Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social), page 4

@EmilyG meanwhile on Amazon…

Irugalbandara et al 2024: "A Trade-off Analysis of Replacing Proprietary LLMs with Open Source SLMs in Production" https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14972 "We present a systematic evaluation methodology for…Small Language Models (SLMs) and their tradeoffs when replacing a proprietary LLM APIs…across 9 SLMs and 29 variants, we observe competitive quality-of-results for our use case, significant performance consistency improvement, and a cost reduction of 5x-29x when compared to OpenAI GPT-4." #nwit

Annual request: is there a _small_ open source desktop WYSIWYG editor that supports in situ editing of diagrams? LibreOffice, MS Office, Google Docs all allow me to create a diagram inside a text doc and edit in place; I'm looking for something 10% their size that I can hack on. (All the "open source WYSIWYG editors" I can find are in-browser Markdown/HTML editors; if you want a diagram, you have to draw it externally and drop it in, which isn't what I want.)

@donny Thanks, but I'm looking for a Word-style text editor that allows embedded drawings, i.e., something that embeds Excalidraw in a text editor.

I finally got around to creating some lists here on Mastodon:
- Internet royalty
- Embalmed persons
- Those who are highly trained
- Those who use the word "octothorpe"
- Strays
- Members of the Antimemetics Division
- Those included in the present classification
- Those who shiver as if they are cold
- Those who are not countable
- Components of group minds
- Others
- Those who have just broken a cherished coffee mug
- Those who from a long way off look like punctuation

Lots of "how to be 10X more productive" lists flying around. None I've seen make any mention of things like looking after children, elder care, needing to manage long-term disability, etc. "Take control of your time" feels pretty privileged to people who have to spend hours in line at a government office sorting out botched immigration paperwork or a weekend fixing leaky pipes because the landlord knows it'll take years for any complaint you make to reach a tribunal.

I own 11 books on how to be a software engineering team lead or manager. At a guess, they total 900K–1M words. Exactly zero of those words are about working in the public sector or cooperative enterprises; *all* of them assume the reader is a for-pay employee of a for-profit company navigating unchangeable structures controlled by other people. I wish I knew enough to write something better—to say that yes, there *are* viable and rewarding alternatives to the Silicon Valley greed machine.

@baldur interesting - I would have put "Peopleware" in the "airport bookstore" category

@baldur If you could get every 25-year-old programmer who hopes to be a VP of Engineering by the time their 30 to read 50K words, what would you put in front of them? Most of what I've encountered is cognoscenti talking to each other rather than to lay readers (even when they think they're doing the latter), which I think is one of the reasons the Goop books thrive.

Re-reading @emilygorcenski 's brilliant essay https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/ this morning, and yeah, it's a totally minor point, but anyone who umlautizes "reëmerged" deserves boundless respect.

Very (very) disappointed that Replit is discontinuing their "Teams for Education" product with one day of notice and in the middle of the term. Teachers who had lessons planned for _this week_ are scrambling to find a new platform.

OK listen up you venomous fucking lumpsuckers: those configuration files you've all become so fond of? They don't come with a debugger, do they? Do they? No, they don't, which means that for every minute I spent actually writing code I'm now spending a solid fucking hour playing whoopsy-doodle guessing games trying to get this [waves hand] to play nicely with that [prods with toe] by trial and fucking error. Honestly, I feel like I'm waving dead chickens around trying to make it fucking rain.

I had an epiphany yesterday in conversation with @judell (but note: revelation is not always truth.) ChatGPT etc. are doing the same thing as GUI wrappers around command-line tools like Git: they're helping people get past the accidental (or malicious) complexity that other people have created. 1/

If Docker is our profession tacitly admitting that we're never going to make a serious attempt to solve the software packaging problem, ChatGPT-for-programmers is our admission that given a choice between a nation's worth of carbon emissions or letting "soft" UX design principles and methods contaminate our precious curly braces, we're burning the midnight coal… 3/

Bash and SQL and JavaScript are so _arbitrary_ that there really is a role for stochastic parrots capable of translating "here's what I want in terms someone sympathetic would understand" into "here are the terse and cryptic incantations I must type to satisfy the whims of the three generations of programmers who stand between me and resetting the clock on my fridge." 2/

I'm still frightened and disappointed by the AI gold rush in software engineering (cf. earlier toots about how many SE papers on arxiv.org are "we threw pasta at the wall and some of it seemed to stick") but I'm no longer going to make snide remarks about the people who are using ChatGPT to help them program, for the same reason that ten years ago I stopped belittling people for using Git GUIs: my generation (plus or minus one) made the mess that makes these tools necessary. 4/4

One of the most useful things I've ever found on the web comes from NOAA, and is about dealing with disruptive behaviors in meetings: https://coast.noaa.gov/ddb/ I've cached the PDF at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DgQmgHWWdRXdHv28zR5_4B84qUTwus1d/view?usp=sharing if you want to post a framed copy on the wall in your office…

"Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights." - Byrne Hobart

At the age of 60, I have finally learned that if I start a sentence with, "I am not a lawyer, but…" I should stop, delete the sentence, and find some other way to make a fool of myself.

As far as I can tell, _every_ software development process works if the people using it are well rested, knowledgeable, respect each other, agree on goals and methods, and have achievable deadlines. Just sayin'…