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The reason SQLite is the most deployed is that it's used by Android.

…and iOS, and Windows, and Mac OS, and Boeing, and Sony, and Firefox and Chrome and Safari…

Yes, which goes in line with the argument that claiming that it's "the most deployed" as proof of superiority or suitability for any use case is equivalent to claiming the same for Internet Explorer. It's the most deployed because it's bundled in a lot of systems, not because people are purposefully using it as a DBMS.

But it doesn't, because none of those systems are presenting SQLite to the user as something they should be using; they don't even make SQLite available to the user at all. Those systems all use SQLite internally to manage data.

Sandboxing doesn't necessarily mean isolating the extension from all potentially dangerous functions, you can have a permission system so that for example a color theme extension can't modify files.

Considering how many AWS and non-AWS services go down at least partially when us-east-1 fails, this reads somewhat like "Don't worry that the steering wheel and pedals aren't working, your engine is still running on cruise control".

The Greek term would be decatetrahedron.


Ancient Greeks did not say "dekatetra" for 14, i.e. ten-four, but as it is correctly written in TFA, they said "tetrakaideka" for 14, i.e. "four-and-ten", which is actually close to English "fourteen".

For example, already Aristotle used "dipoda" (2-feet) for humans and birds, "tetrapoda" (4-feet) for other terrestrial vertebrates and "hexapoda" (6-feet) for insects. After the same model one can say "oktopoda" (8-feet) about spiders and "tetrakaidekapoda" (14-feet) about woodlice.


Apologies - Ancient Greek!


> That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.

May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.


> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers.

I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?


In 1996? Software development was the hot ticket to upper middle class in the early 80s when I was a recent CS grad, and I was already working with people who were in it for the money. By the late 90s, if you could spell “HTML”, you were making decent money as a web developer. This all came crashing down during the Dot Bomb collapse, but SW has been pretty popular for most of my career, and it just continued to get more popular, especially as salaries continued to increase.


I remember seeing an article around a decade ago about a ~50 year old "web developer" claiming age discrimination because they couldn't get a job. Somebody found their resume and it was literally 1990s "html/CSS" added to some other period tooling. Said person found a niche for a new technology (the web) and then stopped upping their skills.

I've had to change course several times in my career (graduated in 2004). UNIX admin and later network admin, DevOps, and now I'm doing a mixture of DevOps and development (despite not being a full time developer in my entire career, being able to use AI to plug into code and fix/enhance things like monitoring, leveraging cloud APIs, etc has been a game changer for me).

Right now, as somebody in their mid 40s, I'm seeing AI as a productivity amplifier. I am able to take my experience and steer and/or fight opus into doing what's needed and am able to recognize if it looks right.

I'm so glad I'm not fresh out of school in this environment, though people said the same thing when I graduated in the Dotcom bust...but being ready and eager to do groundwork was a door opener. Finding that first door to open was tough, though.


In retrospect the Dot Bomb was a bump in the road. Yes, some people who only knew enough HTML to be a "Webmaster" might have been filtered out, but pretty quickly anyone who could really build software had opportunities greater than before.


In 1981 there was 15k cs grads, in 2019 there was 90k (and many non-traditional too).

You’ll also find that engineers are sorted (by self or not) into different companies. I’ve worked at companies where 75% of engineers were over 40, and I’ve worked at places with the opposite.


> P.S. I also live in Poland, not Polish. I also lived in Berlin, and I dont think the salaries are always so different.

Anecdotally this is also my experience. Several countries in eastern Europe have vastly lower taxes, and as a result international companies can pay salaries that are on par with western Europe but still cheaper than an equivalent worker in Germany or France because the cost to the employer is much lower.


An article without telltale signs of an LLM is indistinguishable from an article written by a human, so yes.


Do we? Or are we born with pre-training (all the crucial functions the brain does without us having to learn them) and a context window orders of magnitude larger than an LLM?


It is incredible how willing and eager AI boosters are to denigrate the incredible miracle of human consciousness to make their chatbots seem so special.

No, we are not born with all the pre-training we need. That is rather the point of education, teaching people's brains how to process information in new, maybe unintuitive ways.


> They do see those use cases. It's not surprising that they focus on the enormous number of other, negative use cases. It's misleading to describe the medical use cases as "more important" - yes, they are, in the same way that healing a person is "more important" than ruining their lives. That's not what you're implying by your usage of the term, though.

This comment could just as easily apply to a conversation about computers in general, it's just that people whose lives have been "ruined" by now-established technologies have been largely forgotten by society.


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