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scott_s commented on We might all be AI engineers now   yasint.dev/we-might-all-b... · Posted by u/sn0wflak3s
kif · 6 days ago
But that's the problem. Something that can be so reliable at times, can also fail miserably at others. I've seen this in myself and colleagues of mine, where LLM use leads to faster burnout and higher cognitive load. You're not just coding anymore, you're thinking about what needs to be done, and then reviewing it as if someone else wrote the code.

LLMs are great for rapid prototyping, boilerplate, that kind of thing. I myself use them daily. But the amount of mistakes Claude makes is not negligible in my experience.

scott_s · 6 days ago
You are correct, but this is not a new role. AI effectively makes all of us tech leads.
scott_s commented on We might all be AI engineers now   yasint.dev/we-might-all-b... · Posted by u/sn0wflak3s
egl2020 · 6 days ago
"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Windows because I wanted the program Right Now and decided that was more important than learning those Windows APIs. But I did give up a learning opportunity.
scott_s · 6 days ago
That's not what the author means. Multiple times a day, I have conversations with LLMs about specific code or general technologies. It is very similar to having the same conversation with a colleague. Yes, the LLM may be wrong. Which is why I'm constantly looking at the code myself to see if the explanation makes sense, or finding external docs to see if the concepts check out.

Importantly, the LLM is not writing code for me. It's explaining things, and I'm coming away with verifiable facts and conceptual frameworks I can apply to my work.

scott_s commented on What's up with all those equals signs anyway?   lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
bobince · a month ago
Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.
scott_s · a month ago
I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.
scott_s commented on ACM Is Now Open Access   acm.org/articles/bulletin... · Posted by u/leglock
jules · 2 months ago
The peer review is all done by volunteers of conferences, not ACM.
scott_s · 2 months ago
Yes, and that peer review happens through the ACM. It serves an organizing function. The conferences themselves are also in-person events, and most of the important research papers come out of those conferences.
scott_s commented on ACM Is Now Open Access   acm.org/articles/bulletin... · Posted by u/leglock
rssoconnor · 2 months ago
How does the arXiv manage the same feat for one tenth the cost?
scott_s · 2 months ago
It doesn't. arXiv is exclusively a pre-print service. The ACM digital library is for peer-reviewed, published papers. All of the peer-review happens through the ACM, as well as the physical conferences where people present and publish their papers.
scott_s commented on ACM Is Now Open Access   acm.org/articles/bulletin... · Posted by u/leglock
colesantiago · 2 months ago
This is a great start, but it is not enough.

We need to keep pushing for other journals, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, to be open access and free for all.

scott_s · 2 months ago
IEEE may do it, as it's a professional organization. That is, they're a non-profit dedicated to the furtherance of the field. Being open access fits their mission, and the costs can be handled by dues and fees. Springer and Elsevier are for-profit publishers. I don't know how if they can have an open-access business model.
scott_s commented on ACM Is Now Open Access   acm.org/articles/bulletin... · Posted by u/leglock
scott_s · 2 months ago
Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-.... I'm glad it's finally happened.
scott_s commented on I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer   lalitm.com/software-engin... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
throwaway894345 · 3 months ago
Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance.

It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:

scott_s · 3 months ago
Gather metrics and regularly report them.
scott_s commented on What Killed Perl?   entropicthoughts.com/what... · Posted by u/speckx
rdtsc · 4 months ago
Python killed Perl.

By the time Perl 6 was around, Perl's lunch was already eaten by Python. Only a few table scraps left. Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Python came with better batteries and better syntax. It allowed producing code you could read and understand a week later. Perl I found was a write-only language for me. I went back looking at my old Perl code and I couldn't decipher it without some effort.

And Python became popular not just because it was a better Perl, but it attracted folks who used Java and C++. CPU speeds were getting fast enough that you could actually do file and network IO at acceptable speeds without all the `public static void main(String[] args)` and `System.out.println(...)` boilerplate, but still had all the object oriented bits like inheritance and composition with which you could go crazy with if you wanted.

scott_s · 4 months ago
Agreed. In grad school, I used Perl to script running my benchmarks, post-process my data and generate pretty graphs for papers. It was all Perl 5 and gnuplot. Once I saw someone do the same thing with Python and matplotlib, I never looked back. I later actually started using Python professionally, as I believe lots of other people had similar epiphanies. And not just from Perl, but from different languages and domains.

I think the article's author is implicitly not considering that people who were around when Perl was popular, who were perfectly capable of "understanding" it, actively decided against it.

scott_s commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
testhest · 6 months ago
Wind is only useful up to a point, once it gets above 20% of generation capacity ensuing grid stability becomes expensive either through huge price swings or grid level energy storage.
scott_s · 6 months ago
That's true of all renewable energy sources. So we should take advantage of all of them, as much as is feasible.

u/scott_s

KarmaCake day34109March 2, 2008
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Computer science research and systems software development.

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