Viewing profile — mactavish88

Not "open" as such, but Kobo sells this title.

> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste". Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"? …

Recursive self-improvement towards what exactly? Living organisms evolve towards some notion of "better", and "better" is an incredibly multifaceted notion (many facets of which we…

Have you read Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification" yet? He describes the process quite well. Not sure how to address it though. I suspect keeping companies small and focused on quali…

The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.

I don't think we're going to be able to have rational conversations about this with C-level folks for quite some time. They mostly seem too wrapped up in copying each other to thin…

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives? (Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders,…

Great example of how to set boundaries. The open source community is slowly healing.

> Their whole skill set This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where…

Can't they just leave it alone?

I hear this perspective a lot in relation to open source projects. What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future w…

Pizza parties and "unlimited" vacations?

What you're asking is the equivalent of going to a company whose equity you've bought and asking them: what's the price going to be in 6 months' time?

The exact same way you'd treat any other investment decision. In the real world, if you've got $100k, you could choose to invest all of it into project A, or all into project B, or…

The only approach that genuinely works for software development is to treat it as a "bet". There are never any guarantees in software development. 1. Think about what product/syste…

In my experience, it really depends on what you're building _and_ how you prompt the LLM. For some things, LLMs are great. For others, they're absolute dog shit. It's still early d…

There's something both beautiful/enchanting and deeply tragic about the story. If anyone's interested in an analysis of Saint-Exupéry's psychology via the symbolism of The Little P…

Local-first tech has been around since before the internet, and scalable local-first tech has become increasingly accessible due to the hard work of many, many incredibly talented …

Yeah I've gone through bouts of "anything but tech" several times in my career, and each time ended up stuck in software development because it pays the bills. I'm possibly somewha…

Having been coding for nearly 25 years now and being in engineering management for the past couple of years (still actively coding 30-50% of my time), I'm feeling increasingly tire…

Neat! For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn any…