I suppose when I say, "It's not like its their fault", I'm more saying that expressing any frustration you feel towards an imagined AI personhood is wasted effort.
I think that's a totally fair perspective. I guess what I'm more saying is that we should, like this paper seems to suggest as pointed out by verdverm in another comment in this thread, avoid angry or denigrating language as it activates parts of the model we don't find useful.
In response to "There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity.", I posit the following based on my experience:
Understanding and managing complexity is one of the first steps required in order to eliminate complexity. Some of the greatest achievements in my software development career have been instances where I carefully pulled apart inscruitable solutions, often short-term and built in desperation, and re-constituted them into well tested and much less complex solutions which were more understandable by devs and users.
I agree with most of Chris' observations and enjoyed reading his insights. Makes me want to do the same!
Fast Matrix Multiplication is also useful for physics and other simulations, so I'm sure someone will make some SDKs or something for such AI hardware beyond just the scope of AI.
This was a lot of fun. Reminded me of one of the earliest C programs I wrote when I was learning to code on Win98, before I really knew how computers worked. I was curious: "What does the rest of RAM look like?"
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
for (int x = 0;;x++) {
putc(*(char*)x);
}
return 0;
}
I was mezmerized by the strings from the uncompressed BIOS ROM being dumped back at me, "American Megatrends".. etc. Eventually this process crashes of course, when it runs past the end of mapped memory locations.
As far as games and music are concerned, my needs are fulfilled by Steam and Spotify. I have basically just stopped consuming TV-style content because I just don't care enough about it to pay the price or pirate.
I think your definition of a project is too prescriptive, and is derived from the business world. A project need not be defined by a clear scope or deadlines, it is simply an extended effort to achieve a goal. Often times, the first step of a project is to figure out the scope, or for creative endeavors the scope is often intentionally left undefined.
I like sharing ideas with someone while we're both coding together. I think "pair programming" works a lot better when two people sit down and work together on different parts of the same problem.
Example: Alice is building the front-end for a product search page. Bob is building the product search APIs on the back-end. Alice and Bob working together can share immediate feedback on each other's designs and implementations, and work out any tiny ambiguities that weren't covered by whatever specification they previously agreed on.
I think some of the best software dev experiences in my career have come from this style of collaboration.
I wouldn't touch software development with a ten foot pole if it wasn't fun. It's fine to enforce a code style in your own projects, but proselytizing them truth from on high is a bit presumptuous.
Commenting about the cringe-worthiness of the tone: I noticed early on in my career that folks seem to be extremely polar in their idea of "right" and "wrong" choices when it comes to software. This crystallization is self-fulfilling, as the bombastic tone dissuades softer voices from expressing dissenting opinions or new ideas. Sometimes there are scientifically proven "right" ways to do things, i.e. comparing the computational or space efficiency of different algorithms. When it comes down to code style and API design though, what really matters is self-consistency and clarity. Much of the rest is down to preference and personal expression.
Being able to read and understand other people's code is a tremendous skill. Passing technical interviews is a skill in and of itself. Everyone has room to grow, and even the most experienced software engineers have gaps in their knowledge. Seek honest feedback from your peers, explore data structures, "Big O", and software design patterns (OOP isn't the end-all-be-all), and watch yourself grow. Most of all, believe in yourself, keep coding and making things happen.
It always icks me out when people recommend this. Like with `get-pip.py`... It's fine to download that and run it to install pip, but for the love of GNU please at least take a cursory glance at what you're running!
It definitely sounds like the problem is with your team's culture. I stayed on with my last team and company for 6 years, 3 years beyond the point where it was enjoyable, and wish I had left sooner.
Back in 2008, I chose PHP for my first forays into web programming because of how easy it was to setup and use compared to other solutions I was aware of. The last time I touched it was back in 2011. Python has pretty much completely replaced PHP for me. Get a good basic web framework like CherryPy or Bottle and couple it with a templating engine like Jinja2 or Mako and you can do anything you could do in PHP, but in a better ecosystem.
I grew up here. Cincinnati is a place full of really hard working people who care about family and have a lot of pride.
The comment about the father not wanting to accept aid because he is too proud hurts because my family was the same way. I didn't get basic medical or dental care until college unless I was taken to the ER. There were many nights we went hungry and many times we had to sleep on grandma's floor because we had nowhere else to go. I do wish that families would discard their pride with regards to helping their children and accept as much aid as possible to ensure that they are healthy and prepared for the future.
I've used this most recent Chrome privacy failure as an excuse to give myself the chance to finally learn Firefox's built-in dev tools and wean myself off of Chrome entirely.
I too appreciated his style of candor at times. I hope that he is able to find a way to keep being Linus while also not resorting to personal attacks, and I applaud him for reflecting on his actions.