Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage. It absolutely would not be worth it for them to do this. I can maybe see the arguments that perhaps it’s really a proxy for the anti right to repair groups, but absolutely not the firearms manufacturers.

Yep. That's what happened when Smith & Wesson decided to back a scheme that would require some kind of system to prevent the gun from working if someone other than the owner was holding it. The then-current owners had to sell the company before the sales returned.

> Any gun company caught funding anything remotely anti-2A would be met with an unbelievably negative reaction from the firearms community and face boycotts and massive reputational damage.

This is not true. They currently fund people and policies that are 100% anti-2A without any pushback. It's just a matter of fooling the people into accepting the anti-2A stuff you do support.

Got an example or two?

I wish I could believe that but many people are perfectly okay with curtailing certain parts of rights so long as they aren't parts of a right they personally use or value. Plenty of pro-2a people were fine with gun control when it was being used to suppress the Black Panthers. And also many times to "fight crime" with specific firearm features and configurations being illegal despite not making anybody safer.

That was true, but largely is not true anymore. When Trump was pushing a blanket ban on trans people owning guns, gun rights organizations come out in force against (while anti-gun organizations like Everytown didn't).

IMO we are currently in the ENIAC era of LLMs. Perhaps there will be a brief moment where things get worse, but long term the cost of these things will go way down.

I assume the "briefly gets worse" is when a buch of hyperscalers do a complete write-off of their entire AI investments, bankrupting several of them (which, in turn, bankrupts several large banks and most current venture capital firms)?

Cumulative AI capex will hit $2T this year. Cumulative opex is on the same order. Unless the models get real good (as in: can fully replace many engineers) right quick, nobody is even going to see interest getting paid on those investments. The only alternative is model access costing 5 figures per (replaced) seat.

But yes, once GPU racks can be had at auction for pennies on the dollar, inference of open source models might be an... OK low margin commodity business.

Cost will probably go down but nobody knows when or how. It might take 10 years for all we know as training costs have only been rising.

A huge difference is early computers were not subsidized. It took decades until most people could afford to own a computer at home.

Or we are in the early Netflix era where profit wasn’t as important as customer growth.

Practicing code specifically is one of many options for engineers right now. How about other skills? For example, now seems like a good opportunity to start developing deep knowledge in a particular domain, so that when you build AI assisted software in that space, you’re competent enough to know if it’s doing the right thing. Or, develop a better understanding of a range of disciplines, so that when you go to solve problems, you’re aware of them and have more areas to draw from. (The combination is what Valve calls a T-shaped employee I believe.) Also a good opportunity to develop your interpersonal skills.

I agree. I think the rapid learning generalist has a real advantage right now, but that kind of advantage cannot be leveraged by big companies structured to utilise specialists. I think that's why individual contributors in big teams aren't seeing massive benefits from AI where a small team or solo developer may be seeing greater leverage.

If you are a strong generalist with an entrepreneurial spirit, I think I would be aiming at getting hired by a small company where you can provide a buttload of value or looking at starting something where you have domain experience outside of software.

Generalists are more competent by definition, but large companies don’t need broad competence, they just need a cog.

> I think that's why individual contributors in big teams aren't seeing massive benefits from AI where a small team or solo developer may be seeing greater leverage.

This rings true. It is the best time ever for small teams. A big team is potentially several smaller teams, so this can be a force multiplier for them too.

Another force multiplier for reorganizing larger teams, be willing to consider smaller teams starting with single contributors.

What this is the worst time for: slow adaptation.

> The combination is what Valve calls a T-shaped employee I believe

For what it's worth, I've heard this at jobs before, and I've never worked at Valve (or as far as I'm aware with anyone who worked at Valve previously). I think it's probably more common than just something they say.

Actually this does nothing but create more noise in an org.

The Job of the engineer is to be really good with the tech not business.

Some examples of skills you could develop:

-formal verification

-computational fluid dynamics

-control theory

-materials science

-graphics

I think what I’m suggesting is: consider being more than just a software engineer. Become a software engineer with expertise in other fields. Or a software engineer AND a fluid simulation engineer. This might not make sense for someone who currently works at say a business SaaS company, but how much longer are those jobs going to be around?

But this is also a great time to be building your own business, in which case you may want to develop business related skills.

I had exactly this way of thinking last year and began specializing myself: github.com/glouw/ensim4

I reckon moving forward software will became an applied tool to the applied sciences. I mean, it always has been, but the barrier to entry has lowered for the easily verifiable, and that is programming, and not the problem being solved

Their politics are perfectly in line with their Christian-themed cult.

Yes but when they’re not, they choose politics. See: Catholics right now.

Shouldn’t the pharmaceutical company be held liable for insufficiently understanding the drug before releasing it? I don’t think I understand blaming a tool used in the process of designing it and not those who chose to release it.

Pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated, the "we vibecoded a therapeutic and released it without testing" hypothetical has no basis in reality

Yeah, I feel that in most scenarios the liability should lie with the user of the LLM. If the developers of the LLMs become liable we can expect a much more over active refusal system, and very likely a robust chat surveillance system that looks for patterns in user requests. And likely more gate keeping of the premier models.

An unsecured loan just a straight cash loan. In my experience the interest rates are usually a fair bit higher than a vehicle loan, and I would assume the maximum amount is generally quite a bit lower.

In my experience it really depends. You are still contractually and legally obligated to purchase a vehicle in many of these setups, they just don't follow up or enforce it directly in most cases. Loan rates are nothing like unsecured personal loan rates. Probably higher than best auto loan rates. With rates being what they are it may not make as much sense to use an unsecured loan at this point, but when rates are low the cost was negligible and the convenience worth it.

Ahhh, like if you were to put your new VW on your Visa card entirely.

That might work: you'd have bought the car, from the point of view of VW and your DMV, so the DMV sends you the title, not Visa.

>amid rising demand for imaging

Okay so demand for imaging is up, so we should GET RID of the radiologists? How about we AUGMENT them with AI so that they can do their job better and faster? Why does it need to be either or?

Currently they are augmenting them with Indian radiologists and just sign off whatever they found.

AI = Actual Indian.

This is illegal in the USA.

Jeez, really gives you incentive not to use Gemini.

Google really needs to do something about this. It’s one thing for them to stop doing business with you, it’s another to withhold your data from you (in particular after they set up their services such that you’re inclined to store everything with them). Every time I read one of these stories it reminds me that I really need to break away from them.

I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.

> I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA

Same.

I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.

However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.

This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.

My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.

I recall there are some providers resistant to this attack but also not Google.

Best of luck. Its not a great situation to be in.