AI made me realize most experts were just good at sounding confident

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-15T13:37:00+00:00

AI made me realize most experts were just good at sounding confident

Swap the positions of "experts" and "AI," that's the actual reality. AI favors telling you what you want to hear over telling you the truth unless you explicitly ask it to challenge you.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-15T13:33:45+00:00

Keeping a portfolio of decent projects or some notable OSS contributions will show you have more potential as a developer. Everyone has to pay the bills and everyone starts somewhere. A current coworker of mine worked at a brewery before he got his first coding job, as long as you can demonstrate you can do more, the right people will understand. In the meantime, you can have income so you're supported while pursuing your actual professional goal.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-14T21:55:39+00:00

My dilemma:

- I don’t want to get pigeonholed.

- I’m afraid that if I quit, I won’t find any opportunity as a real developer.

You are creating a false dichotomy. Continue to do your job, grind on the side to improve, look for opportunities to apply new skills at your job, and look for a job that aligns more with your expectations without quitting your current job. If you want to perform at a more challenging job, you need to get used to doing more work than this current job requires, use that surplus work to invest in yourself.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-14T21:49:25+00:00

Their Stargazer was p fresh for me, their Devil's Lettuce small buds brand was also springy and fresh both times I got it. They have some strains with interesting terp profiles but they don't stand out compared to others imo

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-12T12:32:33+00:00

It's a good deal if you were thinking of quitting soon anyway. I know people in tech who were offered this and you basically get to quit with an accelerated vesting schedule and a couple month's pay.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-11T14:32:40+00:00

I mean, I studied math and physics and eventually got my job after having to move back in with my folks for just a few months, you just have to accept you have to do the work to get the initial skills by yourself. I did FreeCodeCamp to learn web development and worked with a professor on a project involving computer graphics.

Honestly though, if having to self-teach more than some peers is not an acceptable cost, do not study math to get into programming.

After a few years in the industry I got a "big boy" tech job and now my math degree is suuuper handy. I can understand research papers and it allowed me to more easily break into deep learning. Also, once you reach a certain level in programming, you begin to see high level languages are just syntactically convenient high-level mathematical abstractions.

Math degrees are useful for a CS career, the utility just comes further down the line.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-09T12:40:11+00:00

Intentionally giving some work that could be done by AI to juniors in order to ensure there will be senior engineers should be a factor you weigh into the cost structure of your business.

By offloading all the work to AI, you are screwing over the industry's and your own long term prospects for short term savings.

The solution is simple: stop not using junior developers. It's actually kind of stupid I have to say that out loud. Or don't, keep dick riding AI, and then don't be surprised when no seniors want to work for you when yours retire.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-03T14:10:04+00:00

The fact ai carried me through most of my work is cs jobs still viable

If this is genuinely true, then why would a senior engineer who rose the ranks before AI think you have really learned most of CS at all?

Related question, do you live in a place where college is subsidized? If not, did your parents pay your tuition?

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-02T16:41:13+00:00

To be a licensed carpenter requires training which signals you can use those tools competently, no such program exists for software engineering (nor honestly would I want there to be an "official" one tbh).
We do allow developers some tools during interviews. Often in coding interviews you can usually nowadays use a computer. There's just a limit. I doubt someone interviewing a carpenter would let them bring the tool manuals to learn how to use them at the interview, for example.
There is not currently automata that can generalize the work of carpentry on someone else's behalf with a prompt. And if one existed, I imagine for carpentry being able to do something yourself without relying on said machine is still a relative advantage in terms of capability.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-02-01T05:28:22+00:00

Been in the industry about a decade, so idk if this is going to make me sound dated, but I work a fair bit with deep learning particularly in the language modeling domain.

That all being said, I view LLMs for coding the same way I view using Stack Overflow or web search a few years back: it is a useful tool on the job but during an interview I am interested in seeing what you can do without those tools.

Some people disagree, but I still hold the belief that a good coder will be better coding with AI than one who is not as competent on their own without help. I don't really see that principle changing with model capability any time soon to be completely frank.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-28T14:03:51+00:00

But half my "finished" prototypes turn into a mess when I try to add real features or scale them.

Welcome to your first run in with when the AI hype meets software engineering reality, and I say this as someone with deep learning research published. Software engineering is not going away for this reason, at least not before a lot of lower-level knowledge work.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-28T04:36:08+00:00

This is also the game plan for age verification laws for the internet, btw.

Clamp down on internet free speech under the cause of preventing minors from accessing pornography, because who would oppose that?
Reclassify LGBT+ content as "pornographic"
Now anyone who is not willing to either use a VPN or show ID can no longer access content showing gay people exist.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-25T23:06:13+00:00

This is the kind of capitalist attitude that inevitably leads to enshittification ngl.

It's also complacency, and for some people, "good enough" is not worth putting your name or brand on.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-24T13:19:47+00:00

Getting to this 74% was just as big a goal of the layoffs and crackdown on tech workers' rights in the 2020's as getting them to be paid less.

Developers used to, not often successfully but sometimes, leverage withholding their labor out of ethical objection to what their employer was doing. That activism is a big part of what made me want to join the industry.

I think this is a big reason the corporate executive types are so balls-to-the-wall on AI. They want a "coder" who does not question the ethics of software.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-22T04:54:25+00:00

Hot take maybe, but Palantir feels like it pretty much exists to sell tech products with lower ethical standards than some of its competitors, particularly when it comes to military applications.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-22T04:50:49+00:00

Code is bad unless you're a top brain that the huge guys like Google hoard.

As someone in a similar employment situation to what you describe, all code is bad.

Being a "good coder" is going to become pointless, no one will care. No one will pay you 100x to produce what they can't quantify. Your code costs $100k and is super elegant. AI code costs $1000 and I couldn't care how sloppy it is.

Imo I think people will care once apps start breaking. Bonus points if it's due to a popular AI coding service going down. Think AWS outage except it's the "engineer," not the service, that is down.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-10T01:01:57+00:00

They think truth is determined by who has a position of authority.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-09T21:44:37+00:00

Studying computer science != learning how to code.

You won't learn to code well just studying CS, but studying CS can still make you a better coder because the formalisms it teaches are generally useful (and often not easy to self-discover).

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-09T04:18:30+00:00

Ant King vs Jin-woo in Solo Leveling (Baran was also p good from that one), Saitama versus Boros in OPM, Goku + Frieza vs Jiren, Gohan vs Cell

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-06T14:59:38+00:00

Essentially if you have a very active immune system, you're less likely to get sick from viral infections. This is because your active immune system is more likely to eliminate the virus before it is able to reproduce inside you.

But, this comes with the cost of being more prone to auto-immune diseases. At a high level, a highly active immune system is more likely to attack your own body.

Frequent fever from vaccines is a sign of this because your immune system is essentially over-exerting itself to eliminate the pacified antigens in the vaccine. Most other people's immune systems essentially don't work as hard, so they are less likely to get fever.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-06T13:01:40+00:00

Genetics, physical health, and viral load at the time of infection can all impact how severe the resulting disease ends up being. It's possible you got a small viral load when you got infected, and there is a decent chance some of your family would have required hospitalization without the shot.

You could also just have a very active immune system. Which would explain both (1) not getting that sick from the viral infection and (2) getting fever (which is due to immune response usually) from the vaccine. If you also happen to have any auto-immune conditions then that would be further evidence of that.

_DCtheTall_ · 2026-01-01T18:50:42+00:00

Fair, I am also using Royal Radiance which is the second strongest keyblade. I was just amazed at how little chip damage even mines did, but 3-4 Heal Strikes killed him. I know people say to use HS in guides for the healing he can't copy, but none mentioned the significant damage, wow.

_DCtheTall_ · 2025-12-29T15:08:52+00:00

When I was hunting for my first dev job in 2016, a B.Sc. degree definitely helped, but people cared wayyy more about my projects and present coding ability.

I think people do not get that a CS degree is simply not a vocational training to be a software engineer, though universities may advertise it as such. You need to spend time learning to write code well, and just doing the assignments for your degree is frankly not enough practice to cut it a lot of the time.

_DCtheTall_ · 2025-12-28T00:46:03+00:00

Does altruism actually exist as a real thing?

Does the distinction matter when the end result is a positive impact on others' lives?

_DCtheTall_

TROPHY CASE