The irony of a five sentence article making giant claims isn't lost on me. Don't get me wrong: I'm amenable to the idea; but, y'know, my kids wrote longer essays in 4th grade.
> which would probably hae been another 3-5k if I could have found someone to do it.
Yo. If you can find an electrician to stop by my house and turn a light switch off for less than 1000$, please inform me. I got a quote for 25k$ to install a system that size, and that price. City code has me by the balls: I can't modify my main panel without inspection, the inspector won't show up without a licensed electrician, and electrician wants the labor. I pointed out that we're talking 8 hours of labor — call it 2500$, lawyer money — and he was like "what's your choice". I'm in Texas.
Ha, they actually messed up a bit and I had to repair a bit of the wall / wainscoting. Because of this they knocked $100 off of the price that I listed earlier.
To get a journeyman electrician license in Texas, you need to have 8000 hours of documented on-the-job experience working under a licensed electrician[1].
So you'd need to find an electrician who will let for you work them on the weekends, and if you work 8 hours every Saturday and every Sunday, then it will take you 500 weekends.
A residential wireman license only requires 4000 hours[2], but I'm not sure if that kind of license would be good enough for the inspection.
Isn't there an exclusion or lower entry requirement if you have a technical education like engineering degree? Like if not electrical engineering because I guess that would be obvious there should be lower entry bar - but for all others at least somewhat related...
I guess if you want to dabble with installing battery packs with inverters, that's not your typical bachelor of arts who is trying to do so.
Where I am at (rural CO), as long as it can be inspected and meets code, the county is fine- you don't need a blessing. Septic is different (that's a $175 certificate, though). But for electrical all you have to do is meet codes, which isn't really super hard.
This right here - I have been investigating getting my own contractor license for DIY work on a property I own that must be permitted but city will only issue permits to licensed contractors. Took a practice test for the exam on a whim and nearly passed it without studying. Anybody seriously considering DIY'ing the install of something like this probably could get a license without a lot of work.
From what I quickly checked you can modify your own home there is an exclusion for doing electrical work on your property - seems like main panel would be somehow excluded from what qualifies as "yours".
That exemption is from the state code and applies to "work not specifically regulated by a municipal ordinance that is performed in or on a dwelling by a person who owns and resides in the dwelling".
Hoss I am sorry to hear that- I have literally no idea what electrical costs, as I've been doing it myself. If you're living close enough to other humans that the can observe and complain, then we're not really in the same situation.
But that doesn't really change my point, does it? Like, if they are installing $6k worth of equipment and materials, then that's what the up-thread points was about paying 10K more for tesla-branded equipment, right? I get that at a certain point the labor makes the cost of materials less of a deal, but my point was that my battery+inverter+panels+material is still less than the equipment they are describing.
It's about 3%, and the study had major flaws in its context; large westernized countries are out of scope. I don't remember paper, but I just lost this argument to a lawyer.
If you're talking about the original vibe coding, sure.
But there are many ways to apply LLMs in the development flow.
Only specifying features broadly is like a product manager might is definitely highly luck dependent wrt how buggy it will turn out.
But understanding the feature and determining what needs to be done broadly, then ask the LLM to do so and verify after if the resulting change makes sense according to your mental model of the software is definitely not that.
Also, I disagree with your implied message. I frequently struggle to articulate solutions even if I know how they'd work
This should apply to art even more, because art is strongly supported by emotions - and people may know the feeling of the emotion (of the image), but not have an explicit framework for it yet
People are trying to use Vibe Engineering for when you know what needs to be done and how, but are using an LLM as a tool to write the code faster and more efficiently.
The OG definition of Vibe Coding is just playing a client who wants $thing, but doesn't need how to write a line of code.
I took the test, and the results were completely meaningless. It said that I have a moderate or below average interest in science or engineering. This is patently wrong. This is a deep, abiding, long-term love-affair. It's why I've got a PhD in programming language theory, and have done all the course work, but not the dissertation for PhD's in Economics, Computational Biology, Statistics, Epidemiology, and Mathematics. So... yeah. Complete & utter baloney.
Right? It was a weird test. It started with OCEAN — which got a completely different result than the real OCEAN tests I've done — and then moved to a weird interest/aptitude test. It's clearly some BS marketing thing.
So you completed some BS online test, realized it, but still use its results to criticize the properly administered tests. This is weird. Just make a credible test (e.g. Jordan Peterson hosts one) and only after that draw conclusions.
I know this is speech synthesis; but, on a tangential note, it'd be lovely if LLMs could help preserve all the extant languages. That way those languages that died could be revived, later...
I just built a C++ formatter that does this (owned by my employee, unfortunately). There's really only two formatting objects: tab-aligned tables, and single line rows. Both objects also support a right-floating column/tab aligned "//" comment.
Both objects desugar to a sequence of segments (lines).
The result is that you can freely mix expression/assignment blocks & statements. Things like switch-case blocks & macro tables are suddenly trivial to format in 2d.
Because comments are handled as right floating, all comments nicely align.
I vibe coded the base layer in an hour. I'm using with autogenerated code, so output is manually coded based on my input. The tricky bit would be "discovering" tables & block. I'd jus use a combo of an LSP and direct observation of sequential statements.
Housing in the US is labor constrained. When I talk to GCs, subs, etc., they'll say that materials a bit more expensive, and labor is a bit more expensive; but what the complain about — and this can be for hours, if I get one going — is the complete lack of labor in all trades. This isn't a new problem; the "old hands" (GCs in the 60s and 70s) noted the labor drop out even 30+ years ago. The only saving grace we had was a strong trade force incoming population (immigrants); but, we've cut that off.
It wouldn't surprise me if our industry is also labor constrained? I know my brother had a machine shop to make aftermarket titanium parts for (motor)bikes, some cars, etc. He had a policy of nonstop looking for new machinists, even if he was fully staffed, because a machinist could just wander off at any time. With only 4 employees, he could find himself at at 25–50% loss of ship time in just a few days, at any time. It's not even like the machinists were getting more money. They'd just leave, because the new shop was 5m closer than his.
Fixing the labor pool issue is a decades long issue. More money in that pool won't fix things. I don't even know what's going on. Maybe I can just blame modern financialization for the issue? That seems easy, if wrong.
But, for sure, the complete lack of social safety net for labor can't be helping. Maybe if we guaranteed child care, 100% round-the-year safe spaces (we could use the fantastically expensive schools which are empty 75% of the time?), 3-free-meals-per-child, and free education through an associates degree? None of those are particularly expensive, even at the national scale.
In my 2+ decades in the trades, the biggest problem is low pay and shitty bosses. Trade unions are absolutely packed full of people wanting to join them because they pay better, have more training, and offer paths towards advancement/pay/benefits over their hiring wage. But outside of the unions people pay crackhead wages then wonder why only crackheads want to lose 20 years off their life and wear out their body for customer service wages despite having a specialized trade experience and skills. Everyone who works in the trades also knows its a boom and bust cycle and they will get the shaft as soon as it is convenient for their employer which isn't a significant risk in many other industries and jobs.
And things get confused more when people only look at the top inflated wages for trade workers in the most expensive cities in the world, completely ignoring that most trade workers can't afford to live in those places and commute into the cities for their work and they almost never actually get offered the kind of wages that are advertised.
Real income in trades is up; that doesn't mean it's great pay, just up. Real housing costs have greatly outpaced that. It's the crazy post-2000 low interest boom-bust cycle that's wrecking the housing trades as a functional job. Trades are hugely oversubscribed during the boom, and the busts are too long to maintain the labor force.
If we want to build housing, we'll need a stabilizing force for that. I don't see a way to make that happen outside of govt intervention.
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