thisoneisreal

7 ms·

31.
by thisoneisreal 9mo ago
I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds like your father was a great man. No need for apologies, I think what you said is very poignant and relevant to the topic at hand. We should all be so lucky to live such full lives.
32.
by thisoneisreal 9mo ago
My take (no more informed than anyone else's) is that the range indicates this is a complex phenomenon that people are still making sense of. My suspicion is that something like the following is going on: 1. LLMs can do some truly impr
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by thisoneisreal 9mo ago
The first part is surely true if you change it to "the hardEST part," (I'm a huge believer in "Programming as Theory Building"), but there are plenty of other hard or just downright tedious/expensive aspects of
34.
by thisoneisreal 9mo ago
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovatio
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by thisoneisreal 9mo ago
I hit the same roadblock unfortunately. My academic references were all in a different field and I hadn't really stayed in contact except with one professor, who sadly has died. I did see that there's an option to use professiona
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by thisoneisreal 10mo ago
The majority of it, yes.
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by thisoneisreal 10mo ago
The best system I ever worked with looked incredibly simple. Small, clear functions. Lots of "set a few variables, run some if statements." Incredibly unassuming, humble code. But it handled 10s of millions of transactions per day
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by thisoneisreal 11mo ago
This was in fact exactly what he cited, that they had adopted a corporate culture at the expense of the university culture he so loved.
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by thisoneisreal 11mo ago
I had the pleasure of working with a handful of Pivots for about 2 years, and I have to say that felt like the closest I ever got to a healthy engineering culture. Delightful people, superb engineers, always focused on working and learning
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I had the same experience and also dropped out after my MA. It's pretty sad. One of my professors told me, "You should have been here in the 70s, you would have loved it."
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I am a contract-drafting Em, The loyalest of lawyers...
42.
by thisoneisreal 1y ago
You didn't ask me, but I can respond as someone with a similar background. I grew up in a religious household. I spent about a decade from ages 18-28 studying philosophy both academically and casually, then entered a technical field an
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I think you're hitting on the fact that there are multiple variables that contribute to "quickness." Having digested a lot of background material is definitely part of it and ties to the higher up posts about e.g. Churchill.
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
A great book in this vein is "Language vs. Reality." The main thesis of the book is that language evolved to support approximate, ad hoc collaboration, and is woefully inadequate for doing the kind of work that e.g. scientists do,
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
This strikes me as a perfect description of the core problem. Whenever I think about this, what sticks out to me is that other animals do all sorts of things that look like "intelligence," or at least cognition, and they do it tot
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
That thought randomly hits me all the time when I'm taking out the trash or whatever and just happen to look up. That and the fact that the Bootes Void and Phoenix A* exist out there.
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
That's why the XP book arranges itself into values, principles, and practices. The best line in the book is about how practices without underlying values are dead, while values without practices are wishy-washy abstractions. What he&#x
48.
by thisoneisreal 1y ago
"Future Shock" by Toffler. It was published in 1970, but the predictions are remarkably accurate and (most of) it could easily have been written today. The core idea is about how the rate of change in industrialized societies is a
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
"The Unaccountability Machine" does a great job summarizing the thought of Stafford Beer, who explained basically exactly what you said as the only viable strategy for designing and managing complex systems.
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I don't know you personally and can't offer individual advice, but there are some general things about our culture and general psychology that might be helpful to people like you dealing with those sorts of feelings (and yes I hav
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
Great reflections. Like Kent Beck said, "Software is a leverage game." Stafford Beer would also agree with you by the way. His whole thing is that the computational complexity of any decently sized organization is mathematically o
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
The point about task variability being normal, and attempts to reduce variability being destructive, is explained exceptionally well in "The Principles of Product Development Flow." Metrics folks want software engineering to have
54.
by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I got hooked in a similar way. Wrote an Excel macro to automate an operational thing I did in my real job, and then asked myself, "Wait, how did that work?"
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
My experience as a self-taught dev too. I managed to get employed as an SE without a real computer science foundation, but then I just kept teaching myself details of networking, operating systems, memory architecture etc. and learned other
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
Strongly recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" if you're interested in exploring this question further. It has a strong bias towards reading but does a very thoughtful comparison of various media. We don't need to con
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I think the dream is that business requirements are contained to one artifact and everything else responds to that driver. In an ideal world, it would be great to have databases care only about persistence and be able to swap them out based
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I think it's both actually, and you're hitting on something I was thinking of while writing that post. I'm reading "The Perfectionists," which is about the invention of precision engineering. It had what I would con
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by thisoneisreal 1y ago
I think this is going to look a lot like the same problem in education, where the answer is that we will have to spend less time consuming written artifacts as a form of evaluation. I think effective code reviews will become more continuous