dkarl

I worked on a product that had to integrate with Salesforce because virtually all of our customers used it. It must have been a terrible match for their domain, because they had all integrated differently, and all the integrations were bad. There was virtually no consistency from one customer to next in how they used the Salesforce data model. Considering all of these customers were in the same industry and had 90% overlapping data models, I gave up trying to imagine how any of them benefited from it. Each one must have had to pay separately for bespoke integrations to third-party tools (as they did with us) because there was no commonality from one to the next.

One thing that's interesting is that their original Salesforce implementations were so badly done that I could imagine them being done with an LLM. The evergreen stream of work that requires human precision (so far, anyway) is all of the integration work that comes afterwards.

To me that sounds like philosophers not being willing to lower themselves to meet people where they are.

There are plenty of professionals who don't let arbitrary standards of rigor get in the way of communicating with people. For medicine, there's an entire subspecialty of public health professionals who specialize in crafting communication for broad audiences. They don't target only the people who are capable of processing communications of a certain rigor, and they don't retire their specialty because advertisers will always have the upper hand.

Not to mention that many fields are taught as school subjects, so they have to be presented to literal children. Of course the school curricula of history, literature, and science are taught with naivete and lacunae that would be travesties if judged by professional standards, but historians aren't calling for teachers to stop teaching a dumbed down version history to children. They accept the necessity of it and debate how best to do it.

> Time needs to pass before anybody is willing to go "actually, this is worth analyzing".

I think that's exactly the problem: the assumption that philosophers should assume, by default, that self-help is unworthy of their time, and only pay attention to the rare cases that happen to have philosophical merit.

They could take a more active interest to questions such as, how can philosophy improve self-help literature? What kinds of ideas should ordinary people with low to average education consume? The wide array of values, goals, and philosophical approaches would make it a contentious and lively conversation.

But philosophers tend to vacate the field and leave it to mercenaries, culture warriors, and amateurs. When they do speak about it, it tends to be in symposiums or on podcasts aimed at college-educated people with a special interest in philosophy. That's as far down as they're willing to dumb it.

Most philosophers would not agree that yielding questions instead of answers makes philosophy unhelpful, nor that the happiest life is necessarily the one in which pain is most successfully avoided.

The latter can be applicable to the former. Traditionally the connection was acknowledged, with Socrates the prototype of the philosopher who believed that happiness, ethical living, and philosophy were inextricably linked. Obviously philosophy has come a long way since Socrates, but academic philosophers continue to give lip service to the idea that philosophy can be valuable in everyday living, if not in ethics then in processing information, critiquing arguments, and understanding the origins and limitations of ideas.

In the west, we've had a long, deep split between what ordinary people rely on (religion and self-help) and respectable academic philosophy. Philosophy rooted in religion has a strict requirement to scale down to serve masses of people. Philosophy rooted in academia has a strict requirement to scale up to allow practitioners to flex their elite skills and show that they are worthy of scarce academic positions. Academic philosophers pay lip service to the idea that philosophy can and should be for everyone, but in practice, they shy away from anything that could compromise their primary pursuit of a career and academic prestige.

As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.

The more often it happens, the more practice you get at delivering the bad news, and the quicker Mike learns to live up to the team's technical standards?

I've received questions like this from very good, very reasonable, very technically carefully managers. What happens is, Mike complains and tries to throw you under the bus, and the manager reaches out to hear your side of it. You tell them Mike is trying to ship code with a bunch of issues and no tests, and they go back to Mike and tell him that he's the problem and he needs to meet the technical standards enforced by the rest of the team.

Just because management asks doesn't mean they're siding with Mike.

I have no idea what AI changes about this scenario. It's the same scenario as when Mike did this with 1600 lines of his own code ten years ago; it just happens more often, since Mike comes up with 1600 lines of code in a day instead of in a sprint.

> I don’t blame Mike, I blame the system that forced him to do this.

Bending over backwards not to be the meanie is pointless. You're trying to stop him because the system doesn't really reward this kind of behavior, and you'll do Mike a favor if you help him understand that.

It sounds like you're saying the only thing ugly about tagging is when it contains objectionable political content. That's not really responding to the complaint here, which is that the vast majority of it is low effort, low quality tagging that makes things aesthetically uglier. It's easy to go out with a collector's eye, cherry-pick the good stuff, and put together a slideshow that makes it look like a public amenity, but that ignores the overall effect of wall after building after block of proof of Sturgeon's Law.

Is it ignorable? Does all the terrible stuff just disappear into the background, or should we care about how it affects the experiences of people who have to live with it and walk past it every day? I think that's the question people are arguing.

In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.

Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.

Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.

WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.

> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying

I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.

If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.

I'm not on Twitter, but I know a lot of the content I see comes indirectly from Twitter. For example, for soccer news, I follow a number of fans and journalists on BlueSky, but they follow journalists, agents, and official team and league accounts on Twitter, as well as players and players' wives and girlfriends on Instagram. As much as I'd love for them to die and won't touch them myself, it's clear that a lot of the information I get originates on X and Meta platforms.

Having different sites dedicated to different kinds of topics helps me partition my time and energy. Otherwise it would all go to the most emotionally salient content. I get that your current choice is to go all-in on the current political crisis in the U.S., but that isn't desirable or healthy for everybody. There are plenty of sites that can help you with that, and people who aren't well-served by that also need places to go. I use HN for professionally relevant content and tech-related diversions. I'll check in on politics elsewhere.

I don't think online engagement correlates much with political effectiveness, btw. Not that I think I'm more politically effective than the average person, but I know that being more engaged online doesn't make me more so.

> Can people keep a good mental model of the repo without writing code?

This is the age-old problem of legacy codebases. The intentions and understanding of the original authors (the "theory of the program"[0]) are incredibly valuable, and codebases have always started to decline and gain unnecessary complexity when those intentions are lost.

Now every codebase is a legacy codebase. It remains to be seen if AI will be better at understanding the intentions behind another AI's creation than humans are at understanding the work of other humans.

Anyway, reading and correcting AI code is a huge part of my job now. I hate it, but I accept it. I have to read every line of code to catch crazy things like a function replicated from a library that the project already uses, randomly added to the end of a code file. Errors that get swallowed. Tautological tests. "You're right!" says the AI, over and over again. And in the end I'm responsible as the author, the person who supposedly understands it, even though I don't have the advantage of having written it.

[0] Programming as Theory Building, Peter Naur. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

That was true of me as well, and at the same time, I was working alongside parents who worked 7:30-5:30 with a break to pick up the kids from school.

Nobody wants a "visit" from the founder, anyway. They want timely two-way flow of information, access and guidance on the occasions when they need it, and maybe (maybe) an occasional chance to hang out socially as a group with no reference to work. Nobody wants the founder randomly dropping by during work hours to assess morale.

I don't think it's possible to want to troll about those things without at least somewhat believing them. To troll about them at the expense of your career and reputation takes a deeper belief that goes beyond trolling.

I suspect that having a family and knowing that blowback from your behavior will affect them is a moderating factor for a lot of people.

I take the "premium" experience of Apple hardware for granted, and if I wanted to buy a Windows laptop, I'd have no idea which brands make similar quality laptops for Windows. I'm shocked at the Windows laptops I see in the wild.

Is that what Microsoft Surface laptops are? Did Microsoft get in the game themselves to make sure a premium-quality laptop is available for Windows?

I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.

It feels obvious that that's where the term originated, but I've never seen it used as a definition. In a mathematical context, something is enumerable if it can be put into 1:1 correspondence with the integers, but it doesn't need to be defined by a canonical correspondence. This suggests that being a finite (in a programming context where the set of ints is finite) set of discrete values is the defining feature, not the representation.

> I don't like the term "enums" because of the overloading between simple integers that indicate something (the older, more traditional meaning)

I disagree with this. I'm old as hell, and I learned programming in a context where enums were always ints, but I remember being introduced to int enums as "we're going to use ints to represent the values of our enum," not "enums are when you use ints to represent a set of values." From the very beginning of my acquaintance with enums, long before I encountered a language that offered any other implementation of them, it was clear that enums were a concept independent of ints, and ints just happened to be an efficient way of representing them.

I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.

The public health discourse about protein is in a weird place right now. The recommendations are higher than ever, yet people are constantly told not to think about protein, or to worry about excess protein intake instead.

Case in point: the Mayo Clinic article titled "Are you getting enough protein?"[0]

It claims that protein is only a concern for people who are undereating or on weight loss drugs, yet it cites protein recommendations that many people find challenging to meet (1.1g/kg for active people, more if you're over 40 or doing strength or endurance workouts.) To top it off, it's illustrated with a handful of nuts, which are pretty marginal sources of protein. It's bizarrely mixed messaging.

[0] https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speak...

Different libraries composing well together is the default assumption in most of software development. Only in Javascript have people given up on that and accepted that libraries don't work together unless they've been specifically designed, or at least given a compatibility layer, for the framework they're being used in.

> I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM

It's not the whole community, not by a long shot. Don't judge Scala by the Scala subreddit.

Most new things you'll see written about Scala are about solving difficult problems with types, because those problems are inexhaustible and some people enjoy them, for one reason or another. Honestly I think this shows how easy and ergonomic everything else is with Scala, that the difficulties people write about are all about deep type magic and how to handle errors in monadic code. You can always avoid that stuff when it isn't worth it to you.

The type poindexters will tell you that you're giving up all the benefit of Scala the moment you accept any impurity or step back from the challenge of solving everything with types, and you might as well write Java instead, but they're just being jerks and gatekeepers. Scala is a wonderful language, and Scala-as-a-better-Java is a huge step up from Java for writing simple and readable code. It lets you enjoy the lowest hanging fruit of functional programming, the cases where simple functional code outshines OO-heavy imperative code, in a way that Java doesn't and probably never will.

That looks very interesting. The code samples look like very simple OO/imperative style code like Python. At first glance it's weird to me how much common functionality relies on macros, but it seems like that's an intentional part of the language design that users don't mind? I might give it a try.

I always assumed a runtime specialized for highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, long-running processes would have a noticeable startup penalty, which is one of the things that bothers me about Python. Is that something you notice with Gleam?

I'd love to replace Python with something simple, expressive, and strongly typed that compiles to native code. I have a habit of building little CLI tools as conveniences for working with internal APIs, and you wouldn't think you could tell a performance difference between Go and Python for something like that, but you can. After a year or so of writing these tools in Go, I went back to Python because the LOC difference is stark, but every time I run one of them I wish it was written in Go.

(OCaml is probably what I'm looking for, but I'm having a hard time getting motivated to tackle it, because I dread dealing with the tooling and dependency management of a 20th century language from academia.)

I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest.

Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.

Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.