CS/CE jobs

I'm skeptical of how much heavy lifting AI is doing in practice, I remember one particular recent experiment I did trying to get GPT to help with a simple state machine table for detecting key presses from a "resistor ladder" keypad connected to an ADC, e.g. so you can take a couple buttons hung off one pin and detect single presses, double presses, held, and so on.

It eventually came up with something viable but it was painful and required a lot of corrections and at the end of the day I probably wasted time on the experiment, I could've just written the table myself and it would've been better.

It does come in helpful for boilerplate stuff like "I want a range function in C++ that I can send a value to and it will bin it when it falls within certain pairs of thresholds and it spits out:

template<typename... Thresholds>

int8_t range_index(uint16_t value, Thresholds... thresholds) { constexpr size_t N = sizeof...(Thresholds); static_assert(N >= 2, "At least two thresholds required"); uint16_t arr[] = { static_cast<uint16_t>(thresholds)... }; for (size_t i = 0; i + 1 < N; ++i) { if (arr[i] <= value && value < arr[i + 1]) { return static_cast<int8_t>(i); } } return -1; // Not in any range }

Which works well enough, I probably wouldn't have remembered that it's possible to directly instantiate a C++ array from a variadic template like in line 5, the template syntax is monstrous in general.

It's helpful sometimes but it's still kind of a mixed bag and may be a mixed bag for the forseeable future, I think it's maybe realistically providing 10-20% real-world productivity boosts not 100-200%.

I think it's more like AI has provided something of an impetus to notice that a lot of programming jobs are overpaid, I've know people in their

Which is fine, most humans in the real world are only good for 3-4 hours of intense focus every day. But IMO these folks are not doing 200k+ worth of work.

What a hideous mess.

Some day there will be a nice way, not necessarily "AI", where ordinary people can describe what they want in a clean, visible form, and the computer will just do it. Soon, I hope.

C++ is for expressiveness and generating assembly that's efficient and/or compact object file size, not really beauty.

Ask it to generate some Python, that's often pretty close to pseudocode

Finding people who can describe what they want in a clean visible form isn't easy. Once you've got them you usually don't need the computer.

A lot of the questions posted here need a lot of reworking and a lot of extra data supplied before we can come up with answer that might work.

Reality is rarely rubbish, but lots of people's perception of reality aren't all that realistic. Donald Trump does come to mind

Ram and CPU power are almost free now. People are expensive. Bugs are very expensive.

P looks a lot like Basic to me, except for the weird indentation.

What's wrong with FOR...NEXT ?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I don't recall you advertising here. My young one spent the summer at Meta but would have preferred an analog hardware intern experience.

I ran an ad on LinkedIn.

I didn't figure that many kids see this ng. It's nearly dead.

But if anyone knows some kid that has serious talent for circuit design, they could contact me.

I had a phenomenal intern this summer, but he's just a junior EE student now. He does the electro-hydraulic automation for a bunch of floats in the Rose Bowl parade. That sure sounds like fun.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I'm glad my wife didn't talk to somebody like you.

She did a double major in psychology and German, and thought that she was going to end up as a high school language teacher.

As it happened she learned about psycholinguistics as an undergraduate, but did a master's in German, and was allowed to work out her Education Department studentship over three years as a university teacher (which was pretty rare), and over that time she met me and (entirely separately) decided to do a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics in America (where she did well) while I worked as an electronics engineer in England, but we stayed in contact.

Her career took off after we got married in England, and she ended up as one of the three directors of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands that lead to her becoming a foreign member of the American Academy of Science, a Fellow of the UK Royal Society, the first female winner of the Dutch Spinoza prize and a bunch of other interesting stuff.

She made a lot of money out of all that. Advice like yours might have set her off in a less profitable direction.

Perhaps he shouldn't have been.

Last year the six months internship with Apple was doing board level work and was enjoyable. The Meta hardware engineering internship turned out to be writing a lot of Python in support of a larger hardware goal which wasn't what was hoped for.