The company I currently work for employs several mid-level software developers who've never worked with "the cloud". Their focus is software design, not operations (which is what the cloud is mostly about). The contact point with operations is container technologies. Their applications do REST, connect to databases etc. like they would do in a bare metal data centre. I occasionally need to remind them of low instance uptime guarantees, the need to plan for horizontal scaling, data replication and disaster recovery (I basically have to design the application architecture for them) but apart from that there's no friction in the day-to-day work.
A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.
> A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.
I am a solo developer at a startup and at some point I'd like to be able to develop a full software product on my own, that entails code and infrastructure. My apps right now were all B2B apps which worked perfectly fine. The "biggest" app I've built was a cashless app for a festival with ~6k visitors and that went perfectly fine with a single server.
I never worked in an environment where infrastructure was handled by a dedicated person.
Ill take this advice to heart once I work for bigger companies again though.
Will epochal advances in Artificial Intelligence complement human expertise, thereby increasing its value, or render it increasingly unnecessary? During both the industrial and computer revolutions, the forms of expertise rewarded by the labor market changed substantially, with vastly uneven consequences for workers in different occupations and possessing different education levels. These forces will play out differently again in the AI era. While the future is a design problem not a forecasting exercise, David Autor will discuss the challenges that AI poses for the labor market, as well as some of the novel opportunities it offers.
CES Munich Lectures in Economics 2025
Expertise, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of the Future
David Autor, Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, MIT Economics, USA
I came here just to complain about that :-) All LLMs I used seem to give more weight to things at the beginning of the context window and omit many details. Eg. I tried this simple thing: pasted a friend's and my CV into Gemini and asked it to recommend topics for a joint conference presentation. Results depended greatly on the order of CVs pasted in.
That's because when they say "long context window" they're lying and they actually mean that they support a long input prompt that is still compressed into a small context window. (Typically by throwing out tokens in the middle.)
An actually large context window is impossible due to how LLM attention works under the hood.
I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days.
The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
My specific need for RSS is the accumulation. There are people who post once a week and I don't want to miss the posts because I was offline at the time.
I just bought a reseller plan from verpex host for $5/month. Can host unlimited domains and bandwidth with WHM. Access everything through cPanel and ftp. SSH on occasion.
Allows you to check your feeds from multiple devices. For example I usually read from my phone, but sometimes would like to check my feeds from my desktop.
You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of what's already been read and that will quickly get out of hand.
If I read from my mobile using NetNewsWire and then go on my laptop and read with the FreshRSS web client, I don't need to wade through a bunch of articles I already read.
I like thinking and blogging [1] about electronic circuits despite lack of formal education. It being a hobby, I must concede that my involvement and proficiency remain well below industry standard.
This looks like some creative effort, are you building lots of prototypes?
When I can, I tend to use the guitar as my equipment so I can get creative with my instrument; the amplifier.
And of course the soldering iron.
It took years but within a certain range of audio circuits including the relatively high-voltage vacuum tubes and associated components I worked with since childhood, I trained myself to design with the soldering iron until satisfaction has been achieved, then document later if at all.
Using surplus or scrap components which I might have unsoldered by hand before being able to recycle them, in advance of taking the risk with relatively expensive new components :)
You come up with all kinds of things when you concentrate on getting the most out of what you have an abundance of, even if it is far from perfect.
More complex things, I'll study drawings or make my own crude schematics for more than one session before accumulating specific parts and plugging in the soldering iron.
I had a lot of math & theory as a kid, which I've forgotten most of, but came out pretty good when you look at it and apply it like "tin/lead sculpture" ;)
No PCB lots of times so with point-to-point, more than one prototype per day was common, or for pedals I would make a PCB in the wet lab because it was more of a chem lab anyway.
I had scopes and test gear and it was all mainly needed for troubleshooting & repair, not design. A huge milestone was to go from components to defect-free operation, consistently the first time you plugged one in, using only a minimal DVM along the way. You can't expect connoisseur sound the first time at all, but as long as it works and nothing smokes you can go from there.
I have said before that you can't start building proficiency early enough, and it's never too late, especially for detailed traditional discrete analog component work.
A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.
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