191–200 of 315 posts
Sometimes i wonder why this hasn't happened anyway: Internet's not what it used to be.
And maybe companies would eventually take a clue, after they banned all actual contributors for having foul fingers (very unlikely i know)
thanks for attending my ted talk
I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…
That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.
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For now. It's important to not confuse activity, with progress, with results. At the same time, it's important to not confuse or downplay results, with progress, with activity. There seems to be activity, progress, and results. It seems to be speeding up. I don't have any preference for or against Tesla. Just observing.
> For now. What can incremental progress do to make a camera see through road salt deposited on its lens? I call bullshit. There isn't any incremental path because it's not physically possible . The photons are stopped by the salt. No amount of "AI" or what the fuck ever else will change this. There is no path towards "progress" here.
People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to…
If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity. I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off. Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/…
For the sake of correctness, the concept of pull requests was not introduced by Github. It already existed in git in the form of the 'request-pull' subcommand. The fundamental workflow is the same. You send the project maintainer a message requesting a pull of your changes from your own online clone repo. The difference is that the message was in the form of an email. Code reviews could be conducted using mails/mailing lists too.
This is not the same as sending patches by email. But considering how people hate emails, I can see why it didn't catch on. However, Torvalds considered this implementation to be superior to Github's and once complained about the latter on Github itself [1].
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
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From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…
It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.
The core problem, as OP called out, is change aversion. It's just that for many previous useful changes, management couldn't immediately see the usefulness, or there would've been pressure too.
Let's not forget that well-defined development processes with things like CI/CD, testing, etc only became widespread after DORA made the positive impact clearly visible.
Let's face it: Most humans are perfectly fine with the status quo, whatever the status quo. The outward percolation of good ideas is limited unless a forcing function is applied.
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From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…
It's an excellent point - but a lot of the pressure to use AI in orgs is top-down and I've never seen that with useful tech tools before; they always percolated outward from the more adventurous developers. This makes me wary of the AI enthusiasm, even though I acknowledge that there is some genuine value here.
I wasn't around to experience it but my understanding is that this is what happened in the 90's with object oriented programming - it was a legitimately useful idea that had some real grassroots traction and good uses, but it got sold to non-technical leadership as a silver bullet for productivity through reuse.
The problem then, as it is now, is that developer productivity is hard to measure, so if management gets sold on something that's "guaranteed" to boost it, it becomes a mandate and a proxy measure.
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Have ChatGPT write it This isn’t AI specific though. The whole industry runs this way because thoughtful decision making doesn’t scale easily. KPIs are easier.
Kinda weird though, like with many things in the industry we seem to be doing things that are far from optimal, but for some reasons organizations that do things differently aren't winning the competition. Ostensibly most successful software is written in languages that aren't very good, with development methodologies that aren't very good, in organizational structures that aren't very good. Where is the existence pr…
The race isn't a competition, it's a death march. If you want to 'win' the death march, prioritize survival above everything else, especially quality and correctness.
(I don't strictly follow this philosophy myself, a good engineer will always ask, why not both. Just make sure you identify endurance as the most important strategy)
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Version control has quickly won. It was so popular that people kept writing new systems all the time. CI was popular. Most major open source projects had their own CI systems before GitHub. "AI" on the other hand is shoved down people's throats by management and by those who profit from in in some way. There is nothing organic about it.
Version control is almost 50 years old. It has very slowly won. AI adoption is, for better or worse, voluntarily or not, very fast compared to other technologies.
This adoption rate / shoving is insane. It is not based on anything but dollars.
Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars. They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges. I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between…
- 2000 minutes of free compute time with GitHub Actions
- free Docker Hub alternative with unlimited pulling (they say that you're limited to 500Mb but I currently have probably +20Gb of images on my Free account)
They have the community aspect AND the freebies