I've identified serious bugs that were lurking in large legacy codebases for years with this approach. Whenever I read code I always try to find the gaps between "what was the author(s) trying to do?" and "what does this code actually do?" There's often quite a lot of space between those two, and almost always that space is where you find the bugs.
Practitioners of this approach to performance optimization often waste huge swaths of their colleagues' time and attention with pointless arguments about theoretical performance optimizations. It's much better to have a measurement first policy. "Hmm that might be slow" is a good signal that you should measure how fast it is, and nothing more.
What can incremental progress do to make a camera see through road salt deposited on its lens? I call bullshit. There isn't any incremental path because it's not physically possible. The photons are stopped by the salt. No amount of "AI" or what the fuck ever else will change this. There is no path towards "progress" here.
You'll eat your words much sooner than you think. The cameras don't need much clarity to work effectively (they work quite well in intense rain). The main forward camera is behind the windshield already.
One amazing application of spectral theory I always harp on when this topic comes up is Chebfun[1]. Trefethen's Spectral Methods in Matlab is also wonderful.
Yeah so the thing is the "success" is
only "apparent". Having actually tried to use this garbage to do work, as someone who has been deeply interested in ML for decades, I've found the tools to be approximately useless. The "apparent success" is not due to any utility, it's due entirely to marketing.
I don't fear I'm missing out on anything. I've tried it, it didn't work. So why are my bosses a half dozen rungs up on the corporate ladder losing their entire minds over it? It's insanity. Delusional.
This is how you know the "AI" proselytizers are completely full of shit. They're trying to bend the narrative with a totally unrealistic scenario where reading and reviewing code is somehow "more efficient" than writing it. This is only true if you
(a) don't know what you're doing and just approve everything you see or
I invite your attention to the StatsD telemetry protocol, where:
1. Every single measurement in a timeseries is encoded as a utf-8 string having (roughly) the following format:
"${name}:${value}|${type}|${tags}"
where name is like "my.long.namespace.and.metric.name", value is a string formatted number, god only knows what type is, and tags is some gigantic comma separated key:value monstrosity.
2. Each and every one of these things is fired off into the ether in the form of a UDP datagram.
3. Whenever the server receives these presumably it gets around sometime to assigning them timestamps and inserts them into a database, not necessarily in that or any other particular order.
I don't really know anything about js but this metrics protocol is how most telemetry data is transmitted on the wire. Petabytes per day of bandwidth are wasted on this.
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth.
EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)
I'd describe myself as a crypto "true believer" - but have been mostly quiet about that since ~2014. That was about the time I interviewed at a couple of startup exchanges. That was enough for me to realize that none of the exchanges that were popular at that time at least were anywhere near "professional".
While I think that's probably true for many of them, Coinbase is the most prominent crypto company, obviously a major target, and yet we haven't seen any real meaningful hacks of them. I think that says something.
I've worked on the triaging side of large corporate bug bounty programmes & trust me when I say that security-by-obscurity is far more impactful in keeping our world (incidentally) secure than any active measure. Absence of exploit does not equal absence of vulnerability.
I think it's unfair to say that Coinbase has effectively "gotten lucky" in not being hacked. Security by obscurity makes sense when you have a low traffic low stakes site, but a place like Coinbase can't rely on that. They are a huge target, they have to take into account the possibility of disgruntled/bribed ex-or-current-employees abusing their knowledge of CB's security systems. They host coins like Monero and others which can obscure where the money is sent.
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