This has never been about (western) morals which is why the masked violent crowds don't care about Russia, or China, or Saudia Arabia or Iran. This is about taking down the west because the west is evil. They also don't care about crimes against humanity perpetrated by Palestinians:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/0282/2025/en/
This crowd is also not calling for "peace in Palestine". That would be something everyone would obviously get behind and could lead to a constructive discussion about how we get there. They are supporting violence against Israeli civilians and calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of its populace.
It also has nothing to do with "US aid to Israel" since we see the exact same behavior in other western countries that do not aid Israel at all. For Americans to question how their aid money is used (e.g. why is it going to Egypt) or who the US does business with (e.g. why with Saudi Arabia or Qatar) is perfectly legit but it's obviously not what's going on here.
Most western a world governments don't fund Israel and yet people there seem to "care" a lot. I don't think your argument holds water. Many western governments trade with Iran and support the oppressive regime there in direct. The US also funds Egypt which is another oppressive regime where there's no human rights. It supports Saudi Arabia that chops up journalists.
Your logic doesn't hold because it never held. The reason people "care" about Palestine is that they've been manipulated to care.
The logical thing would be for the American population to stand with Israel when it's being attacked. That would be the normal default. Like the rest of the world supported the US when it was attacked on 9/11. What we're seeing is the collapse of logic and truth and the win of propaganda campaigns and lies.
But ICE vehicles can be in engine breaking mode. You pretty much never "coast" (e.g. put the vehicle in neutral or hold the clutch in). I get what you're saying but it feels like it's way in the margin if an effect at all. Do you have some reference? People keep talking about tire wear but my model 3 tires (which are relatively high performance soft tires) aren't wearing any faster than the wear I used to get on my Subaru before. I just don't drive aggressively. Flooring the accelerator must be the big difference. I don't think the weight difference is that large, certainly compared to trucks.
The amount of engine braking applied by an automatic transmission ICE vehicle when you take your foot off the gas is an order of magnitude less than the regen braking applied when you take your foot off the accelerator on your Model 3.
First off, my Renault Megane e-Tech has paddles that allow me to change the regen strength on the fly. I use it actively when driving.
But anyway, I find I drive differently with an EV. I don't let off the throttle unless I want to slow down. If I want to coast, I just reduce my throttle input to where its coasting.
I'll have to double-check, but as I recall it the lowest setting in Sports mode was off. But maybe just very, very low.
In any case, what's the problem with having it very, very low vs off? Like, what do you really need coasting for? Not something I've felt I've been missing.
The title seems pretty click-bait. If you read the article the argument isn't that vaccines don't work or that not vaccinating may increase disease and deaths. It's that our personal freedoms should still win. The example the Dr. gives with alcoholism seems quite relevant, many more people have negative health outcomes due to alcohol consumption:
"Alcohol is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, with harms related to both acute and chronic effects of alcohol contributing to about 4.3 million emergency department visits and more than 178,000 deaths in the U.S. each year."
While it's true that there are different externalities here (e.g. you're increasing other people's risk by not vaccinating and losing the herd effect) there are also externalities to alcohol consumption (e.g. drunken drivers).
The question is where does that line go between freedom and health factors and other externalities. We should be able to have this discussion without political tribalism.
If you kill someone when drunk driving you face more serious consequences than if you weren't drunk. There should be similar consequences here you get a disease you could have vaccinated for? You pay 4 times the amount for the cure.
You should also pay more for school fees to cover additional insurance when the school gets sued for letting voluntary unvaccinated child attend who infects another child, who couldn't get vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons.
> The title seems pretty click-bait. If you read the article the argument isn't that vaccines don't work or that not vaccinating may increase disease and deaths. It's that our personal freedoms should still win.
Freedom is all well and good, but what about responsibility? Are you not (partially) responsible for keeping the community you live in safe?
In the US you were born into free and working society because those before you took responsibility to make it so: should you not do the same for the next generation? ((Re-)Introducing disease(s) brings back suffering and subjugation that are imposed on new generation.)
I generally support vaccination and there is an argument that public health can sometimes trump individual rights or even health. That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease. The other example is chickenpox where we are trading off a potentially mild disease (everyone I know had it as a child) to the risk of getting it as an adult where it is more severe. These tradeoffs are not straightforward and the health authorities are also not transparent about how they weigh the risks.
I've also done something similar with my children. Make a determination for a specific vaccine and schedule. This is a combination of both weighing their health above public health and applying my particular circumstances (e.g. stay at home mom vs. daycare) to adjust the risks. They ended up getting most vaccines, just on a different schedule.
> That said, the example that has always bugged me though the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease.
Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids, including blood. In this, Hepatitis B is particularly insidious: there is generally a large viral load in the blood relative to other diseases, so even microscopic amounts of blood are sufficient for infection, and the virus can remain active for up to a week on exposed objects.
Perhaps your children are different, but blood is a pretty common sight with most children.
Worse: when you contract Hepatitis B, it may become a lifelong infection.
Sadly, screening those people who have contact with your child is thwarted by the fact that roughly half of those infected don't realize it.
My daughters were born at home. Me and my wife do not have Hepatitis B. They did not go to daycare, my wife stayed at home with them.
I think the burden of proof is on you (or the health authorities) to have some conclusive evidence based story here how them getting this vaccine is a net plus, or at least that not getting the vaccine is a high enough risk in the big picture. What I read online borders propaganda, it is just the natural reflex to defense the existing practices, there is no evidence that I have seen that has real world data comparing the risk that proves what needs to happen here. Because hard evidence is the enemy of bad policy.
> the default of giving babies Hepatitis B vaccine even if there is no possible vector for them to get the disease
Yeah absolutely. Another example, which is tangential since its not a vaccine but is a default medicine for some reason, is antibiotic eye ointment on literal hours-old infants. Im not concerned we have gonorrhea thanks, ill listen to your talks and sign your waiver.
Fwiw, the hep b recommendation just changed like a month ago :) sensibility wins out, sometimes eventually.
CPC was firmly in the lead for the elections before Trumps' attention to Canada and the Liberals jumping on this to frame PP as another Trump or someone who would yield to Trump, both couldn't be farther away from his actual policy stances, but in the age of social media (and I guess major government owned media that does its bidding) that doesn't matter.
That's not my recollection of the events. I think "showed us who he really was" is just the FUD spread by the Liberals. I have left leaning friends and their opinions of PP are totally disconnected from the reality of what he says and does, they are just repeating the talking points they get from their circle.
Nobody wants to debate actual policy and basically we ended up with a different conservative, Carney, whose actual policies are in my opinion iffy ans his performance the same. Scare tactics are easier than policy debate.
This is very true. So you can't just ask people to use AI and expect better output even if AI is all the hype. The bottlenecks are not how many lines of code you can produce in a typical big team/company.
I think this means a lot of big businesses are about to get "disrupted" because small teams can become more efficient because for them sheer generation of somtimes boilerplate low quality code is actually a bottleneck.
I think part of this is that there is no one AI and there is no one point in time.
The other day Claude Code correctly debugged an issue for me, that was seen in production, in a large product. It found a bug a human wrote, a human reviewed, and fixed it. For those interested the bug had to do with chunk decoding, the author incorrectly re-initialized the decoder in the loop for every chunk. So single chunk - works. >1 chunk fails.
I was not familiar with the code base. Developers who worked on the code base spent some time and didn't figure out what was going on. They also were not familiar with the specific code. But once Claude pointed this out that became pretty obvious and Claude rewrote the code correctly.
So when someone tells me "there's not much there" and when the evidence says the opposite I'm going to believe my own lying eyes. And yes, I could have done this myself but Claude did this much faster and correctly.
That said, it does not handle all tasks with the same consistency. Some things it can really mess up. So you need to learn what it does well and what it does less well and how and when to interact with it to get the results you want.
It is automation on steroids with near human (lessay intern) capabilities. It makes mistakes, sometimes stupid ones, but so do humans.
>So when someone tells me "there's not much there" and when the evidence says the opposite I'm going to believe my own lying eyes. And yes, I could have done this myself but Claude did this much faster and correctly.
If the stories were more like this where AI was an aid (AKA a fancy auto complete), devs would probably be much more optimistic. I'd love more debugging tools.
Unfortunately, the lesson an executive here would see is "wow AI is great! fire those engineers who didn't figure it out". Then it creeps to "okay have AI make a better version of this chunk decoder". Which is wrong on multiple levels. Can you imagine if the result for using Intellisense for the first time was to slas your office in half? I'd hate autocomplete too?
I keep getting blown away by AI (specifically Claude Code with the latest models). What it does is literally science fiction. If you told someone 5 years ago that AI can find and fix a bug in some complex code with almost zero human intervention nobody would believe you, but this is the reality today. It can find bugs, it can fix bugs, it can refactor code, it can write code. Yes, not perfect, but with a well organized code base, and with careful prompting, it rivals humans in many tasks (certainly outperforms them in some aspects).
As you're also saying this is the worst it will ever be. There is only one direction, the question is the acceleration/velocity.
Where I'm not sure I agree is with the perception this automatically means we're all going to be out of a job. It's possible there would be more software engineering jobs. It's not clear. Someone still has to catch the bad approaches, the big mistakes, etc. There is going to be a lot more software produced with these tools than ever.
To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.
Management cares about what their management cares about. So this boils down to what the CEO cares about. The CEO cares about what the board cares about. The board cares about share prices going up.
I do believe that e.g. retaining engineers is something that helps the business. It's stupid that someone ramps up for 2 years and then goes to a different job just as they start becoming really effective. It costs companies a ton of money which they could instead just use to get people to stay. But I'm not on Google's board. It's only when Google board decides that fostering the right engineering culture is important enough for the business that something is going to change. And so far- they don't (s/Google/BigTech).
Re: Incentives- Obviously(?) the incentives are not right. So when you say "plenty of incentive" what it really means is incentive to ship sloppy code and get promoted. Or the incentive to go from Google to OpenAI and get a pay increase or whatnot.
> To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.
To be fair to me, I don't recall ever signing a contract through which I am directly responsible for the company's financial and customer-acquisition / retention efforts. I sign up as an individual contributor who helps advance the customer & product mission forward. I am NOT a cofounder.
So that shows, yet again, how myopic and egocentric managers are. Wise ones -- the all 2-3 I have met throughout a 20+ years of experience -- understand that they must enable you to produce the outcomes they care about.
Unsurprisingly, I worked fantastically well with those managers and we achieved near-miracles in some measly 4-5 months.
But all others? "I never gave you time to optimise cloud spend but now I am angry at you for not doing it in your sleep", more or less. Or "I pushed you to the brink of 12-hour workday regularly and started reaching into your weekends and you rushed that feature I pressured you for and it has one small performance regressions? You are fired!". Deal with it.
/rant.
Not directed at you, obviously. Got triggered a little.
We need to disconnect the question of bad managers from the structural issues though. I try to be a good manager but I still have people jump ship for better comp and where we won't match it. I still need to deal with an incentive structure that doesn't match what I am trying to do with my team.
This same structure is also what helps bad managers. Who is going to get promoted to a director role? The person who stands up for their team and argues with the VP or the person who toes the line? The things that you think are near-miracles are not visible and the people that play politics will make their stuff look more valuable to the company.
Yours and my experience are not mutually exclusive, I think we both see it. I dream of managers like you but I never get hired under them for some reason. (Likely regional culture, experience shows.)
I'm at a stage of life and career where I'd happily take a small pay cut for a year just to establish myself in a place and have stability. Then we'll talk about competitive compensation.
My chief issues are with people that are best described with the proverb "give them an inch and they will take a mile".
Yours seems to be that you deal with people that constantly think that they can do better in terms of how much they take home (let's not sugar-coat it, they're spoiled -- I was too).
Heroics being invisible and people who have their coffee with leadership getting the money and the influence is the wrong system. Always was and apparently always will be.
This crowd is also not calling for "peace in Palestine". That would be something everyone would obviously get behind and could lead to a constructive discussion about how we get there. They are supporting violence against Israeli civilians and calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of its populace.
It also has nothing to do with "US aid to Israel" since we see the exact same behavior in other western countries that do not aid Israel at all. For Americans to question how their aid money is used (e.g. why is it going to Egypt) or who the US does business with (e.g. why with Saudi Arabia or Qatar) is perfectly legit but it's obviously not what's going on here.
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