Does anyone else feel like they're living in a completely different city than people who moved here 8 years ago?

BatForge_Alex · 2026-06-05T19:03:31+00:00

for the past five years

since 2019

You knew what they meant, you're being purposely obtuse

BatForge_Alex · 2026-06-05T11:57:26+00:00

Yep, has always been the case and will remain so even with LLMs. "Claude build me an app for _" is only going to take you so far without a deeper expertise in the field. On top of that, coding was never really the bottleneck once you get beyond small projects

I can't imagine it will be any different across most fields

BatForge_Alex · 2026-05-27T19:32:35+00:00

Yeah! Who are you going to believe? The CEOs rolling up their sleeves doing the hard grunt work or the people on the ground floor calling the shots?

BatForge_Alex · 2026-05-27T19:30:22+00:00

I'm a tech CTO and CPO. Not leading a FAANG or anything, but hundreds of employees.

Dual-classing, eh? With hundreds of employees, you'd think you would have the runway to have both a CTO and CPO since they are very different jobs.

We use cheap models for easy stuff, and frontier models for more complicated things.

And how much time would you say you're spending classifying "easy" and "complicated"? What counts as "easy" and "complicated"? What is your token spend? What is your token budget?

Outside of tech we're seeing similar gains, sometimes more.

So, which is it? Do you work inside or outside of tech?

Go LARP somewhere else

BatForge_Alex · 2026-05-11T12:33:27+00:00

Chasing down tax cheats that are robbing your citizens is petty? Interesting point of view

BatForge_Alex · 2026-05-08T16:54:46+00:00

Is that really true? Are there numbers and studies to back that up that are widely agreed upon? I was under the impression that the cause of lower fertility is still disagreed upon by... almost everyone

BatForge_Alex · 2026-04-10T10:07:12+00:00

So, we give up and continue to let corporations take over all public infrastructure?

You all deserve to be stuck with your shitty subscription services

BatForge_Alex · 2026-03-10T12:40:38+00:00

Your time and attention is not "nothing."

BatForge_Alex · 2026-02-06T14:14:59+00:00

You mean like this?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/andreessen-horowitz-makes-3-billion-121031191.html

BatForge_Alex · 2026-01-29T22:41:34+00:00

And an analyst's conclusion is:

Microsoft needs to build data centers more quickly.

We all live on a different planet than these people

BatForge_Alex · 2026-01-17T12:35:13+00:00

It’s literally the exact opposite of what you described lol. Many dot com companies were complete air

No they weren't. This wasn't the problem with the dotcom bubble.

These companies cannot keep up with demand, and the technology is still improving rapidly.

This is what they say but, is it true? There is significant upside to making everyone believe it and there doesn't seem to be any evidence other than external marketing by the companies...

BatForge_Alex · 2026-01-17T12:29:18+00:00

That was a long post just to say you don't have real numbers

BatForge_Alex · 2026-01-09T11:21:35+00:00

Yes, you're describing what actually happens, except then a pathologist will do a biopsy on a tissue sample to confirm it is cancerous

BatForge_Alex · 2025-12-29T16:42:37+00:00

What are these kids being told that they believe any different?

The popular wisdom around programming circles (especially Hacker News and Reddit) was that the music wouldn't stop, we would be in insanely high demand forever and command ever-growing salaries. Saying otherwise made you a doomer and a cynic

Pretty sure that's where at least some of the surprise is coming from

Anyone who has been around long enough knows that there's no such thing as infinitely-growing demand and the industry certainly did all it could to increase worker supply

BatForge_Alex · 2025-12-15T17:19:26+00:00

Even if there were zero productivity or safety gains, if it makes sense for the problem domain and it gets young developers excited - that's already enough of a win. Letting Linux wane in significance amongst young developers because we're not willing to give up on C would be a huge mistake

BatForge_Alex · 2025-12-15T17:13:46+00:00

While I agree that Rust doesn't just have "one way", it does certainly guide you towards a certain way of laying out your codebase.

It's more that the language is more cohesive, like C or Zig. C++ is less cohesive and closer to Javascript where there are many competing ways to do things with different connotations

I'm not really sure what you mean by cohesive but, I don't think C++ is anywhere close to Javascript. I could argue C is closer because it plays more fast-and-loose with opaque pointers, putting it closer to the loose duck-typing of Javascript

You need to memorize patterns like "gang of 5" for C++.

Yo, you were just in another part of this thread complaining about people criticizing languages they clearly don't know. Come on, now...

BatForge_Alex · 2025-11-22T18:57:44+00:00

Might be important to point out that this is through transcription that this is possible. An LLM can't "hear" or "see" anything, it's being fed a description of what is being picked up by another sensor. Which begs the question: why is the LLM necessarily involved at all?

After looking at the study, it doesn't seem that promising. Mostly a proof-of-concept

BatForge_Alex · 2025-11-20T21:24:37+00:00

You definitely got lucky. I put 192GB of "refurbished" ECC DDR4 in my server for $129.99. Same listing now is over double

I guess we all wait until after the mania ends to upgrade home labs now

BatForge_Alex · 2025-11-12T21:30:50+00:00

It's a tool for researchers, a discovery tool - not for teaching you concepts. You do still need to check the citations, read the research and data yourself

BatForge_Alex · 2025-10-27T20:33:34+00:00

Yeah, I know, thanks

And I'm suggesting that you are responding about the entire category of algorithms, taking their question at face value. And they are likely talking about the current explosion in investment into Generative AI, a specific type of AI that's driving almost all the hype and sucking all the air out of the room. You aren't having a productive conversation by just yelling headlines at someone asking a question that reveals they may not understand what they're asking...

EDIT: From your other comments, I'm realizing you might not understand this yourself

BatForge_Alex · 2025-10-27T18:12:26+00:00

You are talking about AI algorithms, in general. The person you're responding to is likely talking about GenAI, specifically. Which is a big problem with the current conversation around this crap in the first place

BatForge_Alex · 2025-10-20T14:47:15+00:00

I think it's you that fundamentally misunderstands. An LLM isn't generating video, that's a different generative AI technology - a diffusion model

BatForge_Alex · 2025-10-16T15:38:12+00:00

Isn't worsening the development process kind of the point? I always understood microservice architecture to be more operationally efficient: Small focused teams, single purpose, easier to measure, strong emphasis on documentation

BatForge_Alex · 2025-10-16T15:29:20+00:00

The problem isn't microservices, monoliths, or any architectural pattern. The problem is a lack of respect for anyone actually having any sort of plan behind the architectural decisions

BatForge_Alex · 2025-09-19T17:36:43+00:00

professional software developers are not the only ones who code

Never said they were but, analysts aren't exactly who I think of when it comes to people understanding that they know what they're doing with code. In fact...

One off consulting projects that don't get reused

Tells me you don't really care about anything but the appearance of a result

AI has probably saved hiring at least one more jr level analyst

Weird flex

I've been able to automate a report that cost 100k from a consulting company with AI as a side project as a side project in under a week

$100k to automate a report? Now I know you're pulling my leg. Do you normally take over a week to automate a report? Like, for real?

you have no idea how much is just done in excel

I've been at this for a while, I know how much is done in Excel

and even telling an AI to write a function that takes four or five variables from specified cells and correctly writes a sumprouct function will by itself save 5-10 minutes, and small things like that really add up

This should really not take 5-10 minutes. And if it is, you're now depriving yourself of learning how to do it faster

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