While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”
It's when you have to iterate to handle changing business needs, scale issues, and integrate with other systems where the entropy becomes a scary concern over a long enough timeline.
And it's not just "checking" - it's wholesale rejections of code, reframing prompts to target specific classes or approaches, etc... I don't think you will take the human out planning any time soon.
I can't imagine SWEs will be reduced to SDETs anymore than attorneys will be reduced to spell-checkers on AI powered case briefs.
I am a very AI-forward person, but hallucinations are becoming more pernicious than ever even as they get less frequent, especially if the code actually works. A human absolutely has to guide these processes at a macro level for sustainability for SaaS as it evolves with business needs.
Maybe for one and done systems with no maintenance/no updates/no security patches you can reduce humans to SDETs, but systems like that are more the exception than the norm.
> At the gas station, Bradley accused Holland of driving under the influence. When asked if he would submit to field sobriety tests, Holland calmly refused.
Much as I hope Bradley would be fired and lose his pension for abuse of power, this part is on Holland. In my state, refusing a breathalyzer is by law an automatic penalty because of the "implied consent statute" that you accept when you get behind the wheel: automatic license suspension for 1 year, and you still have to face the officer's testimony. There are consequences to the refusal that have nothing to do with the officer.
To quote H.L. Mencken (paraphrasing), a teacher's job is miserable because they must ceaselessly try to get masses or people to think who have no real capacity to.
You might be lucky to reach a small minority of your students, assuming environmental forces of poverty, dysfunctional family, and peer influence don't muzzle their gifts. But the day in day out bulk of your work isn't those "Mr. Holland's Opus" moments: it's handling a bunch of kids who don't want to be there in a bureaucratic set of rules imposed on you from above. And private schools are not immune to these problems either.
As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was and then found so much more gratification as a SWE, all I can say is, the author's experience is not universal. (And I am a parent, so it's not about disliking kids.) I will say though that remote work is definitely dystopia. I need an office and the presence of people physically.
I dislike Jack going back several years, but I think in this instance he's admitting that he's taking responsibility between weighing the risk of doing this vs. not doing this. Maybe morale will tank anyway and the company will hold on, but be out-innovated by competitors that invested in growth. There are future outcomes that could prove he made the wrong call, and I any time layoffs are announced, there is a tacit mea culpa about past over-hiring.
Okay but even that analogy is limited. Incurable progressive diseases almost invariably have lifestyle factors, supplements, or medications that can at least slow the rate of progression for many people. Those are also often more effective when started during early stage detection. There is literally nothing the average person can do about the asteroid.
They've been losing ground to placebo in more recent research.
Plus, most of the more serious side effects take a lot more time to manifest than the typical length any given patient remained in the older clinical trials that secured FDA approval and grounded the official manufacturer literature.
I am glad we have these tools, but I suspect they are vastly overused, and patients not well informed.
On what basis do you call it "slop"? I would agree that it's not much relevant to HN, but it seems to report that the number is at odds with most other figures.
As I get older, I read this entirely differently (as an appeal to empathy) than I did when I was younger (as an appeal to stolidity).
In other words, you should be pained for your neighbor when his slave breaks his cup. Maybe his grandmother left him that cup, and he's developed many fond memories around which he drank a soothing beverage in that heirloom. That empathy how we connect with people, build meaning, and make life richer.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.