CipherThrowaway

IMO it's not that the simplest solutions are the best but that the "better" complex solutions are not actually available upfront. They can only be made with hard-won domain knowledge. The design policy for lld v1 per this article encoded many assumptions that turned out to be untrue in practice (like the importance of platform independence). If they had been true then the extra complexity might have been worth it. Over time the simpler lld v2 might accrue its own complexity that better reflects learned experience.

Code is a tool for exploring and understanding problems as much as it is about solving them. Sophisticated solutions can't be designed before they are validated.

At my first job I inherited a 250K LoC monolith which I had to continue to develop and also operate. It wasn't great but I got by. I don't think I could have managed if that 250K LoC had been strewn across a dozen microservices with all the accompanying complexity and extra degrees of freedom in deployment and operation.

SoA is superior when you have large numbers of devs coordinating and working on the same product. For smaller teams monoliths seem to be the way to go.

That makes sense. It just shows how much variation there is across different areas.

I feel like I am going absolutely nuts reading this thread. 10K LoC is 2-3 months of work for a single person hobby project. 100K LoC is maybe a 2-3 person dev team for 2 years. That's assuming a refactored codebase with no copy-paste repetition. "Append only" codebases with heavy copy-pasting can easily get larger than that in shorter amounts of time.

Huge teams and decades of time gets you to 1M+ range, not the 100K+ range.

Yes I agree. There is something quite elegant and fundamental about recursive descent parsing.

What do you mean by "in the wild"? I would have thought it was the opposite. Handwritten recursive descent is the way to build a parser if most compiler projects are to go by. OpenJDK, GCC, Clang, Rust, Spidermonkey are examples. Occasionally you see a generated lexer but generated parsers seem to be a rarity in practice while recursive descent is ubiquitous.

People with anime profile pictures tweeting about stablecoins, going to the moon and WGMI are not some youth culture vanguard. OP tweet has self-selected into an online social world consisting of people in a similar mindset and demographic to his own. Outside of this bubble, "crypto bros" are considered weird and cringeworthy.

Developers mistaking their personal limitations for fundamental truths and so forth.

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My bad. Your reply didn't register as an earnest to me. The tone and content felt too similar to bad faith commentary from e.g. Elon Musk fans who aren't actually interested in understanding the issues. If that's not the case than I apologize.

Debugger usage has been non-monotonic with time for me. When I first started coding I would print. Then I discovered debuggers and experienced a massive improvement in productivity on bug fixing and problem solving tasks. But over time I found myself reaching for the debugger less and less often as I became better at solving problems. In the last 5 years I have to admit I've barely used debuggers at all.

> I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there.

Perhaps you read "reversing cause and effect" on a blog and assumed it was just a very smart way of saying someone is wrong. In fact it has a specific meaning.

In this case the cause and effect I was positing was that Star Trek et al were a product of techno-utopian optimism. The reverse cause and effect would therefore be sci-fi producing techno-utopian optimism rather than the other way round. This reverse relationship does seem plausible since there is an unmistakable sci-fi influence on the outlooks of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others.

> I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other.

No one is saying that Mars dream-chasing won't have any benefit to real problems on Earth. The objections of scientists, economists and environmentalists are instead based on a concept called "opportunity cost" as well as feasibility and priority.

How much work have you done to try to understand the costs and physical quantities involved in terraforming and transporting people to Mars?

My point isn't that older generations didn't have problems worth worrying about. It's that younger generations have their own unique problems worth worrying about. I wouldn't expect someone who grew up in the 00s to really understand the Cold War, so why would I expect someone who grew up in the 80s to understand the unique challenges of Generation Z? This is why dialogue is important.

The environmental comparison is very shallow. Climate change is a higher stakes and larger scale environmental issue than we have ever seen and will require radical changes to modern life and modern economies merely to limit the damage. Compare it to a past looming disaster like ozone depletion where the risk was bad sunburns and all we had to do was stop spraying Freon into the air. I remember actually being worried about the ozone layer. Boy does that feel quaint now.

>"You don't understand me! You're too old!"

If a younger person said this to me I would find it quite reasonable. As an older person I don't presume to automatically understand the unique problems and circumstances of a different generation from my own. That's why I put effort into engaging younger people in dialogue. What I'm suggesting is that others do the same.

Older people bemoaning the pessimism, fatalism and short-termism of the younger generations really ought to try engaging younger people in meaningful dialog and attempting to understand their points of view. Younger people are interested in the future and they are passionate about tackling emerging global problems. Market research shows gen Z place a huge emphasis on sustainability for example.

Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all. They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-utopian optimism which was disconnected from the actual future and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity's future than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.

I prefer the online approach regardless of downtime. Breaking the migration into incremental and backwards compatible steps is less stressful with smaller tail risk exposure than trying to do it as a single state transition. I think the parallel change approach seems more complicated at first but ends up taking less work and less effort in the long run because of increased safety and incrementalism.

Yes, the article decries some systems. But it's still over-thinking and over-systematizing in it's own way.

People saying "don't overthink it" aren't advocating for ignorance. They are recognizing that over-systematizing and over-thinking is its own form of ignorance. It's a particularly seductive form of ignorance for engineers because we carry tacit assumptions about how systems can be broken down and analyzed. These assumptions are a bad fit for dating and many other non-technical domains such as people management.

In art classes beginners are often taught to "see like an artist." That is, in terms of shape, color and composition rather than objects and logical descriptions. It's not that the logical view is factually incorrect. It's that it emphasizes the wrong sort of knowledge.

>But you know who really does advocate for ignorance? Predators.

This and your "miserable victimhood" comment make me wonder if your views aren't being driven by some personal pain or trauma. If so then it might be worth unpacking your experiences with a therapist. Overthinking doesn't protect you from pain or abuse. It is the opposite if anything.

Being knowingly ignorant is less ignorant than being unknowingly ignorant. Over systematization of dating creates illusory knowledge that impedes connection.

I've seen how the obsessive-analytic mindset fares in dating. I'll take bumbling along any day.

Picking evenly seems to consistently produce higher "randomness" scores than picking unevenly or using an RNG. I wonder how this algorithm would rank random sequences vs shuffled linear sequences.

The fundamental issue with a randomness metric for sequences is that an idealized independent generator will under-perform vs a constrained generator that excludes low scoring sequences.

If you found the article interesting you might want to look into Explaining Pain (EP). Teaching patients about pain is a common approach in treatment and there is some clinical evidence that better understanding can make pain easier to manage or even reduce the experience of pain (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14690673/).

The theme of the article is not that you should be less productive, it's that stepping back and slowing down can make you more productive. For example you could have saved yourself some offense if you had taken the time to consider the author's point before reacting.

Cloud Run was also the sweet spot for me. Containers feel like the natural service unit.

So you feel the tone is too harsh. I'll grant that it is harsh. But I chose it because it's proportional to how misguided the celebration of anti-social tech geniuses really is. The era of uncritically celebrating these personalities is well and truly over for most of us.

Critique isn't jealousy. Expect to grow out of that PoV in 5-10 years.

It's not clear to me that early tech culture is at odds with modern tech culture. To me it feels like the values of that early culture provided quite fertile ground for the situation we have now.

Can we please stop lionizing the "maverick genius." It should be clear to everyone at this point that the Nth brilliant asshole with an untamed superiority complex who hates institutions and fixates on sci-fi tail risks is not going to be making the world a better place.

We are facing unprecedented global challenges this century that will benefit from humble and cooperative thinking at institutional scales. Not more myopic nerds motivated by ressentiment and delivering disruption with zero consideration of social impact.

>“To truly understand what I am. If you want to understand what a radio is,” he said, “build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a microprocessor is, build it from scratch. If you want to understand what a human is, build it.”

This sounds like a joke about the things men will do instead of just going to therapy. It's a level of grandiosity that is indistinguishable from satire.

I think it depends. If all these meetings are about closing deals with clients then sure. But execs engage in a variety of work related social activity. So dinner with another exec, grabbing a beer or coffee, turning a debrief into a lunch all count towards the self-reported 80 hours. A lot of outings with external stakeholders are also low stakes. I'm an introvert and I have never found these work related lunches and dinners anything close to real work. In addition, eating out on the company card relieves you of the personal work of preparing and shopping for meals on those days.

The problem in my view is not how we categorize work vs non-work but how people homogenize different types of work to create unrealistic expectations of what work is and how much of it we should be doing.

This ignores a large volume of low stakes business lunches and dinners and the propensity of business people to turn debriefs and meetings into leisurely lunches. I've been to many lunches and dinners like this and they feel like more of a psychological break than eating lunch in the common room. Plus the company pays.

If you're closing a high stakes multi-billion dollar deal with Boeing then you should count that as work, definitely.

I don't think this establishes the presence of burnout. It's an expected result of increasing workload at any level and is caused by the diminishing returns to labor as an input of production.

There is a certain breed of exec who is extremely generous with what they consider work. They will read a few articles after dinner and consider it "working all evening." Staying up late idly scrolling through LinkedIn is "working past midnight." Their accounts don't differentiate between operational work and social activities that relate to work. For example, wining and dining a stakeholder is always considered several hours of pure work. Once I worked with a CEO whose "80 hour" weeks included regular binge drinking and 2am kebabs with his buddies on the board.