The article has quite a bit of "me, me, me, I, I, I" self-promotional content. Which makes sense given it is an advertisement for his book.
I find it jarring to hear that authentication is "largely solved" by passkeys and FIDO, technology that a very very small minority of applications support. Making claims like this combined with the focus on self-promotion is a quick path to being dismissed and ignored.
"real coding" carries a lot of the weight in that comment.
Seems like if you ask 5 different people what "real coding" means you might get 5 different answers.
Not everyone is building the next framework or compiler.
Self-hosted Qwen 3.8 @Q4 on my RTX 3090 can produce beautiful functional CRUD pages and apps all day long. And that is 90% of the "real coding" being done in corporate settings.
The quote in the article about Mazda vs. Maserati captures this. Many might want the Maserati and drool over its specs and capabilities, but balk at the cost and how often are they really going to run it up to full performance limits on their daily commute to their cubicle?
A few years ago a software engineer asked a few Chemical/Civil/Mechanical engineers and the majority of "real" engineers seemed to think we were [1]. I'm not aware of a better study but happy to be proven wrong, since I generally refer to myself as a Software Developer
Absolutely. Engineering is defined by it learning from history, it's an art build up from thousands of years of human attempts to alter the world around them. In a modern sense engineers inevitably require a certain amount of schooling, certification, and most critically of all professional and ethical standards.
Not sure it’s obvious reasons, but understandable, sure. When someone questions your credentials the default is to tell them to jump, whether that’s a good idea or not.
Because Engineering is an incredibly rigorous discipline and title that requires so much work to obtain. It’s like a massage therapist calling themself a doctor. Computer Science isn’t Engineering.
Sure but out of my engineer friends I've never heard of them sneering a programmer calling themselves and engineer, they literally don't care and just worry about their own job. It seems only programmers seem to care about their lack of a proper engineer title.
Do people seriously care about this debate? I don't even use the term software engineer. I usually just say [computer] programmer. Though depending on my mood I might say I am virtual firefighter, and believe me, there are always virtual fires that need to be put out.
It seems like one of the design goals was separation/independence. It also doesn't need a battery if it is meant to be tightly coupled with the Steam Machine. Which is nice for opening it up to many alternate uses.
I am guessing the BMI would track. Unless they make unlikely changes including spending more time away from that couch, these two are looking at health consequences that will probably make them a burden on society by the time they hit middle age.
It did a great job with this prompt. Got it done in about the time it would take me to login and load Fusion. I forgot to include the wire diameter but it made a reasonable assumption and included it in the params for edits
"Make a grommet seal for a hole in an aluminum pipe where a cable goes through. The hole is 0.48 inches in diameter. The wall of the pipe is .25 inches thick. Make the seal split so it can be installed with the cable in place. Make a circular cover lip that is .2 inches across on the outside, and an inner lip to secure it that is smaller. It will be printed in flexible tpu"
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about statements like these which seem to assume the reader is incredibly uninformed and naive, to the point of condescension.
"sends the information to a central storing place (called a database)" TIL what the word database means?
"Amazon can use your purchases to know more about you using patterns." Is this news to someone? Condescending.
"It might be connected to a network (via Internet or radio frequency)" Radio frequency and Internet are not really directly comparable
Also don't like that the site hijacks the appearance of my mouse pointer, which feels similarly disrespectful of the reader.
Who is the target audience? Obviously not HN. Is it right to criticise someone for not writing for HN?
Radio networks and Internet are both networks. That part is fine. It means surveillance devices either have SIM cards and connect to the cell network, or they have their own isolated radio network.
Honestly, a lot of critical theory enjoyers who can talk fluently and at length in that academic dialect are astonishingly clueless about non-abstract matters.
I think these criticisms are unjustified. The article could be aiming for less tech-savvy people. Remember the most tech-savvy people in the world are those who enabled the surveillance infrastructure in the first place. Also if you want any meaningful grassroot change, you need to appeal to the less knowledgeable cohorts. Politics is more or less "which informed people can convince the most uninformed ones."
I find it jarring to hear that authentication is "largely solved" by passkeys and FIDO, technology that a very very small minority of applications support. Making claims like this combined with the focus on self-promotion is a quick path to being dismissed and ignored.
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