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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#461

Post by anthk »

dranudin wrote: post #258
embedding-shape wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Europe they are Where specifically? I've been working as a "Software engineer" for multiple decades, across three countries in Europe, and 2-3 countries outside of Europe, never been sued or received a "big fine" for this, even have had presentations for government teams and similar, not a single person have reacted to me (or others) calling ourselves "software engineers" this whole time.

In Germany. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and am thus allowed to call myself an engineer, even though I write software professionally. Colleagues who have studied computer science cannot, as it is not considered an engineering, but a science degree. This is why most people talk about "software developers" and not about "software engineers" (in German) to avoid this problem. That being said, most people wo…

Where it should be the reverse. Science demands reproducibily where engineering just tight thresholds to function upon defined conditions, but not 100% exact.

And except for SEL4 and some small microcontrollers with Eforth, C and tons of languages have undefined behaviours.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#462

Post by cedws »

youknownothing wrote: post #311

I understand your pain, we're just a peak hype, I think people will learn to backtrack and use the tool in a more sensible way. It always happens. I remember when MongoDB and other NoSql databases came out, people went as far as to say that "SQL is dead" and refuse to use a normal SQL database for anything. Not even for the most obvious relational application. People would store everything as key-value pairs with no…

[dead]

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#463

Post by throwanem »

NateEag wrote: post #375
throwanem wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems folks have forgotten that Yegge used to blog that he owed all his success in software development to chronic cannabis use, like if wasn't for all that weed there wouldn't be any Google today. I remember a lot of Steve Yegge's impressive claims from back when he and Zed Shaw were what I would call "fringe contemporaries" in the early 2010s - like all the time he spent gassing on about his unmaintainable, barel…

The most obvious one is this brilliant piece on complexity: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal... It doesn't match OP's description, but it certainly fits talk about his pot use. There may be others.

I remember thinking of him as a skillful writer and a sometimes incisive thinker, back then. Apparently my taste has significantly improved in the interim; for a piece ostensibly about complexity, this is an embarrassingly superficial analysis from priors that already don't make any sense.

I'm not going to knock a guy today based on an almost twenty-year-old piece, especially on subjects (cannabis legalization, the quality and direction of Obama administration policy initiatives) that were widely misunderstood at the time, including by such luminaries as the Nobel committee. But Yegge really wasn't starting from so strong a position as I had misrecalled. Thanks for the link.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#464

Post by throwanem »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #365
throwanem wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no liability or penalty for software defects and therefore no incentive for program correctness. Arguably, Dijkstra didn't fail; society has foolishly decided not to hold developers accountable for their bad code.

Arguably? Okay, so argue it.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#465

Post by throwanem »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #178
throwanem wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the real tragedy here is that we can spend *all* of our time trying to improve the quality of our output, but it simply doesn't matter, because as long as the button is where the boss wants it to be and is the right color, all is right with the world. Literally nothing else matters, and we (or at least I) have wasted a ton of time getting good at writing software.

As long as it continues to matter what the button actually does, I can't consider our effort to have been entirely wasted. We only have the misfortune to live in stupid and dangerous times, but good heavens, we're hardly the first in that, and hardly starved for examples from whom to learn.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#466

Post by NateEag »

throwanem wrote: post #463
NateEag wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most obvious one is this brilliant piece on complexity: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal... It doesn't match OP's description, but it certainly fits talk about his pot use. There may be others.

I remember thinking of him as a skillful writer and a sometimes incisive thinker, back then. Apparently my taste has significantly improved in the interim; for a piece ostensibly about complexity, this is an embarrassingly superficial analysis from priors that already don't make any sense. I'm not going to knock a guy today based on an almost twenty-year-old piece, especially on subjects (cannabis legalization, the q…

I haven't read it in at least ten years myself - maybe it's not as good as I recall.

I do remember that I appreciated his grasp of the fact that if you aren't deep in the weeds, you really cannot understand just how complex a system really is.

I also appreciated the slow build to the actual point, which I think could help people who wouldn't hear a direct explanation understand what he was getting at.

"'Shit's Easy' syndrome" is real, and I wonder if the prevalence of LLMs doing the scutwork will lead to an entire generation of programmers who suffer from it.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#467

Post by ProllyInfamous »

andai wrote: post #182

It 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 mus…

>>[2019] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

During the Q&A, he responds "do we really want software written that humans cannot understand?!" His steadfast doubts against singularity are called into question, at least by his supporting 2019 responses.

Certainly the speaker is correct that modern hardware allows software to be crappily written — I fondly recall the "olden times" recanted about full-access operating systems of yesteryear. Those days are over...

The fact that a modern computer "needs" to be online to install an update is frustrating/concerning (e.g. for MacOS, without a USB installer must be online to update, even with stand-alone updater downloaded). Just use my local hardware (that I own) and install this software (that I have provided).

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#468

Post by crisnoble »

hbarka wrote: post #458
xivzgrev wrote: post #450

There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs". And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful? Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform? I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now…

Vendor lock-in is real and it’s scary. You are helpless to the constant price increases and each passing renewal you get deeper and deeper into the lock-in. Here’s to the day when someone clever with AI can disintermediate this situation. You don’t have to vibecode your own CRM but imagine a deterministic harness that lets you lego-block CRM functions like lead management, opportunity tracking, contact list, campaign…

Moving the vendor lock-in to the AI provider and exponentially increasing the pain of migration by locking all teams and all services in at once.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#469

Post by jaffee »

dwaltrip wrote: post #140
jaffee wrote: post #16

> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

Maybe they meant un-uninstallable?

oh yeah, that's actually how I read it though now I realize it's nonsensical... like when someone says "I could care less" when they actually mean "couldn't"

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#470

Post by Balooga »

furyofantares wrote: post #457
mojosam wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it What exactly do we mean this? Because it is obviously common for human coders to tackle learning how an unfamiliar and complex codebase works so that they can modify it (new hires do it all the time). I can think this means one of two things: * The code and architecture being produced by agents takes approaches that are abnorm…

> What exactly do we mean this? Because it is obviously common for human coders to tackle learning how an unfamiliar and complex codebase works so that they can modify it (new hires do it all the time). I agree with you, BUT: I find it much harder to get my head around a medium sized vibe coded project than a medium size bespoke coded project. It's not even close. I don't know what codebases will look like if/when th…

And is "model collapse" a thing when LLMs are trained on 100% LLM-generated code? Fun times ahead.
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