Chris_Newton

7 ms·

1.
by Chris_Newton 3d ago
We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. Hadn’t good developers been focussing on those things, and ot
2.
by Chris_Newton 3d ago
But 20 years ago is now 2006, and unit tests were well established as a best practice. I agree with the spirit of what you wrote, but my recollection of the timeline is different. The first decade of the 2000s was peak Crazy Agile Advocac
3.
by Chris_Newton 2mo ago
The big downside of the moderation system on Slashdot is that you can’t both participate in a discussion and moderate at the same time. I want people who are interested and well informed on a subject doing both in the same discussion! Met
4.
by Chris_Newton 2mo ago
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and tod
5.
by Chris_Newton 2mo ago
I’m with andreyvit on this one. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had read a subject involving a lot more essay-writing at university. In subjects like the mathematics and computer science that I studied, where you need to be very clear about
6.
by Chris_Newton 2mo ago
I also prefer to have a smaller network of people I actually know. I haven’t found LinkedIn to be a very valuable channel for finding new clients, but it’s always nice to see past colleagues being successful at finding new roles or starting
7.
by Chris_Newton 6mo ago
Speed actually just wins, because we are usually constrained by time. Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean here. What do we win by being faster at producing the wrong things?
8.
by Chris_Newton 6mo ago
With all the emphasis on the speed of modern AI tools, we often seem to forget that velocity is a vector quantity. Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction. If we’re far enough of
9.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
Interesting, thanks. In the UUID example you mentioned, it seems the CodeQL model is missing some information about how FastAPI’s runtime validation works and so not drawing correct inferences about the types. It doesn’t seem to have a gene
10.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
This is true and customers do a lot of unfortunate things in the name of security theatre. Sometimes you have to play the cards you’ve been dealt and roll with it. However, educating them about why they’re wasting significant amounts of mon
11.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
OK, but all I said before was that CodeQL’s approach where it supplies a specific example to support a specific problem report is inherently resistant to false positives. Clearly it is still possible to generate a false positive if, for e
12.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
I too found that my LinkedIn account had suddenly become “temporarily” disabled a little while ago, for reasons unspecified. I too was invited to share my government ID with some verification system to get back in again. I too declined on p
13.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
If you replace a dependency that has a known vulnerability with a different dependency that does not, surely that is objectively an improvement in at least that specific respect? Of course we can’t guarantee that it didn’t introduce some ot
14.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
CodeQL seems to raise too many false-positives in my experience. I’d be interested in what kinds of false positives you’ve seen it produce. The functionality in CodeQL that I have found useful tends to accompany each reported vulnerabilit
15.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
Sorry, I don’t understand the point you’re making. If CodeQL reports that you have a XSS vulnerability in your code, and its report includes the complete and specific code path that creates that vulnerability, how is Rice’s theorem applicab
16.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
Dependabot has some value IME, but all naïve tools that only check software and version numbers against a vulnerability database tend to be noisy if they don’t then do something else to determine whether your code is actually exposed to a m
17.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
MVC is a structural separation of responsibilities between model, view, and control logic. Yes, but the “MVC” pattern used by various back-end web frameworks that borrowed the term a while back actually has very little to do with the orig
18.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
In the original MVC architecture, the fundamental idea was that the model was responsible for storing the application state, a view was responsible for rendering output to the user, and a controller was responsible for responding to user in
19.
by Chris_Newton 7mo ago
B5 is still one of my favourite TV shows of all time. The common criticisms are largely true: it does start slow with some weak episodes in season 1, some of the acting is a bit wooden, the CGI hasn’t aged well, season 5 is slightly anti-cl
20.
by Chris_Newton 8mo ago
I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason. Windows appears to be posit
21.
by Chris_Newton 8mo ago
The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure,
22.
by Chris_Newton 8mo ago
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now. Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruptio
23.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
I can only speak anecdotally, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been unlucky with this particular box, but I’ve seen a few quite serious issues going back over the past few years since I switched to NixOS as my primary OS. Not so lon
24.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
Instability is one of the biggest but perhaps also the least understood downsides of NixOS, IMHO. Contrary to the name, even the stable branch of NixOS can have problems while installing routine updates with `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`
25.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
I once had a well-known LLM reproduce pretty much an entire file from a well-known React library verbatim. I was writing code in an unrelated programming language at the time, and the bizarre inclusion of that particular file in the output
26.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
I think I prefer languages that realize things can improve and are willing to say if you want to run 10 year old code, use a 10 year old compiler/runtime. IMHO, the trouble with that stance is that it leaves no path to incrementally
27.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
IMHO, the ideal for package management in a programming language ecosystem might recognise multiple levels of “standardisation”. At the top, you have the true standard library for the language. This has very strong stability guarantees. Its
28.
by Chris_Newton 10mo ago
Geometric modelling tends to need a lot of detailed work for two main reasons. Firstly, you probably have a variety of analytic shapes to represent — things like lines and circles in 2D or cubes and spheres in 3D. Even seemingly simple ques
29.
by Chris_Newton 1y ago
It turns into a specification problem. This, IMHO, is the critical point and why a lot of “deep” development work doesn’t benefit much from the current generation of AI tools. Last week, I was dealing with some temporal data. I often find
30.
by Chris_Newton 1y ago
A compose key is very useful if you’re a typography snob — as many of us who studied mathematics and ended up learning TeX probably are… I haven’t been paying attention to exactly what I’ve typed with it lately, but I habitually use symbols

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