Notices by 22 (22@octodon.social), page 2

Yes, I’ve missed Yegge’s full-on rant mode!

“One of the craziest damned things I hear devs say about LLM-based coding help is that they can’t “trust” the code that it writes, because it “might have bugs in it”.

Ah me, these crazy crazy devs.

Can you trust code you yeeted over from Stack Overflow? NO!

Can you trust code you copied from somewhere else in your code base? NO!

Can you trust code you just now wrote carefully by hand, yourself? NOOOO!

All you crazy MFs are completely overlooking the fact that software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE. That’s why we have reviewers. And linters. And debuggers. And unit tests. And integration tests. And staging environments. And runbooks. And all of goddamned Operational Excellence. And security checkers, and compliance scanners, and on, and on and on!

So the next one of you to complain that “you can’t trust LLM code” gets a little badge that says “Welcome to engineering motherfucker”. You’ve finally learned the secret of the trade: Don’t. Trust. Anything!“ https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need

“A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.”

Ladies and gentlemen. The inimitable Steve Yegge ? https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need

I’ve been trying to understand why I trust Yegge on his calls and what my own track record is.

It was thanks to Yegge that I acknowledged my lurking realization that Haskell and niche programming languages won’t Go Big. And Go Big means something specific here—of course Haskell is great intrinsically and of course Scala advances the state of the art and all. Go Big here means it’s not something most makers like me (in the maker–hacker–poet simplex https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/) will care about.

A little after that, I realized neither emacs nor vim are high-value to new or old engineers that didn’t grow up with them. I was good at vim but around the Sublime/Atom era I stopped recommending juniors go thru vimtutor, and of course myself converted to VS Code when that dropped.

I ran Gentoo for years. But then I stopped recommending folks learn Linux and instead just Get Shit Done on their MacBooks. I wasn’t wrong and don’t think I’ll be wrong for the next five years.

I knew React and SPA were gonna be huge. I’ve built great apps I’m really proud of with it, and I’m excited about the new post-React MPA era. I think the Express.js docs still talk about templating engines. What a farce—approximately nobody built a Node.js server using a templating language, it was JAMstack all the way.

As soon as I saw that Merkle-tree-based platforms like Dat and Secure Scuttlebutt were append-only, I immediately dropped developing for them and just used Mastodon. Very little will beat a centralized Postgres database. I count this as a win.

As soon as I saw Solidity’s API and irreversible transactions, I knew cryptocurrencies were a dead end. Happy owner of US Dollars (and Japanese Yen).

Enumerating these big waves isn’t meant to convince me let alone anyone else that my opinions matter—read way too much Taleb and Kahneman and Galef for that. It’s more to convince myself that I should trust my instincts, and others with similar instincts, like Yegge (modulo the emacs thing ugh he loves his emacs). If only when it comes to making things with code. Being a code maker isn’t everything but it is everything to me, and I’m bullish on LLMs. I don’t think this is crypto or Google Glass or VR because I make shit.

Other predictions I’m happy to verbalize.

Notebooks (Jupyter, etc.) aren’t the future—making this concrete I predict the percentage of respondents to Stack Overflow’s annual dev survey who say they use code notebooks will stay approximately fixed for the next ten years, i.e., plus or minus 2.5% the 2022 level of 11.61% (2021 level: 12.63%; both all respondents).

In fact, nothing will unseat text editor-based coding in the next ten years except something like Darklang (https://darklang.com/ so, AST-level programming, i.e., the editor only allows you to ever input syntactically valid code). I assign a 10% chance of this happening (realistically 2-5% but I really want this to happen).

I ran out of steam but I do notice something important in how I think about predictions like this—they’re in terms of what masses of developers care about, the people making apps for you and me and our mums and dads. Those devs are my people and I’m done pretending that I have zero clue what they should focus on learning.

@evan short answer:no ?

Longer answer: no innocent ? I have long admired the decentralization of platforms like Secure Scuttlebutt—decentralized down to the physical network layer! Works over bicycle-net, sneaker-net!—even though their use of Merkle trees and resulting inability to delete/forget made me sadly give up on SSB. I’d love to see a lighter more energy-efficient ActivityPub. The Mastodon REST API is also incredibly heavyweight (several kilobytes for a single toot).

But. Your point is very well-taken.

@evan thanks for this follow-up! I’m still surprised by the force of your feeling and I’m trying to read between the lines—when you said “Anyone working on brand new protocols in 2023 should stop immediately” are you mostly talking about BlueSky? Or do you mean exactly what you said, anything not building upon ActivityPub is wasted effort?

@evan curious to see what you recommend!

(As a technologist I feel Mastodon and it’s clones (Hometown, Glitch-soc) are too heavyweight and would feel awkward recommending those to a bunch of organizations, but don’t know enough about Akkoma, Misskey, GoToSocial to recommend those either, so would be most excited to learn from you.)

@toneji you can move your presence to another server but all your toots stay on the old one right. I’m starting to realize saying “mastodon makes it easy to move to another server” is like “airplanes make it easy to move to another country”.
@dumpsterqueer @shahaan

@Rachel_Thorn are there more things like this? I am truly astonished and electrified that something this accessible (that is, targeting the lay public by academics) and this meaningful about Indigenous art was published.

I’d be just surprised if something like this was published about something European like the Books of Kells or maybe Egyptian or Japanese visual culture and am delirious this beatify but am left agog that this penetrating work was done for Aztec art.

Wondering how annoyed Dr Lopez I would be if I emailed her begging to do more maybe via Kickstarter, I would instantly back her. But I would suspect that would be distracting to an academic maybe ?

Was thinking about adding an in-browser database for toots in Yoyogi (um, this non-timeline Mastodon reader app I made https://fasiha.github.io/yoyogi/) and thought, "PouchDB?" Went to check Pinafore, the other brainchild of Mister PouchDB, @nolan, and saw it uses raw IndexedDB! <rolling up sleeves to learn raw IndexedDB> #Yoyogi #PouchDB #Pinafore #IndexedDB

I've complained enough times about Mastodon, Pinafore, etc. slavishly copying Twitter's timeline presentation, and the last couple of weeks brought that to a head—a month ago I followed 15 people who posted infrequently. Today I follow ~120. And you crazy kooks post a lot. And I just cannot miss anything, especially from the quiet folks whose toots are ripe for drowning.

So Yoyogi is "non-timeline". You log in and it shows you all the people you follow. You pick one of them. It shows you all their toots, fully threaded. (I'm a sucker for threads.) (No, I really, really like threads.) So each thread has its own column, kind of like a newspaper. And you scroll right to see older stuff.

This is how I've consumed social media for a few years now. Whether through RSS readers or folders of bookmarks or now Yoyogi, I love consuming one person's posts, rooting around their replies, and then switching off. I decide when to visit each of my follows—some people I visit daily, others I have to gather up some spoons before I catch up with.

https://fasiha.github.io/yoyogi/ it's all client-side, like Pinafore, just your browser talking to your Mastodon instance—pretty secure and privacy-preserving.

Yoyogi is super-alpha right now, it doesn't even load avatar images or media, nor does it remember when you last visited whom. All that's coming I hope! But I'm already dog-fooding it and am so happy to have a more controlled Mastodon experience.

Because y'all are precious. But. Also a lot. #Yoyogi

@Rachel_Thorn well, when twenty years ago we were all installing Linux, which was free and open source and etc., and Microsoft was trying to destroy it and Linus (the author of Linux) said something like “I’m not trying to destroy Microsoft that’ll be a totally unintended side effect”. But today Microsoft and Amazon make a ton of money selling Linux cloud services to companies. The lesson I learned from this is, people will find a way to monetize even the most unmonetizeable-seeming of things.

(Another example is Buddhism → mindfulness apps.)