Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.

• Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
• There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.

I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.

Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…

I liked Outer Worlds, but while I do see some “NV magic” there, it feels like both Bethesda AND Obsidian are no longer the same companies that they once were. Obsidian are still quietly putting out some solid games…but not to the same quality of two generations prior.

Tribalism is surprisingly rampant in gaming, especially when a developer picks a side/is acquired by the creator of “their” console.

It’s sad that I know this, but no.

Years ago, I buried one of my guinea pigs that had died. I dug the hole really fucking deep, but each night our lawn was getting brutalised by foxes or whatever tried to dig holes in the night. One night I looked out, and saw multiple animals digging at the hole.

I mentioned this to someone at my gym, and one person chimed in to say that they worked in forensics. Apparently lots of dead bodies are dug up either partly or fully by animals that can smell the body, so much of what they had to work with was tainted by animal markings. The animals might not smell below the ground, but you probably dug the hole with the body nearby…

TLDR: Animals don’t give a heck about the law.

I graduated in CS alongside a guy in his fifties. He’s now retired, but he had easily 10-15 years as a software engineer, and was the lead of a group at a large company before he retired, so I assume it all went well for him.

If you want to learn something, do it. if you want to do it professionally, do it.

I recently upgraded from a OP6 to the new Pixel, and aside from being a bit shinier in some ways, it felt like an expensive downgrade, since I’ve lost a headphone jack and gained features I didn’t particularly care about.

The days of a phone upgrade bringing new features feel like a lifetime ago.

Not sure why you’re downvoted, but this is already happening. There was a story a few days ago of a long-time BBC voice-over artist that lost their gig. There have also been several stories of VA workers being handed contracts that allow the reuse of their voice for AI purposes.

That’s why it would need regulation to work…

My own personal belief is very close to what you’ve said. It’s a technology that isn’t new, but had been assumed to not be as good as compositional models because it would cost a fuck-ton to build and would result in dangerous hallucinations. It turns out that both are still true, but people don’t particularly care. I also believe that one of the reasons why ChatGPT has performed so well compared to other LLM initiatives is because there is a huge amount of stolen data that would get OpenAI in a LOT of trouble.

IMO, the real breakthroughs will be in academia. Now that LLM’s are popular again, we’ll see more research into how they can be better utilised.

I work in AI. LLM’s are cool and all, but I think it’s all mostly hype at this stage. While some jobs will be lost (voice work, content creation) my true belief is that we’ll see two increases:

1. The release of productivity tools that use LLM’s to help automate or guide menial tasks.

2. The failure of businesses that try to replicate skilled labour using AI.

In order to stop point two, I would love to see people and lawmakers really crack down on AI replacing jobs, and regulating the process of replacing job roles with AI until they can sufficiently replace a person. If, for example, someone cracks self-driving vehicles then it should be the responsibility of owning companies and the government to provide training and compensation to allow everyone being “replaced” to find new work. This isn’t just to stop people from suffering, but to stop the idiot companies that’ll sack their entire HR department, automate it via AI, and then get sued into oblivion because it discriminated against someone.

What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.

In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.

A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.

A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.

Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.

Unironically, yes.

I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.

After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.

In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…

In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.

I’m getting some serious “The Most Interesting Man In The World” vibes from your cat.

You don’t need to make something unique, if your goal is to learn.

The best thing you can do is to build something that solves a problem for you, or to build something that already exists that you know well.

As for money, given that companies seem to love layoffs lately, I would say that higher salaries only matter if you are employed. It’s an employers market right now, and a lot of people are really struggling to find work again, even from large companies like Amazon and Google.