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The corporate dilemma between "I hired some less competent engineers and they're dragging the team down" and "I hired only highly capable engineers and now I have to give 10% of them bad reviews in stack ranking and later let them go"

I don't think this is a real dilemma - people hell bent on avoiding work can get by without shipping a single line of code for years.

I'm curious what the trend for whites in the US is over time. That would be a good first approximation on how much of this decline is due to culture or the educational system (including COVID disruptions) and how much is demographic change/immigration.

Doesn't seem to have incentivized cryptocurrency enthusiasts away from being in that last category for years...


Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.


> Crypto never did anything is the difference? The only people it did anything for were speculative investment types.

Don't forget the criminals. When it comes to crypto, never forget the criminals.


I mean, that's totally fair.

That doesn't seem untenable at all. It's perfectly consistent with legal precedent and current practice.

There are MANY cases where the government legitimately possesses personal information that could potentially cause harm if revealed, for operational as well as public safety purposes. Vehicle registration and drivers license records, for example.

This personal information is typically exempt from FOIA laws. I can't go FOIA vehicle registration records to look up where a certain driver lives, but the state and police officers do have access to that information.

A search involves access without consent. Police don't need a search warrant to perform a search with the consent of the owner. In the case of cell phone data the search is without the consent of the data owner (the phone company). In this case the municipality is collecting public-view data themselves, not without the consent of the collector, so there's no search warrant issue.


You’re missing the point. It seems like you’re saying how things “generally” are, but not how they legally should play out. For instance, among my lawyer friends, they insist that drug-sniffing dogs should require a warrant as well, and a few have said they’d happily take a case like this pro-bono to start putting the goalposts where they belong.


Common complaint is that government enforcement of laws is insufficient, i.e. fines are only x% of their worldwide revenue. Sounds like this way has teeth and might force companies to actually obey the law?


it doesnt have teeth if its unconstitutional

otherwise they could just send the texas rangers to canada to go kill the execs in montreal


Texas rangers vs RCMP sounds like it would make for a decent arena bloodsport matchup.

Back on topic, does the constitutionality matter if the business is destroyed by the process? How long might they be without their domain name even if they prevail in the end? I somehow doubt texas would ever get stuck paying out damages.


"Unconstitutional" is whatever the Supreme Court says it is.


I was wondering about that. I've taken a number of different cold medications over the years, one active ingredient at a time, to check their effectiveness while sick. Phenylephrine, as widely reported, had zero effect. But Dextromethorphan seemed to work for my kids - give it to them, stopped coughing. Started coughing again 6 hours later, etc. n=1 and it's a 4 year old, but in one of those cases my results clearly matched the studies, and in the other it didn't, at least as reported by this article.


What I've been doing recently:

1. Vibe code a codebase that does what I want at a high level.

2. Iterate with LLM on this codebase to add features, fix bugs, improve performance, and address issues until it basically does what I want, but the code behind it is often a toxic waste dump.

3. Take lessons learned from vibe coded version and implement by hand. For challenging areas (writing a complicated algorithm) that would require a lot of thought or brainpower, I'll sometimes ask the LLM for a reference implementation and then modify it to suit.

This is a big speedup on manual code because you've figured out all the question-marks ahead of time and have a functioning blueprint you can refer to.

It's not as fast as having LLMs do all the code of course, but I find it to be a considerable improvement over doing everything by hand, while still letting me write code I'm comfortable with and understand deeply.

The other angle is to be very specific with the prompts and then dive deep into the code output and keep asking the LLM to change the code structure in various ways to ensure you get code you like. I found that to be frustrating and painful. Maybe in the future I'll write some really good prompts and future models will be better at following direction, but I haven't been happy with the results of that approach to date.


The people doing the voting are mostly talking about how much water datacenters supposedly use.


More electricity than water around here—rates going up gets everyone’s attention—but there’s nothing supposedly about the water use: data centers don’t consume the water permanently but they still put stress on systems which weren’t designed for the extra volume, pushing requests for expensive expansion projects, and there can be other problems: a colleague mentioned his family back home recently learned that the extra water circulation was spreading a groundwater pollution plume substantially faster, affecting well water users in the area. Since these things tend not to contribute many jobs, there isn’t much to balance out the bad news for communities.


As I have snarkily observed at work: if I go $100 over the meal allowance on my business trip, I'll have to have an unpleasant conversation with my manager or finance. If I use $500 in AI tokens unproductively I'll be recognized for being a top AI adopter.


I have seen this type of behavior happen many times in different companies.

For example, at more than one company I've worked for, if you wrote shitty code but got it into "testing" faster than anybody else, you are considered a superior programmer. And then, if you fixed the hundreds of bugs found in your code seen as an extraordinary programmer going above and beyond the call of duty.

Management is always measuring the wrong thing.


Certainly disagree with "AIs are not good at writing Rust". We can discuss the pros and cons of AI coding in general but in my experience they do just as well with Rust as any other language. If anything I'm impressed with how seamlessly the models can work with Rust's ownership model.


The kind if code they are writing is probably not what you are using Rust for.


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