Aceticon

Just look at the long, long, LONG list of American and European companies helping Israel murder little children...

It makes sense to use Machine Learning technology (not the Generative crap, the actual pattern recognition stuff) for terminal target recognition.

The surprise would be if Russia did not use AI in their newest cruise missile design - just because their society is fucked up and their leadership is a socipathic, disconnected autocrat surrounded by yes men that put his own personal pride above the lives of millions of his countrymen, doesn't mean Russia doesn't have the people with the technical knowledge to design systems with AI (though certainly far fewer of those than they had before they tried to invade Ukraine, since a ton of the Russians with the highest qualifications left).

I mean, given them another 50 years or so in their current trajectory, but for now they're probably still capable of creating their own high-tech solutions in focused applications.

Yeah, pretty much the same.

(Mind you, I personally went into Gold at around 2013 after having experienced the 2007 inside the Finance Industry, and back then I used British Pounds, and Gold did not give a shit about Brexit but the British Pound sure did - by crashing 20% - so in pounds Gold is actually a bit better than vs USD or EUR)

That said, I look at it the other way around - Gold is the original currency and one that can't be devalued at will by governments (its only inflation comes from gold mining, which increases the amount of gold in circulation by, last I checked 1.2% a year), so it's not Gold price going up, it's the value of government issued currencies going down vs the more traditional currency that's not controlled by any one government which is Gold.

Certainly this seems closer to how people have felt inflation in at least the major paper currencies - back in the 60s a single blue collar salary was enough for a good house, a car and the expenses of a familiy of 5, now a white collar salary it's barelly enough for a single person to live in a small appartment in a city, even though according to official inflation those two are equivalent amounts: it looks a lot like the purchasing power of gold has roughly remained steady whilst the purchasing power of government issued currencies has steadilly fallen and done so faster than official inflation figures for those currencies say it did.

If you compare it with Gold - against which the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold Standart - it's a lot worse than just a 50% loss since 2013, more like a 65% of value.

The fall is probably the same in terms of real inflation (as actually felt by people in terms of how much less their money buys) - the official inflation figures understate inflation (probably because the mathematical calculation for GDP involves raw GDP being deflated by inflation, so the less the official inflation is the more politicians can harp about how much they made GDP "grow") and this has been going on for decades, which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s, now can barelly pay the rent of small appartment in a major city.

Don't take this badly, mate, but you sound like me when I was a "kid" thinking I was truly the shit for all my technical achievements as a self-taught programmer.

Absolutely, really impressive 1 in a really-big-number kind stuff, just the most pure technical track imaginable and not the same as understanding software development the process as whole, at all.

Decades later, 3 countries later, several industries later, various different environments and kinds of projects later and all sizes of company later, I've figured out that they pay us the big bucks to make software for OTHER PEOPLE, to serve THEIR needs not ours needs and certainly not for our personal enjoyment, though a good dev will always find some enjoyment in cracking complex problems, IMHO - from were a fuckton of constrains and dependencies on what and how you make it and whom do you have to work with are born - and if you want to achieve something that's great in more axes of greatness than just pure technical impressiveness you need to actually learn how to effectively work in a team and with other teams even non-technical ones, including, beyond a certain point of experience, how to empower other more junior people in your team rather than just be pissed off at how little they know.

(And I don't mean going into the Management track, I mean staying the Technical career track and still progressing as a Software Engineer).

And don't get me started on the engineering-style concerns of software design around software live cycle in production and how to prepare for expected future directions of change.

Mind you I've crossed paths over the years once or twice with people who never moved beyond "technical excellence" as their one and only metric for software development (typically "rockstar coders") and they were invariably miserable people who bitch and moaned about "lusers" and how other developers don't know how to use the (not really properly designed for robust usage by people that can't read your fucking mind) libraries they made.

Unless you find yourself a nice niche where you can be a solo rockstar hacker, technical excellence is only a good software development metric up to maybe the 5 years experience mark. Beyond that, unless your career has stagnated you're supposed to be delivering the results the customers need to the customers and doing so in complex environments in cooperation with various teams, some of whom don't at all understand most technical language and certain don't have a fucking clue what "pre-emptive multitasking" means.

You missed the documenting the code

Your words.

As for your job title, don't take this badly but "Systems Architect" is not at all the same as "Technical Architect".

If you're actually designing or at least tuning software development processes and coding standards across multiple teams (so, not just optimizing how teams work but also optimizing cross-team work), you're a Technical Architect.

A Systems Architect, when the title is properly used, just means that you're designing software whose operation spreads across multiple platforms (so, for example, multiple tiers in a multi-tier system).

Also there is quite a range in Systems Architect - knowing how to code in two or more platforms (say, STM32 and some Android, to make a bit of home electronics with a microcontroller be controllable from a smartphone) is not at all the same as knowing how to design a high-performance distributed system running in multiple machines, integrated with multiple external system working for ten/hundred of thousands of client front-ends and supporting things like Distribute Transactions so that any failures don't leave half-complete operations.

You can be a Systems Architect and be isolated form most of the concerns of the software development out there. especially if you're a team of one developing the software side of products based on some marketing person's idea of what customers supposedly want.

Unsurprisingly, Technical Architects are non-existent outside large companies and even there they're pretty rare.

Again, still making my point on Dunning-Krugger.

It says a lot that you think a coding good practice like "documenting things in code" which is at the level of using descriptive variable and function names, should be in the same bucket as structural non-coding processes (which are often entire professionions or very senior professional branches) like Requirements Analysis or Technical Architecture, both highly-complex things (the latter being the very top in seniority of the technical career track) which are non-existent in a formal sense in improvisational (read: amateur as fuck) "programming" companies.

You're making my point on the whole Dunning-Krugger thing.

That style of software developer used to be called "monkey coders".

Employing "monkey coders" because they are cheaper is a great way to end up paying a lot more money over the long run because their work is unmaintainable, ureliable, not robust and stupidly hard to be upgraded to implement new requirements.

Which, if you think about it, it's pretty much what you get with AI code.

And yeah, totally agree that these are the people who are most threatenned directly by AI at the moment. Then again, they were the ones most threatenned by outsourcing already (to India especially, since when they grew massive as an outsourcing place for software development they started hiring tons of people there who had no skill whatsoever for it and would never have gone into software development and were pretty bad, so most coders based in India were eventually this kind of code writter).

Hiring "monkey coders" was always the product of bad management: they looked good on paper - cheap, made lots of code, bums on seats, often the kind of person who worked long hours (which in low efficient management cultures makes a manager look good because of "making their people work hard") - whilst creating massive costs spread over time and hitting everything from production downtime costs to future system improvement costs. In some ways the mass replacement of developers with AI is born from the same management incompetence as outsourcing, which is probably why it is hitting the US so hard.

Which brings us around to how, indirectly, even good software developers are right now threatened by AI - the kind of incompetent manager who thinks code lines is a productivity metric aren't replacing just "monkey coders" with AI, they're cutting down head-count with no selectivity or even replacing first the more professional coders because they're the most expensive.

This might not be sustainable in the mid and long term because AI, like "code monkeys", just piles up massive less obvious over-time costs on software systems (I expect a lot of companies will go under from this shit) and some are already getting desperate for the kind of professionals that can fix their self-inflicted AI problem, but people who aren't prepared for up to two years of being out of well paying software development jobs (so, most people) are getting screwed instead of aligning themselves to really profit from the wave of post-AI "oh, shit or systems are unreliable shit" work for senior types that's just starting, plus if indeed as I expect companies will fail due to this, the Tech boom will be over and there will be fewer positions than there were 2 or 3 years ago.

"Writting the code was never the hard part"

It's figuring out in detail what the program is suppose to do (i.e. Requirements), how it can and should do it given the technical constraints of the available deployment environment and performance & reliability requirements (i.e. Technical Analysis) and how it all gets structured from the highest level to the lowest level so that bugs are minimized, performance is suitable with the appropriate margin to absorb expect unexpected problems and costs for maintenance and future requirements implementation are low (i.e. from Technical Architecture and Systems Design down to Software Design) that are hard.

And I say this as somebody who has done all of those professionally, plus the coding (oh, so, so much coding) for systems of all kinds and sizes in various countries and industries, including some mission critical high performance distributed systems (which if they failed would have cost millions of $$$ in lost business income).

Fly by the seat of their pants coders who have never worked in a properly professional environment have no fucking clue just how much more there is to it than "coding" to go from no software at all to "reliable and robust software system that serves existing business needs".

A lot of "coders" are like I was in the beginning of my career: they think they're the shit, know nothing but a very limited range of work environments which they think "that's how things are done" when those environments are actually, amateur hour, every hour of every day, every day of the month, every month of the year - they're basically at the peak point of the Dunning-Krugger curve for software development knowledge.

The absence of their influence in Politics will make a massive difference.

The resources captured by the rich are probably a far smaller part of the problems they make than how they use the money they have to shape Politics and Public Opinion (via the Media they own), hence policies, hence the way our society and economy operates to maximized their own wealth.

Most Overconsumption and Negative Externality problems (both things that serve to maximized the profits that end up in the hands of Asset Owners and both the kind of thing that most damages the Environment) could be legislated away, but there is no will and there is no will because the politicians and the media are bought by those who benefit from things being as they are, and they are bought because those people have lots of money to buy them with.

Take the power to buy politicians and deciding what the press puts out away from the rich and all of a sudden profit-reducing pro-Environmental policies are not just politically acceptable but even demanded by public opinion, and given that said rich people would never give up on that without a massivelly destructive fight (literally Revolution), the safest and best option for about 99.9998% of people (8 billion minus 10,000 out of 8 billion) would probably be that a handful of rich people just die.

Most of the destruction is Capitalism and Consumer Society overproduction and overexploitation - a lot of unecessary shit is done and a lot of what's done is done in unecessarily destructive ways (with lots of Negative Externatities) when it could've been done in far less destructive but less profit-generating ways, all because our political and economic structures are dedicated to the maximization of the wealth of the richest people.

(It's not by chance that Ecologist parties are generally leftwing - the politicies for protecting the Environment are generally diametrally opposite of the politicies that maximize the investment profits of those who own most shit and have the most money)

I bet that only about 100 people need to die (all billionaires) to save the planet, an acceptable sacrifice.

Oh yeah - as I said, I lived in Britain for over a decade and I totally get how one can hear people who have no familiarity with Britain talking about the "British accent" and mentaly comment "you have no clue what's you're talking about".

It's just because I actually like learning languages, can notice accents in various languages and have thought about it, that I came up with an intellectual explanation of why that would be and that's what I put forward (well, only part of the explanation, the whole thing would end up talking about Eskimo familiarity with ice and snow and how they have far more words for variants of it in their laguage than everybody else).

I was thinking that somebody from an English speaking country has to be exceptionally ignorant to think there is a "British accent" - even I as a Portuguese and well before going to live in Britain recognized "Scottish" accents from "Irish" accents from "English" accents, if only because in films you generally hear actors make those 3 highly distinctive kinds of accent. If I remember it correctly I could even spot scouse and cockney accents as different, even though I had no idea were they came from, but I'm thinking that I myself as a Portuguese can't really tell any of the Brasilian accents apart and it all sounds like a "Brasilian" accent to me, so maybe there's more it it than that - I could long tell apart multiple accents from Britain in a language that's not my native one but can't tell apart Brasilian accents in my own native language, so mere "ignorance" doesn't seem a good explanation.