Viewing profile — novembermike

I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What s…

Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential …

Yeah, these things are all part of being a team of 1x engineers rather than a team of .5x engineers. If you have a single 10x (and I've worked with some) then it's not important bu…

This clearly falls into "fraud waiting to happen" rather than "minimal risk" though. It's fairly simple to treat Amazon as the actual seller and just hold them liable if there is f…

Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Frei…

European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something lik…

One thing to keep in mind is that "expert on team's codebase" is a form of career growth. Not always the best or most prestigious kind but it's enough that the company finds you va…

One thing to remember here is that a senior dev might be at the beginner stage for org wide changes.

It feels like half the usage of inheritance is also just workarounds for mocking things in unit tests or being able to access things that are private/protected. Everything ends up …

The argument I've heard for T-shirt sizes is that if you go to numbers people try to add them together when that's just not how it works. I do agree that T-shirt sizes don't work t…

The issue is that the current direction that big data is going doesn't do much to help planned economies like that. The big issue is really calculating preferences, which a market …

Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not r…

How so? If they turned out to be amazing then I would have considered an offer, I just didn't go into it expecting to accept anything.

Yep. Last time I interviewed I did one interview at a random place I didn't care about just to get rid of jitters, one at a mid-tier place I'd actually accept if I didn't get anoth…

Keep in mind that the research around this is very poor. It's in the realm of things where flipping a coin might be better.

Social services are not socialism. Socialism is about the workers owning the means of production. Social services are something that goes back to basically the dawn of human societ…

This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.

TDD is more of a Java thing and it has a lot to do with the lack of a good type system in Java. TDD essentially lets you create a class that encapsulates a type and then enforce th…

Eh, it's a useful proxy. 1000 lines a day isn't better than 100 lines a day but both tell you that it's being actively worked on.

It really isn't. Most of the code is probably going to be uninteresting and you can do 10 lines a minute or more. Some of the code will be more relevant and might take a day for 10…

In something like typescript you could represent this as a union type. If I'm expecting a location I could take a string ("Baghdad"), lat long pairs, an enum, etc. With a union typ…

Most of what you're talking about isn't that important. People don't pay you to be smart, they pay you to build things that will make them money. Interview culture is only tangenti…

Restrictions are usually on specific modes (ie. no violence, obscenity, etc) rather than the content of the speech. Most of the current attempts to restrict speech focus on content…

The issue is that "DRY" isn't actually about coupling at all, it's about creating unambiguous ways to do things. If you have a single http library that's DRY, but if you've got a f…

Yeah, I'll probably be switching to a Surface Book. I don't mind spending for a premium laptop but I care about it feeling good to use and I just don't like the newer Macbooks.