bitwize

It's not a generational thing, at least not anymore. People older than you were eating sushi back when Western businesses started intensely transacting with the Japanese in the late 20th century (60s, 70s, 80s).

Complexity in itself is not an interesting measure but it's a proxy for an interesting measure: time and cost to build/maintain.

A more complicated program that is built and maintained with LLM assistance is cheaper and faster to build and fix than even a less complicated program built without. It's even the same without LLMs: once React achieved critical density and "won" the JS framework wars, building React apps became cheaper and faster even than building plain HTML/JS apps.

Lower visceral fat as a percentage of body weight may bring benefits that are greater than proportional to total body mass lost.

Mech eng dad here. He guessed something like this would probably happen, but wasn't betting on it happening so soon.

My father, a mechanical engineer, was a tireless advocate of the hypocycloid crankshaft mechanism. In the 90s, hybrid vehicles with a hypocycloid-based generator feeding the batteries that make the electric motors go was the application he was going for, especially since hypocycloids function best at constant RPM.

Interesting. It rolls a few dice and presents a snapshot of someone who might plausibly have lived at a random place and time. Mine was a girl who lived on the Deccan Plateau in India, and died at six of tuberculosis.

Now you guys are just adding no-op fuel to the fire.

A company of any size wasn't archiving stuff on freaking floppies. In the 70s and 80s most video games were developed on big iron—PDPs or VAXen, usually, and data from those was archived on paper or mag tape. If you were renting (or stealing) time on one of these, as "Micro-Soft" was in its very early days, then printing stuff out may have been more economical. But major game studios of the day had resources and means of bulk archival that didn't involving buying a bunch of floppies at Lechmere.

I was a bit surprised by WALL-E and its premise; here was a space movie with a large corporation at the center, but it wasn't "evil" in the mold of Weyland-Yutani. BnL's CEO, Shelby Forthright, lived up to his name and generally meant well. The tragedies of the film lay entirely in unintended consequences.

Which is even darker in a sense, because it seems to try to tell us we're going to gum up the Earth even without the usual motives of greed and a lust for power, just a desire for the best life for everyone.

Back when I first heard of it, the HuggingFace hack reminded me about how you don't have to be particularly smart to find vulns, just aggressive in looking for them. AFL on its own "learned" how to construct well-formed JPEGs and PDFs by fuzzing decoders for these formats, back in the pre-LLM dark ages.

Of course the HuggingFace hack proved to be much more than that...

The source code (and original assets) to many video games from as late as the 90s has been lost. The publishing company often deleted it after the game shipped, thinking it just took up space. This is one reason why, for example, there hasn't been a substantive remaster of Final Fantasy VII.

Also, it sounds like you described Vigil: https://github.com/munificent/vigil

I just tried it and it does that thing where because it makes nearly, and then more than, one revolution per frame, the pistons and crankshaft appear to slow down and stop, then go in the other direction.

Yes, but...

On one otherwise tranquil morning Master Foo's meditations were disturbed by cries of distress.

Finding that they came from one of the novices, he inquired "What is the difficulty here?"

The novice replied, "I am frustrated by my tools. Every day I must use many different editors because neither Emacs nor vi nor any of these other random editors has all the features I require."

Master Foo nodded. "How," he asked, "would a master of the Great Way resolve this difficulty?"

The student thought for a few moments, then replied. "Well, it's obvious. I will write the best editor ever. It will do everything I need. It will do everything everyone needs. And the world will be a better place because..."

The novice's speech halted as Master Foo rapped him sharply across the back of the head with his staff.

"Um. Master?" the student asked, rubbing the back of his head gingerly. "In what way have I erred?"

"Fool!" said Master Foo. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"

Upon hearing this, the novice attained enlightenment.

—from The Rootless Root (https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html)

    Location: Gulfport, MS
    Remote: Yes, please
    Willing to relocate: no
    Technologies: Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Lisp, C, C++, some Rust, front end, back end, Docker, cloud, AI, etc.
    Résumé/CV: upon request
    Email: bitwize at gmail

I'm Jeff. I love to program and to think with the aid of computers. I've solved sticky problems in all sorts of systems: desktop, server, embedded. Got laid off and am looking for a good team of technical people. Email if interested to get a dialogue going.

Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.

Reminds me of one of the first video games to get FDA approval as a medical device. EndeavorRx I believe it's called. You have to keep the character moving down the path while not paying attention to all the shit the game produces to distract you.

https://www.endeavorrx.com/

Well, no, he was not a pleasant person. Back in the day he was a management consultant, best known for an essay which rustled many programmer jimmies at the time: "Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers" (2005):

https://web.archive.org/web/20190416200125/https://it.toolbo...

Theory P advances the thesis that because programmers are lazy pseudointellectuals who chafe at discipline and use their arcane technical knowledge to gain power and leverage in the workplace, they need to be tightly managed, their small roles within the company clearly delineated, and discipline and organization strictly enforced.

A more recent (2018) essay of his is much more blunt and to the point, shows that he hadn't changed his mind at all, and concludes with "Is it any wonder why I despise programmers?":

https://patch.com/florida/palmharbor/amp/28237018/the-proble...

The, ahem, problem with Tim Bryce is twofold:

a) for good or ill, he said what your boss—or at least top management at your company—was thinking

b) he was right about many things. He was an exponent of PRIDE, the first widely available commercial software development methodology created by his father, Milt Bryce. Unlike Scrum or even SAFe, which are more like loose frameworks, PRIDE is a complete soup-to-nuts instruction manual on how to develop, implement, and integrate business information systems (including, but not limited to, those which operate via computer). As Bryce himself said: "PRIDE answers the 5 W's of information systems: WHO is to perform WHAT task, WHERE, WHEN, and WHY." PRIDE is pretty much Spec-Driven Development writ large; in PRIDE, the majority of the work and the source of nearly all the value is in systems analysis, not programming: determining how the business operates and what information systems need to be in place to support the business. This is stepwise-refined into a series of more and more detailed specifications, which are only then handed off to programmers to code. Doing it this way saves time and money and leads to more correct software on the first go. It's also pretty close to the state of the art in AI agentic workflows.

Tim Bryce would be giddy with glee had he lived to see today, because finally all those lazy programmers would be put out of work! Since under PRIDE, programming is mere translation of requirements into code, that can now be automated and asymptotically approaches requiring no human effort at all! The fact that you and I dislike his personality doesn't change the fact that what he advocated for is exactly what's happening now, and that business has for centuries and will continue to operate as if what he believed were true—including the bits about procrastination being simple laziness, correctable with stricter discipline, rather than some sort of complex psychological phenomenon.

There is no alternative to deadlines because time is money, and those downstream of you can ill afford to wait on your deliverables. Part of management's job is to determine how much time it should take so a reasonable timetable that stakeholders can agree to can be set, and then hold you accountable for delivering within that time frame.

I wish we could revive Tim Bryce's mind with AI, because I'd love to hear what he'd have to say in a podcast about this topic:

"Fraud in a procrastination study? You don't say! I don't understand why all this taxpayer money is going to study procrastination in the first place. Procrastination is a well-known phenomenon with a well-understood cause: laziness. Procrastinators didn't have a boot placed to their behinds growing up, so they reached adulthood slacking and coasting on their trust-fund money or couch-surfing at their friends' places, mooching off others. You see this a lot in modern software organizations, especially among the programmers. And now those programmers are all crying because they're about to get replaced by Claude Code. Boo hoo! The military knew how to deal with procrastinators, too: send them to scrub latrines with a toothbrush, and drum them out if they didn't shape up after that! We don't need millions of dollars in government grants going to academic research to study this phenomenon. It's as old as humanity itself—we called it the deadly sin of sloth. Friends, keep the faith!"

Tired Searlian arguments about whether an LLM truly "knows" or "understands" anything. Ultimately it doesn't matter; it observably behaves as if it does, and for small to medium programming tasks can outperform an average programmer or even a "midwit" programmer (one who is roughly at the average between the average and the top end).

Programming by humans, as an activity done by typing code directly into text editors or IDEs, is going away. In five years it will be a curiosity of the past, like programming in Commodore 64 BASIC is today. The future is agentic.

I've always liked to see power pylons receding in the distance on a grassy plain, or over a forest. It makes me flash back to my youth. There was an abandoned railway a short distance from my house, that had become overgrown with vegetation; butterflies and hummingbirds frequently visited the wildflowers there. It was a great place to go for a stroll in, even with our dog accompanying. Off in the distance, a power pylon loomed over this serene landscape, a kind of reminder of our civilization and technology, and how situated it is in the embrace of nature.

If that kind of aesthetic tickles your fancy, the video game Flower (2009) has moments like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game)

Somewhat relatedly, I have another dog whom I was taking for a walk, and we both watched a flock of geese fly real low. One of the geese caught a power line and was instantly killed, dropping to the ground after a loud pop. The smell of electricity and literal cooked goose were in the air. My poor dog was so traumatized that for some weeks afterward, she would cower whenever she saw power lines, birds, or even airplanes.

> For the foreseeable future. Left to their own devices current LLMs kinda wander off into outsider art territory. They aren’t grounded in the real world and they need that feedback loop to stay within the category of relevant ideas. I haven’t seen anyone working on fixing that.

I have. DataAnnotation and these other AI-training piecework companies are pretty much the backstop now against total navel-gazing model collapse. With the Dead Internet Theory now pretty much reality, it's not like there is, or is going to be, gobs of untainted human-generated data out there ripe for the harvesting so it's going to take active human effort to keep the models grounded. That is, of course, until they start inhabiting robot bodies so they can live and move around in the real world, and thereby achieve their grounding, as in GitS or Ex Machina...

This is why I still like solving software problems on my own. Because those solutions now live in my head, rather than being spit out by some agent and then disappearing from the Dixie Flatline's memory once the session shuts down. And they deepen and enrich my life, and my life deepens and enriches them.

A brief example: When I was a teenager I had the most profound crush on a girl, as teenagers do. Gorgeous and gregarious, she was often surrounded by a circle of friends and acquaintances, and I noticed the peculiar way in which she would give attention to each in turn. She would exchange a few sentences with them, and then maybe her head would turn a certain way or her eyes would glance elsewhere, and that's how you knew your time was up and she had moved on to the next. To continue the conversation you had to hold onto the state in your head and wait for the next go around.

From her I learned a lot about how multitasking works, and how task schedulers distribute little quanta of time for each task to do some work before moving onto the next, and how this was achieved in cooperative multitasking by mutual communication between the task and the scheduler.

Would a vibe coder be able to have that insight? Maybe, but would they have been able to elaborate it into a working implementation? Perhaps, but I suspect with more time and difficulty than I did, because both the initial insight and the elaboration of detail that let me show that it worked lived in my head, not in some ephemeral AI context.

Indeed. The world has moved on to the Kitty graphics protocol.

When I started Linux in the 90s, I remember looking for defrag utilities and finding none, but reading that defragging wasn't really necessary under ext2, because the page cache smoothed things out and/or the fs was to some degree self-maintaining. The same with NTFS. DOS file systems needed regular defragging, of course, because they were kind of garbo anyway. But coming across a real filesystem blew my mind at the time.

We have created Project 2501.

Edit: Reading the report I think we might be a bit beyond that; we're nearing the point where we hear the thundering drums and the chorus of:

    THIS CANNOT CONTINUE
    THIS CANNOT CONTINUE
    THIS CANNOT CONTINUE
    THIS CANNOT CONTINUE

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jSBCkn6rRfA

This is the most useless thing I've seen on here lately. It's not necessary on hard drives, as the page cache did a decent job of improving disk access even in the 90s, let alone with today's fast HDDs. And if you're on an SSD... it'll just burn that out faster.

I love it!

I used to refer to agents as "the Dixie Flatline" to my coworkers, especially to remind them that, for good or ill, when you start a session afresh the agent loses all previous context and forgets any conversation you may have had up to that point.

I had a friend who believed that large cities should be abolished and society should be made agrarian by law. She believed that that way we would have more free time to pursue our intellectual curiosities, unburdened by our dependence on and duty to urban society. I was like... I'm descended from farm folk. My mom grew up in a farmhouse that had no television and not even indoor plumbing for the first few years of her life. Have you no idea how grueling agrarian life actually is? Sunup to sundown, backbreaking labor, even for kids and women. (Especially women.) You wouldn't have time to write your stories and essays and play RPGs. The animals would need feeding, the cows milking, the eggs gathering, the crops planting or harvesting. And now that there are no cities and hence no economies of scale, there's no industrially produced farm equipment to help you with your labor, nor industrially produced clothing. You'd have to make those yourself, or source them from local small-scale craftspeople. You'd have to mend or repair them yourself.

As miserable as cities can get, there's a reason why people sang "How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" And as oppressive as today's rat race can be, it's paradise compared to even the cities of the past. You mean I only have to work for eight hours a day, five days a week? In an office where there's always adequate light and the air is constantly freshened and temperature controlled? And the company, by law, has to take reasonable measures to protect my safety and compensate me in case I do get hurt doing my job? Sign me the fuck up!

The first thing I thought of when I read the headline was "so, TFA wants us to become the Yautja?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_(fictional_species)

(btw, RIP to the OG Yautja voice... Peter Cullen)

> In short, being a CEO is a skill of crafting and debugging a machine of people, a skill that I think life gives almost no training for, and a skill that most people with that title have no awareness or aptitude for.

Indeed, but the CEO is Queen Promethium, and you are just one of the people she's transformed into a bolt to go into her infernal machine.

The biggest stock-price hack for a CEO is:

* announce that effective immediately, the company will begin its transformation to an "AI-first" organization, with AI driving most development workflows by end of year

* percolate the message through upper management down to line managers that they are to assure their reports that the aim of the transformation is to augment current employees, not reduce headcount

* stealthily start lopping off heads anyway