• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Cynicism is warranted. If you also look at inflation/CPI, it held pretty firmly at 2.7% for the year. That puts a 3.3-3.4% increase in salaries and benefits in a bit more perspective. I’m not even sure that 2.7% figure is very realistic. The way they measure CPI is pretty outdated. There are a lot of services we consider necessary now that aren’t covered, and those things have been going up a lot in recent years. Just as an example, my cell carrier bill went up 14% last year. I’m looking at other options, but it’s just one example of a service provider that either increased prices or watered down their product to try and squeeze more profit out of us in recent years.




  • I did read the article, and that’s true, but insurance companies have been using that as an excuse to drive up premiums at record rates for years now (and making very healthy profits as a result, no pun intended). In my state, the exchange prices went up an average of 21% this year due to the loss of ACA subsidies. It doesn’t help a lot to know that they are legally required to offer you coverage if you can’t afford to pay for it.

    I’m in my early 50s. Over my life, I’ve been very diligent about saving, and I expect to have what I thought would be enough to retire in my 60s. But I’m looking at the cost of health care going forward and I’m very concerned that I won’t be able to afford it.








  • Yeah… this is one of the (many) problems with generative AI. It’s trained to produce an end product. It doesn’t know or care about the process of getting to that end product, or what happens next. It knows how to make bits and pieces of code that look and function like the code it was trained on. If the problem you’re trying to solve has already been solved hundreds or thousands of times, you’ll probably be fine. But that isn’t why software engineers get paid good money. We get paid because we’ve spent years learning lessons about the advantages and disadvantages of different solutions and when to use them. AI doesn’t know or care about that. At best, it just knows “make thing work.” Trying to maintain or change AI-generated code is nearly impossible because there’s no reason or logic to how it made the decisions it made. Whenever it made a decision it just did whatever was the most statistically likely thing. If you want to make a change, the easiest thing to do is just modify your prompt and let the AI regenerate the entire codebase from scratch.