Biblically speaking, spirits from the vasty deep must be demons since they are from below and angels, God and Jesus are from above. So in that sense it’s not very impressive. Demons are something a sane person would rather avoid.
I mean, if you want to inject religion into this, that interpretation that it "must be demons" isn't even supported by the source text.
In 1 Samuel, King Saul visits a medium in Endor in order to speak to the (dead) prophet Samuel. Human dead go to Shoel (in familiar terms, it is similar to the Greek underworld) in the Old Testament. Later on in the New Testament, the idea of a really really bad place is introduced in the form of Tartarus, which is specifically where the rebelling angels were sent. But that is not the same place human dead go.
The idea that everything "not Heaven" must be Hell is an invention, caused mostly by dogma that rose from bad translations of the Greek and Hebrew in the middle ages (for example, King James - itself mostly correcting minor errors of the older Bishop's Bible - refers to all of it as Hell even though the original text most inarguably refers to different places different beings go).
I see your point about Sheol not being Gehenna not being "the bosom of Abraham" not being the New Jerusalem and so on, and you might already know everything I'm about to say, but just to clarify for others' sake: I think it's wrong to say that the "really really bad place" is uniquely introduced as Tartarus (AFAIK mentioned only once in the NT, in 2 Peter 2:4[0]).
Jesus clearly refers to a very unpleasant place in e.g. Mark 9:47–48[1], Luke 16:24,[2] and Matthew 25:41[3] (where it's explicitly stated that false prophets will go to the same place as "the devil and his angels"). Other references to an unambiguously bad place, as the sole and final destination of unbelievers, are throughout the New Testament, e.g. the "lake of fire" in Revelation 20:15[4] and 21:8[5]. Revelation 20:14[6] even says that "Hades" will be thrown into that same "lake of fire" (which of course supports what you're saying about Hades being distinct from Hell).
As a final note, even the reference to Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4 speaks of it as a temporary holding place where "angels who sinned" are being "kept for judgment", implying that there's a more final fate awaiting them (identified in Revelation 20:10[7], at least for Satan, as the aforementioned "lake of fire").
The main point I'm trying to make is that, while it's certainly true there are other "places where dead people/angels go" than Heaven and Hell, that's only true at this point in time. To my knowledge, the New Testament is consistent about a final judgment where there are only two possible fates (the New Jerusalem, i.e. Heaven, and the lake of fire, i.e. Hell).
[0] "For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but cast them into the pit [Tartarus] and delivered them to chains of darkness, being kept for judgment;"
[1] "And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell [Gehenna], where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."
[2] "And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’"
[3] "Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;"
[4] "And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
[5] "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and sexually immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."
[6] "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire."
[7] "And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever."
I’m very much surprised but also not. I recently gave Astra a 3D model file and asked Astra to build a viewer for it, and it figured out the data structures in no time. What I mean to say is that AI is insanely good at things that we humans would never do since the work would be too monotonous.
I wouldn’t mind if AI progress would stop right here and now, but I fear it will continue, and increase inequality in society which is contrary to what the CEOs say (as usual).
> What I mean to say is that AI is insanely good at things that we humans would never do since the work would be too monotonous.
In my opinion AI is superior to humans when it comes to pattern recognition in in large amounts of data. For example humans can only hold like 7 distinct numbers in the short term memory and you would require extra context-management (aka writing things down, storing them in a system entry by entry) while the AI can do this effortlessly with huge datasets.
I'd argue this is the core part that enables all this superhuman intelligence.
To me one of the most interesting aspects of observing how LLM capabilities evolve is how it highlights the meaningful ways human minds remain unique and valuable. It gets into Philosophy of Mind stuff but the existence of the inner self (or the illusion it exists, if you believe Dennett) and the subjective experience of qualia do give humans both unique strengths and some of our most annoying weaknesses.
So I work on low-level compiler backends and such for chips (mostly AI at this point). I completely disagree that this is something humans never do, because I have spent years doing it. However, it's monotonous and boring and LLMs do it better.
> For example humans can only hold like 7 distinct numbers in the short term memory and you would require extra context-management (aka writing things down, storing them in a system entry by entry) while the AI can do this effortlessly with huge datasets.
Correct. For a long time people wer obsessed with 'increasing context length' as if humans have some great context length system in our brains. We don't. I doubt our equivalent of 'context length' (short-term memory) is very long at all. We just have a good training process that puts these memories into long term storage.
I think the latest round of models is about to do to CAD the same thing that has been happening to development. I don't know if CAD designers have picked up on this. What happened to dev is probably going to happen to CAD designers soon. I've been having Opus 5.5 design parametric openscad models, and it can do some rather amazing work.
Yesterday I just printed an adapter for my sink siphon. Told GLM-5.3 the problem, it guided me on measuring what it needed to know to build the pipe adapter. Then printed two test rings to confirm the measurements, and an iteration later, it spit out a parametric pipe adapter for me.
Yes! The page posts Astra's reasoning, and it's perfectly intelligible. A clever human with background in mechanistic interpretability could have done pretty much everything in these experiments.
Too much inequality in society is a mortal danger to 1%.
That’s the beauty of the democratic capitalism system. If a government isn’t totalitarian, it naturally seeks to preserve stability thus having to elevate common people, lest they would cease to form a civilized group or simply vote away the politicians.
99% rule the 1% through elections.
There is no better system of checks and balances where opposite engines of greed vector sum to faster and faster abundance for everyone.
Is HN now against western capitalism? I'm confused...
That comment may have been overly preachy, tone deaf[0], and out of place, but it doesn't seem wrong, per se. Or am I missing something?
[0] e.g. elections themselves are so prone to manipulation (exhibit a: Dominion voting machines), previously trusted institutions now lack integrity, the insane power of well-funded NGO networks, etc.
I fear western capitalism has lost its guide rails. We are seeing more and more centralization of wealth, along with unlimited election spending. Its a dark path.
There is another type who confuse ideology with reality. I wonder if you one of those, oh bingo-loving senior dev. Do you also cut people down for being idealists, when the reality of the situation serves you more than the ideal?
if you lookup playback as a concept, as it relates to the intelligence services, you will understand better what I meant.
my point was only that this is perfect description of the ideology behind western capitalism. there is (so) much more that could be said, but i'm not sure this comment section is the right place for a proper dissection of the very many ways in which this ideal is misconstrued, misdirected and coerced in order to serve interests that are far from ideal, to put it mildly.
since you have taken the time to ask a question, albeit a rather weak one, i will attempt a brief synopsis of my perspective on the parent comment:
a mortal danger is hyperbole, since shielding oneself from bodily harm is much easier with money. it is the poor, especially in the US, who cannot afford healthcare, as a first-line example
people regularly vote against their best interests. while the ideal might have been true for a while, behavioural influence on both a widespread and personal level is now a mature science.
i am not anti-election, not anti-democracy. claiming the opposite in the face of opposition is a sign of a polarised mindset, which cannot accept nuance, either because it is not used to it, or because it doesn't suit an vested interest, or because dissonance is simply too uncomfortable
the "there's nothing better" argument is usually used in ignorance, but in fact there are lots of system-level adjustments that have been shown historically to mitigate the corruption of incentives and the exploitation of systemic forces that, although initially unintentional, create emergent positive feedback situations that lead to a state that it counter to the utilitarian perspective that is contained within the western capitalist model.
the reading above is a very narrow view of Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, ignores the fact that human interests can be subverted and ignores the devil in the details
> it is the poor, especially in the US, who cannot afford healthcare
Is that even true? The poor are well subsidized. If you as a single person make less than $22,000 in Washington state, for example, you're covered at 100%.
By definition, there is no ruling class in an egalitarian liberal utopia.
Cynicism about corruption is one of the most power tools wielded by the ruling class in any system. In general its one of the best ways to keep the smarter-than-average from posing any actual threat.
Is this an example of why Fox News had to pay Dominion nearly $800 million for defamation, or are you referring to e.g. the CISA vulnerabilities, which are not known to have been exploited?
Over my ~9 years reading HN daily, I'd say most of the HN community broadly accepts there is no perfect system, just different sets of trade offs, but that history has shown generally democratic systems based on enlightenment values (uniform rule of law, respect for individual civil & property rights, free markets, etc) usually net a better average outcome over the long-run - despite still being very far from perfect.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's the worst system... except for all the others (which are even worse). :-)
In my almost 20 years on HN, for a long time the groupthink was basically standard libertarian-capitalism, worshipping billionaires and big tech companies, and skeptical of anything that could be construed as "socialism".
The last few years, though, while anything "anti-capitalist" or overly critical of some big tech companies that hits the front page gets flagged by bots pretty quickly, the overall feeling I get from the comments is much more skeptical of big tech and is pro-socialism.
Speaking for myself, I think we've become jaded after the constant barrage of big companies spying on us, charging more for less, enshitifying their products, and so on. I used to be optimistic about the future and my prospects, now I'm just hoping I can hold on and keep my health insurance until I retire. I worry about what my school-age kids are going to have to deal with in 5-10 years.
I agree that most are much more skeptical of big tech (and mega corps in general), as am I. I think there's also a growing sense the two-party duopoly is increasingly a 'managed democracy' primarily interested in perpetuating itself vs any real alternatives.
I disagree that most here are pro-socialism, that's a (very) vocal minority. Our democracy has entered a failure mode (two-party stage managed hegemony) and it's being tacitly supported by mega-corps because it's easier to game than a functioning free market democracy. Every complex system has failure modes, that doesn't mean free markets aren't long-term far better on average than socialism (although some redefine socialism so vaguely it seems conceptually little different). I've seen two flavors of socialism up close. Never want to again.
> I worry about what my school-age kids are going to have to deal with in 5-10 years.
Having a teenager, I share your concerns but I'm also a bit more optimistic about the longer term. It's easy to forget that our parents had similar concerns for us and their parents did before them. We've had an historically long period of broad systemic stability, really since the depression and WWII. While I don't think that level of upheaval is at all likely, I think we're overdue for a disruptive correction bigger than 2008, maybe something more on the order of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Era trust-busting to reset the two-party duopoly and crony corperatists both perpetuating each other's hold on power.
It may get rougher and more uncertain for a while, but the worst thing would be to lose the ethos of 'free minds, free markets, free choice' by falling into socialism, communism or totalitarianism. That's the only outcome that turns worry for my teenager into fear for my (still-theoretical) grandkids.
To be clear, you're using the word "socialism" different than I am. You're using it in the derogatory way conservatives do when they're trying to scare people, like linking it to "totalitarianism". I'm using it in the original definition, similar to Bernie Sander and Mamdani, and how the Scandinavian countries better the lives of their citizens. That's also the definition I'm using to describe the HN comments I'm referring to.
Words have definitions. You can’t just use them how you see fit, even if you are a populist politician.
Social democracy is a very different concept to socialism and these populists like mamdani are cynical manipulators that don’t truly believe in anything in their hearts other than winning sympathy of the masses.
Is this satire? Or haven't you noticed that what actually happens is that the politicians are all owned by the elite 1%, and they allow you to choose between politician A and politician B who both take their orders from the elite to give you the illusion that the government is the 99% ruling the 1%.
Then you must introduce necessary reforms or perish as Neanderthals of political system.
In any case the system works as intended
It will be very interesting to see if USA swims or drowns from appropriately afar.
I have already supplied myself with plenty of roasted corn and a high speed internet connection so I can stream the political car crash at the highest bitrate available to humankind.
Ever since I switched to Forgejo (could do Gitea or other self-hosted too), my outages have gone down to basically zero. It’s only down when I do maintenance but since I’m not pushing code at the same time it doesn’t matter
It really depends on the shape of the tests and the shape of the language. Eg: Untyped languages often have tests that effectively implement a type system as software grows and the developer count grows. That seems like a waste…
Writing a good test or good set of tests does take effort but enforcing 100% coverage often pushes some folks to just run the code in any way possible within the test subsystem.
> Untyped languages often have tests that effectively implement a type system as software grows and the developer count grows. That seems like a waste…
Nicely put. A very verbose type system that is also placed too far away from the definitions indeed
If I have a function add_nums that takes 2 numbers and adds them, there are like infinite inputs that can be tested.
If I have a function shape_color that can take circle, triangle, square for the shapes and red, blue, for the colors, then there are 6 different states. But what if my function just returns if it is a circle or triangle. It only cares about 2 different color paths when it is a square. Do I test all 6 states or do I test only the 3 code paths?
I think code coverage like many things is a “it depends”.
I think 100% code coverage usually means that for every branch, there is some test that results in it going down that branch? Like, there’s no line of code (outside of potential exception handling code?) that isn’t “tested” by any test (where “tested” means “it gets run during the test”).
>> If I have a function add_nums that takes 2 numbers and adds them, there are like infinite inputs that can be tested.
That's what formal verification is for: you generate math statements from the code, and then prove them.
Testing is for covering the most common scenarios and likely edge cases. 100% coverage means every line of code in the app is executed when your test suite runs. It is useful as a bare minimum, but by itself does not guarantee that there are no bugs.
It’s a question of the degree to which you want a self audit to be native to your structure or not
if you are confident that the complexity of what you have built can be fully tracked in your head then either you are some sort of God or you’re not used to building complicated enough things with critical failures attached to them
func below_ten()
if 10 < x
println(“true”)
else
println(“false”)
end
end
Now what would a test for these two paths test? It would basically be writing down the same - easy to understand logic - in a less generalized way. Good perhaps to ensure that this function doesn’t accidentally change over time but apart from that it wouldn’t add much value.
Exactly. If the function is already verified to be correct, then the unit and integration tests will determine if the function is appropriate for the context.
It sounds essentially like 1984. Not that the world needed him for that though because with the most recent Samsung TV scandal about microphone and camera spying on users it seems also that fiction became reality to a certain extent.
I wouldn’t mind a complete recording of my life at all times, provided I get to determine who has access to what. Would end a lot of I never said that arguments in my house.
> haven't fully realized/felt the cost implications of trainwreck software yet
As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.
> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
There is a hierarchy. Do robots need software or does software need robots?
There are lots of fields with easily verifiable outputs but that doesn’t make them valuable targets.
Eventually you’re going to need robotics to kick off the singularity, sure, but I would start with programming and math (and compute) which is exactly what they are doing.
Let’s say you start with robots, like we did, but we lack compute, we lack dev tools, we lack the ability to generate vast training environments, we cannot automate mathematical research of any kind in any way shape or form not even trivially, in general we are bottlenecked by math, code and compute. “Doing robotics” first without tackling the others is taking an astronomical detour which we as humanity are fond of.
I find the notion we automate cognition itself first and then tackle the secondary problems quite rational.
> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
I've done it with Local 60. I didn't last long. The work is legit heavy and hours are crazy. I lasted 4 months before I figured it is not for me. 6 am safety meetings and talk about injuries or someone getting decapitated was not a good motivator either.
My programming cohort in the '90s were predominantly ex-trades and service and the pay was initially a cut. The work environment and the people were almost a middle finger to everyone I couldn't stand in the real world, and they paid me to solve logic problems.
A large part of the trades is learning how to deal with toxic coworkers or shops, or understanding that you're being worked like a rented mule for no real reason. And I was able to leave all that behind for a moment.
The difficulty with human abilities in vision, locomotion and particularly coordination and manipulation is due to their arithmetic complexity being high. Modern deep learning solves that, LLMs provide the "interface" for planned action.
From the outside, this process of "solving" perhaps looks like "robots stumble around haplessly". But it's just the same as with mathematicians in the intellectual realm: when the level of ability surpasses that of humans, it appears as a "sudden event" to outsiders, having occurred far faster than anticipated.
The reality is that humans are far cheaper than robots in most real world situations. The only real exceptions so far are heavily controlled environments like factories.
Where robots ‘win’ is following orders with no regard to self preservation or long term survival.
Ponder that for a bit, and it’s consequences get a bit scary.
The world is vastly messier than engineers like to assume, and every real world trial I’ve seen requires massive human babysitting of a robot by humans for it to last any length of time or be useful at all.
And we’re not talking about AI type stuff, but corrosion, terrible field conditions causing sensor issues (mud, sap, dirt/dust), power management issues, communication disruption due to terrain, enemy action, etc.
Back when I worked shifts I had a colleague who looked like he had 'flu after a set of early starts.
The safety brief is supposed to motivate you to work safely so maybe they need to work on how they present it. I saw a couple of colleagues injured in my old job (EMS) but only seen a member of the public decapitated.
I don’t know where you live but here in the Netherlands we always turn the power off first. (Another thing I like about the trades so far are jokes like this.)
Last I checked, one of the biggest causes of arc-flash deaths were linemen turning off the lines and someone turned on a generator in response to the power being off and back-feeding the power through the lines because they didn't use a transfer switch.
I got lit up by 277/480 when I worked as an electrician because someone removed a lockout and turned on the breaker.
In any case, not all jobs can have the power turned off.
I was a software engineer at a FAANG, now an airline pilot. I feel a bigger sense of satisfaction with my job now, because at least at the end of the day I helped people get to where they needed to go.
The work is was doing in big tech was pretty far from anything that would help people in any tangible way.
The money isn't as good but the office view is way better.
I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
I bought my own airplane to do a lot of my ratings, then sold it for a decent profit, I think it was pretty much a wash. I also flew my wife and kids all around the country and had a wonderful time.
I offset the costs by doing flight instruction, which is a very common route. To get to the flight instructor stage by renting airplanes is probably in the order of a $50k investment, with a significant variance depending on the cost of living.
As a caveat to this, all my experience is in the US.
> I'm glad to see very poor coverage for transportation jobs on the AI benchmarks. May that continue until I'm done flying, at least AI probably won't ruin that for me any time soon.
No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Airplane automation has shown to be rather bad at diagnosing what is wrong and coming up with a workaround.
For example, engine falls off. The automation doesn't know that happened, it just sees various problems like the hydraulic pressure falls, and for some reason the engine thrust went to zero.
When I was at Boeing, an incident was recounted to me where the autopilot glitched and rolled the plane over into a vertical dive. It was going so fast it entered "separation", where the airflow no longer flows over the flight controls. In other words, the pilots were just along for the ride.
But the pilot figures, since we're dead anyway, let's try lowering the landing gear and see if it slows the jet down. He did, and it ripped the doors off and bent the gear back, but it slowed enough that the flight controls could get a "bite" and the pilots were able to regain control and landed safely.
Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable. It's simply not possible for a human to process the inputs and control the outputs in real-time sufficient to keep the fighter in the air. And that's old technology compared to the flight control systems in modern quadcopters - again, literally impossible for a human to pilot.
Suffice to say that what's in current civil jetliners is very far from the state of the art. I fully expect properly implemented and integrated AI to be far superior to human pilots in the future - it probably would be already, if we put the effort in.
> Many modern fighter jets literally cannot be flown by a human without automation, they're too unstable.
That's correct. But it's an easy problem to automate, because the problem being solved is well understood.
That's not the case for something randomly breaking.
I doubt the FAA would certify an AI running a jetliner, for the simple reason that if something unexpected happens, there's no way to predict what the AI will do. FSD for cars was done by collecting an incredible amount of data from the cameras on Teslas. Yet still, how much data was collected from Teslas having a catastrophic failure, like catching fire? A jetliner has a lot more failure modes than a car.
Being responsible for knowing what to do when autopilot fails has pretty good job security actually. The job might be babysitting, but no one wants to be in a flying tube without a captain that can at least let us know when we’re all going to die
Pilots can do that because they go through a ton of training and they deliberately do things to maintain their manual flying skills, including regularly taking manual control outside emergencies when the autopilot could fly perfectly well. And when a pilot takes control "for practice" there's no reduction in productivity for the airline compared to if the pilot is sitting in the seat with the autopilot engaged.
How can software engineers maintain a healthy "manual programming" skill set?
What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
> What employer would be willing to pay for so much wasted time for their software engineers to do deliberate training courses, or willing to accept the productivity loss from their engineers occasionally working manually for practice, when working manually is so much slower?
Lots of regulation or some landmark lawsuits should do it. If airlines operated the way tech companies did, we'd have daily plane crashes.
Pilots have to know all the ins and outs of every single system and subsystem of the machine they operate. If software engineers were required to understand their systems to the same degree in order to ship something, the only way you could do it is by coding yourself.
I honestly don't really see that big of a difference between a pilot and a software developer steering an agent. Both let a machine do 99% of the work.
It's not like the pilot instructs every single control surface individually. Nor does he physically carry every single passenger on his back.
Just because you're using a machine to do your job now doesn't really change anything substantial about the job other than the fact that you now need capital to pay the machine.
Any role where the human is a buffer against chaos should be thought of as secure by everyone involved. All automation and information flow will be in service to this position. This is not a bottleneck, it is the point of the exercise.
> No offense but pilots are probably at peak automation since their job has mostly been reduced to being a glorified AutoPilot system babysitters mainly needed for regulatory hedging. The ground transportation is still fair game though.
Wow. You clearly have zero idea of what a pilot's job is, and it shows.
You are also severely underestimating how much work and regulation would be required to replace pilots. And this work can be undone in a flash the first time automation messes up.
Also note that plane automation heavily relies on sensors. Many plane accidents were caused by faulty sensors even with humans in the loop.
You made the right choice. You will outlast OpenAi and Anthropic. They sell hallucinations and best guesses. The future can't be built on that. A good pilot who cares about safety and details, that can't be replaced with an LLM.
I have done multiple studies and they were always technical, so the company took a shot and hired me and would train me on the job. So far it's going well. They say I'm picking up stuff quickly and I occasionally help the head engineers with problems on their computers. This would probably be the same for most programmers. Reading drawings, connecting electrical circuits, and doing troubleshooting is surprisingly similar to programming.
I mean, from my perspective as an engineer, electricians’ work is just extremely primitive. I do not mean this as a disrespect - its hard and important work, but its on order of magnitude simpler mentally.
Of course many software "engineers" are nothing more than plumbers/electricians with data and that cohort is being quickly pushed out by AI. And our industry in general has conflated technicians and engineers which makes this worse.
But fundamentally, engineers job is to model the problem from the first principles and then apply that model to whatever problem. Technicians operate within the model, so I postulate anyone considering themselves an engineer is fundamentally a more capable electrician, plumber, carpenter, whatever than any master tradesperson.
I'm not speaking as someone that changed an outlet once and thinks they are now an "electrician". I have two decades of extensive property maintenance experience. I do everything myself and since my state does not allow pulling permits without licensure, I hold myself to commercial standards minimally. So EMT, MC, trapezes and gutters, no romex crap. Similarly, I will likely outsolder and outthread at least the current generation of "plumbers" that only know how to press things.
What I'm saying is extremely evident in any electricians' forum where its obvious that electricians just do not understand why is NEC written certain way. Then there' usually some "oracle" on said forums "deciphering" what the code is, despite it all being a pretty basic and coherent spec.
That doesn't change what I said. Work can be both primitive and life threatening.
And the main message is that anyone calling themselves an engineer by definition is should be as capable as "technician" level workers.
OT. What’s the going rate for adding a new circuit from the panel? Let’s say the circuit ended with an external outlet outside of the garage and to an outlet inside the garage.
This fits right alongside product asking how much work is it to move any button somewhere else in the UI. It depends which button, where it starts and where it ends, and even which app we're talking about.
Old work is always harder than new work. It varies by how your home is designed. It varies by where your panel is located and where your garage is located. You will pay a premium for the extra time and pain in the butt it causes.
As a great example, my friend asked for assistance with their home's street light not working. Long story short is that they ran a UF (underground feed) line directly under her concrete driveway (the contractor was too cheap to run it in conduit). I megged that line and it had a short. Their light stays off because rerouting through their house then digging up their yard isn't something they want to do (don't want to pay as I don't have that much free time and they don't want the massive headache it would cause). I was able to disconnect/wire off the failed part of the circuit so everything else works for them, so that's a win (and I didn't charge, so that was a win for them too I guess).
For one exterior GFCI receptacle in a bell box with a weatherproof in-use cover and one GFCI receptacle in a plastic box with 50’ of 14/2 NM-B cable, I would charge you $650.
Just stacco on wood frame. It’s adding a new circuit from the panel; might need to add a circuit breaker for the circuit. The wire can go through crawl space or over in attic.
Insurances love this trick so much they will refuse to pay anything in case it even indirectly caused any event. At least get it verified by professional, lowering financial gain of such approach a bit
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