I used to tell people there that my favorite development technique was to sit down and think about the system I wanted to build, then wait for it to be announced at that year's re:Invent. I called it "re:Invent and Simplify". "I" built my best stuff that way.
There are pragmas you can give to a compiler to tell it to "expect that this code path is (almost) never followed". I.e. if you have an assert on nullptr, for example. You want it to assume the assert rarely gets triggered, and highly optimize instruction scheduling / memory access for the "not nullptr" case, but still assert (even if it's really, REALLY slow, relatively speaking) to handle the nullptr case.
It’s not that they embed probabilistic behavior per se. But more like they are chaotic systems, in that a slight change of input can drastically change the output. But ideally, good compiler design is idempotent — given the same input, the output should always be the same. If that were not generally true, programming would be much harder than it is.
I'm intrigued, as this article did not trigger my (clearly as yet underdeveloped) GenAI spidey sense. Will you share some specifics of what triggered yours?
Separately, do you have any thoughts on the subject matter? Whoever or whatever put these words in a row, they resonate deeply with my lived experience of the last several years.
One reason that I would value is that it would speed up boarding and deplaning. As you correctly point out, the prevailing overhead luggage system provides a benefit to some travelers, potentially to the detriment of others. It's a tradeoff.
I seriously doubt it would make much difference for deplaning - people already stand in the isle with their luggage out of the compartment long before the doors open.
For boarding it might speed things up but often boarding is done before all checked luggage is loaded so it will probably not let you take off faster either.
I agree that it wouldn't cause the doors to open any sooner for deplaning, but once they did, people could just ... leave. The people standing in the aisle with their luggage out of the compartment are the ones who started in the aisle seats. People in the other seats need to get out, reach up, pull down, get organized. Sometimes they have to salmon their way back from their actual seat to the compartment several rows behind them because that's where they had to stow their carry-on because the people seated in row 30 put their bag over row 16 when they boarded[1].
Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.
Whenever I see the term "AI" or similar, I mentally substitute the phrase "a lot of math, done very quickly", which is more concrete, and typically helps me sort out the stuff that still seems plausible, as in the sentence you quoted.
SDE, just passed ten years at Amazon; opinions my own, obvs. The three best managers I've worked with in my career have all been at Amazon (you know who you are). Also the three worst (ditto). And the respective bars were pretty [high | low] coming in. Just like everywhere else I've been, it comes down to the individual. Amazon, as far as I can tell, have never tried to homogenize management. Your team delivers? You're in.
People wildly underestimate how good some of the people at Amazon are. Tenured Amazon employees that have moved up the ranks over 10+ years are astounding in their ability to execute on projects.
Gandalf says this in the movies, not in the book. However the descriptive language is drawn from Frodo's dream in the barrow downs and his experience sailing into west at the end of LOTR.
> And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
But "sailing into the west" is not a metaphor for death, Valinor is not a metaphor for heaven (as it's a real place within LOTR world where e.g. Frodo dies). Gandalf's movie quote does not appear to be based on book material.
> But "sailing into the west" is not a metaphor for death, Valinor is not a metaphor for heaven
Tolkien wasn't a fan of allegory that's for sure and you won't find a 1:1 between his fictional works and his own religious beliefs but a devout Catholic like him was definitely channelling heaven as the new glorified Eden to some degree when describing the "undying lands" that were lifted up into the heavens after the corruption and treachery of Numenor and ruled by the great spiritual powers that rule as stewards for the Creator. The movie did paraphrase, and perhaps I'm wrong but I don't think its something that Tolkien would have been offended by.
I recently was asked to take over the role of Deputy Governor Danforth in The Crucible a week before opening. I accomplished it -- barely -- largely through rote memorization. Yes, I also had to imbue the words with appropriate intent and emotion, which I did not achieve by rote, but in a way it was comforting to have those specific words to start with, rather than make up some of my own that might or might not actually convey the proper intent, and almost surely not nearly as well as a luminary like Arthur Miller. As I see it, it's those words that establish my character, not the other way around.
I like how Patrick Stewart puts it [1], as "dead letter perfect", which is apparently the default expectation in British theatre more so than, say, film acting.
Alt: Be Aragorn and wrest control of the Orthanc stone from Sauron.