There are two layers to that.

The first is how to develop skills. And you do that the exact same way everyone before you did it: you actually do the work. Calculators are awesome but you still learn how to do long division and the like because it gives you insight into how to approximate things. Same with sims/solvers versus actually solving PDEs.

The other is… if your boss wants you to feed everything into an LLM then you won’t have a job much longer. So you can either look for a new one or work toward more advanced tickets/tasks. Make it clear that LLMs have limitations and that some stuff will need a proper coder and that YOU are that proper coder.

But also AI cannot currently do everything, so you need someone to fill those areas.

And who is going to be able to fill those gaps? Probably not the person who “knows what I want to achieve but (…) don’t know how to actually implement it”.

Which ties in to

their capability to learn, their personality, will they mesh well with the existing team, have they got drive to make things better, do they have soft skills to position themselves to become better, is the person adaptable

is the bar for what is considered fundamental shifting?

If the bar is “I know how to ask a magic box to do my job for me” then there is genuinely no need for previous training and experience and a company won’t be hiring engineers or spreadsheet gandalfs or marketing experts. They’ll hire the cheapest “prompt engineer” they can, underpay them, and then replace them the moment they ask for a cost of living increase.

And… the companies considering that really aren’t the ones with any longevity. Yes, yes, any port in a storm. But they will RAPIDLY run into that wall and have no way to move past it. Whether that is getting the senior engineer in cargo shorts to do it or curating training data to improve the model.

but as time went on we got new levels of coding and so knowing how to write low level code is no longer a required skill.

And that is another barrier that MANY companies have run into.

The average coder? Yeah, they don’t need to understand how to optimize a loop. But when there are forty tools on the market that all just call pytorch? The one company that knows how to optimize a critical path function suddenly looks REALLY good with their 10% performance (and thus power) savings.

Again, these tools are incredibly powerful and I regularly use chatgpt et al to generate a first draft of a utility script. And I’ve been using editor plugins for… sweet Eothas over two decades now, to generate docstring stubs and even a lot of unit tests. And people SHOULD know how and when to use these tools.

But you also have to consider what you can get out of it. “AI” generated documentation is pretty much worthless outside of checking off a box that you have documented every function in the code. Your LLM won’t understand what that function was trying to achieve or why “it is wrong but that is because this library is wrong” and so forth. Any documentation that is actually meant to be referenced still needs a proper pass from whoever drew the short straw in Engineering.

Same with testing. AI can generate tautologies. AI won’t stress test your code because it doesn’t know what you think that code might do in the future. By all means, generate the boilerplate, but you are still going to be the one who has to go in and add that really weird corner case that TOTALLY didn’t break prod lats month.

And… you know who historically did those tasks? Interns and junior engineers. The same ones who are adamant that their entire job can be done by chatgpt and lamenting that they don’t know how to move from idea to implementation. And guess how you learn how to do that?

I have a rough idea of what I want to achieve and some steps on the way there, but don’t know how to actually implement it.

That is literally what the job is. If you can’t do that then you aren’t an engineer.

I’m concerned that there are skills I am missing out on developing, but at the same time if AI is being pushed so heavily is it not something I should lean into to be better equipped in working with it?

I’ll tell you what I told my nephew: Yes, everyone is going to use AI to one degree or another. So why would I hire you over anyone else? Or, more pointedly, why would I hire someone at all?

Getting to that interview gets harder and harder every year (every month, really). But engineers (and even many managers) can immediately tell someone who knows their shit versus someone who “vibe codes” all the “hard parts”.

These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.

But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.

Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.

Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).

This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.

That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

Yes. the system logs every entry/exit by keyfob.

Whether the building managers associate those fobs with individuals or even know how to look at the log is a different discussion entirely.

That said: If the building cares enough to have a lock on the door then they have a camera too and THAT is much more likely to be recorded. So if your “friend” depends on people not knowing he is entering or exiting his building for whatever reason… good luck with that.

Fun story time: I used to work at a facility that was VERY strict about people badging in and even out of many areas. At one point it came up in a safety debrief that there was no way to log who was inside or outside of an area… that required badging in and out. Could see someone’s brain cell trigger in real time as they proceeded to ask a lot of very pointed questions that boiled down to:

They had an access control list that was checked. They did not know how to access the log files to know when that list was checked or even the result of a check. The person who asked questions was pushed out of the company because it was easier.

If a government has you in the nebulous situation where you technically aren’t in the country yet and they want your phone, it doesn’t really matter what security system you have on there. You either give them access or go to a black site.

That’s why every company of “moderate” size ends up adopting a policy of “DEVICE for foreign travel”. You don’t take your actual work laptop/phone/whatever. You take a burner (except they hate the term “burner”) that can remote in but stores little to no data locally. And you realize that any good remote access software has logic to detect if you are accessing it from a security checkpoint and flag you…

So what does that mean for you, an individual?

• A super locked down device is just gonna get your ass beat… if you are lucky.
• A completely clean factory wiped device? That is going to raise a bunch of red flags (kind of rightfully) and more or less equate to the above

Like almost all things privacy/security related: Nothing is easy if you actually need it. A good friend of mine is a journalist and they semi-regularly do the kinds of stories that get a person “investigated”. And the reality is that there is nothing they can do, in software, to protect themselves. So what they instead do is have completely separate devices that are never in the same physical location. So, unless they are communicating with a sensitive contact, they always have a device that “looks real” because… it is. Texts from the partner about a dinner party next week, spam from facebook, etc.

And if they need to access something sensitive while on foreign travel or otherwise unable to get back to their “private” devices? Either buy a cheap laptop at a best buy equivalent or use one of their burner emails/accounts.

If you find an author you like, check their website. There are decent odds they directly sell ebooks or link to their publisher’s website first. I’ve heard mixed reports on it, but some people claim buying direct from the publisher gives the writer a bigger cut (and, obviously, buying from them directly does).

Usually resutls in a DRM free ebook without any effort.

Yeah. Adobe is basically easy mode. It is why so many people, erroneously, claim that Kobo has no DRM (it also uses Adobe Digital Editions).

Guides for that are basically everywhere and versions don’t matter at all. Was going to set that up with just a bottle but it is harder to get ADE to run under wine than it is to use the drm removal plugin with it and I have this Windows VM just sitting in a folder…

Yup.

A Sanderson book will be on every tracker. But ML Wang? Maybe now that booktube love them but most smaller writers don’t get that

And, truth be told, I like reading and want authors I like to be able to justify the time spent writing.

Can’t hurt. But the batch file creates a dummy file that actively prevents k4pc from downloading any updates. Amazon could always change how it handles updates but… that would require an update to take effect.

The big issue is that Kindle is actually a spectacularly author friendly platform and stuff like Kindle unlimited locks them in it

So I buy most of my e-books via kobo or direct purchases from the authors. But some are still locked in Kindle

Can never tell who is going to wipe their posts on reddit or not so reproducing this here (and locally for my own use) since a lot of people have been trying to do this and this method still works as of March 12th 2025.

Last I checked, using Kindle For PC on a windows (virtual) machine still works. I did it last weekend and the instructions are still on reddit.

In the process of re-verifying and ever so slowly using kvm on my desktop and will likely duplicate the instructions as part of that. But if you just go check the calibre board at reddit, it is super easy to find.

But yeah. Strongly suggest migrating to a different ecosystem. There is no guarantee that Rakuten aren’t going to shit it up but they are way better than Amazon right now (super low bar…). But since some of my favorite authors only self publish on kindle for pricing reasons…

Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).

But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.

And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.

But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.

But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.

Ah. Thank you for actually finally citing yourself.

I actually HAD seen that before so:

1. .Protonmail Behaves like a CIA/NSA “Honeypot”: This is an incredibly sensationalized point that boils down to them having a really shit TOR page. And, agreed. But “In fact, the only other websites that operate like this are suspected NSA/CIA Honeypots.” is very much false. LOTS of sites are configured in a really shitty manner which gets back to people having to understand the tools they use.
2. Protonmail Does Not Provide “End to End Encryption”: Yeah. Which gets back to what I have been saying the entire time. If you actually care about your security, encrypt your own emails. Nobody should EVER trust a company to do encryption for them when it actually matters. Which speaks to the quality of proton as a service, not it being a “honeypot”
3. . Protonmail’s Was Created Under CIA/NSA Oversight: That article is almost entirely them just repeating that same inflammatory statement over and over. But it boils down to having issues with something coming out of MIT research which is a prestigious school with government grants and very questionable side hustles for some professors. The reality is that almost all software is at least “incubated” under very questionable circumstances because… people gotta eat and the people doing the kind of research that makes “cool stuff” tend to get government grants (well, not as of two weeks ago but…)
4. .Protonmail is Part Owned by CRV and the Swiss Government: Which is not the CIA?
5. CRV, In-Q-Tel & the CIA : I am not seeing a direct link to Proton Corp other than “Additionally, The mastermind, cryptographer & back end developer that created Protonmail, Wei Sun, now works for Google.”. Which… okay? If it was written properly that doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t then… encrypt your own emails.
6. Protonmail Follows CIA Email format & Metadata Requirements: "There are several ways to store emails, and Protonmail has selected the format that the CIA requires. ". Yup. Smoking gun right there. They chose the wrong standard. Yes, I would like it if they encrypted that metadata on principle. But it doesn’t matter. If they are compromised, they have that metadata anyway. Again, encrypt your own communications and maybe don’t use your personal accounts when you are discussing super sensitive topics?
7. . Swiss MLAT Law Could Give the NSA Full Access: Are we back to the Swiss being a CIA front?
8. Protonmail Uses Radware for DNS/DDOS Protection: So now it is Mossad who controls Proton and all they have to do is compromise a DDOS filter. Again, encrypt your emails.
9. Protonmail Developers Do Not Use Protonmail: if not wanting to eat your own dogfood means you are a CIA operation then Uncle Sam owes me a lot of money.
10. Protonmail engages in illegal cyberwarfare: They did a “hack back”, Okay? Fuck 'em, but okay?
11. Protonmail has a history of Dishonesty: Yeah, there is no bias in that list at all

You see, when you actually post a link to stuff people can discuss what you are talking about and explain why you are misinformed and clearly referencing a somewhat deranged hit piece.

The main takeaway from that? They are, at worst, as bad as gmail. Except with a much smaller customer base and at least more open that they want you to pay for functionality rather than not question what google is doing with your data.

And, as proton themselves even say: if it actually matters, encrypt your own emails. That way Proton Corp don’t have anything they can give to their CIA/Mossad/Swiss overlords.

you want me as an ally, your tone lost me…

If the only way you care about people protecting their privacy and very selfs is if someone is nice to you and cuddles you and thanks you for spewing uncited nonsense…

There was a blog post by a website called Privacy Watchdog (if I remember correctly), I can’t find that website anymore nor the blog post,

Yeah. And trump totally read an article somewhere that black trans people are the root of all evil. He can’t find it right now, but totally trust him on that.

I don’t know if you are just this stupid or if you are actually trying to undermine those who are trying to make educated decisions on what they should or should not “trust” communication wise (you’ll note that I all but say “don’t trust proton. protect yourself”).

But either find that mystery article so that people can make educated decisions or shut the fuck up.