novembermike

6 ms·

1.
by novembermike 1y ago
I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What scares me is non-technical people just vi
2.
by novembermike 1y ago
Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential in the real world is logistic.
3.
by novembermike 3y ago
Yeah, these things are all part of being a team of 1x engineers rather than a team of .5x engineers. If you have a single 10x (and I've worked with some) then it's not important but those guys have their own issues.
4.
by novembermike 3y ago
This clearly falls into "fraud waiting to happen" rather than "minimal risk" though. It's fairly simple to treat Amazon as the actual seller and just hold them liable if there is false advertising. There's a di
5.
by novembermike 4y ago
Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares abo
6.
by novembermike 4y ago
European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.
7.
by novembermike 5y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that "expert on team's codebase" is a form of career growth. Not always the best or most prestigious kind but it's enough that the company finds you valuable and worth paying more.
8.
by novembermike 5y ago
One thing to remember here is that a senior dev might be at the beginner stage for org wide changes.
9.
by novembermike 5y ago
It feels like half the usage of inheritance is also just workarounds for mocking things in unit tests or being able to access things that are private/protected. Everything ends up with an interface and an impl just because of silly lan
10.
by novembermike 5y ago
The argument I've heard for T-shirt sizes is that if you go to numbers people try to add them together when that's just not how it works. I do agree that T-shirt sizes don't work that well though.
11.
by novembermike 5y ago
The issue is that the current direction that big data is going doesn't do much to help planned economies like that. The big issue is really calculating preferences, which a market economy does through prices. If you don't have pri
12.
by novembermike 6y ago
Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not realistic at a population level and you should not promo
13.
by novembermike 6y ago
How so? If they turned out to be amazing then I would have considered an offer, I just didn't go into it expecting to accept anything.
14.
by novembermike 6y ago
Yep. Last time I interviewed I did one interview at a random place I didn't care about just to get rid of jitters, one at a mid-tier place I'd actually accept if I didn't get another offer and then two at FANG companies. I ea
15.
by novembermike 6y ago
Keep in mind that the research around this is very poor. It's in the realm of things where flipping a coin might be better.
16.
by novembermike 6y ago
Social services are not socialism. Socialism is about the workers owning the means of production. Social services are something that goes back to basically the dawn of human society (Roman bread and circuses are a classic example).
17.
by novembermike 6y ago
This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.
18.
by novembermike 6y ago
TDD is more of a Java thing and it has a lot to do with the lack of a good type system in Java. TDD essentially lets you create a class that encapsulates a type and then enforce the contract for that type through the tests. Modern type syst
19.
by novembermike 6y ago
Eh, it's a useful proxy. 1000 lines a day isn't better than 100 lines a day but both tell you that it's being actively worked on.
20.
by novembermike 6y ago
It really isn't. Most of the code is probably going to be uninteresting and you can do 10 lines a minute or more. Some of the code will be more relevant and might take a day for 10 lines. This would just be checking for accuracy though
21.
by novembermike 6y ago
In something like typescript you could represent this as a union type. If I'm expecting a location I could take a string ("Baghdad"), lat long pairs, an enum, etc. With a union type I can specify that it could be any of these
22.
by novembermike 6y ago
Most of what you're talking about isn't that important. People don't pay you to be smart, they pay you to build things that will make them money. Interview culture is only tangentially related to this so it can be a bit weird
23.
by novembermike 6y ago
Restrictions are usually on specific modes (ie. no violence, obscenity, etc) rather than the content of the speech. Most of the current attempts to restrict speech focus on contents.
24.
by novembermike 7y ago
The issue is that "DRY" isn't actually about coupling at all, it's about creating unambiguous ways to do things. If you have a single http library that's DRY, but if you've got a function that encapsulates seve
25.
by novembermike 7y ago
Yeah, I'll probably be switching to a Surface Book. I don't mind spending for a premium laptop but I care about it feeling good to use and I just don't like the newer Macbooks.
26.
by novembermike 7y ago
If you're in California you could probably drive to a desert, mountain, forest or urban area in less than a day.
27.
by novembermike 7y ago
The rifling has generally gotten more extreme. IIRC Stoner wanted 1:14 and the army went to 1:12, but the modern rifles are moving to a 1:7 twist rate. The ammo is different, it's heavier and does better at low velocity so the twist ra
28.
by novembermike 8y ago
Sure, but that's just a logic error. If you switch it around so we know that Bob is a murderer, then we can say that he's probably a man (and that's actually right).
29.
by novembermike 8y ago
This is misquoted quite a bit. Here's the actual quote. "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a
30.
by novembermike 8y ago
I think you can usually say if something will take hours, days, weeks, months or years. Anything more detailed runs into problems.

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