I consider it a blessing to have a choice in how I go, rather than leaving it up to nature and the medical system.
Readit Newsppeetteerr commented on Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths bbc.com/news/articles/c0j... · Posted by u/vinni2
Pay $180 for our new, slightly better, but still not accurate service.
ppeetteerr commented on When did estimates turn into deadlines? domainanalysis.io/p/archi... · Posted by u/alexzeitler
I've gone through times when management would treat estimates as deadlines, and were deaf to any sort of reason about why it could be otherwise, like the usual thing of them changing the specification repeatedly.
So when those times have occurred I've (we've more accurately) adopted what I refer to the "deer in the headlights" response to just about anything non-trivial. "Hoo boy, that could be doozy. I think someone on the team needs to take an hour or so and figure out what this is really going to take." Then you'll get asked to "ballpark it" because that's what managers do, and they get a number that makes them rise up in their chair, and yes, that is the number they remember. And then you do your hour of due diligence, and try your best not to actually give any other number than the ballpark at any time, and then you get it done "ahead of time" and look good.
Now, I've had good managers who totally didn't need this strategy, and I loved 'em to death. But for the other numbnuts who can't be bothered to learn their career skills, they get the whites of my eyes.
Also, just made meetings a lot more fun.
For starters, never commit to a timeline without doing your due diligence. We're not selling carpets. Anyone who gives a time estimate on the spot is setting themselves up for failure.
Second, always pad your estimates. If you have been in the industry longer than 6 months, you'll already know how "off" your estimates can be. Take the actual delivery date, divide that by the estimated date, and that's your multiplier.
Google (even now) wasn't absolutely accurate either. That didn't stop it from becoming many billions worth.
> You can have it craft an email, or to review your email, but I wouldn't trust an LLM with anything mission-critical
My point is that an entire world lies between these two extremes.
Google became a billion dollar company creating the best search and indexing service at the time and putting ads around the results (that and YouTube). The didn't own the answer of the question.
A support ticket is a good middle ground. This is probably the area of most robust enterprise deployment. Synthesizing knowledge to produce a draft reply with some logic either to automatically send it or have human review. There are both shitty and ok systems that save real money with case deflection and even improved satisfaction rates. Partly this works because human responses can also suck, so you are raising a low bar. But it is a real use case with real money and reputation on the line.
Keyword is "draft". You still need a person to review the response with knowledge of the context of the issue. It's the same as my email example.
I don't think we've even started to get the most value out of current gen LLMs. For starters very few people are even looking at sampling which is a major part of the model performance.
The theory behind these models so aggressively lags the engineering that I suspect there are many major improvements to be found just by understanding a bit more about what these models are really doing and making re-designs based on that.
I highly encourage anyone seriously interested in LLMs to start spending more time in the open model space where you can really take a look inside and play around with the internals. Even if you don't have the resources for model training, I feel personally understanding sampling and other potential tweaks to the model (lots of neat work on uncertainty estimations, manipulating the initial embedding the prompts are assigned, intelligent backtracking, etc).
And from a practical side I've started to realize that many people have been holding on of building things waiting for "that next big update", but there a so many small, annoying tasks that can be easily automated.
The reason people are holding out is that the current generation of models are still pretty poor in many areas. You can have it craft an email, or to review your email, but I wouldn't trust an LLM with anything mission-critical. The accuracy of the generated output is too low be trusted in most practical applications.
ppeetteerr commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
For reference, here's a current job opening for NYT's tech org for a senior software developer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorktimes/jobs/4472655005
Salary is 140-155k USD.
For reference, here's levels.fyi's breakdown of the New York city area: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor...
Median total comp is 185k.
It seems like their total comp for NYT is slightly above the mark based on reported salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/...
Thank you for surfacing this.
A senior role in NYC for 155K (plus bonus, which they do offer) is nothing when you factor in the cost of living.
ppeetteerr commented on Show HN: Kotlin Money blog.eriksen.com.br/en/in... · Posted by u/eriksencosta
Even as someone familiar with Kotlin, it's hard to decipher what this library is doing without syntax highlighting here. The author is using infix functions and custom extension functions on primitive types. Non-Kotlin-natives will scratch heads.
Oh no, I know how it's done, I'm just surprised by it. There are more straight forward ways of expressing the same thing without using infix functions and those extensions (e.g. `val price = USD(100)` or `val price = Money(100, 'USD')`).
ppeetteerr commented on Show HN: Kotlin Money blog.eriksen.com.br/en/in... · Posted by u/eriksencosta
What is up with that API? `1.25.percent()`? `1 money 'USD'`? Love the spirit of a money library, but this is a little odd.
One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).
I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode