This is/was absolutely a thing and I saw it happen to others and switched to y’all, I got called out for using “dude” and come on dude, dude is extremely gender neutral in this sense.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
That holds only as long as people can afford the unsubsidized prices or do without. I'm not sure that wither are tenable given modern life at least in the US.
I've seen this argument before but I don't think I understand it.
Suppose I want to post a bunch of recipes. I could just post the recipes with absolutely no further commentary. In that case someone else could copy what I write wholesale and that might be depressing, or stop me getting famous, or reduce my income from advertising. So far, so good.
I could preface each recipe with a short relevant paragraph or two saying a bit about why I like the dish, where I got the recipe from, maybe some things I tried that didn't work out. In that case someone just scraping my site would be guilty of copyright violation, yay. Maybe I could force them to take it down. Or they could just copy the recipes, which doesn't seem like it would be super-difficult technically, and then I'd be in the same state as before.
Or I could preface each recipe with six pages of rambling about how much I love my dog and how sweet my now-deceased grandmother was. And that would get me ... so far as I can tell, exactly the same protection from plundering as a couple of relevant paragraphs would. (And would be exactly as vulnerable to a slightly smarter plagiarist stealing just the recipes.)
It's not clear to me that copying just the recipes is hard enough to make any of this worth while, but even if it is I don't see how you get any extra copy-protection from the long rambling anecdotes, compared with a small amount of actually relevant information.
So I think that the rambling-blog-post phenomenon has to have some other explanation. Maybe you can embed more ads in a longer post, or maybe recipe-bloggers just often tend to enjoy telling anecdotes, or maybe they think the anecdotes are what will actually draw readers in.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the state of the industry and my feelings about it. I realized the time I most enjoyed and was happiest was when I was early in my career, learned a lot and tried to actively be a better software engineer.
I decided to "go back" to that place. I've started reading engineering books, using physical media instead of digital media, etc.
In addition to learning, I've been writing programs that are 'useless' but things I want to make (even if no one ever sees them). I'm also building a product with unconventional technologies simply because I enjoy it and think it's a better way of doing things.
This seems like an excuse/conspiracy theory. Hot people could always find hot people: go to where hot people hang out (clubs, hipster bars, art galleries, yoga, etc). What has definitely increased is access to people complaining about hot people not dating them.
Love the logos, colors, and at the same time simplicity. These are so much more memorable than what you see today which I find to be bland or over the top “grafix”.
A lot of cheaper restaurants and bodegas in nyc use AI images to show what food they serve and a lot of them have this slightly grotesque quality thats very unappetizing. Almost like a nightmare/ acid trip filter.
Wow. Talk about the worst uses of AI -- the actual representative pictures of product you're selling. If false advertising law ever got an update, a ban on an AI depiction of one's product itself in an ad or other pre-sale imagery should be added.
I think there are already laws in a lot of places requiring food images whether photographs, illustrations, AI generated images, etc. not to materially mislead consumers about what they’re buying.
So people using AI for this might soon run into issues with hallucinated extra ingredients or exaggerated portion sizes.
It's been all over rural America now. Every single roadside sign I've seen now has been either fully AI-generated, or the logos are all following the same damn 'logo in a shield' that one of the services loves making everything it generates be.
Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades.
Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate.
GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two.
An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.
Sol routinely catches stuff in review that fable misses for me. It's impossible to compare them meaningfully because it's a complete dice roll - but in practice using both in my projects I can get work done with both, and Opus 5 is far more tedious.
But Fable security false positives and pricing just make it not worth compared to Sol IMO.
Yeah, it's pretty much apples to oranges, and I don't consider GPT and Claude to be interchangeable at all. From my anecdotal experience, GPTs generally codes more creatively and verbosely but Claudes tend to code more carefully and precisely, so the result is that GPTs generally finds more creative solutions to problems but also writes buggier code, which is why I converged on the setup of GPT/Codex for implementation and Claude for debugging, which feels more like a force multiplier than using each model individually.
Classic gatekeeping argument insisting a CS degree is necessary to write good software. I don’t have one and have 20+ year successful career with accolades, know many others in the same boat. Obviously there are CS degree people who were also successful, and the flip side comes for both camps, I’ve worked with absolutely awful engineers with or without a CS degree.
Same here, 20+ years, no degree. but have a slightly different view about folks with CS degrees.
It really comes down to the individual. Those who are good with CS degrees would likely be good without them. The majority of those who picked CS as a degree because “it pays well” are truly awful. Only a small handful end up enjoying and understand how to write code and make good software.
I agree about the existence of people who really just aimed for the grades (sometimes dubiously) to unlock a career. There were also enthusiastic folks with whom I learned a lot.
While I'm an interested self learner, I significantly benefit from structured learning. I don't think I would have had the breadth of depth of knowledge if I didn't do a CS degree since I didn't think I would have done such a variety of focused projects and homework. I would "shop" for good teachers and wait until they taught to take a course. I would have lots of questions in class. At the end of many of my semesters, I genuinely felt like Neo's "I know kung fu" - knowledge given on a platter. I didn't think I would have left covering undergrad subjects if I didn't, well, feel the need to earn my keep and at least aim for higher level studies and get assistantships for initial financial independence.
That being said, this was all before the YouTube era. Although, YouTube is a double-edged library of distractions and amazing educational material.
As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds.
Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.
Becoming a good developer was nowhere in the curriculum at the CS program I attended, unfortunately. It still had some interesting topics. I think the profession evolved too quickly for an academic curriculum to cover anything relevant.
Nowadays I hope the CS curriculum explicitly disregards whatever the standard industry code factory meta is, since from the outside it appears to be soulless and dehumanizing. Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?
The meta has changed in 6 months so the university is investing millions of dollars to design a new 101 course: Hit approve all day on the agent which should be taking your job any time soon.
Classical developers IME can’t properly abstract their way out of a paper bag. They’ll draw semantic boundaries everywhere but where they belong usually following tech and tradition instead of properly reasoning about it. They are generally unable to see beyond an inch of their nose and think the business comprises 75-90% software dev and don’t see how their activity is actually the tiniest insignificant wiggle in the grand scheme of things (“the suits are just there to act important”). “Don’t see further than your nose is long” they say in Dutch.
I think philosophy is an excellent match for development, certainly now with AI.
There are many great developers who did not get CS degrees. Might be an unpopular thing to say, but in my experience interviewing a lot of applicants, the majority of applicants who don’t have CS degrees are not in that category.
It’s always great to find a diamond in the rough who has been passed over by other companies for lack of degree and is looking for an opportunity to shine.
On the whole, a CS degree is directionally correlated with being more likely to have a good understanding of the fundamentals, algorithms, and other important context that helps more as the problems get hard. These things can all be learned by someone without a CS degree, but in my experience being open to interviewing non-traditional applicants it’s more common for the self-taught applicants to be more trial and error type devs who got to this point by experimenting and seeing what works.
I always have to give the blanket disclaimer that a CS degree does not guarantee a great dev and a lack of CS degree does not mean the dev is not good. However, I honestly can’t say that a CS degree is not correlated with better developers on the whole. I choose to interview non-traditional applicants who don’t have CS degrees, but to be entirely honest I can’t fault companies who get a lot of applicants who start prioritizing those with degrees.
I think your interviewing experience is valid because tech interviews have been designed to filter out people without DS&A experience which a CS degree will give you a big advantage at. Day to day job performance (for the most part, in most roles) will have nothing to do with DS&A though. If you know when to use an array vs a dictionary then you’re good for 99.99% of actual software development day to day tasks.
I think it honestly not even a signal of how good anymore. It's become noise in my experience..
I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess.
One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance.
Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that.
You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.
> Neither the prestigious degree nor the good proficiency in algorithmic problem-solving guarantee a career success. They are factors that make statistics work in the favor of the candidate.
I think the article takes a more nuanced view than you suggest. And the existence of counterexamples to a "for the most part" claim are not counterexamples at all.
The author didn't have a CS degree so it's not classic gatekeeping: "For the majority of my career, I neither had a formal, rigorous computer science education...". The author also directly addresses the parent poster's viewpoint: "If I had to categorize the 'no need for education, no need for algorithms' crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics."
Personally I agree that a CS degree isn't needed for most software jobs because frameworks and libraries hide most of the gnarly CS stuff. But those are the software jobs least likely to survive adoption of LLM-based software development.
To be completely frank, I'm scared of missing out on not learning the fundamentals properly and having this omission bite me in the back later in my career. I also think that AI can make terrible people "look good", and some filtering isn't too bad.
reply