tonnydourado

I think we're only bad at language in the sense that we created harder problems than the language we have can solve, so we feel its limitations. But the kind of stuff out language can do is pretty amazing, in a larger scale.

I don't think anyone is saying that "anything goes" and there's no right or wrong ways of writing, they're just arguing that your narrow definition of "correct" is too narrow to be useful for anything other than gatekeeping.

I can't tell whether this is an exercise in scifi-ish speculation, a la Julio Vernes, in which case is kinda interesting, or an attempt at seriously exploring possible near future, in which case I hate it.

There's a weak and strong version of what I feel is the core idea, "what if human communication becomes largely intermediated by machines".

The weak version is already here, as the article points out. We (at least we, chronically online people) already talk in memes and gifs quite a lot. And how AI will shape it is worth thinking about. I saw that happening on real time on TikTok with people using alternatives for words they feel get their content deprioritized, like suicide, murder, sex, etc. A literal AI model changing language.

The strong version, though, is purely star-trek/Asimov level of speculation. Let alone the same neighborhood, current technology is not even in the same country as that.

The article kinda mixes both things back and forth for a bit, and then fully dives into the scify version, which makes me wondering if the author genuinely believe they will see anything like this. If they do, boy will they be disappointed.

Now, assuming it's all fun scify speculation of a future we'll never see, but hey, might happen, I have some problems with the ideas, but I'll highlight two.

> Plenty of other species manage fine with simpler languages or no language at all.

No they don't. Only species doing well right now are the ones we breed or our parasites. We can potentially erase almost all non-microscopic life forms by accident, let alone if we really put our minds to it. Humans have effects on a geological scale, that's a very select group of species.

> And it is not clear to me that intelligence has much to do with the linguistic fabric of contemporary society.

Kinda see the above comment? I don't think we even have a concept of intelligence that isn't somehow based on language, even if that language is not necessarily some form of spoken language. We certain can't evaluate intelligence without it. And as far as I know, humans don't develop language without socialization.

Sure, you could envision a future where the machines do the socialization, but I think that would be a civilization that would be too fragile to exist for much long.

First, there are the cliches: "face to face meetings are better", "spontaneous collaboration", "out of sight, out of mind".

Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that?

Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I'm a college dropout, I'm not qualified to do any scientific research. But I still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.

> It's that other people won't understand you.

I think the idea is the other way around. It's not about inventing a new language, it's about taking a jargon that already exists, is used and understood by domain experts, and make it executable. Less regex/XML, more nouns and verbs from a very specific business context.

Granted, even with that perspective, it's still a stretch to say little languages are the future, but both the article linked here and the one it's replying to are from 2004, so, there's that.

When I work from home, swearing and some moderate shouting at bugs is kinda regular, but that's because I'm alone.

Throwing shit around is a red flag, though.

Etching slides into clay tablets with your hands tied behind your back is less painful than PowerPoint. Beating that isn't much of a flex.

This dude could be in the top 50 asshole employees worldwide, and Musk would still be in the wrong, maybe legally, definitely morally, for handling his firing the way he did.

Do you think those things are good or bad?

Damn. I don't know, and I guess almost no one can know, how much of this is genuine honesty and how much is calculated messaging, but I barely care. It's refreshing enough that I kinda wanna give the thing a try. Which, ironically, might make their problems just a tiny little bit worse, since I likely won't be a paying customer XD

Other than the meme illustrating the article, I'd say there is nothing in any way whatsoever at all relevant on this very old, drowned on clichês, disconnected, and somewhat pointless, rant.

This kind of law exists because companies coerce people into becoming "freelancers", so the company doesn't have to pay benefits and can fire them at will, but then ask the "freelancer" to come to the office everyday, clock in and out in time, wear a badge, work 40h week, etc.

So lawmakers crack down on that, but law is a blunt instrument, and other valid situations can get more complicated.

But believe me, those laws are created 100% because companies abuse the concept of contractor.

Does PowerShell counts as alternative? Is wildly different from any POSIX shell, but I use it daily and it's kinda alright.

> 500 knowledge workers—including 109 that had recently been laid off—in the US

Before commenting on the content of the article, I'm wondering if this is a sample worth giving any attention to?

I'm no statistician, but drawing from a sample of 500 to make sweeping statements about "Workers" seems disingenuous, at least.

I wouldn't call it loosing my marbles, but I was in pretty bad shape between the second half of 2020 and pretty much the whole of 2021.

The isolation from the pandemic, combined with being a recent immigrant in a country whose language I didn't speak, and seasonal depression from shorter days and colder weather than I had ever experienced before, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I was deeply depressed, it impacted my job, which sent my anxiety through the roof, making the depression worse, in a feedback cycle from hell.

I tried medication and therapy. The medication was honestly useless, and the therapy only helped in perhaps preventing things getting worse.

What really worked was changing what I could. The pandemic was getting better already, so I worked on the rest. I moved to a country where I spoke the native language, with longer days on winter, and a hybrid job, so I'd be around people at least some of the time.

I'm still sad, and lonely, and often ansious. But it's all back to a level with which I can deal, so life goes on.

I still had to dance around the last job only lasting 6 months, when I was interviewing for this one, though. Mumbling some bullshit about "things not working out" seemed to do the trick.

There aren't that many actual employers responding, but I read several of these comments, and kinda starting to see a pattern: clichês, anecdotes, no nuance, no acknowledgement that the world has changed, or that teams, jobs, and people, can be different then your own experiences

Y'all are not looking good, bosses.

Fully remote teams didn't come out of Zeus head fully formed in March, 2020. There was less of them, but they existed.

I consider the dynamic you described, of local teams in separated locations that have to work as one, actually to be a major antipattern. The communication doesn't flow as well between locations as it does inside each location. It's much better to shape the teams to the geographic organization.

I can imagine how one could arrive at such conclusion, but I have seen somewhat useful stuff come out of those.

Some key components for me are:

- don't impose too much structure, or God forbid, try to make it fun. It's work, let's complain about work and hopefully some useful ideas might come up - Bring in relevant people, that actually get work done. The less managers the better. - Don't be afraid of being negative. The whole point is to complain about shit and see communalities in problems, and perhaps come up with potential solutions.

A more conservative approach would be some sort of layered storage/archiving, I guess. The older the commit, the less likely it is to be used, so it could be archive in a different storage, optimized for long term. This way you keep the "hot" history small, while keeping the full history still available.

> People's teeth (and brushing technique/effectiveness) are way too varied

You're absolutely correct, because I don't floss that often, but every time I do a whole meal comes out, so I'm incredibly envious of your naturally clean teeth XD

I always drink coffee, which is acidic (I think) with milk, for breakfast, so I guess I should just give up on teeth?

Maybe I'm missing something, but besides reducing the Earth's temperature, vulcano eruptions have also caused famines, because reduced solar light impacts crop yield.

We have much better agricultural technology now, but:

1. Is there even any research saying we can counteract the reduction in solar light by "planting smarter"?

2. Agricultural technology is very unevenly distributed. If solar light gets reduced globally, Europe and US might be fine, but Africa, Asia, and South America could still face catastrophic reduction of crop yield.

I don't want say that it's a stupid idea, but boy, surely sounds like it is.

Now I thinking how I can put that I've been the unofficial git guru in several jobs in the resume without sounding like I'm just playing the keyword game.

Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD

OP: this is not a direct criticism of your idea or implementation (in fact, by the end, you might notice I'm not sure I even have a valid criticism here), just a general observation on a trend I feel is common on this sort of initiative.

I don't know about y'all, but I hate this idea of random 1-on-1s. Nothing sends my anxiety levels to the freaking roof as the idea of having to talk alone to a complete stranger.

Make it 3+ people, though, and I'm absolutely game for it. This is not about being reclusive/introverted/autistic/antisocial/whatever: I actually like socializing, and meeting new people (well, to a certain extent, but I digress). It's just that, at least for me, 1-on-1 interactions are the most intense ones, even with people you know, let alone with strangers. Group interactions put much less pressure in each person, and it increases the chances of having at least one more extroverted person to lead the conversation.

And yet, almost every single instance of this trope of "helping people connect through random pairings" is 1-on-1.

Maybe I'm the exception here, or maybe it's easier to implement 1-on-1 pairings, I don't know. But I'd love to see more things like this, but that didn't promote one of my worst nightmares as a feature.

> Most tools allow you to jump down to low level stuff

Eeehhh, kinda. Sure, a compiler will let you just write some assembly by hand, but it won't let you write a optimization step, or even directly configure it. You have to tweak your code or the compiler flag to give the right hints so the compiler generates the binary code you want. Doesn't look much different than a query planner.

Things that work for me:

1. Discuss with your manager if it's ok to cancel when you don't have anything to talk about. Sometimes it's all fine.

2. If you're unsure of what to speak about, ask the manager to bring up what he wants you to talk about. My current one always ask me to rate my "happiness" with things are going, I like it as a starting point.

3. Try to reframe how you see your complaints. Part of our jobs is to complain: to notice the problems and to bring them up to the ones with decision power to fix it. I try to always put my complaining in this light, both because I think it helps how others see me, but also because it helps me to identify better what is a genuine problem and what is just a personal annoyance.

I agree that process should be public, I disagree that personal 1-on-1s should be ad-hoc. The whole point is for feedback to be continuous, so if you're starting to fuck up, you get early warnings and a better chance of correcting course.

That has been my experience, at least, I am somewhat of an acquired taste, personality wise, and often unwillingly unaware of my effect on others, or bad habits I might slip into. Having regular 1-on-1s gives manager opportunity to give me early feedback.

It also gives me a regular chance to 1) ask for help with interpersonal things I struggle with and 2) get positive feedback, when I manage, to everyone's surprised, to not fuck things up.

All of that depends hugely on the manager, of course. If your manager is using this time to check on your regular work, or give you tasks ... there might not be hope for this job. Maybe you can talk to them, maybe to their boss, but it smells like just a bad culture, that you're better of leaving than trying to fix.

> Regular programming languages don't require "query optimizers".

Isn't that what llvm does? Or GCC? Or a JIT?

> Possibly it would be better to send small programs written in a "better" language (something like Lua) to the server?

I'd certainly like something better than SQL, but going for an imperative, Turing complete language seems like the opposite direction of where things should be going in this scenario.

I have the impression that learning this would feel like learning Italian, after learning Spanish, and being a native French speaker.

> If you know RegExp's, the syntax will immediately make sense

Doesn't seem like a feature.

I get the appeal of offloading toil to AI. But gotta be careful to not mistake thinking for toil. Sometimes thinking is hard and not fun but that doesn't make it toil.

Writing good commit messages is thinking, not toil. 90% of the time is even easy, one line description, good to go. The other 10% is when you gotta do the thinking, though. Extracting the relevant changes from the incidental ones, summarizing the whys, the pros and cons, the weird interactions that lead to the specific choices made in the code. This is not toil, it's thinking. It's not even a matter of whether AI can do it well (for this 10%, I'm *very* skeptical it can), the issue is that this is the kind of thinking you should *want* to do, that you should want to get better at.

TL;DR: this feels like asking the computer to jog for you and expect to loose weight.