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taybin

1,002 karma · joined September 24, 2010

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taybin··on Anthropic in Talks to Buy World Model AI Startup Decart for $6B
Before they buy Dehorse?
taybin··on "Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)
Yes, a toy problem only needs a simple implementation. This is a straw man. And I don't even like Robert Martin's Clean Code, but the author is not addressing where this style actually provides benefits. When you're updating 23 if-statements because you had to add support for some new business workflow, you'll wish you had a conceptual entity that encapsulated the operations on the type of workflows so you just had to implement them in one place.
taybin··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
taybin··on Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)
To-does. Just like how a butler buttles.
taybin··on Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)
I would love to see an example of a proof for something like a text editor. How can people be expected to do this when the examples are always trivial toys, like array sorting? Show me a formal proof of something that in the trenches programmers can copy from. A proof of a basic todo list or something like that.
taybin··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
Yes, that is also gross.
taybin··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
Maybe he's suggesting it for Canada?
taybin··on Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.
taybin··on Claude Opus 5
How long is a fable though?
taybin··on Cruller: Bun's Zig Runtime, Continued on Zig 0.16
There are several possible reasons for that, but I'll just say it's a very common use case. It's actually the one of the original use cases for SCSs. How else could you revert to a prior commit?
taybin··on Superfile: A fancy, modern terminal file manager
What does it mean to “obsessively craft every pixel?”
taybin··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
That’s an interesting point about the tension between standardization and creativity. I’m going to think about that for a bit.
taybin··on Economists say 'we must act now' on AI's economic impact and job displacement
I hate to be cynical but I expect this call will generate as much action as climate change warnings.
taybin··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.
taybin··on EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why
For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.
taybin··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
Coding is so rich that you can use it for artistic pursuits, but I argue that the output is the real art, and the code itself is not art and itself is not expressing anything.
taybin··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
I actually think plumbing does require a bunch of creativity. Trying to add some fixture to an old house with out of spec walls and prior creative solutions can be a real challenge. And you can really appreciate the people who come up with an elegant solution that isn't "tear it out and redo it from scratch".

I'd like to read that blog post.

taybin··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
Thank you for understanding my comment. Code is a craft and could maybe be more compared to pottery, which usually has a use, and is primarily judged by well it fulfills its purpose. I'm not saying that there isn't "beautiful" code, and certainly not denying clever code. But the goalpost that code is just as expressive as literature or music is just too much. Show me the code that is inspired by the reflection of a sunset on a pond on a windy day.
taybin··on Learning to code is still worthwhile
> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music

I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

taybin··on AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector
I’ve seen a ton of new open source slop programs. Every day there’s so many “announcing my cool new app” posts. I don’t remember the rate being this high before.
taybin··on Resetting Xbox
I'm in software and I do alright, but I'm still on a PS4 too. Just can't justify the upgrade when there's still so many great old games available. Maybe when the next Horizon Zero Dawn comes out, I'll be forced to upgrade, but I'm taking my time about it.
taybin··on 'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots
No it doesn’t. Laws and regulations aren’t equations and don’t need to be perfectly balanced. There is no QED here with your reasoning.
taybin··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
The sci-fi novel A Fire in the Deep starts with describing a Software Archeologist, who digs through millennia of strata of layers of indirection and I think we could end up needing that one day.
taybin··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I haven’t seen any that are made by humans for a long time.
taybin··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
What are you talking about? They’re so ubiquitous.
taybin··on Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country
Bernie Sanders proposes a lot of things that are never implemented. I’m not sure his support is actually a useful signal of greater support.
taybin··on Jira Is Turing-Complete
That is exactly what i did last week. Got praised for it.
taybin··on DAG Workflow Engine
What makes it production ready? What's the code coverage on your tests? There are only seven commits in this repo as of this comment.
taybin··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
I don’t. What are you referring to?
taybin··on The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'
Music is something you can do without formal training. Much like how you can be a terrible programmer but still create popular software. Just like how maybe what the world wanted at some moment was a slow PHP alternative to moveabletype, maybe the world also wanted sped up, stripped down, 60s girl band songs, without complicated rhythms and harmonies.

Not trying to say that Wordpress v1 was terrible software written by terrible programmers, but I hope you get my point.

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