newAccount2025

I think this is mostly right.

In a blameless postmortem style process, you would look at not just the mistake itself but the factors influencing the mistake and how to mitigate them. E.g., doctor was tired AND the hospital demanded long hours AND the industry has normalized this.

So yes, the programmers need to hold the line AND ALSO the velocity of the tool makes it easy to get tired AND and its confidence and often-good results promote laziness or maybe folks just don’t know better AND it can thrash your context and bounce you around the code base making it hard to remember the subtleties AND on and on.

Anyway, strong agree on “dude, review better” as a key part of the answer. Also work on all this other stuff and understand the cost of VeLOciTy…

The site is completely unusable. Even with reader mode it somehow aggressively refreshed. Gave up in disgust.

That’s an added windows license though?

Great list. Invented Concept Labels is the one I think I get most frustrated by. When exploring new areas, I’ll read its paragraphs of acronyms and weird words and think I just don’t know some term of art, and as soon as I ask for a definition it’s like, “I just made that up, that’s not a formal term, blah blah blah.”

No doubt. Sports betting too. I’m a curmudgeon but we should completely unwind to the pre-lottery days when organized gambling was simply not legal.

Sadly apt. Democrats don’t make progress fast enough, while Republicans pull us backwards on vaccines, diversity, environment, abortion, healthcare, global prominence, naked corruption, oligarchy, theocracy, and military oppression.

Impressive and heartening. Bravo.

The matrix framing is a very nice and way to put it. This morning I asked my assistant to code up a nice debugger for a particular flow in my application. It’s much better than I would have had time/patience to build myself for a nice-to-have.

100%. Even beyond the direct incarceration costs and the opportunity cost of their lost contributions, there is also the cost of the whole apparatus for arresting and charging folks with crimes and trying them. The police department alone is more than 1/3 of our budget in Austin. Add courts and forensics and it’s 40%. And that’s still just the money part, to say nothing of the moral impact and humanity we throw away.

This, and for politicians who actually agree without fear, it creates credibility, my constituents are up in arms about this and I will be supported if I champion it.

The specification task is indeed a lot of work. Driving the tool to complete the proof is often also a lot of work. There are many fully automatic proof tools. Even the simplest like SAT solvers run into very hard computational complexity limits. Many “interactive” provers are more expressive and allow a human to help guide the tool to the proof. That takes intuition, engineering, etc.

There is tons of work on this question. Super recent: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10817-025-09743-8

It should slow down your compile instead of the runtime. That way the pain is felt by the developer who can fix it.

Yes. Love it for quick explorations of available options, reviewing my work, having it propose tests, getting its help with debugging, and all kinds of general subject matter questions. I don’t trust it to write anything important but it can help with a sketch.

Why is that better?

Your IDE can do that?

For my part, returning to Java a couple years back after 15+ years away, streams + var/val were my favorite discoveries.

I wonder what percentage of our feelings on the spectrum of “ok yeah makes sense” vs “omg how could this happen” is even based on the actual marriage.

GP’s comment vs yours mirror my brother’s reaction vs my reaction when our parents divorced. Same divorce, completely different feelings about it.

Can they win?

> I don't understand. These are just problems with meetings in general no matter what you do in advance. What are you arguing for?

That by simply requiring a doc, you have forced the person who called the meeting to think about what they want to achieve, and to prepare their thoughts ahead of time. This makes the agenda clear to everyone and helps to guide the discussion.

> It means that letting someone else manage your time is more efficient than managing your own time.

If we are reading the doc together in the meeting, I only need to accept/decline the meeting and I am good.

If I am expected to pre-read, I have to actively do something to schedule that pre-read time. And the doc has to be ready whenever I decide to read it. Multiply that by 10+ meetings a week for a busy manager, and you have a lot of mundane scheduling work to keep straight.

> If I need 5 minutes to read a document, how is it helpful for someone to force me to sit for 10 minutes to read it at a specific time?

I’ve not found that to be a problem in practice. I can use extra time to think and prioritize my feedback, or catch up on Slack, etc.

> Meetings are for low-latency collaboration, not information transfer.

Ok, but without a doc, collaboration in a meeting can become inefficient in many ways. Folks can talk past each other, bouncing between unclear options and losing clarity on what they are even debating. Only one person can talk at a time, so folks are sitting and waiting for their turn, etc.; Strong personalities can dominate and filibuster.

Writing even a bad doc ahead of time can help to make the meeting’s purpose clear. The author can guide the discussion by laying out and labeling big options and decision points.

While reading the doc, everyone can comment in parallel, so you aren’t serializing the conversation for small things or letting some verbose person waste the time.

Reading during the meeting helps folks manage time outside the meeting. It means: you don’t have to prepare for meeting you don’t own. It avoids “random people” assigning you work beyond what they are asking you for in your calendar. For busy managers this is a huge benefit.

I don’t buy it. This assumes the tasks to be done are fixed, pre-determined, binary pass/fail kinds of things. Many (most? all?) salaried jobs aren’t like that: you can spend more time and do more, or so it more thoughtfully, insightfully, carefully, etc.

This! There is a real joy in being able to make the fundamental change to the structure, then letting your compiler show you the places in the code base that need to be updated. The alternative is hoping you are thorough enough to spot it all yourself. Maybe you’re that good but I’m sure not.

Why don’t all shells just do this?

> I use AI too but I am very cautious to not let it ”take over”

I think this is the key. Who’s driving?

If you are deliberate about what you want to own, focus on, and create yourself, you can consciously decide how AI help you bootstrap, scaffold, and critique your work to help you go farther.

If you aren’t, and you just tell AI to do it for you, you’re just ordering that Biryani. And heck, maybe that can be OK too. Sometimes you just need a meal you aren’t wanting to work at.

I don’t know what I’m talking about but doesn’t that go both ways? If (say) AmEx is getting a ton of chargebacks from this one hotel, don’t they at some point say “that’s enough of that” and drop them as a client? It seems the hotel should really have a huge incentive to not do crap like this?

Can’t you do a charge back? Isn’t this a key kind of protection that credit cards give you?

> How can they possibly be qualified to give advice on a subject that takes years and years and years of developing and refining soft skills, let alone consulting on the particulars of leading people in that time?

This seems quite excessively harsh. He doesn’t claim to be an expert with all the answers. He literally opens with “I’ll walk through some of the early challenges I faced when transitioning into engineering management.” Surely folks should be allowed to talk about their experiences and what they think they are learning.

Strong agree. If you simply ask an LLM to challenge your thinking, spot weaknesses in your argument, or what else you might consider, it can do a great job.

This is literally my favorite way to use it. Here’s an idea, tell me why it’s wrong.

I agree with the meat of what you say, but is selective enforcement really so unique to authoritarian governments?

In the US, even before recent administrations, we’ve long had evidence of uneven application of laws. Police love power. Criminalizing more stuff gives them more power to decide who to target.

Look how the war on drugs and policies like stop and frisk have targeted black folks. Even innocuous sounding things like seatbelt laws give police the ability to criminalize “driving while black.”

Meanwhile we’ve long ignored white collar crimes like wage theft. You know rich families aren’t going to be affected by anti-abortion laws.

My heavily tattooed White friends and I recently ignored no trespassing to swim in a nice river in TX. We agreed that if the cops came, I (non tattooed, White) would do the talking.

Anyway, the police have never been interested in holding the rich and powerful to account.