If you can't, or won't work from home, having work from home still benefits you.

First, if people around you are working from home, suddenly rush hour stops being such. You benefit because the roads are less busy so you get a smoother commute. Less traffic on the roads means you get to your destination way quicker and time spent commuting goes down.

Second, if you have to fight for parking, well, less people to fight with which means you probably can find a parking space much quicker or it's just less packed overall so you're not hunting for that one empty space.

Third, if you're packed in the office, fewer people means more space.

All this means everyone saves on gas - working from home people save on gas. Everyone having to go into the office means gas isn't wasted in traffic jams of hunting for parking as well.

It's just like how improving public transit options helps those who have to commute by car as well - someone taking the bus means one less car on the road. A full bus means several blocks worth of cars are taken off the road making the road less congested overall.

Benefits all around. Even better, it doesn't actually cost taxpayer money to implement - no one has to build new roads. Heck, make it so employers who want people in the office should provide electric cars to their employees or pay a gas tax and RTO will suddenly reverse.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

An AI data center can replace a legion of human workers. So the heat emissions can be offset if those humans cease to exist.

A human operates at anywhere from 75-150W of energy. At 150W, a MW of energy is 6666 people. A rack in a datacenter right now consumes around 5-15kW, so a megawatt is around 100 racks.

AI datacenters are attempting to scale that up to 100kW per rack.

And none of that includes cooling and ancillary - this is just pure compute power consumption.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

Clive Sinclair's company collapsed within five years of shipping their first computer. Perhaps not a good counter-example.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit, plenty of others could have done what he did. VERY few could have done what Wozniak did and its a damn shame that not many people outside of the tech world have heard of him.

That is false. Jobs and Wozniak actually are the yin and yang of Apple. Wozniak by himself, left to his own devices, would still be working at HP. Jobs by himself, would have been a has-been engineer. Jobs was actually competent as an engineer (unlike say, other "engineers" like Musk).

Jobs though, was more tuned into the business side of things than the engineering side of things, while Woz was the opposite.

Woz and Jobs got started by making a blue box - Jobs had read about them in the Esquire article, and Woz built one of the first digital blue boxes. Both of them went around Berkeley selling them to college students for $150 or so and they made a few thousand.

Jobs knew about computers, Woz built a computer. Woz was basically giving the Apple I away at the Homebrew Computer Club and it was one among dozens of others doing the same. Jobs had the business acumen to recognize he could do one better and sold it to a computer store and get the production of it going (requiring Woz to sell his HP-35 calculator). They'd build 10 (all they could afford), sell them and use the money to build 20 and so on.

Wpz designed the hardware. Jobs saw the potential and could leverage the confidence he had to not just sell it, but to get it produced - arranging the suppliers to give them 30 days credit.

These days it's a lot easier since if you want something built, China can handle the production if you meet the minimum order quantity. But back then, it's not like there was a huge electronics supply chain, production lines, or anything else.

Both Jobs and Woz were soldering Apple Is in that garage too - like I said, Jobs was an OK engineer, but he knew talent. Woz was an excellent engineer, but was happy at HP and didn't really have the desire to start his own company.

It's Yin and Yang - you need both, which is how Apple got started. Woz would likely have kept this computer as a nifty prototype then bought a Commodore when they came out a few years later whilst still at HP. Jobs would likely have drifted among various electronics companies (he was at Atari) once the crash happened.

You have to remember Jobs went and found NeXT after Macintosh got the Apple board to oust him. He sold his Apple stock and basically created NeXT. He used the earnings at NeXT to basically backstop Pixar (who was struggling and about to go under) and eventually fund Toy Story.

And he brought the second coming to Apple, recognizing talent in Jony Ives to design a computer so unique everyone knew what it was.

Doesn't excuse Jobs being an asshole, though. The only redeeming personal quality Jobs had is that he managed his RDF (reality distortion field) to push the people who work for him to do their best work. He was a pain to work for, but if you actually do good, he did reward you to encourage you to do more great work.

I didn't know about that before.

That's always a big factor in early experimenting. Who pays for all the components and test equipment? Even when the labour is free, if you don't have the R&D resources you're forever dead in the water.

It's odd because it's a pretty well known story. Wozniak loved experimenting and HP had a policy that lets engineers have access to HP's parts to produce a product. The only restriction was that HP had the right to your invention if they wanted it.

Wozniak presented HP management with the then Apple I computer, but they rejected it because they couldn't believe anything using a standard TV would meet HP's quality. The reason being that TVs from random manufacturers will have different visual quality and there was no way to control it.

That's a valid point, though right now while they're facing competition from startups the dealerships do provide them with a moat that they want to preserve. If/when the startup threat is gone, the automakers will go back to hating the dealerships.

I think people forget how everyone laughed at Tesla because everyone knew that starting a new car company in the United States was impossible. Now we also have Lucid and Rivian. Maybe someday Aptera will manage to get off the ground. This is a novel situation for American carmakers.

I found the book underwhelming. The Martian was a great book, and I read it long before I heard of the movie. Project Hail Mary I found was much more formulaic book and much less compelling a read than The Martian. I haven't read Artemis - in fact, I didn't know of it until recently.

It was my friend who introduced me to Project Hail Mary and said it wasn't as good. After getting my own copy at a local indie bookstore and reading it, I have to agree. It's a nice book, but honestly it lacked a lot of the surprise and wonder of The Martian.

Still, doesn't mean I don't want to see the movie, but i probably would get it on disc since I can't really justify seeing it in IMAX. Unless it was in 3D I suppose. 3D at home is basically dead which makes it impossible to see anything in 3D outside of theatres.

They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

I thought exactly the opposite. I think Rocky is far too "human". I didn't mind it, though, because a lot of the humor would be lost if Rocky was properly alien.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.