No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D

They do produce one tangible product ... hot air.

you need to show that reality is discrete, not real.

  Quantum mechanics appears to be computable. That is why quantum computers cannot solve problems which are impossible on classical machines, though they appear to be up to exponentially faster on some problems.

In other words, you can't use the continuous nature of quantum mechanics to compute things today are classically non computable, because you can't make infinitely precise measurements. And if you cannot compute anything that's non computable, then you are by definition computable.

That doesn't mean we know how to do it, or that a simple descritisation scheme will work.

Honestly though I don't have a good enough understanding of quantum mechanics or computation theory to really understand the arguments in fully mathematical detail.

No, because juniors learn.

Also, many juniors will admit when they don't actually know something (this depends on the junior and the manager). AI never learns and will spew bullshit with a veneer of utter confidence.

If you're a developer in 2025 and you're not using AI, you either have very specific concerns (ie. you can't let *anyone* else, not even an AI, see your code) ... or you're a few steps removed from being a Luddite.

Or, options 3 you're working on something actually interesting. My job isn't to churn out as you said "massive" amounts of code, it's to produce some code (ideally good code) that solves particular and often not very common problems. I've tried AI quite a bit, and will continue to use it for some things, but I've soured on it somewhat. It often hallucinates API calls, which really ruins it for the "I want to use this AI but don't know how" kind of tasks. It produces astoundingly verbose code, often spending ages covering all sorts of edge cases which aren't remotely relevant to the situation and it's often wrong in subtle ways.

AI is deterministic software

Kinda, but probably not. Usually things like fast matrix multiply are a little non deterministic because the results depend on the order of summation due to rounding and that's non deterministic due to threading. And the output is usually sampled based on random numbers which can be a PRNG or can be (or be seeded by) a HWRNG, the latter being nondeterminstic.

executing on a machine that implements boolean logic.

Apart from the trivial super-Turing case of randomness, physics is so far known to be computable. Which means a human brain (given enough time and memory) can be simulated with just boolean logic.

It does not have feelings.

That I do agree with.

I've searched all over their academy but can't seem to find lessons specifically written for these exams. Has any one else found them? I'm very interested in performing these courses but being slightly above average in my Linux skills will never do. The overview for the first exam alone, The Linux Terminal, has more than a few skills there I have never attempted.

The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.

There are three factors that define productivity:

• Toil (T) - The time spent doing random s**t that nobody wants to do, but you have to do, but that probably doesn't contribute much to productivity. This is a constant reduction in productivity at the bottom of the graph.
• Energy level (e) - A curve that declines over time for each day and does not fully recover in subsequent days without days off.
• Error rate (E) - A curve that is inversely proportional to energy level, and becomes exponential at high levels of fatigue.

Raw output in a given time period is proportional to energy level. Useful output is raw output minus the error rate, because erroneous output has to be redone and cancels out its benefit. And the time spent is then reduced by the time spent on toil.

So the equation looks something like f(t) = (t - T) * (e - E). That's why small reductions in bulls**t make a big difference, and the sweet spot for time spent ends up being hard bounded by when the error rate exceeds the useful output, at which point productivity goes negative.

Hope that helps.

Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.

More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.

So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.

And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.

Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.

See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.

I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.

I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...

Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.

No, not even then. Options in a startup that has a 2% chance of making it to IPO are worthless, as is your equity stake. Working yourself to death for a lottery ticket is stupidity.

Startup or not, hire enough people to do the job. If you're pushing people to work crazy hours, you're a moron, and your company is all but guaranteed to be in that 98%.

Citation needed.

Not yet haha!

They're not yet at the level of the UK either. They are over 10 times that of France. The "not yet" is doing some very heavy lifting. I'm not going to cheer on Germany for being so far a bit less shit than they were.

Wikipedia is hopelessly biased and always will be: reality has a well known liberal bias and since Wikipedia aims to represent reality there is no hope it's ever "neutral".

No assembled or manufactured product on this planet is sourced from a single country in its entirety.

This is very true. And it sort of gets weirdly fractal because many of the individual parts are also manufactured with complex supply chains. Where does the copper, silicon and chemical supplies for the manufacturing of the many ancillary chips (which may or may not be made in USA) come from? And so on.

Only pretty simple things can be "made in X" for some X.