I deal with it by progressively developing some ideas that might one day allow me to exit the software industry entirely. Simultaneously, I'm holding on to my job and collecting paychecks while secretly giggling as various Dilbert strips play out in real life because of AI hype. Saving up a "micro FU" fund also helps.
They're likely doing this because it's likely the only remaining loophole to their new DRM scheme. Too bad for them it's caused me to buy all my ebooks elsewhere.
If the book is readable, it can be pirated. Even the most labor-intensive piracy technique is not that difficult. And once a drm-free book is out there, it's out there.
Though sadly the new types of Kinds require a method of extracting Kindles to PDF which is an order of magnitude harder than the old Calibre DeDRM method. I had to boot Bluestacks and export license files and rub my tummy and pat my head and do the Hokey Pokey… but in the end, the books are now 100% mine.
Edit: It’s been a while. Looks like the process is more streamlined, but still not what it used to be.
Corporate leaders don't learn lessons. They follow trends, chase growth, reduce the perception of risk, diffuse blame, get their business acquired, and exit with money bags in both hands. No learning from experience necessary.
Not explosive, but still a potential fire hazard, especially if a still gets way too hot (coolant system fails) and alcohol vapors escape. The risk becomes extremely minimal when using an electric still.
With an electric boiler, risk of fire is essentially zero. But if it did boil over due to cooling system failure, something else in the room (a spark from a relay, etc) might cause an explosion. This is why runs always need to be human attended and monitored, unless it is truly a bulletproof well tested setup that is designed for automated operation.
The ultimate alcohol boiler for small runs is an electric water heater. They have an inert glass coating on the inside, and as long as all plastic is removed and fittings are replaced with lead-free copper then it's safe.
You can match the heating element to the still head and always be assured of running it at exactly its maximum speed. Both heating elements can be used to speed up initial heating of the contents before dropping down to one element for the run.
Get a short, stubby water heater for best results. Then you can set your receiving pot and other stuff on top, like it's a table. Most painless and trouble free distilling experience ever.
Nixon and McCaw wrote a great book on distilling and they also sell a fine copper wool packed column that, at full length with extension, will support 1500W continuous boiler power. The stainless pot they sell as a boiler is good to get started with and works as a great receiving pot for the water heater boiler. If you upgrade the bottom water heater element to 6000W (normally 4500W in most heaters) and run it at 120V (half voltage), that drops it down to 1/4 power or 1500W, so a perfect match.
Truth! I converted my still to electric and would never go back to gas now that I know how easy the conversion is. Also uses air cooling so that almost no water is wasted.
Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.
The saying also ignores the fact that humans are not perfect programmers, and they all vary in skills and motives. Being a programmer often not about simply writing new code but modifying existing code, and that can be incredibly challenging when that code is hairbrained or overly clever and the people who wrote it are long gone. That involves programming and it's really hard.
Isn't overly clever code a result of programmers doing simple things the hard mode?
Okay it's a spicy take, because juniors also tend to write too smart code.
Figuring out what to do and how to do it, is maybe not hard but it's effort. It's a hidden thing because it's not flat coding time, it requires planning, research, exploration and cooperation.
It's also true that some seemingly simple things are very hard. There are probably countless workarounds out there and the programmer wasn't even aware he is dodging an NP hard bullet.
Both arguments are valid.
I think the weight leans on effort, because effort is harder to avoid. Work, complexity, cruft piles up, no matter what you do. But you can work around hard problems. Not always but often enough. Not every business is NASA and has to do everything right, a 90% solution still generates 90% returns, and no one dies.
> Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.
Isn't this kind of true, though? Housing construction, for instance, isn't bottlenecked by the technical difficulties of building, but by political and regulatory hurdles. Or look at large, capital-intensive projects such as the always-proposed, never built new Hudson river train tubes. Actually building these will take billions of dollars and many years, but even they would be long built by now were it not for their constantly being blocked by political jockeying.
Building stuff _does_ often involve difficult technical challenges, but I still think that as a general aphorism the observation that this isn't the _hardest_ part holds true.
We might have different concepts of "hard", but if I were a construction worker I think I would agree. Hell, I'm a developer and I agree. Figuring out what to do definitely is the hard part. The rest is work and can be sweaty, but it's not hard as if it's full of impenetrable math or requiring undiscovered physics. It's just time-consuming and in the case of construction work physically tiring.
It might be that I have been doing this for too long and no longer see it.
I imagine the hard part isn't the literal building of the stuff. It's the months or years of politics, beauracracy, and bids needed to get to a point where you can build it.
That's not to discount the intensity of the labor. Just that the labor is rarely the bottleneck in building stuff.
I see what you're saying, and our labor isn't the bottleneck from the perspective of engineers. However, I'm pretty sure that business leadership would beg to differ. They see engineering as a necessary evil to getting their products out the window, and it can never be done fast enough. The solution is the bottleneck in their eyes. Engineers have a better understanding of why they do what they do, hence they get that their work isn't inherently a bottleneck in spite of how challenging it can be.
But yes, in reality, you're correct that programming itself is not (or should not) be a bottleneck, but the process around developing a product definitely can be. The irony here is that this bottleneck usually gets worse the more corporate a business becomes and the more they try to treat programming as if it were a bottleneck. Not a day goes by that my job isn't made more difficult because the business wants greater agility and efficiency.
Though I think these companies are wildly overvalued, I don't see LLMs as a service going away in the future. The value in OpenAI is that it provides extra compute, data access, etc. My money is on local AI becoming more of a thing, while services like OpenAI still exist for local AIs to consult with. If a local model can somehow know that it's out of it's depth on a question/prompt, it can ask an OpenAI model if it's available, but otherwise still work locally if OpenAI fails to respond or goes out of business. To me that makes a lot more sense than the future being either-or.
It's not even more economical than raising chickens. Just because raising relatively small batches of crickets uses less water per unit of protein (which isn't even necessarily a problem) doesn't mean that it's manageable at scale.
Moreover, as you said, bugs have to taste good for people to want to eat them. I was into entomophagy way before it became this sort of thing in the 2020s. As much as I appreciate it from a curiosity standpoint, the truth is most bugs don't taste very good. I think there's maybe one insect that I thought was truly worth eating again (sphinx moth caterpillars). Supposedly bee drone larvae taste good but I've not had them. Neither of those can be scaled for mass food production. The rest of the bugs I've had either taste extremely earthy or like nothing.
Civilization should just scale with how much food it can produce. The idea that food production should infinitely scale with civilization is backwards.
When I looked at this a decade ago, I concluded that if bugs can't get popular as a source of protein powder, they aren't getting popular in the US and Canada. Since then, not a single gym rat I've mentioned this to has liked my concept product, Pretty Fly for a White Powder.
A civilization increasing food production to feed itself is civilization scaling with food production. There is no extrinsic food production with which civilization can scale. All food production is intrinsic to the civilization.
All food must be produced by the civilization, either by gathering or farming or any other means.
Lobster and crab are both just as much a bug as a tarantula is, so the same reason that the seafood industry pushed lobster and crab into mainstream acceptance: profit.
Sure. But… why not push these foods on a population that is currently used to eating some bugs rather than one that only accidentally or unknowingly ingest them? Like there are areas of the world where insects are a thing. And the US isn’t one of them.
They were more or less remarketed as a luxury, though. Historically (at least in the US), lobster and crab were considered low class foods, if not outright fertilizer for crops. Some terrestrial bug could theoretically be given the same sort of luxury status, but lobsters have the advantage of actually tasting good. The best candidates would be snails and bee drone larvae. But what would be the point? Neither could be farmed at such a scale that they could be made food staples that are also better for the environment.
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