> Prose density is not the same thing as succinctness
Can't agree with you more. I review 2-3 PRs a day from my team of eight data engineers. Most of my team members use Claude to write SQL, dbt and Python code. Some of them use Claude a lot, some less so. I can easily tell when I review the code that is mostly Claude generated vs. the one that is not. In dbt models where we have a lot of biz logic in intermediate layers, that's where I really have a difficult time following Claude-generated comments. So much jargon copied over from other adjacent dbt models (yet inconsistently), and the prose is super choppy (for the lack of better word).
After reading a looooong sentence/comment line, I still can't figure out what it really means. Had to always re-read the line 2-3 times (sometimes, more) to sort of understand. Reading code, however, is so much easier and usually, I just skip to reading the code and then come back to the comments. :D
He will be pardoned by trump before the latter leaves the office. There will be LOTS of people pardoned by trump.
I immigrated from a very poor, military-ruled country to the US more than 20 years ago. It is very sad to see the democratic system and the rule of law eroding in the US. All the mistakes that I observed and lived through in my former country are being practiced in the US these days.
Rand Paul has solved that problem for us today; if Fauci can be prosecuted despite his pardon, so can the Trumpists. (Probably a win-win for him, I suppose, and I was never a fan of the pardon power in the first place.)
> Still, this rate merits carefully watching in coming months; a continued decline may signal a deeper change in the behavior of workers in this critical age group.
I know I'm speaking from a rather (somewhat) privileged position. I myself don't consider working beyond 50 years of age. I have lived frugally/minimally and am confident that (unless WW3 happens or some sort of unexpected global catastrophe arrives) I can FIRE (retire frugally with my savings) before I hit 50.
I also know it's somewhat of a bubble, but Reddit has a lot of subreddits (like r/HENRYfinance/; r/Fire/; and r/coastFIRE/) dedicated for folks retiring early.
Observing that FIRE trend and the fact that AI psychosis (don't get me wrong, I believe AI is useful, but not to a level that humans will be entirely replaced) at work place will surely drive some folks away (or at least discourage them) from staying in the work force, I am not surprised that this trend is showing up in the data. Plus, a lot of millennials are child free (by choice), so they can afford to retire early as well.
I bailed out at 50 while fully employed and making a ton of money in big tech - I was not laid off, I simply let my manager know, found a replacement and walked away. I have kids but I saved enough for healthcare, housing etc. I worked my ass off and lived very frugally to get here. Yes, I would be screwed if WW3 comes along, but who wouldn't? That comfy Big Tech job would vanish pretty quickly too.
I have no desire to keep working for random "Mikes" and "Bobs" in upper management that only care about their bonuses and stocks. Not in Big Tech, not in random startups, not anywhere else. "Mike wants this", "Bob wants that"... Gosh, I couldn't care less about their "direction"!
My days are now full of self-imposed challenges and interesting projects. Am I in the labor force? I guess so, but I'm working for me and humanity now.
Time is the most precious asset we all have, folks.
You are living my dream! When I retire, I want to teach for underserved areas; I also want to help out in some ways related to the homelessness problem. Plus, I want to learn how to play piano/guitar and learn how to swim properly (I can swim, but not too well). I also want to try improv. I have ever-growing books that I want to read. So many things I can do to enjoy life personally and do something nice (albeit it having just a teeny tiny impact) for the future generation and humanity.
> I have no desire to keep working for random "Mikes" and "Bobs" in upper management that only care about their bonuses and stocks. Not in Big Tech, not in random startups, not anywhere else. "Mike wants this", "Bob wants that"... Gosh, I couldn't care less about their "direction"!
Agreed! That's one of my motivation to retire early. :)
I hope you get there! I made a lot of sacrifices. The one thing I'll say is to have the projects lined up. Don't leave the figuring out for after you stop working for others.
I just turned 50, but I never feel I can pull the trigger. The only thing really keeping me from doing it is the cost of health insurance. I've got 15 years before I can get on Medicare, and 15 years of privately purchased health insurance for the family is just not do-able.
The tight coupling between employment and health insurance is a huge issue for the US, and has been for as long as I can remember. It's a pretty big ask of someone to "become an entrepreneur; either pay your own premiums or go without!"
Yea, in an alternate universe where the USA had an actual healthcare safety net, I might have even gone the entrepreneur path rather than sweating it out for The Man for 25 years.
Thank you! Health Insurance is certainly the big one. It took me a while to save for that. There are some ways explained by the FIRE community to reduce the amount you pay through the subsidies, but these could vanish at any time so you have to be prepared for that.
I'm 45. I caught asymptomatic coronavirus in 2024 and developed Long COVID, burned out hard from my role as a Principal Engineer.
We got lucky and just happened to inherit my in-laws estate the very week that I was let go in my company's third round of layoffs. Spouse and I decided it was best to take some time away from tech and see what happens from the AI bubble.
Two years later, I'm ready to work again, but the jobs aren't there. Everything I read and everyone I talk to says that even if they were, I would probably hate the work anyway (I can't stand LLMs or the code they produce).
You could try contracting. Perhaps you would like places that are not pure software (some kind of hardware, either electrical or mechanical, that needs software for UI). I'm at one currently, and one of the hardware guys is using AI to generate test US, which seems like a reasonable use, but there isn't a lot of interest elsewhere.
I have at least one coworker who literally copy-paste AI output to respond to code and doc reviews (and most of her communications like on Teams and Asana) despite me telling her multiple times to take it a notch down. Two days ago, she started answering my doc review questions with literally AI outputs (like "Good question. <insert a bunch of verbose response>" and "You're right. <insert a lot of fluff with little substance>").
That really bothered me that I finally announced AI "code of conduct" (more like AI usage expectation) and stressed that if one is not so kind as to have his/her coworker review AI output as it is, then I'll take formal measures to address that. We'll see what happens in the near future.
Really worrying that some people are totally comfortable with relying 100% on AI to do their work. Then what's human agency? What's the point of having them in the team (as opposed to just building an AI agent and work with that)?!
> If I were to be real, my coworkers that post AI responses straight rarely had insightful comments before AI.
There's never been a shortage of low-value coworkers because hiring is hard and firing is unpleasant and painful in many ways.
But there's a weird phenomenon with AI where a lot of people are using it to actively call attention to the fact that they aren't doing anything but call the tools.
Rarely in the past have the I-just-want-to-coast-doing-the-minimum folks called so much attention to it!
Ironically, in synchronous conversations, the same co-worker is constantly going on about how swamped he is, and how he's being pulled in so many directions.
Apparently, it takes a lot of time and work to manage all those AI chat bots.
> Rarely in the past have the I-just-want-to-coast-doing-the-minimum folks called so much attention to it!
You seem to presume that they realize they're calling attention to it.
On Stack Overflow, there was this phenomenon for a while where people would blatantly copy and paste answers from ChatGPT, have them deleted, and then run to the meta site to complain. The complaint would either be in barely comprehensible broken English or in recognizable ChatGPT-ese. It would involve swearing up and down that no LLM assistance had been used. Looking at the user's history would reveal a gap of several years of not answering questions, and then the old answers would have the same barely comprehensible broken English (and often not be very good technically, either). The OP demonstrated a genuine complete inability to understand how obvious the ChatGPT use was.
This happened multiple times with different users.
Yeah, but now it’s more confidently slowing us down… It kind of sucks. Someone else said that non-SMEs can’t filter through the noise and may actually mistake the AI slop for signal, which worsens the problem.
Hard for me to even imagine being in that kind of work environment. I know that I don't always like the output for AI, and even will argue with it at times (often into submission), then ask it to restate.
For code gen and review, it's been pretty good since recent Opus versions, and I really like Fable's outputs (though a bit costly in terms of use). Fable is much closer to my own style for the couple things I've done with it.
I have yet to even consider replying to emails/messages with AI. I sometimes write a wall of text on my own, but it's entirely me.
It really irks me for some reason that American Medical Association (one of the top spenders in lobbying) is doing the lobbying. I did a quick Gemini/Google search and these are the topics they lobby for.
```
Core Legislative PrioritiesMedicare Reform:
Fighting to fix stagnant physician payment formulas and account for inflation.
Prior Authorization: Pushing to reduce administrative roadblocks and delays enforced by insurance companies.
Scope of Practice: Opposing laws that expand independent clinical roles for non-physicians like nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
Burnout Reduction: Supporting federal and organizational relief to help doctors manage workplace stress and administrative tasks.
--
Public Health and Science
Public Health Crises: Supporting science-based policies on vaccinations, gun violence prevention, and chronic disease reduction.
Digital Health: Guiding regulations for artificial intelligence and telehealth integration in medical practices
```
Most of these are about keeping the gate (i.e., doctor's compensation high). The US doctors are the highest paid in the world (among developed countries like UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by a long shot. Kind of mad if you think about it.
Disclaimer: My spouse is a specialist doctor. You can say I have selfish interest in keeping doctor's salaries high in the US. But I can't help highlighting that doctor's guilds (like AMA) are part of the reasons why the healthcare expenses are so high in the US.
One of the ways that the AMA gatekeeps is to limit the number of medical school seats and residency slots in the US (residency is run by Medicare).
Quality of life (at work) for many physicians is arguably pretty bad due to long hours, administrative requirements, and insurance requirements / prior auth. Physicians should lobby to get some of these things fixed by regulation, because it's likely the only way they will get fixed! However, a physicians lobby of any kind is going to have a tough time reducing healthcare costs because they have a significant financial incentive to gatekeep and their members can pay high dues to spend a lot on lobbying.
I wonder if the AI meant PAs instead of pharmacists -- as I understand it, a pharmacist's scope of practice is quite distinct from a physician.
Yeah, doctors have been wilding and it's curious how completely they have been able to avoid public backlash for it. Probably some combination of knowing your doctor and more strongly associating billing/insurance with the financial pain even though providers are a big part of the cost spiral.
One of the most informative videos from Practical Engineering channel. I thought I knew NYC infra fairly well, but I learned so much from that video still (like how NYC's electric grid is actually a grid and more fault tolerant).
> Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help
I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
Interesting... at my current job, my team and I are solving this problem of how to make sure LLM understand our SQL data warehouse to answer analytical questions for clients. We have a 20-year old database with rotting schema as the blog post describes. So we had to rebuild the database in a way that is well structured and governed. Once that hard work is done, we slap dbt models on top of business metrics with model YAML files (and some common MD files) carrying a lot of semantic and metadata info for them.
Then our software engineering team ingest the dbt models (we have to tactically create dbt models; that is, always think "what would make LLM hallucinate less" as we are implementing them) and info from the semantic layer to build context for the LLM, and use that to answer analytical questions. So far, it's been promising. The accuracy isn't zero like the blog's author suggested though. We have built like 30 metrics in dbt and semantic layer in the last quarter, and asked the research and analytics teams to do internal testing on the LLM app. I will find out how accurate this approach is from the feedback soon.
I am like OP -- I use old.reddit.com strictly in Firefox. I'm comfortable and familiar with the old UI (been a Reddit user for as long as Reddit has been around).
I was a little annoyed by being asked to log in. But I don't want to browse 'reddit.com' because I don't like the way the new UI looks. It's hard to read and scan the first few pages quickly in the new UI (also looking at you Vanguard; you destroyed your old UI which was compact and informative).
Worse, now that I'm logged in and can use "old.reddit.com", Reddit serves me what it "thinks" I like, so now I'm trapped in the subreddit/topic bubble that Reddit selects for me (btw, it selects things poorly). I want to go to the old front page, so I click on 'Hot' or 'Top'. But Reddit still interleaves the posts with what it thinks I'd like to see.
Like some folks already commented here, even as someone who has been working in tech for 20+ years, I find Passkey confusing. I understand the key aspect in computer science term, but I don't know how to use it across devices. Another big worry is that if I tie that to a physical key, then I might lose it (because it's physical) and never get it back.
use an open source password manager that supports them.
as others mentioned, there's BitWarden (cross-platform, self-hostable), but if you want something simple there's KeePassXC (and you can put the store file on a dropbox shared folder)
I resent that I need a special app to "manage" them. I want to know where this key is on my filesystem so I can back it up and edit it myself, not have to use some app to access it. My ssh authorized_keys is just a text file. I can "manage" it with something as simple as vim. Maybe KeePassXC and BitWarden give you that simplicity, if so great!
KeePassXC "supports passkeys" but the website/app that offers the passkey needs to offer it in the correct way for KeePassXC to ingest it. I've found a fair amount of scenarios where they don't correctly let you drop it into them.
Yuck. Look closely at the wording: He is trying to counter a "user choice" feature by saying it doesn't have "protection". "File protection." "Protection of the key." Protection from who? From the user, that's who!
This mentality that the user is an attacker, and the software must protect its data from the user. Isn't a passkey ultimately supposed to be my data?
This is simply the mentality. Everyone who's worth anything (as in money) has it. Everyone who makes anything you own has it. They do everything based on this mentality and will not give it up. Every new specification or policy has provisions to ensure the device is protected from its user. Whether it's age verification (non-California-style), passkeys, or CSAM scanning.
The cabal of evil behind the passkey project actively have KeePassXC on their naughty list fore deigning to allow users to access their keys, and specifically included in the standard the means to discriminate between different passkey vault providers. It is the opposite of an open system, and cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted. Do not use passkeys, tell other people not to use passkeys, and make sure to not let shills astroturf conversations about passkeys unopposed.
Here's the most readable reference to playing favorites on passkey vaults I could find from the FIDO Alliance (the previously mentioned 'cabal of evil').
See Section 2.2: "Validating FIDO UAF authenticator attestations against the configured authenticator metadata to ensure only trusted authenticators are registered for use. "
And Section 2.3: "Verify attestation assertions made by the FIDO UAF Authenticators to ensure the authenticator is authentic and trusted. Verification occurs using the attestation public key certificates distributed via authenticator metadata. "
Basically, Relying Parties (the sites you are logging in to) are expected to allow/disallow certain passkey authenticators (the devices or software that hold your passkeys), based on registration and trusted lists. The FIDO Alliance can use entry into those trusted lists as a cudgel to force compliance with the standard. Effectively, the standard is that users must be locked into to proprietary ecosystems, unable to escape.
Even if I have my Yubikey passkey that's with my house keys, it's annoying to go grab it and connect every time I need to access something. Enabling it on GitHub was a mistake...
The problem here is i want to have more than 1 yubikey, so if i lose it, all is not lost... I can't do that with the current implementations unless i present N yubikeys to every new account i make. Which makes an off-site backup yubikey impossible. With my current yubikey usage with password store, my "offline" yubikey can be brought in whenever i want to decrypt the passwords, including ones inserted while the key was in storage.
Also yubikeys have limited passkey slots (100, 25 with old firmware)
Also, where do I store the backup Yubikey, or any other pass key owning device for that matter? It has to be easily accessible to set up the pass keys, but also safe from accidents like house fire.
There's a strange tension where I want to use pass keys because they are easy to use but also they are easy to lose, so I choose a KeePass synced over cloud and deal with a bit of a hassle by having to copy/paste my passwords.
Technically i would think so too, but is that how it's implemented? (I legit don't know, but my feeling was always that you had to add them while they're present, especially as there's different passkeys for different sites, to do it offline do you pregenerate 100 keys for each device to assign later?)
a big problem with passkeys is that there is a lot of flexibility in how it is rolled out with a given site or app. Some sites ask your browser for a passkey as soon as you hit the login page. Some sites you need to enter your username/email address first before you're prompted. Some sites a passkey satisfies both password + second factor. Some sites you need to enter your password and the passkey is the second factor. Some sites you don't need a password but do need the passkey + a second factor (usually SMS)
This is on top of the confusion around enrolling passkeys in your device and synchronizing them
I am a big passkeys fan, and use them on every service I can, but they leave a lot to be desired in terms of user experience. Not sure all of them are solvable, either. The platform vendor side can be fixed: vendors can better integrate with each other to make your passkeys available on every device. But, the issues with how they work across sites and applications is probably not solvable
i don't think you really understand how it works. most implementations are secondary implementation alongside login+password.
how to use cross-device? either use some password manager that supports it (apple/google/1password/keepass/etc support it), or use device that you have on hand most of the time - phone. when the passkey pops up - point your camera and scan the qrcode - you are done. otherwise use dedicated device like yubikey or similar.
really not sure what is hard about that to understand. i'm using android and chrome, so i can use the password manager in chrome, or my phone to scann the qrcode.
my country is using similar authorization for government "profile" (mobywatel - poland) that has similar to passkey implementation. you download the app on your phone, login via login+password (or other), download the certificates, and from now on you can point your camera on qrcodes to login to government websites; it requires pin/code or biometric confirmation on the phone - same as passkeys.
Can't agree with you more. I review 2-3 PRs a day from my team of eight data engineers. Most of my team members use Claude to write SQL, dbt and Python code. Some of them use Claude a lot, some less so. I can easily tell when I review the code that is mostly Claude generated vs. the one that is not. In dbt models where we have a lot of biz logic in intermediate layers, that's where I really have a difficult time following Claude-generated comments. So much jargon copied over from other adjacent dbt models (yet inconsistently), and the prose is super choppy (for the lack of better word).
After reading a looooong sentence/comment line, I still can't figure out what it really means. Had to always re-read the line 2-3 times (sometimes, more) to sort of understand. Reading code, however, is so much easier and usually, I just skip to reading the code and then come back to the comments. :D