Software Engineer and general technologist. 20+ years experience (majority at Google, working in Corporate Engineering, Energy/Climate, Maps, Search, ChromeOS, and others).
Now working primarily in climate tech and adjacent spaces.
Interests:
- Energy/Climate Tech (especially decarbonizing and bringing resiliency to the built environment, electricity, transportation).
- Applications of emerging tech to solve problems in climate and energy, education, and quality of life for the majority of people.
- Linguistics (especially historical, also computational and social).
The best way to get in touch is to triangulate me on the Internet (shouldn't be hard from my comment history) and reach out over LinkedIn.
> The idea NYC shouldn't do its best to take care of its own because people in Alabama aren't getting enough is nonsensical. Imo they already get far more than they deserve.
Absent a federal wealth redistribution, yes NYC must do its best for it's residents. I'm not disagreeing with that. A federal wealth tax, however, would tax Alabama billionaires as much as it would tax NYC billionaires.
> Confiscating 100% of all billionaire wealth (~$8.4T) covers - ~1.1 years of federal spending (~$7.4T) - ~4.4 years of deficits (~$1.9T) - ~23% of debt (~$36T):
Adding a wealth tax doesn't mean eliminating existing income taxes.
> Cities like NYC pretty much can afford UBI (look at per capita spending on homelessness, public schools etc).
Perhaps , but what about poor states like West Virginia or Alabama. It's not universal if they don't receive benefits also.
> They’re mad about being told after the fact that their town might lose water, power, quiet, or tax revenue to a project they didn't have a say in.
I suspect they might also be a little bit mad (whether they admit it or not) that they are being subjected to all this to make a few people unbelievably wealthy.
These people aren't simple peasants - they are as aware of how the system works as well as the rest of us. Lenox is just a short distance from Flint, where they know all about how a city and its population can be left behind by an industry.
The problem is that all of a sudden they are being made to pay the price in quality of life, instead of some other group of people they could care less about or even dislike.
If this truly matters to them, and it's not just a negotiating tactic for a piece of the pie, they should consider making common cause with other groups affected by this in other areas and look past their traditional tribal alliances. Otherwise, no little municipality stands a chance against the power of capital that effectively controls government.
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
> just that they are sufficiently efficient that beating them is a genuinely hard job requiring heavy, expensive analysis
No expensive analysis is needed. Beating them just requires (1) having disproportionate capital to others, and (2) having disproportionate control (and therefore know in advance) whatever the markets are pricing.
It helps that there are enough believers (in the religious/cult sense) that markets are 100% efficient, that they will deny that any of that is happening - even while they lose their shirts to those who are doing the market manipulation.
> Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
> I’ve only ever worked at messy mid-size software companies and have never once had a legit product manager guiding feature work, it’s generally been up to the developers to figure out what needs doing
That's because the systems and problem spaces at FAANG companies are so large that you need(ed) a lot more division of labor to make anything work. The division of the technical side of the house between those focused on product management and those focused on building software allowed both to be done more effectively, but both roles have had a lot of their work overtaken by LLMs.
Also, From what I've heard, FAANG companies are going through big (and painful) transitions to align their staffing with the reality of what current AI tools are capable of.
> I’m working on a program for myself and the overall architecture of the program as well as some parts of its implementation are clever and compose well to make the codebase a joy to work in. I am not simply “mapping features to mundane technical details”.
You said it: you are working on a "program for yourself". Hobbyist craft programming will always be here. The question is what kind of software engineering will be paid for, and a career can be built on.
I don't see much of a market for pure software engineers anymore. You also need to be a product manager, scientist, or have some other domain knowledge adjacent to software that relates to the real world.
I say this with empathy for those who just enjoyed the craft of designing and building software, and thought that alone would provide them a livelihood and career in perpetuity, but have found a big chunk of what they loved doing (and getting paid for) overtaken by AI coding agents.
> It's a quite a bit broader than that: for instance most of science and engineering is heavily supported by simulations (very useful when the system you're considering doesn't have perfect spherical or cylindrical symmetry),
That isn't the vast majority of traditional software engineering work, and arguably is better called applied physics or applied science. Super interesting though - and definitely uses programming as a core skill/tool - but it leans heavily into traditional engineering and science.
> Someone asks you to add a feature to an existing program
While I empathize with the tone, even before AI the creativity was largely at the feature definition step, not in the implementation.
Outside of the very few computer scientists working on novel algorithms, the vast majority of software development is a mapping problem between the feature request and the mundane technical details, something repeatedly (and correctly) mentioned here in the context of FAANG algorithm fixated interviews. This has now largely been automated by LLMs
What is left is just creativity part - defining the use cases and features to develop in the first place. But the corollary is that software engineers that start after the requirements have already been defined are obsolete, which is a sobering thought for any of us in that vocation.
> It is just utterly baffling to me. I'm... well along the spectrum... so people not responding correctly to obvious information is just something I've gotten used to but just... wow.
People get quite a kick out of seeing people they don't like get hurt. They can stay entertained by that for a long time until it bites them.
Only now is it finally biting with the collapse of the rural medical clinics, the war induced spike in the price of gasoline, etc.
That's probably playing a big part in the seeming shift in the electorate in every election.
> Whilst true, its your generation who got us here.
You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.
> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.
Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.
> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).
Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.
The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
> The bigger sign to me is that this is a pressure against democratized personal computing
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
> It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
Another unc perspective: As that compute has become cheap, the value of what you can do with that compute, and sell in exchange for money, has also diminished.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
Not more efficient at heat dissipation, but radiative cooling panels can achieve sub-ambient dissipation in conditions (like high humidity) that evaporative cooling performance declines in, and with no water consumption.
I was thinking the justice system, but yes the entire concept of government and law is built upon the monopoly of violence. Bringing it into this discussion is reductio ad absurdum. Even property rights are protected by the same monopoly (and even more directly).
My point is that the so called "social contract" has never been upheld by large corporations - it may have seemed that way at times but it was mostly self serving marketing, not anything that would influence their treatment of employees vs their shareholders and executives.
Furthermore I'm arguing that we shouldn't rely on them to uphold it. If we have a belief in what is universally fair or just (i.e minimum wages, no child labor, no slavery), we should encode it in law, not hope corporations find their conscience to renew the social contract.
> I don't know how the social contract between employees/employers gets rebuilt.
The only social contract that is guaranteed is the one written into law. That's why we have government, but the problem is that the government is (for a while now) captive to / bought by large corporations, not responsive to employees/workers/voters.
Whatever principled social contract you may have thought large corporations upheld was smoke and mirrors. It just worked for enough of the right kind of person for a while.
> Secession from the EU has certainly been bad for the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be doing ok
The UK might have paid the biggest price due to Brexit, but the EU also lost a significant trading partner for it's goods and services. Arguably it was a lose-lose outcome.
> We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire.
The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.
Now working primarily in climate tech and adjacent spaces.
Interests:
- Energy/Climate Tech (especially decarbonizing and bringing resiliency to the built environment, electricity, transportation).
- Applications of emerging tech to solve problems in climate and energy, education, and quality of life for the majority of people.
- Linguistics (especially historical, also computational and social).
The best way to get in touch is to triangulate me on the Internet (shouldn't be hard from my comment history) and reach out over LinkedIn.