Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

Prepare for a slew of new start-ups ending in "X". DefenceX. HealthX. RoadsX. etc.

"Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations."

Brace yourselves for the biggest grift in human history!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/12/trump-appoints-elon-musk-government-efficiency-department

"TDD is slow because you're writing twice as much code"

Okay, let's pick this apart.

First of all, how much of our time is actually spent writing code? It's typically a lot less than devs think.

Secondly, how much of our time do we spend debugging code? It's typically a lot more than devs think.

Thirdly, would it be less time writing code if we wrote the tests after? Can't see how that follows.

So, it's not TDD, is it? It's writing automated tests you have the problem with.

Fun fact: everything Elmo has done to reinstall That Man in the Whitehouse was enabled by software developers.

Sleep well.

Lazyweb: I know that, technically, any computer program can be represented as a finite state machine, and we can model state machines if we choose to, but is there a programming language or syntax that explicitly embodies that paradigm?

My people are software professionals, sci-fi fans, cinephiles, progressive metal peeps, science folks, engineering stans, writers, actors, painters, architects, historians, philosophers and dreamers.

Wanna hear a "great replacement theory"? We're being replaced by dumbasses.

What many of us kind of sort of knew is now being born out by research. LLMs don't reason (and probably never will), and that's a *big* problem.

We've just been dazzled by the statistical complexity of our own natural languages, and fooled by our well-known tendency to project agency on to things that *appear* even vaguely human. (Think of "Wilson" in Castaway...)

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reasoning-and

The irony is that, in the context of Agile planning and tracking, "velocity" has no direction component.

At this point, it's hard not to conclude that anybody still holding up Elmo as some kind of business genius is an actual idiot.

"Here is a large-scale study which demonstrates how LLMs are bad for learners"

"Yeah, but they're great for learners, though."

QED.

After 18 months investigating claims that LLMs can do X, or Y or Z, I think - going forward - I'm just going to skip straight to disbelief to save time.

I believe the real product of software development is software development teams; that building software products builds capability to create & adapt software when future needs demand it.

So, to me, outsourcing it's like throwing away the toy and playing with the box.

"Sure, I can't cook. But there'll be plenty of time to learn after my restaurant gets busy."

When I hear developers complaining about a colleague who's a "perfectionist" that is "slowing them down", even just a cursory investigation usually reveals that the team has low standards and that the "perfectionist" keeps trying to raise them.

This is normally when things like "pragmatic" and "just get it done" get bandied about to try and make it sound as if the developers who've been checking in untested code are the real professionals in this set-up.

@alcinnz I watched a "tutorial" on how to build your own version of Zoom recently. Not a single word about video streaming. Half an hour about start-ups, MVPs etc.

The way software development's shifted from people wanting to do it better to people wanting to get rich reminds me of how contemporary music schools shifted from people wanting to get better at making music to people wanting to get famous.

There's a real X Factor feel to the common discourse, with lots of folks obsessing over levels of commercial success they're never going to experience - too busy preparing for hypothetical stadium tours to learn scales.

If 99% of developers have little to no refactoring skills, then it should come as no surprise that most engineering managers have never seen refactoring in action.

This is important to bear in mind when they tell you that you have to plan for future possible use cases in your design. They assume that significant changes won't be possible.

Chocolate makes you more attractive, claims Cadbury https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/25/ai-could-enhance-almost-two-thirds-of-british-jobs-claims-google

The fun starts when the dumpster chicken it's procuring for you is chicken that was output by older dumpster chicken recycling engines. Until what you're eating really isn't chicken at all.

Copying and pasting code off the Interwebs is like eating chicken you found in a dumpster. Automating the procurement of dumpster chicken through LLMs might not be the productivity boon some people think it is.