I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."
and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.
But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.
"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."
I’m not familiar with any HF comms channels other than military or broadcasting that get 20 kHz of bandwidth. Most HF modes get 3 kHz. You might be able to get 5 kbps at 3 kHz BW with some modern modes that can adapt to the frequency selective non stationary channel.
He’s giving advice about generic protocols - you could learn about them and make your own decision. The tools he mentioned are open source - you could read the source code or trust in the community. I don’t know what other guarantee you could hope to get. If he told you he’s an anti digital censorship expert he could just be lying to you. Anyone COULD be an agent, but at a certain point you have to choose to trust people, at some potential risk to yourself.
Spacex rocketry tech is subject to ITAR regulations. That restricts who they’re allowed to contract with, data encryption and handling, but altogether those regulations are quite bare. It likely wouldn’t be enough to stop a state actor or rogue employees.
I think ITAR is mostly just to stop the outright sale of controlled items to foreign entities, not necessarily to prevent IP theft or corporate espionage.
I worked on an ITAR-controlled camera once and it was drilled into me than even allowing a non-US person to view the output images of the camera constituted an ITAR violation.
Right, which is all well and good if you're a benevolent actor, but ITAR really doesn't do anything at all to stop you from intentionally committing (corporate or actual) espionage if you want to. There should still be controls to prevent you from violating ITAR either accidentally or on purpose.
The controls are you go to jail if you get caught. At least this is what one is told in the mandatory ITAR compliance trainings. That seems to be how the law works for most crimes.
It's an incentive but it's certainly not a control. Controls stop something from happening, they don't respond to it after the fact. Controls would be things like security checkpoints, network monitoring, random searches, that sort of thing.
"You will go to jail if you kill someone" isn't a control against murder.
Do you mind sharing what industry you’re in where you can fully rely on FOSS? In my industry we’re dependent on MATLAB, Xilinx tools, closed source embedded software and more. To name a few industries: game devs might be stuck with unity, finance quant devs might be stuck with Bloomberg terminals, iOS app devs are stuck with apple’s tooling etc… this isn’t just an LLM problem IMO.
I think this is different. Yes, 3rd party tools and services are nothing new. Depending on 3rd party libraries is also a standard thing, although minimum dependency is generally considered a good practice. But all these services provide something you don't want to do yourself and are willing to pay. They all complement what you do, and don't replace your core competency.
Apple is your business partner, doing marketing and distribution for you, and shares its user base. Bloomberg terminals provide real time data and UI to non-technical finance people. Github provides you Git hosting service so you don't need to setup and maintain servers. MATLAB (although there are Octave, Python and open alternatives) sells numerical computation environment to non-CS engineers. Xilinx is sells its hardware and dev tools. Game devs use Unity because they want to focus on gameplay and not game engine development.
These are all the examples of Division of Labor. This time, however, you have to pay for your core competency, because you cannot compete with a good AI coder in the long run. The value you provide diminishes to almost nothing. Yes you can write prompts, but anyone, even a mediocre LLM can write prompts these days. If you need some software, you don't need to hire SW engineers anymore. A handful of vendors dominate the SW development market. Yes, you can switch. But only between the 3 or 4 tech giants. It's an Oligopoly.
If we have FOSS alternatives, at least we can build new services around them and can move on to this new era. We can adapt. Otherwise, we become a human frontend between the client and the AI giants.
That's a good remark. As my sibling said, backend and web dev.
But indeed it always struck me that some developpers decided to become Apple developpers and sacrifice 30% of everything they ever produce to Apple.
I would argue that it might a bit different though, because when doing iOS development it's possible that you don't lose you core skill, which is building software, and that you can switch to another platform with relative ease. What I think might happen with LLM is that people will lose the core skill (maybe not for the generation who did do LLM-less development, but some devs might eventually not ever know other ways to work, and will become digital vassals of whatever service managed to kill all others)
Android also charges a fee for Play Store distribution, as do most platforms - not just mobile app ones. The cost of doing business on a platform does not mean no one should do it - like literally all other businesses.
Well you definitely SHOULD say RJ45. We do a lot of networking at my job and if I asked for an 8P8C connector, I would get confused stares. Say Ethernet cable, Cat 6 cable (or whatever cat), or RJ45. Sometimes being correct isn’t the right thing to do.
If a contractor installed exactly what he asked for, an RJ45 jack which would be unusable for his needs he would have no grounds to stand on to demand it be corrected without paying more. By specifying the technically correct name as well as the colloquially recognized name he is being precise and accommodating.
If a contract requires RJ45 terminated Ethernet patch cables and the contractor delivers keyed RJ45, they have not delivered because RJ45 doesn’t even have the correct conductor layout to act as an Ethernet cable. Contracts call for RJ45 all the time and there are no mixups. You’d probably find it quite difficult to even find vendors for keyed RJ45
I know this feels like a technically correct gotcha, but in fact is not. Do some parametric searches on digikey and flip through some manufacturer catalogs. If you go out of your way to misinterpret industry standard jargon you won't be paid for your work and you'll lose the contract.
They can make advanced chips in Arizona, but the bleeding edge is in Taiwan. Arizona can make TSMC’s 4nm process, but in Taiwan they’re doing 3nm and ramping up 2nm.
It's TSMC and Taiwanese state policy is to lag the US fabs bu couple of years as they don't want to lose their strategic importance and their protection that comes with it.
AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
I dont think its especially unreasonable to assume that these models will continue to improve. Every year since chatGPT has seen incredible advancements, that will end eventually but why do you think it is now?
> Every year since chatGPT has seen incredible advancements
Advancements in what exact areas? My time using GitHub Copilot years ago was more successful for the simple act of coding than my more recent one trying out Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5. I'm not really seeing what these massive advancements have been, and realistically none of these LLMs are more useful than a very, very bad junior programmer when it comes to anything that couldn't already be looked up but is simply faster to ask.
> realistically none of these LLMs are more useful than a very, very bad junior programmer
This is an incredible achievement. 5 years ago chatbots and NLP AI couldnt do shit. 2 years ago they were worthless for programming. Last year they were only useful to programmers as autocomplete. Now they replace juniors. There has been obvious improvement year after year and it hasnt been minor
To the extent it’s measurable, LLMs are becoming more creative as the models improve. I think it’s a bold statement to say they’ll NEVER be creative. Once again, we’ll have to see. Creativity very well could be emergent from training on large datasets. But also it might not be. I recommend not speaking in such absolutes about a technology that is improving every day.
I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.
We were talking about LLM here, not computing machines in general. LLM are trained to mimic not to produce novel things, so a person can easily think LLM wont get creative even though some computer program in the future could.
Most software engineering jobs aren't about creativity, but about putting some requirements stated in a slightly vague fashion, and actualizing it for the stakeholder to view and review (and adjust as needed).
The areas for which creativity is required are likely related to digital media software (like SFX in movies, games, and perhaps very innovative software). In these areas, surely the software developer working there will have the creativity required.
