Not to be a downer. It is therapeutic, and I exercise 5-6 times per week between strength and conditioning, but it's not enough. It's a short distraction, it helps me temporarily. The truth is there's something very wrong with the world today and the pressure we're all feeling, speaking personally here, leaves me feel like I'm ready to crack constantly. But I have a wife and kids and elderly parents, and they all depend on me so I need to keep holding it together. Somehow.
I quit 2 years ago. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Sad, to think at one time I almost opened a brewery.
And it's bad for you, yes, and that's why I quit, it was fucking with my sleep horribly, but also it's such a drain on your finances today. And given the state of things today, I'm glad I quit when I did. Saving a grand a year isn't a lot but that money is much better off being spent in a different way.
Brooks' point was more about accidental vs. essential complexity. You seem to be implying that design was only ever an artifact of "expensive" typing, but design exists to prevent systems from collapsing under different failure states.
If the cost of emitting syntax collapses without adequately resolving the essential complexity then you have not eliminated the design phase and you're just externalizing your failure modes onto downstream teams and systems.
You're acting like math is some sort of infinite game of automating unit tests. There is no shortage of conjectures and generating them is cheap. The struggle is finding the ones that are actually interesting. They only have value when they can unify disparate domains or reveal something that was previously hidden, or (the thing that I see most Mathematicians lamenting today) if they force the creation of new abstractions to solve.
Insight in mathematics doesn't emerge from brute-forcing conjectures. There is a recognized aesthetic economy that exists and without a semantic filter to detect the significance in any of these proofs we just end up with a lot of noise.
You don't need a new toilet seat? But you just looked at toilet seats and then bought one. Are you sure you don't need another? Don't you like toilet seats?
I think that's equivocating on the word semantic. Word embeddings map concepts like "king - man + woman = queen" or cluster synonyms together in high-dimensional vector space and the ML literature very loosely calls this "semantic space." But a high-dimensional topology of token co-occurrences isn't semantics in the sense of computation or formal semantics. It's still "just" measuring distributional similarity. Some vector that represents "thread deadlock" lives near tokens like "mutex" and "race condition" and "starvation," but the model itself has no concept of concurrency and contention.
Claiming we "solved" statistical interpolation long ago just means curve-fitting and basic regressions on structured data. Transformers are a truly impressive achievement, scaling all of this to unstructured high-dimensional text topologies, but it's fundamentally the same math operations on statistical proximity.
Like how do we explain hallucinations here? Tokens that are hallucinated are semantically "close" in that vector space but they're completely false in reality. If LLMs operated in a true semantic space they wouldn't hallucinate CLI flags that don't exist.
Right, there's a difference between statistical interpolation and semantic induction. The whole point is that LLMs can't reason from first principles to drive missing rules. It keeps confidently feeding you approximations until it collides with some source that already mapped it.
This feels like a sleight of hand to me. The hard part of evolving Scribe and Web Scrapbook was discovering that a browser extension manipulating a local SQLite database was _the only_ architecture that could reconcile local offline persistence with live DOM scraping across arbitrary catalogs of academic data.
An agent can synthesize existing solutions but (because I see this failure mode at work constantly) it can't synthesize an architecture to resolve the sorts of tensions that the person prompting it doesn't yet understand (not that that is stopping anyone). You can't prompt it to build something if the operational primitives required to solve the problem haven't been mapped.
"Build a tool based on Scribe and Web Scrapbook" in 2003 would've made a fragile PHP wrapper because that's what the existing landscape looked like.
Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra... What you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.
Sure, but I went through startups, too. I just hung on for dear life and the people above me were willing to hear about issues with culture and work on it. Only the last 4 years of my career have been at a FAANG.
I had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us!
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
Well you see we need to migrate system A to B and X to Y and here's another new integration to look at and we need to finally get off of this EOL distro and... It'll never stop.
I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.
We have a tool at work that was entirely spun out of a prototype that itself was entirely driven by a single guy with an unlimited Claude budget. I only touch it on the edges, where I need to integrate it every so slightly into one of my systems. It's a crucial piece of software for the team, though. I've looked over the source, the thing that strikes me the most is the verbosity. Human software engineers would've been much more terse, so the thing has a fucking lot of code that's doing very little. They're trying to deal with that now, while also driving feature requests forward, and from the distance it looks like an unmanageable shit show.
I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.
I've seen some weird behavior with it, as well. But I'm fine with it. I visit a single subreddit now and if they destroy the UX I'll only be happier for leaving.
The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
I started doing this in the mid-2010s, too. Used to grab throwaway hardware from a former employer and piece whatever still worked together. I've since moved on to a different employer. How do you procure throwaway hardware?
Have you tried Lisp Flavored Erlang [0]? I never got around to trying it out. I used Elixir for a couple of years, building web backends, and I truly loved the experience. I remember wanting to try out LFE but never got around to it before moving on to a different employer/stack.
I just got back from a 12 mile trail run. I'd love to be on the trails more often. And I'd love to explore more trails that are further away. But I have to work all week and that leaves me with my weekends. I also like to read, write, garden, hike, bike, strength train, I have other hobbies like woodworking that I'd love to get back into, homebrewing, I bake bread, and on and on. I love spending time with my wife and my kids and my/our friends. And I have to ration my time heavily because I've got ~50+ hours every single week that's wrapped up in making my staggeringly massive corporation employer more money than it knows what to reasonably do with.
I live nearby, I'm hosting some family at my home who have been evacuated. A fireman friend who has been to the site said the same. That it'll either explode or spill and they're banking on it spilling.