Agreed. Even some of the latest IR missiles (AIM-9X I believe) also include a visual seeking component to compliment the IR seeker, and try to identify aircraft types based on their outlines (presumably for orienting the missile for maximum damage).
You just can't make that distinction with people, especially not if just using IR or the likes. The guy with a rifle slung over his shoulder just happens to look like the guy with carrying a rake. Hand gun in hand happens to look the same as a power drill. Someone wearing a beanie looks suspiciously like a soldier with a helmet.
There are limitations to the technology, but in right scenarios it is perfect.
One should not use it on attack, when people need to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian.
But on a defence, when you need to keep a certain area empty from enemies (and there is nobody else but enemies incoming), then it resembles the usage of mines, only better (both in terms of efficiency and safety/callback/disarm).
Another scenario or cutting the logistics. If you know that a road is only used by military, then letting the automatic drones watch and engage is a great idea.
The US has made it very clear that they're going to be targeting Iranian water infrastructure. Israel have flattened most of the hospitals in Gaza along with the university. They just don't care about not targeting civilians any more.
It does not at all indicate the effort that went into doing the thing. Clearly not.
I propose that what you enjoy is having a token of the appearance of effort, easily constructed and easily observed and easily suitable for low-effort handling of these proxy objects for actual work.
Recently I reviewed some vibe-coded stuff and sent a list of issues and suggestions to the “author,” figuring he’d read it and then go through each one with Claude until fixed.
Instead he didn’t read it at all, and just threw the whole thing at Claude Code as a big prompt. The result was… interesting!
This is happening with coworkers now. It’s honestly insulting.
They put up a PR with all the obvious tells, the markdown table of files that changed, the description that basically parrots back things the human obviously wanted them to stress in the task (“this implements a secure, tested (no regressions) implementation of a Foo…”), and the code is an absolute mess of one-off functions placed in any random file with no thought to the way the codebase is actually organized.
Then I give feedback after spending like an hour going through their 2000 line change, and then here comes back an update with a very literal interpretation of my feedback that clearly doesn’t really understand what I was even saying. Complete with code comments that parrot back what I said (“// Use the expected platform abstractions for conversion (not bespoke methods”).
Reviewing coworkers PR’s feels like I’m just talking to the LLM directly at this point, but with more steps and I have less control over the output.
The last place I worked for, if it happened with someone new in the company or the team, I would find a polite way to say "do your job and fix this shit" and it worked.
Some people have put me on their blacklists after these interactions, sure, but they're the exact people I don't want to work with again. The important thing here is that I've never done someone else's work for free.
You tell Claude to review it and if it breaks something you blame Claude. No one can get mad at you for it because they don't want to look like luddites.
That’s what this whole thread is about. Appearances of productivity, laziness, and the offloading of real work downstream by sending of “looks good enough” ai generated work.
Checkmarks as bullets on progress/comparison lists I really like, assuming you mean //. The emoji properly put me off looking deeper into whatever it is that I am looking at unless I was really interested to start with.
Both predate common use of LLMs, unless my memory is even more shaky than usual on this, but must have been over-represented in the training data (or something in the tokenising/training/other processes magnifies the effective presence of punctuation) because LLMs seem to love spewing them out.
I hear what you're saying, especially around just moving to iOS not being a better argument. However with
> And if I'm already this motivated I'm certainly motivated enough to wait 24hs on future (more locked down) devices.
But I don't think that's the point. It's a continual erosion of people's ability to use hardware _they own_ in ways _they want_ under the guise of 'security' - which to be fair google does fuck all to actually prevent malicious, scammy and misleading apps from appearing on their play store.
Like, why make it harder _at all_? I develop Android apps for a company that is used only internally. I don't want to have to release apps to the play store so that they have to go through a bs review period before I can get them out the door users. Currently I have a <10m turn around from starting the build to having an app in user's hands, ready to go... Every other time we've had to use the play store it's 2+ days, and they don't test or verify anything meaningful.
I recognize my experience isn't universal, but I'm pretty opposed to changes like this. I'm not American so I don't really have underlying rhetoric around freedom etc, but this is an impingement and part of continuing anti-consumer trend. Google's not the only one, but certainly the one under the spotlight here.
> It's a continual erosion of people's ability to use hardware _they own_ in ways _they want_ under the guise of 'security' - which to be fair google does fuck all to actually prevent malicious, scammy and misleading apps from appearing on their play store.
A lot of people don't seem to understand this and point out that Android is still more open and free than iOS, but iOS has never been about openness and freedom. People believed in Android, and in Google. Now they either see Google betraying them (once again) or only see the Android vs iOS comparison, forgetting about the implications about autonomy, agency and about the future of Android. Many people don't care which actors control their digital lives and what motivations they have. People should be made aware that Google is on their side and that they have shown many times that they have no honor.
I wonder why. The last time I considered believing in Android was in 2008 when I was choosing between getting an Android phone or Openmoko phone. Went with the latter and never regretted, as Android quickly turned out to be a disappointment. This is just the continuation of the slow crawl they've been on since 20 years ago and it's been really obvious that it's going to happen. The answer is to reject Android just like iOS, not to keep hoping that inevitable isn't going to happen.
I was thinking about this too, and I think there are two different views you can take.
1. Do you want to work IN the games industry?
2. Do you want to make and ship your own games?
I think the overall internal engineering standard for #1 is higher, because you're ultimately assessed against that standard by others.
For #2 _as long as it works_, you can get away with some under the hood crap, but you're the one that suffers for it (and hopefully not your players). I think I'd be wary (as I'm wary of this for myself), that aiming for #2 gives you an easy out to produce crap, as no one is holding you to standard other than yourself. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it obviously, but it's a risk.
- OP takes rectifying what they deem to be deficiencies seriously, and actively work to fill those gaps.
At first I was reading the article thinking "wtf, that can't be real" and by the end felt I had respect for OP, both for their self-reflection and their willingness to put in the effort to learn. Admirable, really.
My take on it is more around domain speciality, than a purely technical focus.
I'm a web developer / designer-lite (amongst other things in previous lives), and have embedded myself as the web-tech guy for an embedded / hardware team. I help provide better customer facing interfaces (through websites, apps, etc) to both end users and manufacturer that the company uses.
I've made small, simple tools that can be packaged up along in a device's flash (it's ~2KB), that allows a user to interrogate the device via serial, capture all the commands + responses, & trivially email them to an engineer. It's designed for troubleshooting devices remote, without needing to ship JLink's or debuggers or what not to clients. It's a very small thing, but it's cool to hear people using it to help troubleshoot with users, in a way that's much simpler than trying to jump on the phone with them & guess what they're seeing on their screen.
I also specifically help make manufacturing test systems which sit closer to a web-app like experience (in terms of usability and visuals), because I've observed that providing end-of-line manufacturing staff with poorly cludged together test systems leads to a bunch of errors which don't need to exist (they're often just quickly thrown together CLIs, which are unpleasant to use and buggy all round - especially for less tech savvy manufacturing staff).
I also happen to really like embedded engineers, they're fun to hang around with - and I get genuine satisfaction out of being able to help them out in areas they haven't specialised in.
I suspect part of it is also just visibility. You can't be hired, if people don't know about you. Being active in a community gives pretty large visibility surface area, while still being able to provide genuine value & build relationships.
yes, i believe that's very true. the challenge now is for me to figure out what the best places are to be visible on.
programming language forums are good when they are growing and there is more demand than can be satisfied. i was in a group like that and it worked well for a while.
i think potentially small business forums should be good. a least when i want to target small businesses.
> any recommendations or other suggestions?
Sure, but not any you should really deeply pay attention to :)
Targeting small businesses can be good and fun, for a variety of reasons. It's just... small business mean everything from rivet manufacturers to real estate agents. The more generalised you are, the less you can set yourself apart.
The more focused you are, the more you begin to understand your market / audience - what matters to them, common problems, financial cycles, the overall network etc - the better you can serve them (including making actual products for them). This creates a positive feedback loop... over a long period of time. Years, probably (at least it was for me. I started from scratch in the web dev space, it's taken about 4 years to get to a 'good' financial position with nice clients).
I've begun specialising in web-tech-for-hardware (so not embedded, but web tech focused around accessing, commissioning, controlling embedded devices by non-engineers), and providing the supporting software for those (web apps with serial support, manufacturing test systems, in-field mobile apps to access & setup devices when there's no internet). It's niche, but I thought it was a good field because I also like UI/UX design, and I felt it's something embedded engineers aren't great at.
I originally started my career in the embedded space (before taking a detour into the business world), so I guess it gave me enough of a leg up to understand just enough parlance to talk shop. Not enough to really build anything, but to know what UART or I2C are, to know to poke fun at PLCs, the difficulty with soldering LGA/BGAs, why performance and low power matter, etc etc. This builds trust... but that's a by-product. I genuinely enjoy the space and like the people, so I guess that comes across too.
Maybe instead of focusing on a technical field, if you're interested in helping small businesses, see if they have any industry groups or bodies you can join + conferences you can attend. Be the guy in the room that has the skills they don't have. There might be lots of more competent engineers out there (certainly true for me), but in my case I'm the only guy I know that's willing to be in _this_ particular space.
You just can't make that distinction with people, especially not if just using IR or the likes. The guy with a rifle slung over his shoulder just happens to look like the guy with carrying a rake. Hand gun in hand happens to look the same as a power drill. Someone wearing a beanie looks suspiciously like a soldier with a helmet.
This all feels like a really bad idea.
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