mactavish88

Agreed. Having used OpenSpec extensively for a few months now, long-lived specs in the repo are useless, but the OpenSpec change process is super valuable for keeping agents on track across a single complex project (e.g. developing a single complex new feature in a large codebase).

Not "open" as such, but Kobo sells this title.

> I still have one pillar standing, though: code quality and software architecture - what's now being reduced to being called "taste".

Genuine question: what exactly is "quality"?

It's something I've been trying to understand for a very long time. It seems like it's entirely contextual, and it has both subjective and objective facets (the latter only for quantifiable things, and still entirely contextual).

Recursive self-improvement towards what exactly?

Living organisms evolve towards some notion of "better", and "better" is an incredibly multifaceted notion (many facets of which we simply cannot even capture in language).

Have you read Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification" yet? He describes the process quite well.

Not sure how to address it though. I suspect keeping companies small and focused on quality, sustainability, and free of VC influence would be a solution. It'd take continual work though, like tending to a bonsai.

The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.

I don't think we're going to be able to have rational conversations about this with C-level folks for quite some time. They mostly seem too wrapped up in copying each other to think clearly, and it's only when the bottom line starts suffering that we might be able to start asking some questions about their strategy.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives?

(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

Great example of how to set boundaries. The open source community is slowly healing.

> Their whole skill set

This is the fundamental problem with how so many people think about LLMs. By the time you get to Principal, you've usually developed a range of skills where actual coding represents like 10% of what you need to do to get your job done.

People very often underestimate the sheer amount of "soft" skills required to perform well at Staff+ levels that would require true AGI to automate.

Can't they just leave it alone?

I hear this perspective a lot in relation to open source projects.

What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future when you start out building an open source project.

(Coming from having contributed to and run several open source projects myself)

Pizza parties and "unlimited" vacations?

What you're asking is the equivalent of going to a company whose equity you've bought and asking them: what's the price going to be in 6 months' time?

The exact same way you'd treat any other investment decision.

In the real world, if you've got $100k, you could choose to invest all of it into project A, or all into project B, or perhaps start both and kill whichever one isn't looking promising.

You'd need to weigh that against the potential returns you'd get from investing all or part of that money into equities, bonds, or just keeping it in cash.

The only approach that genuinely works for software development is to treat it as a "bet". There are never any guarantees in software development.

1. Think about what product/system you want built.

2. Think about how much you're willing to invest to get it (time and money).

3. Cap your time and money spend based on (2).

4. Let the team start building and demo progress regularly to get a sense of whether they'll actually be able to deliver a good enough version of (1) within time/budget.

If it's not going well, kill the project (there needs to be some provision in the contract/agreement/etc. for this). If it's going well, keep it going.

In my experience, it really depends on what you're building _and_ how you prompt the LLM.

For some things, LLMs are great. For others, they're absolute dog shit.

It's still early days. Anyone who claims to know what they're talking about either doesn't or what they're saying will be out of date in a month's time (including me).

There's something both beautiful/enchanting and deeply tragic about the story.

If anyone's interested in an analysis of Saint-Exupéry's psychology via the symbolism of The Little Prince, the book "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus" by Marie-Louise von Franz [1] is absolutely fascinating.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1404609.The_Problem_of_t...

Yeah I've gone through bouts of "anything but tech" several times in my career, and each time ended up stuck in software development because it pays the bills.

I'm possibly somewhat burnt out - not entirely sure - but the reason I say so is that it's hard to tell what actually calls to me right now, whereas 5-10 years ago I felt I had a much clearer picture. Nowadays I'm skeptical of the idea that following any passions of mine would result in a better overall quality of life.

It's tough to find something that's both fulfilling _and_ pays the bills. I'm nowhere near "rich", but I'm fairly certain being poor will decrease my quality of life substantially - regardless of how fulfilling my work is. Right now I'm stuck leaning more in the direction of the thing that pays the bills.

In your experience/journey, what tech-adjacent careers have you become aware of? I'd imagine it's easier to pivot into something "tech-adjacent" than something completely different when one is in their 40s/50s.

Neat!

For this to be long-term sustainable though, it needs to be implemented in such a way that non-tech-savvy folks can also participate very easily, without needing to learn anything about P2P, relays, decentralized or edge computing, etc.

The open social web's decentralization is just as dependent on relevant protocols and communities as it is on the hosting services on which they depend.

It's way easier to censor a decentralized social network if the majority of its nodes run on AWS, GCP and Azure, for instance.

What'd be great is if we could run these networks primarily from our personal devices (i.e. true edge computing), but the more the computing's pushed to the edge the harder it becomes to implement technically and socially.

Even if they fill a real need, their go-to-market strategy will determine whether the masses even know about them, or give a damn about trying them out in the first place.

For those of us who've been around for some time and still value privacy, this sort of paradigm is obvious.

The trouble isn't a lack of the right technologies - I'd argue it's a problem in the go-to-market strategy of those building these products/technologies.

Ideas flow along lines carved out by power/influence. Facebook's early strategy was to start with restricting its usage to people at Harvard University - arguably a highly influential institution - and then expand outwards to other highly influential institutions. Only once the "who's who" from those institutions were already onboard did they let down the walls to allow us plebs in, and we all rushed in head-first.

X's current strategy leverages Musk's visibility and influence (for better or worse).

Get the most prominent influencers onboard with your decentralized social network, and others will follow (dramatically easier said than done, of course). But without a significant contingent of influencers/powerful people, your network's DoA.

> A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on.

> Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I'd argue that a fair amount of the former results in the ability to do the latter.

There's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into designing "simple" systems (simple to understand when reading the code). Just as there's a substantial amount of wisdom that goes into making "simple" changes to those systems.

It's always odd to me how people tend to think that human-created ecosystems are "freakish" or "unnatural".

Humans evolved in the same environment as the ecosystems we're modifying. The buildings and cars and roads we make are made of materials we find on earth, similar to how birds build nests or ants make anthills. (Whether all the things we build are good and healthy for us and our environment is another story.)

My hypothesis has long been that this view of human activity as "unnatural" was actually born of the religious perspective that some religions hold that humans were implanted into the universe from the outside.

A secondary "travel" smart phone, not connected to any of your cloud/social accounts, sounds like a reasonable option in your case.

What's a good "dumb phone" these days to travel with?

I’m about to hit 40, and I’ve had this exact same experience. Even a single beer, shot of whiskey or glass of wine will leave me feeling depressed for at least a day afterwards.

For me it seems to correlate with having had COVID back in 2021, where prior to that I could still have 2-3 drinks and feel okay the next day. My suspicion/intuition is that it has something to do with a shift in my gut microbiome - from what I understand, alcohol can very easily disrupt one’s microbiome, and the state of my microbiome seems to have a significant influence on my mood.

I haven’t missed the alcohol though. It’s actually been a blessing for my general health and wellbeing.

Did you perhaps have H. Pylori and your antibiotics eliminated it?

I was also diagnosed with EoE recently - my understanding is that it also causes symptoms that feel like reflux, but aren’t. Very occasionally I might actually have a bit of reflux (evidenced by a bit of regurgitation), but the burning sensation that I used to attribute to reflux I now attribute to EoE instead.

Seems worse when I’ve recently been eating my trigger foods (mostly dairy). Sucks not being able to eat cheese :(