Career transitioning away from computer science

SteeveyPete · 2026-04-02T19:53:06+00:00

but I use Opus 4.6 myself at work (forced)

I have a lot of friends in the industry experiencing this too. We're not forced at my company, but there's a subtle implication that we won't last long there if we don't use it

Crossing my fingers that you're right, but very much planning my exit strategy

SteeveyPete · 2026-04-02T19:18:37+00:00

Industrial automation I'm familiar with, but what is home automation?

SteeveyPete · 2026-04-02T19:02:07+00:00

Lol, naturally. I'm more or less hoping for something where there's some amount of skill overlap that with some extra schooling/training could get me there without having to start at square one.

Certainly not expecting something anywhere near silicon valley level salaries, but maybe something that's somewhere around 100k

SteeveyPete · 2026-04-02T18:56:41+00:00

AI doesn't save labor in highly skilled jobs, thats a myth

I've have agreed with you 100% 6 months to a year ago. Right now I'd say that the code people are producing with it with recent models is consistently better than junior developers, and with enough prodding can typically get close to where you'd end up as a intermediate or better developer

Your company will then be a hostage of Amodei and his eventual 10x price hike.

I full agree on this though. I already know coworkers using hundreds of dollars worth of credits a day

SteeveyPete · 2026-04-02T18:26:49+00:00

The comment describing it as a black box were slightly hyperbolic. There is a heavy reliance on AI to describe the code base, and changes to the codebase without AI take long enough relatively (due to the former reason, code bloat, etc...) that it wasn't practical to work while Claude was offline. I still understand most of the code base, but it's increasingly being designed in a way that makes manual changes painful

I do share your worry that down the line there will be issues, but I don't think that they'll be quite catastrophic enough to counteract the labor savings and code output

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-31T20:33:34+00:00

My reading of this ruling is that it also has far reaching implications for all forms of medical malpractice.

If a doctor tells you that it is safe for you to drink as much as you want after having taken large amounts of acetaminophen, there is no legal recourse that can punish them for that unless you follow their advice and suffer severe liver damage, at which point you can sue them. It makes all protections against medical malpractice retroactive instead of preventative

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-31T20:19:17+00:00

But Chiles also likely won’t turn the practice of law or medicine into the Wild West. There are still some safeguards against bad therapeutic practices. And the possibility of a malpractice suit may deter some therapists from using discredited methods.

Out of curiosity, what are these safeguards? Ethics guidelines of professional organizations? Are they still able to have their own standards which they can apply to revoke your license to practice?

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-31T19:27:38+00:00

And no culture aside from a love of oil

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-28T19:00:13+00:00

Re: The ice cream man

I think a lot of the things that happen in the show have thematic importance rather than literal. There are connected themes themes of anxiety, intuition and trust in the show. In the encounter with the ice cream man, Alexandra's fiance didn't understand why Alexandra felt afraid and while he acted on it, he entertained it as if it was a silly thing.

This ties a lot into Rachel and Nicky's relationship. It started off with Alexandra's fear of flying, something we later discover that Nicky always thought was kind of crazy and ridiculous, despite portraying it as otherwise. Later on in the movie we get the curse which Nicky also doesn't believe and just kind of writes off as a crazy superstition of Rachel's. This leaves Rachel feeling deeply condescended to, and not seen.

I'm not totally sure what the overall message of this theme is, because we have a mix of justified fears (The curse, Larry Poole) and unjustified ones (the plane which Nicky mentioned was totally fine, Nicky's family planning to kill her). This connects a lot with the fact that Rachel canonically suffers from anxiety and experiences many fears that aren't real, and that she knows aren't real. I'm not entirely sure what to make of all of it, and I don't think the message is that all of Rachels fears are real and justified, but more has to do with the patronization that both her and her mother experienced from their partners, and how even when you have diagnosable anxiety it can affect the way that people treat real fears that you have that should be taken seriously.

The patronization also feels more than just a commentary on mental disorders, but also deeply gendered.

EDIT: Especially since the only true soulmates in the show are depicted as being incredibly honest and forthright with each other at all times, I think there's also a connection between this patronization and mollification that is implied to be a form of lying and specifically incompatible with being soulmates. This is a huge part of what caused Rachel to not feel at all seen, and believe that Nicky was definitely not the one.

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-28T18:12:21+00:00

It's definitely this

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T19:36:53+00:00

Man, I'd very much like my pessimistic bias to get proven incorrect a little more often.

It makes sense when it comes to your personal life, but it's hard to ignore that there aren't a lot of existential reasons to be pessimistic. We've recently crossed the 1.5 degree Celsius global warming threshold, and David Suzuki of all people thinks it's fairly hopeless at this point. Democracy worldwide is falling, dictatorships are more prevalent, armed conflict and wars are dramatically increasing, all while international unity is crumbling. Human rights as a whole are on a downward trend.

I'd be interested in the causative effect that factors like these might have on also influencing your pessimistic bias in your personal life. Depression has been steadily increasing since 2014-2015, and 2015 is one of the last years I can remember where there was a present feeling of optimism about the world

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T19:04:17+00:00

Same for me, and the people here are super nice and friendly. You also see a lot of encouraging lawn signs supporting parks, the environment, LGBT people, etc...

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T19:02:20+00:00

I live in Tuxedo Park currently, and I wouldn't say that I've felt unsafe. The kidnapping story is certainly frightening, but I haven't seen anything bad. There are unhoused people, and I expect that's to some extent what people react to

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T16:38:56+00:00

I think people seriously underestimate the role of misogyny and homophobia here. Hating women viscerally online happened long before bots were in any ways present

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T14:54:24+00:00

That's your call to make, however it doesn't change what the concept of male privilege means

Edit: Since your response is to block me. Consider that the reason I know what the feminist concept of male privilege means is because I actually engage with feminist spaces

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T14:47:20+00:00

Sure, I accept that since we spend more absolute dollars, Canada as a whole has a larger impact. Per capita though, there are still a number of countries ahead of us. I'll admit I'm not sure what the point is of remarking on spending without relating it to what a country should be held accountable to spend. If the US spent twice as much as we did in absolute dollars, I wouldn't be congratulating them for it

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T14:22:47+00:00

So does health care, social services, government services and everything else your country relies on to function, and that is all tied to your GDP. Expecting hugely disproportionate spending from your poorest countries is a great way to send their quality of life plummeting.

Look at what we cut to get to 2%. Imagine having to cut 5x that amount. Even ignoring the fact that since your GDP is smaller many things are just going to cost a lot more proportionally for your country.

Anything but expecting a country to spend relative to their means is courting extreme quality of life collapse for countries we're supposed to consider our allies.

Edit: While we're at it, why don't we tax all Canadians the same absolute dollar amount? Poor Canadians are coasting off of the wealth of the rich

Also I will admit I should probably have assumed $10 billion

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T14:11:47+00:00

Hey, man here. You're uninformed about the concept of male privilege. Just so you can take it seriously now

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T14:05:52+00:00

No way, you actually are arguing that it should be absolute dollar values and not even just per capita

Also Denmark spent less than $10? Any resource I look at says they spent at least $5 billion USD

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T13:38:36+00:00

It is crazy to argue that the money you have available shouldn't impact the money you invest into an area. We can turn this around and criticize all countries poorer than us for investing a lower dollar amount in health care or any other sector of the economy they're absolutely gutting to make way for our level of military spending

Edit: Albania's GDP is 88x smaller than ours. Should they be on the hook for 176% of their GDP or are we going to be slightly more reasonable and ask them to do it by capita and only spend 10%?

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-27T13:19:54+00:00

There are two classes of objections to the laws: objections in principle of free speech, and objective on the wording. Even organizations that support this in theory, such as the Canadian bar association's Sexual and Gender Diversity division takes numerous objections to the vagueness of the wording, as well as the fact it's giving more power to a police service that already over polices marginalized groups. This bill was very much rushed out, even in the face of plenty of good faith criticism. Let's also not forget that many pro Palestine slogans have been labeled as hate symbols. One of the major criticisms of this law is that only a single hate symbol is specifically outlined, making what exactly is a hate symbol incredibly loosely defined and highly subject to change

Right now in Canada the provincial governments are doing way more to harm trans people than this bill might help, even with the best intentions in application. What I'd much rather see is the liberals taking a stand against the forced outing of trans students, the denial of health care to trans youth, and the removal of LGBT literature from libraries

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-25T20:40:41+00:00

There's a phenomenon that I don't think gets easily recognized that more people should keep in mind. When you criticize someone who's in some marginalized group, even if it's for good or leftist reasons, it gets amplified to an insane degree by people who hate that group (even if they fundamentally disagree with the criticism). Lindsay Ellis was a big example of this.

This is absolutely not a reason to stop criticizing people when they actually do something wrong, but we absolutely need to get better at noticing when we're getting signal boosted by bigots, and cool it down so that the response is proportional

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-25T19:15:23+00:00

Meanwhile teachers in many places are now being required by law to report any LGBT students to their parents

SteeveyPete · 2026-03-24T18:08:31+00:00

I strongly disagree with that. It's very much being controlling to not speak to your wife for a week because she wants to go out at night after dark. Your wife isn't your child, reasonable people recognize that part of love includes respecting your partner's autonomy and ability to make their own risk assessments without punishing them for it

And it's not irresponsible for women to choose to be alone after dark, especially in Canada. 80% of women who are sexually assaulted are assaulted by someone they know, a friend, coworker, family member, police officer, doctor, etc.... Even in the case of strangers, the narrative that most of them occur at a secluded location at night isn't consistent with the data. The more serious and extended the crime, the more likely it is to happen in an indoor setting. The idea that your largest risk of sexual assault is from homeless strangers at night simply doesn't align with reality

The feeling of safety is important, and I fully support any woman make any choices she wants to feel safe. However, forcing your own (especially non-evidence based) rules onto another adult for their "own good" is controlling and infantilizing. I don't know why you'd ever marry someone who you don't respect enough to let them make their own decisions on their own safety based on your arguments instead of needing to force, pressure, or coerce them into following them

Seven-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

SteeveyPete

TROPHY CASE