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undreren

968 karma · joined August 10, 2017

Software developer
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undreren··on Creatures That Don’t Conform
It would be more constructive, if you defined “anticipate”. Your dismissal really needs that to be taken seriously.
undreren··on The 2-MAXSAT Problem Can Be Solved in Polynomial Time
Simple proofs are often only possible, because the language of mathematics become increasingly descriptive over time.

The language conveniently helps us make incredibly complicated statements by using specialized terms. Simple solution are rarely that simple, once we eschew the jargon of the field.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that.

undreren··on I unschool my 5 kids. This is how much it costs
You were completely at liberty to not join this conversation that you are clearly not interested in having.

Yet here you are.

undreren··on I unschool my 5 kids. This is how much it costs
Why?

I’m Danish, and homeschooling is imcredibly rare in Denmark, and I frankly can’t see the appeal.

What is it that makes it so compelling?

undreren··on ChatGPT has trouble giving an answer before explaining its reasoning
Did something interesting happen?
undreren··on Ask HN: What would happen if we prioritised all bugs over all new features?
The thing about bugs is their subtle influence on overall product quality.

It's like building a wall; if one layer of bricks is laid unevenly, at least a number of layers built on top of it will have to compensate. Usually, this compensation takes form in increased development times or increased complexity / convolution of new features.

Furthermore, it lowers end users' overall trust in the platform.

Both of these two effects will have at least some negative impact on profitability, though it may be lower than the increased profitability gained by adding new features.

I'm not saying all bugs should be fixed immediately at the expense of new features, but I've rarely been in a situation, where it felt "right" to ignore a bug indefinitely.

undreren··on Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)
Also the fact that WotC has promised over and over that these cards would never get reprints, not even non-tournament legal reprints.
undreren··on Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job
I couldn’t have said it better myself.

With three kids, my current side project is my day job, at least if measuring by workload. Taking on more work, voluntarily or not, will be at a significant personal cost for me.

I don’t get the constant peddling of hussle porn in SWE circles.

undreren··on One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
Governments can also violate all your other rights as well. But this completely irrelevant to the post I responded to.
undreren··on One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
I did not imply that it was.
undreren··on One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
Governments could easily use private data to blackmail or silence you, even if you’ve done nothing illegal.

This is perhaps the primary reason that the right of privacy even exists.

undreren··on One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure
The “only valid use cases” of privacy is not to hide illegal or criminal activity.

Crypto currency is a wasteful, destructive, expensive and innefficient technology that has few benefits except facilitating crimes like tax evasion, money laundering, financing terrorism and purchasing drugs.

undreren··on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
> SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software.

Plenty of terrible corporate software works like this. Precurement has a checklist of features, and that list never includes "Has great UX", because only the people on the floor has to use it.

I'm looking at you JIRA...

> SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large projects). Making sure that in case the project fails it is the customers fault will be strategically taken into account from day 1.

I was a consultant at a major software consultancy for the better part of three years. No matter what, it is always the costumor's fault, even when it isn't.

Paying a customer back some 100 billable hours worth of payments is simply just not feasible, when a large part of consultants have less than a years worth of work experience.

While you sit down and talk about the project with senior and managing consultants, you are being deluded with a completely skewed perception of the base level competence of those that will carry out the work.

The higher hierarchical "level" a consultant is at, the less implementation work they'll do, because associates will take longer time doing the same tasks and will therefore sell more billable hours.

The entire T&M consulting industry is economically incentivized to produce organisations that shirks responsibility, while simultaneously work on "too big to fail" projects, because that's where the money is at.

> SAP is a fairly closed ecosystem. Typically consultants are recruited straight out of school and never leave the stack as it is very different from the rest of the industry. It has it's own cultute and habits that do not travel well outside of it's niche.

Not to mention that it has its own programming language. I had a colleague that worked as a SAP consultant, and she said it was horrible. Features like "variables names can consist of at most 8 characters" certainly didn't help.

undreren··on Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
I don’t get why you got downvoted. A common piece of advice for building habits is to set trivial goals and to let them snowball.
undreren··on Project Fear
Bureaucracy is foremost a tool for control, and the cost is time, friction and/or autonomy.

Sometimes this control is great, as it can streamline processes, which can make employee training and automation cheaper.

The problem is that the extra work created by bureaucracy is rarely executed by those that demand it, and is often only desired due to a lack of trust in those working on the floor.

A good bureaucracy requires very little active work (by humans) and has tangible benefits. It has to be of greater measureable value than the loss of productivity it incurs on the employees tasked with running it.

undreren··on Consciousness is not computation
> “is AI going to torture us for eternity if we don’t praise it enough?”

Probably not. It is after all not an Abrahamic god…

undreren··on We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
I don't know what context you read my comment from, but the comment I responded to ended with the following paragraph:

> The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).

I don't need consciousness or sentience to need a special or magic substrate to combat existential dread, because I don't feel it in the first place. My comment was not meant to be an explanation either, and I honestly can't see how you read that into it.

undreren··on We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do
I would be much more disconcerted if we were super special.

I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that.

On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.

undreren··on LaMDA is not sentient
I don’t think that’s an interesting question at all and misses the point completely.

We have no idea, what causes the sensation of subjective experience. Assuming that sentience is no more complex than our current level of understanding is arrogant.

Furthermore, it’s just plain useless; without a fundamental theory of sentience with both predictive and explanatory power, our understanding can’t grow.

undreren··on LaMDA is not sentient
I don’t find it terrifying in the slightest. I find it naive.

Our understanding of the world reflects our modelling of the world. Empirical science models the world in terms of probabilities, and this, by necessity, makes everything look like a Markov chain.

But “the map is not the territory”, as the saying goes.

I’m not implying, nor do I believe that there’s any sort of magic going on, but if Markov chains are all that is needed for sentience, then what isn’t sentient? Panpsychists would certainly be having a field day.

undreren··on LaMDA is not sentient
> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging.

But is it all that we do? And how do you know?

It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.

undreren··on A small guide for naming stuff in front-end code
I would guess that it is a convention used to highlight a code dependency.

“If you remove or rename this class, the code will break.”

undreren··on Paul Osman on long-term strategies, open telemetry, and boring systems
Can confirm. IME, software that does less usually end up achieving more.
undreren··on If-then-else had to be invented
Haskell has “otherwise” as a built in constant that equals true. It reads better in some cases.

    f n | odd n     = 3 * n + 1
        | otherwise = n \\ 2
undreren··on We need to talk about testing
> They way I've run CD is we had continous deployment to a staging environment where final testing and stakeholder review happens, then periodic deployments to production.

As you hint at, it is called continuous delivery, not continuous deployment.

The best strategy IMO is to mob with testers, and clarify how a thing will be tested before implementing it. It saves you a lot of headaches.

undreren··on Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion
Precisely :-)
undreren··on Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion
Agile is (maybe a bit oversimplified) about releasing as often often as possible.

Delivering sooner, not faster.

To do this, decision makers must be close to the team, and ideally a part of the team. Either managers are part of the team, or the team a given the authority to make product decisions.

Full time managers lose power and influence either way, and I think this is the real reason Big Corp never really bought into it except on paper.

undreren··on Why do we use R rather than Excel?
It also interprets and coerces values in formulas.

Empty cells are interpreted as zero, which can be downright catastrophic, if the data is just missing.

undreren··on Reversals in Psychology (2020)
Sloppy science is done in every field, natural sciences included. The article even leads with the statement that psychology experience more reversals due to being exceptionally open in terms of sharing code and data compared to other social sciences.

Reversals through replication failure is scientific progress. Your “better” question is nothing of the sort, just lazy contrarianism.

undreren··on Handling errors with grace (and sometimes without it)
I really enjoy writing parsers. It’s just really fun, though as the article suggests, error detection and comprehension is hard and tedious.
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