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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Good, fire 2 devs out of 3.

    Companies that do this will fail.

    Successful companies respond to this by hiring more developers.

    Consider the taxi cab driver:

    With the invention if the automobile, cab drivers could do their job way faster and way cheaper.

    Did companies fire drivers in response? God no. They hired more

    Why?

    Because they became more affordable, less wealthy clients could now afford their services which means demand went way way up

    If you can do your work for half the cost, usually demand goes up by way more than x2 because as you go down in wealth levels of target demographics, your pool of clients exponentially grows

    If I go from “it costs me 100k to make you a website” to “it costs me 50k to make you a website” my pool of possible clients more than doubles

    Which means… you need to hire more devs asap to start matching this newfound level of demand

    If you fire devs when your demand is about to skyrocket, you fucked up bad lol


  • You skipped possibility 3, which is actively happening ing:

    Advancements in tech enable us to produce results at a much much cheaper cost

    Which us happening with diffusion style LLMs that simultaneously cost less to train, cost less to run, but also produce both faster abd better quality outputs.

    That’s a big part people forget about AI: it’s a feedback loop of improvement as soon as you can start using AI to develop AI

    And we are past that mark now, most developers have easy access to AI as a tool to improve their performance, and AI is made by… software developers

    So you get this loop where as we make better and better AIs, we get better and better at making AIs with the AIs…

    It’s incredibly likely the new diffusion AI systems were built with AI assisting in the process, enabling them to make a whole new tech innovation much faster and easier.

    We are now in the uptick of the singularity, and have been for about a year now.

    Same goes for hardware, it’s very likely now that mvidia has AI incorporating into their production process, using it for micro optimizations in its architectures and designs.

    And then those same optimized gpus turn around and get used to train and run even better AIs…

    In 5-10 years we will look back on 2024 as the start of a very wild ride.

    Remember we are just now in the “computers that take up entire warehouses” step of the tech.

    Remember that in the 80s, a “computer” cost a fortune, took tonnes of resources, multiple people to run it, took up an entire room, was slow as hell, and could only do basic stuff.

    But now 40 years later they fit in our pockets and are (non hyoerbole) billions of times faster.

    I think by 2035 we will be looking at AI as something mass produced for consumers to just go in their homes, you go to best buy and compare different AI boxes to pick which one you are gonna get for your home.

    We are still at the stage of people in the 80s looking at computers and pondering “why would someone even need to use this, why would someone put one in their house, let alone their pocket”


  • Meanwhile a huge chunk of the software industry is now heavily using this “dead end” technology 👀

    I work in a pretty massive tech company (think, the type that frequently acquires other smaller ones and absorbs them)

    Everyone I know here is using it. A lot.

    However my company also has tonnes of dedicated sessions and paid time to instruct it’s employees on how to use it well, and to get good value out of it, abd the pitfalls it can have

    So yeah turns out if you teach your employees how to use a tool, they start using it.

    I’d say LLMs have made me about 3x as efficient or so at my job.







  • Yup, I usually have it set to the slowest setting when typing.

    I find I work much better and can think clearer while walking, as it keeps the blood flowing and makes me feel more awake and engaged.

    If I have a tough problem I’m trying to work through I turn the speed up to a faster pace and sorta just work through it in my head while speed walking, often this helps a lot!

    During meetings when I’m bored I also turn the speed up a bit.

    I often get around 10k to 12k steps in a day now.

    Note I don’t stay on the treadmill all day long, I usually clock a good 4 hours on it though.

    Then I take a break and chill on the couch with my work laptop, usually I leave my more “chill” tasks like writing my tests for this part, and throw on some Netflix while I churn all my tests out.

    Highly recommend it, I’ve lost a good 15ish lbs now in the past year since I started doing it, and I just generally feel a lot better, less depressed, less anxious :)


  • From my experience the only big changes I’d say I made overtime are:

    1. Font size bumped up

    2. Switched to neovim from visual studio, which took like a year to relearn my entire workflow (100% worth it though)

    3. Switched from multiscreen setup to one single big screen (largely due to #2 above no longer needing a second screen, tmux+harpoon+telescope+fzf goes brrrr)

    4. Switched to a standing desk with a treadmill, because I became able to afford a larger living space where I can fit such a setup.

    If I were to do this meme though it’d mostly be #1, there just came a day when I had to pop open my settings and ++ the font size a couple times, that’s how I knew I was getting old.


  • Others have covered the fact it’s because of air pressure but haven’t fully answered why that is the way it is.

    It’s simple really.

    The force of gravity is also at play. As you go higher up, gravity gets weaker as you get farther from the earth’s centre.

    And it is that gravitational force that increases the air’s density, same reason why if you keep going down in the water, the water gets denser.

    For the heat to move around you need to be in a sort of goldilocks zone of density.

    It needs to be dense enough that the fluid molecules can move around and spread the convection energy around… but not so dense they can’t move much either.

    Furthermore there’s actually a couple different layers of our atmosphere.

    First at our level is the troposphere, where heat is absorbed into the ground itself and radiated back out, as well as the perpetual heat from the earth’s core, and reflected off the ground too (visible light).

    The troposphere is warm and gets colder as you get farther away from the earth’s surface, naturally. That heat is absorbed by the air itself so, as you get farther away it gets colder as it has more air to travel through.

    Up higher is the Stratosphere, where it’s ice cold and the air thins out.

    However we get a sudden uptick in temp as we go even higher into what is called the Stratopause, back to briefly warm temperatures between the Stratosphere and the Mesosohere. Why? How?

    Simple, this is the little sweet spot Ozone molecules hang out, forming a protective convenient bubble around the earth. Ozone absorbs Ultraviolet light from the sun and turns out that stuff is HOT, so there’s a band of a hot zone right above and below the Ozone layer. Think of it as a toasty little bubble around us.

    Above is the mesosphere which cools off again and gets back to being really frosty quickly, for the same reason the Stratosphere did, distance.

    Then we hit the mesosphere, which is effectively the point when the atmosphere is so thin it stops protecting and is the “outside” of our protective blanket.

    You can imagine this like earth being wrapped in a blanket, and the mesosphere is everything outside the blanket. Without any protection you are subject to the unbridled radiation of the sun which means you go back to being really toasty, as you get a bit higher you are effectively in space now and will soon enough hit temps that just cook you alive in a minute or two. Really bad sunburn zone.

    So to answer the question overall:

    Hot air rises… but only when there is air to rise.

    Top of the mountains just don’t have enough air anymore for it to really rise much more. It still does but the hot air rising effect just gets weaker and weaker as the air gets thinner due to less gravity.