I prefer to code myself out of a job, and be the shareholder. I'm counting on myself!

I don't think my gaming PC will ever use an ARM core. When you want true "big iron" you want x86. Intel and AMD have a duopoly on high-performance, no-TDP-spared chips, and they aren't sharing that market with anyone.

The reason ARM is making inroads in the server market is we've reached the point where cooling is a significant cost factor in server farms, so lowering TDP is starting to become a relevant factor in total cost.

Hardcore gamers are not a big enough market segment to sustain x86. If everyone else switches to ARM/RISC-V, games will too, eventually.

Hardcore gamers were the reason behind a whole new chip type being introduced - the GPU. This was also when this market was a lot smaller. I don’t see this changing. The market will continue rewarding chips that cater to it. It is absolutely big enough to sustain several different completely bespoke chip types, regardless of what non-gamers are doing.

x86 will lose to ARM/RISC in gaming only if those chips provide a better gaming experience.

Yeah things like heat and energy use don't matter much for gamers. Most of that comes from the GPU anyway.

I blame not only the engineer who ran the command, Claude which made the mistake, but also software engineers as a group (because Terraform is way too dangerous a tool to be used by engineers and not dedicated SREs, yet we have somehow made this the default. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but I've seen enough carnage when "senior" engineers fuck up terraform that it'll be difficult), and also I blame cloud platforms like AWS that are overly complex and led to the Claude confusion.

> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever

I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".

And if they're saying 92k, just wait until the obligatory 3-months-later revision where they say "once again, oopsie, we miscounted, it's actually 50% worse".

Guesstimation at its finest.

Without it, all a package can do is drop files on a filesystem. Its used to do any sort of setup, initialization or registration logic. Its actually impossible to install many packages without something like it. Otherwise, you end up having to follow a bunch of install instructions (which you will mess up sometimes) after each package gets installed.

Many, many other programming languages’ package managers don’t (or can’t) do this, though.

Even big complex desktop apps can, on first run, request initial setup permissions or postinstall actions via the OS’s permissions approval system.

Genuine question as someone who uses it rarely: why is that need so much more common in NPM? Why are packages so routinely mutating systemwide arbitrary state at install time rather than runtime? Why is “fail at runtime and throw a window/prompt at the user telling them to set something up” not the usual workflow in NPM as it is in so many other places?

Can't the unpacked code just detect the uninitialized state and complete the install on first run?

(You know, after the developer has had a chance to audit the code, pass security scanners over it etc. before it runs?)

Yeah. Another big benefit of this approach is that it can use or trigger OS-level permissions approval prompts (eg UAC or MacOS’s “do you want to let this program access the desktop?” approvals).

No, the installer runs with privs the app won't.

I think that helps me understand. What are some examples of things where I'd want initialization or registration? What packages are impossible to install with this, besides cases where npm is used as an alternative to apt/yum to install dev executables?

Create registry entries in a config file for all local printers found in the existing OS configuration. Remember that the installer runs with privileges that the application won't normally have. So anytime you have to use those privileges you don't do it at runtime, you do it at install time. And this requires the hook.

If I install a package and it starts scanning my local printers, it get immediately removed and the author put on a blacklist.

No other ecosystem is that dense, none of them require such stupid and dangerous flows to work.

Yeah I'm not sure hunterpayne isn't an AI that did some research to answer my question and immediately found a printer-based hack in an npm package.

I think I'm the last living engineer based on this conversation. Installers have worked this way for decades.

And is that worth it? Scanning for printers? In an NPM module? Surely there are better examples somewhere.

Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.

pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?

> Graham was immediately impressed by Altman, later recalling that meeting the 19-year-old felt like what it must have been like to talk to Bill Gates at the same age. He noted Altman's intense "force of will" from their early interactions.

Is there a Gates-like "presence" or a "force of will" displayed in his public interviews?

The only vibe I get from Altman is that he's a weasel, willing to say anything or burn whatever to get what he wants.

> pg's sama praise bewilders me. Is there some other Sam Altman he's talking about?

Paul Graham was a pudgy mediocrity clever enough to capitalize on nerds' obsession with Lisp, and leverage it into f-you money. Game recognized game in the shape of Sam Altman.

Given Gates' current reputation, I don't think this aged well.

its reasonable praise. a 19 year old social outcast who grew up in the midwest drops out of ivy league and starts a company before smartphones exist that he sells for $43 million dollars at age 27, then invested almost all the money into more startups, became a billionaire, and hijacked chatgpt from the richest person in the world.

its not a comment on his ethics or morality