voidifremoved

The bottleneck in software engineering has always been communication, whether that is engineers communicating amongst themselves or clients communicating what they want, or client's customers communicating to clients who communicate to management who communicate to middle management who communicate to engineers.

Every step introduces misunderstanding and miscommunication, and minds change, and when you go down the wrong path it is hard to alter course or start over while avoiding blame and ill feeling.

Offshoring quality was not as good as the original, because the original was being produced by developers who were close to the clients and steeped in the same assumptions.

With offshoring, all of the weight was borne by the specification - if something was not captured, it did not exist. It doesn't matter how much it was just a basic assumption that something would work that way - if you didn't say precisely what you wanted, you didn't get anything even close.

So someone close to a product could implement something in a week for x money. Management would see that "week" as a fixed unit of work that could be given to someone who would work for less - but that other person would require an order of magnitude more "prompting" in order to produce what you really wanted, because they didn't have the same knowledge and assumptions.

So their calculus was, well, it might actually take 5 weeks to get the same output, but it was still cheaper. But that completely overlooks the local overhead of 5 failed iterations, and the cost to client relations, or the cost to internal staff burning out in frustration at what was once simple becoming multiple needless failures, or the additional cost of documenting the spec to such a degree nothing gets left out. And the latter, you can't do until you've failed enough to know both sides different assumptions and knowledge gaps.

(Edit: also my point wasn't don't do it or that this can never work - it was that in this case management simply didn't care about the demonstrable quality problem because the cost of reiterating was so low they could afford to write off the first couple of failed attempts, and this is exactly the attitude we'll get with AI. If you can get something that's superficially most of the way there in an hour with a prompt all by yourself, there's no cost to just changing your mind, retrying, trying other things, all with no pesky engineers slowing things down)

That's not the rug pull.

The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.

Remembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.

Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.

This is true in every online space, whether explicitly or implicitly.

I would be 100% behind a version of Infinite Jest where the footnotes are in a separate volume.

Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.

Amazon just ended support for older Kindles. Not sure how that's any different.

Virtual Threads aren't quite the same as green threads (they don't block the OS thread) and they work extremely well now.

Nice site, but missing the Law of Conservation of Misery.

> A lot of it was unfortunately organizational politics

The hardest bugs in my experience are those where your only source of vital information is a third party who is straight-up lying to you.

My recollection is that before subreddits were a thing, Reddit was not that far off how this place is now.

On wikipedia: don't trust it blindly and always read the talk page.

The original is almost impossible to debug when something inevitably goes wrong too.

I have encountered dozens of places where streaming API calls have been reworked into imperative by whoever ends up maintaining it just so they can figure out why the hell it is breaking in some unforseen edge case.

One of the most prescient of the 20th dystopian novels was Fahrenheit 451.

This was not about a totalitarian government burning books.

This was about a population numbing themselves with bright colours, bland affirmation and meaningless feeds of facts. With vacuous, superficial interaction with friends and family through screens. They burned the books themselves, so they didn't have to encounter anything challenging.

I first encountered this at SCEE in 2008.

A while ago, Google photos autogenerated a video for me from my photo library. It was about a minute long, stitched together dozens of photos, called "dog video", and with a horrifying yapping dog soundtrack.

Every single photo was of a cat.

I have to say I was humbled by the amount of human and computing power that had gone into developing this system over the years, that could achieve such a complicated, impressive technical feat, without requiring any effort or money on my part, and yet also be 100% wrong.

At a large organisation I worked at years ago we used to call it Coder Shopping - when a manager would do the rounds trying to find someone who would say "yes" in a situation like this.

Invariably there would be someone who would, and if you were the person who had initially refused you probably wouldn't even be aware that it had happened until the bug reports came in...

My personal favourite was when my partner bought a book on breastfeeding through my account, and for weeks afterwards my recommendations were full of erotic novels.

Which was adopted by trolls as a "white power" sign, very much to muddy the waters as to what is or is not an intentionally racist gesture, and to have fun with the idea of offence and racism at the expense of anyone that might possibly be offended.

So when you see people, who are well aware of this meaning, using it in a photo like that, what they're saying is "ha ha look how funny the idea of us being racist is". Which of course is actually just normalising white supremacy, and enabling it to go unchallenged by shifting the line between overt racism and coded racism, and preventing any good faith discourse.

So this is either intentionally racist joking-but-not-really on his part or incredibly crass idiocy that provides cover for other racists.

It isn't about ideology it is about ease and quality.

Facebook is legendary for introducing breaking changes to their API without warning, for having terrible documentation, baroque and inconsistent APIs, flaky behaviour and broken examples.

Whatever you think of Facebook the company, Facebook the API is something everyone I know has horror stories about.

Having in the past crunched like mad on multiple titles, I will say that few things annoyed me more than non-essential people staying late and just messing around, eating the free pizza.

There is a difference between being willing to work at the current pay, and tolerating exploitative conditions out of fear of destitution.

Which is where UBI comes in as the missing part of a liberal capitalist economy. Until you remove the stick of starvation and homelessness, labour markets cannot respond rationally.

A Wizard of Earthsea, and then The Tombs of Atuan.

Then read the rest of the series, which are all good, it is just the first two are particularly wonderful.

But then both are just a kind of polygon, with an arbitrary number of sides of arbitrary length.

At which point you really want a variable length list of Sides, each with a length property.

Or you want a series of points with relative coordinates, making the sides implicit.

Or or or...

What I take from it is that there is no one true object model, there is no universally "correct" way of solving the problem. An evolving understanding of the problem leads to an evolving solution that places different priorities on different attributes.

Is there any value provided to the system by making Square a specialisation of Rectangle? Is there value in being able to express a Square without a redundant attribute value? What is the tradeoff? And so on.

I would say it is far more of a process and managerial failure.

That it was even possible is to me quite damning of project oversight, for allowing the system to get to that stage with such inadequate procedural and UI safeguards.

> how would you get eye images on a regular enough basis for it to be useful

Could they be collected from all those devices with front - facing cameras people spend their lives staring at?

> evident in some parts

I didn't even know that there was an anti-Catholic element to it, until I went to Lewes one year. It was eye-opening.

For example, the Cliffe bonfire society refused to join the main parade because it meant giving up their "No Popery" traditions.

http://www.cliffebonfire.com/history.html

Not to mention the anti - catholic bigotry that is still evident in some parts of the uk on bonfire night.

Requiring comments be attached to a real identity invariably does the exact opposite of what it intends to and lowers the quality of commentary. Sure, some people use the cloak of anonymity to perpetrate abuse, misinformation or low-effort participation, but the alternative has a chilling effect on potentially thoughtful commenters who don’t want to become targets.

It doesn’t really get rid of the anonymous abuse or disinformation either, because there are plenty of bots using fake social network identities out there.

The real people that do remain invariably put about as much thought into their contributions as they do into the long-term consequences of associating those comments with their real identity, or are simply so angry or strident that they don’t care.

Without real identities I would encounter islands of reason adrift in a sea of inanity. With real identities, I tend to see the loud and ignorant shouting at (or alongside) bots.