iainctduncan

Almost like some strange new technology is increasing the number of people making low quality projects they want to show off....

Bad assumption. I taught myself to code in the early 2000s while scrapping by earning just above minimum wage in Vancouver, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

So uh, you would be hard pressed to be more wrong. And I used free resources.

From the article "And yet these tools have opened a world of creative potential in software that was previously closed to me, and they feel personally empowering. "

I keep seeing things like this, about "democratization" etc. But coding has been essentially free to learn for about 25 years now, with all the online resources and open source tools anyone can use.

Is this just a huge boon to those too lazy to learn? And what does that mean for later security and tech debt issues?

Anyone have experience with the author's book? I am just getting into this world right now, as it happens, and am working on Art of Prolog, Simply Logical, and the Reasoned Schemer, but other suggestions for resources that are particularly good would be welcome!

You might want to know that Gambit is an open source Scheme implementation that has been around a very long time.

"While the best time to make an RSS feed was 20 years ago, the second best time is now."

I literally laughed out loud. This is so on point, and so is the rest of the article.

Oh man, this is bad advice. So, maybe one manager said it... but having been a CTO/dev manager, I will say that having to deal with people trying to do a job that isn't their job is a royal pain in the ass. I have had to deal with this several times, both as someone on the sidelines and as the manager responsible.

When I was a CTO it ultimately required the talk: "It's MY job to manage dev resources and figure out what levers we push where with our limited money. When you try to do a different job then you got hired for, you screw that all up and set me and the company up for failure. If you don't want to do your job, you need to look for another one"

It definitely didn't make me want to promote those people.

A much better approach is to talk to your manager and skip manager about what great career development looks like to them. And if there is no path and that's what you're after, leave. (Lots of good jobs out there that just don't have this path for perfectly good business reasons, or the funnell is too full.)

Another aspect of this is that a band or label really need to hit a minimum sales quota to justify pressing albums, so people buying vinyl are actually helping them more than they would be by simply donating the profit of a vinyl purchase (which is of course not the retail price of vinyl). Bands want to release, and this helps them do it.

Preordering product – whether books, vinyl, or digital – really, really helps self-funded artists and indy arts business.

Keep it up, kids! :-)

This book is EXCELLENT. I was told by a colleague at one of the big consultancies that it was mandatory reading there.

I have this, it is very well written and thorough. Highly recommend!

This essay is effin' brilliant, and beautifully written.

I'm not Kenyan, but I was raised in a Canadian family of academics, where mastering thoughtful – but slightly archaic – writing was expected of me. I grew up surrounded by books that would now be training material, and who's prose would likely now be flagged as ChatGPT.

Just another reason to hate all this shit.

Right, but if you start off with uuids and the expectation that you might use them to shard, you'll wind up factoring that into the data model. Retrofitting, as you rightly say, can be much harder.

Counterargument... I do technical diligence so I talk to a lot of companies at points of inflection, and I also talk to lots who are stuck.

The ability to rapidly shard everything can be extremely valuable. The difference between "we can shard on a dime" and "sharding will take a bunch of careful work" can be expensive If the company has poor margins, this can be the difference between "can scale easily" and "we're not getting this investment".

I would argue that if your folks have the technical chops to be able to shard while avoiding surrogate guaranteed unique keys, great. But if they don't.... a UUID on every table can be a massive get-out-of-jail free card and for many companies this is much, much important than some minor space and time optimizations on the DB.

Worth thinking about.

Shameless plug: People into this sort of thing might be into my partner's book coming out in April. It's a beautifully written blend of science writing (penguin biology), memoir, and terrifying asides from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Her accounts of the wackiness of living and working out of McMurdo are really fun to read, and include all the orientation and training for which this manual was written (though she was there in 2003). And the history stuff is just hair raising.

One of my favourite lines: "There are many ways to die in Antarctica."

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/796661/where-the-ear...

(That's the Canadian publisher link, but it's coming out at the same time in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and Russia as well, and is on all the major book things as preorder).

No.. that is not the question.

This is a conference purporting to do PEER review. No matter how good the AI, it's not a peer review.

I really doubt they will ne different. In fact I would guess it's even easier for the to change.

Any improvising musician or athlete of a complex sport knows with absolute certainty that language is not necessary for thought. And in fact, we spend years learning to turn off all linguistic thought –it degrades performance.

Hard disagree on the moat. I do tech diligence on "AI startups" regularly and so far have yet to hear of one that has had a hard time ensuring they can use competitors just as easily. Everyone is very aware of that issue, if blissfully ignorant of others.

How long until they are accepting money for what goes in the reply masquerading as fact? I trust this company less than anyone.

thanks!

Curious if anyone has real-world stories/data around Green Tea's pause times....

Thanks for the tip, I just did!

I don't know what it is, but it seems form my slowly blooming collection like the standard of writing in PLT books from that era was just really, really high.

Diode ladder filters are a mainstay of old analogue synths... and sound awesome.

I'ma just leave this bad boy here.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNF891FVC6M

AJH Synth Sonic V Diode Ladder Filter. (IMHO AJH make the best eurorack filters out there..)

This has always seemed intuitively obvious to me. I use a lot of em dashes... because I read a lot. Including a lot of older, academic, or more formally written books. And the amount used in AI prose has never struck me as odd for the same reason. (Ditto for semi colons).

The truth is ... most people don't read much. So it's not too surprising they think it looks weird if all they read is posts on the internet, where the average writer has never even learned how to make one on the keyboard.

Delve on the other hand, that shit looks weird. That is waaay over-represented.

I'm actually with you on that one to be honest.

I personally think a big factor here (i.e., on HN discussions) is that, to programmers, gen-AI seems amazing because we happen to do something it appears to do well and which can be useful if we supervise it. But really, typing up the code has always been the low-skill part of the job! Anyone who's been in the biz 10 years or more knows that that new coders can create code that seems ok but actually creates nightmares long term.

To people who aren't programmers, there isn't really the same kind of easily-verified use case. Most people can't tell at a glance that a business proposal or email is full of errors they need to correct, thus the stuff causes even more damage.

Unfortunately, programmers, as a rule, aren't terribly good at listening to the experiences and perspectives of non-coders, so I don't see this dynamic changing anytime soon.

There is that something now... vanilla js (written seriously) and web components.

I'm never going back to heavy weight spa frameworks. The hidden costs are way too high.

Another thing they do right is build cheap instruments that are actually decent and have high build quality. It is quite remarkable how high quality their "beginner" and "intermediate" line saxophones are.

They are really well respected in professional music circles. I don't like their tenor saxes, but man they made some great altos and sopranos, including the mid tier ones.

I had the same experience for summaries of private things too. They were just shit!