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you missed (not a complete list): the TSA travelling over to your country to give to their "was it as good for you as it was for me" inspection on your home soil, the non stop 16h conversation between two strangers right behind you, 45min of bus ride following the 30min of taxi, followed by catching an uber between the international and domestic terminals, carry-on luggage overhead tetris, people somehow coming on the plane with 4 or 5 large pieces of carry-on, the "can you swap seats with me and my middle seat because my partner/child is next to you" tap on the shoulder, the "Missed The Tight Connection" walk of shame, the overnight in a cheap hotel miles out of town because it was the airlines fault, the body odour buddy, the snorer, the last minute departure gate change, the 2h on the tarmac at ATL due to thunder storms, and the ironic applause when a nervous pilot puts you all down rather bumpily.

oh god, so many hacks, so many hacks

::facepalm emoji::

Been saying it for years. Basic probability theory should be taught in schools, it's a strong tool for understanding the world around you.

"Their old testing tool, Enzyme, had fallen out of active maintenance and was becoming a blocker to modernizing Asana’s frontend stack"

Non prod code, good use case.

Well sure, and lots of things that used to be luxury items are now normal. The wheel turns.

"My one walled garden won't let my other walled garden in."

Yeah, not much to see here. Each of the activists named likely had a similar "dossier" on MSG and the Dolan guy. Knowledge workers are going to practise knowledge management. People use to do this with a Rolodex.

Much as I liked the books, enjoyed the most recent movies, big fan of Herbert; lining up the Pandora books to reread next. Etc.... people tend to read too much into his world building. Mostly he was just looking for backstory to lightly justify the story he wanted to tell. Pretty much none of the world building holds up to more than a passing scrutiny, and the Butlerian Jihad is no exception. Better to just enjoy the tales for what they are.

TFA has a point that it should never have happened, and that CF software engineering practices are likely to blame.

But a BCNF (or 5NF or whatever) database without nullable columns wouldn't have prevented it. Formally verified code might have but that remains a pipe dream for any significant code base.

The proposed cure is worse than the disease.

Haunting images. Plenty of blind spots today that might be looked back on similarly.

Yup, we've all been cornered at a party by that dude, the one who has all these great contrarian ideas he got from reading books. And listening to podcasts. And reading blog posts like this one.

Yeah, MPESA was and is still an incredible product. A real lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Even if they've struggled to replicate that success in other geos, the original vision and execution back in the 200x's is a textbook case that bears study.

The npm ecosystem's approach to supply chain security is criminally negligent. For the critical infrastructure that underpins the largest attack surface on the Internet you would think that this stuff would be priority zero. But nope, it's failing in ways that are predictable and were indeed predicted years ago. I'm not closely involved enough with the npm community to suggest what the next steps should be but something has to change, and soon.

> we’ve eliminated resilience wherever we could, because it’s more cost-effective. Resilience is expensive.

You are right. But alas, a peek at the AMZN stock ticker suggests that the market doesn't really value resilience that much.

Echoing a lot of users ITT, Windows has been good to me but the enshittification has reached what feels like the end point.

Windows value to me was "everything just worked". But that's no longer the case now, unless you are willing to walk down Microsoft's centralized rails. Need an MS Account and OneDrive... need expensive modern hardware... get ads and crapware... get telemetry and data exfiltration. The effort of working around all that is non trivial. EDIT: and if I was ok with all that stuff I'd already by captured by Apple.

If I have to fuck around with something in my home OS, that OS might as well be Linux. So now I am compiling wifi and printer drivers from github (FFS Linux!) instead of disabling telemetry and hacking an install with local accounts only.

The challenge, as always, is going to be taking the family with me.

Sounds about right.

These kids have been on camera since they were in the womb. The delivery had a pro videographer. Parents had baby monitors with a video feed, later a nanny cam. Schools had cameras in the classrooms and busses from before first grade. Higher grades onwards all their peers had smartphones and social media accounts.

Some middle aged dude who doesn't want to be on video makes no sense to them, like that weird uncle of yours who in 2010 had no phone or email address.

TFA doesn't make it clear to me how the line is drawn from "bunch of mates playing a pro-sports seasonal drafting game and spice it up with a buy-in pot" to "you sit alone in front of an online skinner box and lose money on opaque spot wagers on ongoing pro sports events".

One thing is very different from the other.

>> ...summarize these rules into one sentence, it’d be: >> Prefer global UI consistency over local optimizations.

I weep for our field, because this should be true beyond the confines of each app.

Instead even on the desktop we have hoards of local "optimisations" - one in each bloated Electron POS.

There's a place for novelty UI - entertainment.

Productivity should have no place for it.

I did wonder about that. Maybe yeah. It's likely that several no-better forks would have sprung up right away.

i would contend that they are no worse than the original teams, who also clearly didn't care. their motivations may have been growth rather than AI training data but the outcomes were the same

It's a stretch to pin blame on Microsoft. They're probably the reason the service is still up at all (TFA admits as much). In hindsight it's likely that all they wanted from the purchase was AI training material. At worst they're guilty of apathy, but that's no worse than the majority of npm ecosystem participants.

Sure, SOAP was often awful, I agree with that. But I can't see any angle where one can credibly assert that a SOAP XML payload isn't equivalent to a REST JSON payload in terms of the operation of a receiving application. Both are a chunk of structured information, your application parses it and operates on the resulting data structures.

Maybe it's just me but I find the complaint confusing and the suggested remedy absent in TFA, despite reading it twice.

Data comes from outside your application code. Your algorithms operate on the data. A complaint like "There isn’t (yet?) a format for just any kind of data in .class files" is bizarre. Maybe my problem is with his hijacking of the terms 'data' and 'object' to mean specific types of data structures that he wants to discuss.

"There is no sensible way to represent tree-like data in that [RDBMS] environment" - there is endless literature covering storing data structures in relational schemas. The complaint seems to be to just be "it's complicated".

Calling a JSON payload "actual data" but a SOAP payload somehow not is odd. Again the complaint seems to be "SOAP is hard because schemas and ws-security".

Statements like "I don’t think we have any actually good programming languages" don't lend much credibility and are the sort of thing I last heard in first year programming labs.

I'm very much about "Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around" and I think the author is starting there too, but I guess he's just gone off in a different direction to me.

Do you still need an add-on library to use more than one core?

As others have kind of pointed out, using "outside our DC" processing for corporate data is a non-starter for many companies.

These companies are left to choose between self-hosting models, or a vendor like MS who will rent them "their own AI running in their own Azure subscription", cut off from the outside world.

Only vibe-coding influencers were ever talking about 10x multipliers.

Internally we expected 15%-25%. A big-3 consultancy told senior leadership "35%-50%" (and then tried to upsell an AI Adoption project). And indeed we are seeing 15%-35% depending on which part of the org you look and how you measure the gains.

Nah, this lays out what everyone knows going in and leaves out what you really need to know as a newby.

Budget. Getting some for your team or at least for your priorities. Protecting what you get. Capex vs Opex.

Upward management. Translating messages upwards. Interpreting C suite decrees. Pacing and leading. Inducting new leadership before they fuck things up.

Retention. Keeping the people you need on your team. Cutting the people you don't. Compensation and promotions.

All of which is to say, Politics. How to not come out a loser at the game of thrones next time there is a merger, reorg, budget season, or just end of quarter.

The author puts the BLUF: "The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication."

They're not wrong, but they're missing the point. These bottlenecks can be reduced when there are fewer humans involved.

Somewhat cynically:

code reviews: now sometimes there's just one person involved (reviewing LLM code) instead of two (code author + reviewer)

knowledge transfer: fewer people involved means this is less of an overhead

debugging: no change, yet

coordination and communication: fewer people means less overhead

LLMs shift the workload — they don’t remove it: sure, but shifting workload onto automation reduces the people involved

Understanding code is still the hard part: not much change, yet

Teams still rely on trust and shared context: much easier when there are fewer people involved

... and so on.

"Fewer humans involved" remains a high priority goal for a lot of employers. You can never forget that.

Devereaux's objection is that Scott is to some extent trading off a reputation for making "historically accurate" movies. As TFA points out, on a "historical accuracy scale" Gladiator gets about a 2/10. So in that sense it's false advertising.

Yeah it's an issue for new devs for sure. TFA even makes the point, "A lot of people felt refreshed by having better transferable skills to the industry. Our onboarding times were slashed by half".