher price versions of the Jetbrains equivalents. If one take their tools seriously, and uses them to the maximum extent possible to increase productivity, reliability, and robustness of code then there is just no comparison between the two.
Don't get me wrong, I still use VS code for all front-end development and other ecosystems (such as Rust). But when it specifically comes to C#/.NET there is no substitute to Rider in my opinion.
Rider is great for front end development too!
I have used it for angular and react and have had 0 complaints, it works great and the best is that I do not need to switch IDEs anymore
I haven’t tried cursor because I don’t want to “downgrade” to VS Code anymore.
Volrath89 commented on Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week simonwillison.net/2024/Oc... · Posted by u/recvonline
I'm sure there are plenty of examples like this, but one thing that I find really hard to deal with is to integrate such tools into existing codebase -- you can make all these things as standalone pages, but for a professional developer, you have certain standards and conventions, and often it takes a lot of work to review/revise the code to make it work with existing codebase, so much that you end up using inline completion just to help with obvious stuff or boilerplate. I woule rather spend 20% extra amount of time to write the code myself yet have confidence, than spend time tweaking the prompt or giving follow up instructions.
You are right, except on the part about tweaking the prompt to get your desired code styling.
The easier way to integrate into an existing code base is just to refactor the code yourself. AI gives a working version, you refactor and move on. For me this has been a huge productivity boost from writing everything from scratch
Volrath89 commented on How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF) simonwillison.net/2024/Se... · Posted by u/babelfish
THIS. I would like to tell you a bit of a personal story and this may shed some light on your question. Disclaimer* I am American.
I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.
I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".
So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!
Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".
but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...
And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...
But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...
but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.
what would you say are the chances for tesla to actually deliver optimus and start a commercial humanoid robots operation in the next 5 years?
Volrath89 commented on Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there? · Posted by u/zer0sand0nes
overemployment in multiple 100k-150k year full remote jobs as a sr engineer
2 is easy to do, 3 is manageable. I've heard of people doing more than 3, but most I've personally seen someone do is 3.
Volrath89 commented on You won't find a technical co-founder breakneck.dev/blog/no-tec... · Posted by u/vyrotek
Does anyone know a similar article for the opposite case? Technical guy looking for a salesperson co-founder.
I think many of the points of the article still apply, especially regarding opportunity cost. A great salesman can make way, way more than a great engineer, so why would he want to join me?
And let's say I want to hire my first salesperson. How do I know who is good and who is not? For me as an engineer, everyone looks like a good salesman, because everyone is better than me (I suck at sales)
I have been torn between wearing mechanical watches and smart watches. I don't need/want/like notifications on my wrist, but I really enjoy the activity and heart rate tracking of the Apple Watch.
I have been reluctantly wearing a Samsung Withings watch that looks mechanical but is actually smart, but a mediocre compromise (you need to wear it higher up the wrist than I usually do, and I don't believe it gives accurate heart rate and activity measurements). 30 day battery life is pretty cool though.
I may just start going back to my Vostok and Seiko watches full time at this point. (I don't like spending a lot of money on watches, anyone who is curious on getting into them should check out both brands as economical starters - the Vostok Amphibia has a storied history!)
wouldn't this be the perfect use case for the hybrid watches? I am looking forward to buy a Kronaby for next year.
Volrath89 commented on Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decision-making bps.org.uk/research-diges... · Posted by u/wjb3
Modafinil is a great tool to have in one's toolbelt.
There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be very draining to work through if you need to load in the context every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great deal.
True. I remember I used this back in the day when I was a pro online poker player. I would like to try again in Software, maybe to kickstart an indie project ... food for thought.
How often do you use it and have you found any side effects? (or long term effects for that matter)