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The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

notashelf.dev

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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#41

Post by TeMPOraL »

arjvik wrote: post #34
pmkary wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went down this road and it doesn't free up time, you just get to fix many many more problems.

I should clarify - I don’t mean I use GPT to write these solutions, I leave them unsolved knowing that they’re solvable in a very inelegant way.

That makes me feel even more guilty for not solving them, now that I realize the solution is one or two orders of magnitude easier to do.

Not joking with orders of magnitude. At this point, I regularly encounter a situation in which asking ChatGPT/Claude to hack me a little browser tool to do ${random stuff} feels easier and faster than searching for existing software, or even existing artifacts. Like, the other day I made myself a generator for pre-writing line tracing exercise sheets for my kids, because it was easier than finding enough of those sheets on-line, and the latter is basically just Google/Kagi Images search.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#42

Post by erulabs »

Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you.

I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot.

   Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better.
   Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists.
Everything, everywhere, is greasy and lousy and half broken. Sysadmins, we accept that everything is shit from the very beginning.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#45

Post by Tepix »

walterbell wrote: post #20

> I can fix something, but not everything. “Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.” —Bill Watterson (1988)

A parody of the Serenity Prayer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#46

Post by Tepix »

daliboru wrote: post #37

I see a similar issue in 2025, but with vibe coding. It all boils down to the 3 key factors: speed, quality and cost. And you can't have it all Know your trade-offs.

With vibe coding, you have none of those. The initial speed advantage will disappear once you need to maintain the mess.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#47

Post by anthk »

Well, with OpenBSD:

- Updates often don't break things

- Remind for notes

- Gopher as my main site

- Multimarkdown+git for a wiki

- A web/blog without RSS is not worth your time

- Nvi can be good enough against vim, entr+make do magic

- mbsync/msmtp/slrnpull and so work in batch mode, fire mutt and forget

I don't hack my tools any more. I don't distrohop. CWM, XTerm, MuPDF, GV and friends like Bitlbee do everything well since years. Now I'm focusing in Forth, because in a near future low power microcontrollers and laptop will say a thing or two.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#49

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #24

I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind. Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in anothe…

Does this help explain why any simple household activity has a frustrating ~50% chance of turning into a string of dependencies and dependents that make you spend 10x the time you expected on it all? E.g. you figure it'll take a minute to take the trash out and wash your hands. But on the way you discover you run out of trash bags, and while washing your hands you run out of soap, then as you pick the refill bottle f…

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