[deleted]
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
181–190 of 505 posts
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#182It occurred to me on my walk today that a program is not the only output of programming.
The other, arguably far more important output, is the programmer.
The mental model that you, the programmer, build by writing the program.
And -- here's the million dollar question -- can we get away with removing our hands from the equation? You may know that knowledge lives deeper than "thought-level" -- much of it lives in muscle memory. You can't glance at a paragraph of a textbook, say "yeah that makes sense" and expect to do well on the exam. You need to be able to produce it.
(Many of you will remember the experience of having forgotten a phone number, i.e. not being able to speak or write it, but finding that you are able to punch it into the dialpad, because the muscle memory was still there!)
The recent trend is to increase the output called programs, but decrease the output called programmers. That doesn't exactly bode well.
See also: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#183> it sure feels like software has become a brittle mess, with 98% uptime becoming the norm instead of the exception, including for big services As somebody who has been running systems like these for two decades: the software has not changed. What's changed is that before, nobody trusted anything, so a human had to manually do everything. That slowed down the process, which made flaws happen less frequently. But it w…
Super good take - the Andon cord is needed everywhere.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#184This is what I call content based on 'garbage'. Because garbage is the random collection of peoples' stuff. You can try and make sense and commentary on a society through the garbage dump, but it's pretty superficial. It doesn't tell you a lot about any real person's motivations. So it's not a great basis for commenting on real people. OPs comments are on the collection of things that they happen to come across through news and social media. Sure it looks like a lot is happening, but look at any one person's or business's approach and it will make a lot more sense. Yes, I realize people are producing content that appeals to the 'garbage' mindset, but it's obviously theater. A system that writes 10,000 lines of code for you a week, is headline theater.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature…
One would as sensibly dismiss the concept of an assembly line as "how to build a car if you cannot." Dijkstra was a mathematician. It is a necessary discipline. If it alone were sufficient, then the "program correctness" fans would have simply and inarguably outdone everyone else forty years ago at the peak of their efforts, instead of having resorted to eloquently whiny, but still whiny, thinkpieces (such as the 198…
The formal methods people may yet have the last laugh. I did not have Lean becoming a hyped programming language / proof assistant on my bingo card for 2025-26 and yet here we are, because these tools help us close the validation loop for LLM agents. That is not dead which can eternal lie...
But yes, I think the best rebuttal to Dijkstra-style griping is Perlis' "one can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means". That said I also believe kind of like Chesterton's quote about Christianity, they've also mostly not been tried and found wanting but rather found hard and left untried. By myself included, although I do enjoy a spot of the old dependent types (or at least their approximations). There's an economic argument lurking there about how robust most software really needs to be.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature…
One would as sensibly dismiss the concept of an assembly line as "how to build a car if you cannot." Dijkstra was a mathematician. It is a necessary discipline. If it alone were sufficient, then the "program correctness" fans would have simply and inarguably outdone everyone else forty years ago at the peak of their efforts, instead of having resorted to eloquently whiny, but still whiny, thinkpieces (such as the 198…
> One would as sensibly dismiss the concept of an assembly line as "how to build a car if you cannot."
I agree, but I'm not sure this says what you think it does.
The people on the car assembly line may know nothing of engineering, and the assembly line has theoretically been set up where that is OK.
The people on the software assembly line may also (and arguably often do) know nothing of engineering, but it's not clear that it is possible to set up the assembly line in such a way so as to make this OK.
Arguably, the use of LLMs will at least have some utility in helping us to figure this out, because a lot of LLMs are now being used on the assembly line.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…
> Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.
Resume driven development.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#188It's always been this way - the people that rise to the top are the people who never had to deeply understand something, so they can't even comprehend what that would look like or why it should be important. They're trying to automate the "understanding" part, with predictably disastrous consequences that those of us who aren't the "rise to the top" type could see coming. Agentic AI is just another symptom.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, if you remove 'engineer' , informatics should fall under the faculty of Science, so scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;) Maybe software tinkerer?
> scientists, which are even more rigorous than engineers ;) You should see the code that scientists write...
This x1000000
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Name a single time doomers were right about anything. - NFTs - Surveillance schizos - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and…
- NFTS doomers? I mean I appreciate the humor here. - Surveillance schizos - Society still works - Global Pedophile Cabal schizos - Again, funny use of 'doomers' but that's what the current society seems to be run by so I wouldn't say it's fitting for doomerism. - People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming th…
> You will still be able to walk down the street and grab a Big Mac pretty much any day of the week.
Yeah while you’re on your shift break there.