Notices by Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io), page 3

Consequently... Things work on a 40 node stateful cluster just fine. But you're absolutely fucked if you ever want to run something ephemerally, "restart" anything, or even just sensibly provide something as a service for other people to run.

Why in the absolute fuck did we write ourselves into a corner as an industry where "oh sorry minimum specs are 187 vCPU, 4TB of ram, 20TB of disks" seen as something sensible instead of absolutely ludicrous beyond belief?

ok ok yeah yeah high availability and whatever but also have you seen how highly available a single fucking binary running on a single fucking computer can be? Have you seen the performance specs of sqlite?

I'm reminded of that one paper from like 2010 or so when a researcher showed that a single threaded binary could outperform many 100 core clusters because they were so poorly designed to scale *down* at all

Did we learn nothing from that? Anything? Anything at all??

@shortridge Actually, I take it back, this is my favorite bug story of all time

https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/

The writing is incredible, the twist is beyond absurd. The full implications of it are profound and potentially disturbing

It's not a read for the lighthearted, it'll take a while, but it's absolutely worth it

Imagine "reflections on trusting trust" but rendered real and haunting

New definition of tech debt: work that is considered so unvalued by the company that you can get fired for doing it

@thisismissem that's the secret, everything is hacky 😅

I find it fascinating that we talk about over engineering as if it's a thing in software engineering. It's not, cut it out, stop talking about that.

If I'm a contractor and I over engineer something, guess what? It works for that use case and all the future ones. The only thing I wasted was money and time. Did you make a 10 ton capacity deck when you only need 2 tons? Cool... It's still a deck.

Software engineering? We don't have over engineering. We have "building to solve the wrong problem"

In software we don't build a 10 ton deck when a 2 ton deck would do, we build a Deck Builder Factory that prints out decks that are fully extensible up and down but we build it into a concrete foundation where the only extension options are sideways. Then we bolt on safety join points to the house that prevent you from actually extending the deck at all. Then we only use the printing system once and throw it away. Then we complain that we over engineered the deck. But the deck? Rated for one ton

It sounds ridiculous when I phrase it that way, but I see things that are that obviously incorrect all the time. A huge problem is that software engineering is so incredibly abstract, ill defined, and nebulous, that it's non trivial to even find out that you're building a deck at all, much less what the load capacity should be.

Software engineering is hard because there's no rules and no answers and it requires mutual understanding among groups to an extent that rivals the Tower of Babel

But over engineering? In software? It's not a thing. "yagni" might be a thing, but it's also still addressing the wrong part of the problem.

If the hardest part of software engineering is building mutual understanding among a group of humans with different contexts, backgrounds, and approaches, then it stands to reason that trying to anticipate future problems will result in *solving the wrong problem*

We don't over engineer, we just build the wrong thing.

The secret to software engineering is to focus all of your energy as a team (and a company) on learning how to share information between each other better. Build that understanding. Build that ability to uplift and teach each other.

For fuck's sake, stop worrying about over engineering and worry about under understanding the problem.

The over engineering goes away the second you start putting humans first and start prioritizing understanding over an artificial roadmap built without context

Currently addicted to this song

https://youtu.be/h5jz8xdpR0M?si=vy73IOFih2yqzFQv

Anyone got similar song recommendations? The things I'm particularly vibing with are:

- powerful lyrics
- the emotional strength and compression in the vocal style
- the reverb style and echoing of the vocals
- I'm an absolute slut for halftime shuffle style beats and this one is straight delicious

I want more 👀

(bonus points if it's sapphic or witchy vibes)

Anyways, 9/10, would dream about impromptu marrying off people again. Maybe I should get ordained somewhere online so that I can actually do that if I ever accidentally get invited to officiate anywhere

Might have to do it without shoes on because you never know, apparently

Had a dream where I showed up to a random Haskell and Fornal Methofs meetup somewhere and it turned into a wedding between two lovely people and I got chosen to be the officiant.

Except someone had lost my invitation so I was the only one who didn't know there was a wedding, showed up by accident, had no plan, lost my shoes, and was annoyed that my outfit wasn't cute and I wasn't wearing makeup

In the dream: I figured out a lovely speech on the fly, delivered something sweet and sentimental on the meaning of correctness, love, verification, and marriage, and ended the whole speech as a proof of marriage by construction. Except I had to end it with "and now for the fun part, I'm not ordained because I had no idea this wedding was happening, so I leave this verification of this proof as an exercise to the reader"

And thays when they found out they forgot my invitation. But it worked out

@celeste damn how much dust was in there

I've got a question! I love speaking and I love meeting people!

What conferences do y'all think I should apply to speak at next year? And what topics would you like to hear more about? 👀

Any sufficiently advanced systems thinking is indistinguishable from premature optimization

@inthehands @lisamelton oh that is SUPER awesome!! I love it!

LIFE HACK

How I use ChatGPT to write stuff:

1. Write out a prompt to generate the text I want
2. Read the response
3. Go "this is fucking garbage, what the fuck, you call that writing?"
4. Get pissed off and write the thing correctly

(This is what I call https://xkcd.com/386/ as a service)

@shanselman I do this all the time, it's so awful