Finger on the monkey’s paw curls

Too little delay on the automated back and forth.

Clueless middle management dork sees (imagines) amazing, promotion-grade results - huzzah, obviously I was right all along!

Things get weirder, and worse.

(eh, the sardonic joke I read was: ya stopped short of deleting Windows)

Fuckin lol. Lotta these old greedy pricks starting to converge, in visage and thought, on - “well, there has to be a first lich, after all, so…”

They utterly trashed their OS, a globally ~dominant cash cow, at an astonishing pace. By completely, eagerly (forcibly!) jumping the gun on exciting new tech, maybe the single above-all “thing you never do with anything even like a cash cow of any shape or size”.

As in, that is known - viscerally, below the level of words or even thought, as if that knowledge originates from another realm - by anyone who has ever actually been directly responsible for any valuable piece of technology.

The depth of ignorance and really just flat-out juvenile naivety (fueled by naked greed) that produced this is something I’ll probably be thinking about for the rest of my life. Truly amazing, just historically, I mean mythically foolish.

This dude has been locked into this outcome for a long time, and it’s getting increasingly obvious how disastrous it is.

There are no dances left for him to perform except “it’s really not that bad!”

I completely agree and appreciate sincerely that they released this. It’s unfortunate, the way the obviously nonsense claims made by the industry at large - “LLMs are AI and can do everything!” - have polluted a lot of devs’ ability or willingness to see the tools for what they are, and maybe official acknowledgements like these can help.

It also seems likely to me that the major players know a lot of negative truths about all this stuff, you’re probably right about hiring observations. I don’t follow any of their marketing really so I have to admit I’m even just assuming that releasing this is out of character.

If I’m being honest, I’m mostly just on the edge of my seat waiting for the hype bubble to burst, lol, and curious about how it’ll unfold. Probably just kind of hoping this marks a step toward that.

Interesting read and feels intuitively plausible. Also matches my growing personal sense that people are using these things wildly differently and having completely different outcomes as a result. Some other random disconnected thoughts:

1. I’m surprised they’re publishing this, it seems to me like a pretty stark condemnation of the technology. Like what are the benefits they anticipate that made them decide this should be published, vs. quietly kept aside “pending further research”? Obviously people knowing how to use the tools better is good for longevity, but that’s just not what our idiotic investment cycles prioritize.

2. I’m no scientist or expert in experimental design, but this seems like way too few people for the level of detail they’re bringing to the conclusions they’re drawing. That plus the way it all just feels intuitively plausible has a very “just so” feeling to the interpretation rather than true exploration. I mean, cmon - the behavioral buckets they are talking about range from 2-7 people apiece, most commonly just 4 individuals. “Four junior engineers behaved kinda like this and had that average outcome” MIGHT reflect a broader pattern but it sure doesn’t feel compelling or scientific.

Nonetheless I selfishly enjoyed having my own vague subconscious observations validated lol, would like to see more of this (and anything else that seems to work against the crazy bubble being inflated).

That’s a useful way to look at it, as verbose / extended documentation (amounts to exhaustive usage examples, if you’ve got thorough tests).

I don’t have a metric that’s quick to relate, but for me the…attractiveness or value in testing relates heavily to:

• Project lifecycle - longer and slower -> more tests
• Team size (really more like 1st derivative of team size…team “churn”?) - larger, changing faster -> more tests

Both of these are influenced by your description of tests as docs. Onboarding new engineers is way, way easier with thorough tests, for the reasons you’ve mentioned. Plus it reduces that “gun shy” factor about making changes in a new codebase.

But it’s not always better. I’ve been writing less (few, honestly) the last year or so, sadly.

This should be the standard :)

Yeah I’ve been hearing about it and meaning to dive in. Been learning some infra stuff lately though.

Any particularly strong selling points you want to convey?

Yeah, not trying to dunk on other commenter, but these don’t sound like complaints I experience with Python at all. Setting up the environment is a breeze with venv, package installation couldn’t be easier with basic pip, and I really like having a diverse ecosystem of multiple (often high quality) approaches to solving similar problems.

I really credit my present strength with Python, in at least a small part, to PyCharm. Really a great IDE for Python projects. It irritates me, if anything, how much more flexible VSCode can be for non-Python stuff. I end up using VSCode.

Yeah, it’s certainly not a perfect model :) and I will absolutely acknowledge that some folks seem to delight in their own smugness and knowledge and seem to enjoy opportunities to shit on someone. The way the platform works probably amounts to a certain “gravity” pulling those personalities in, TBH.

It’s mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it’s the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.

SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there’s a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.

Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.

I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.

Utterly tone deaf, some of these guys, it’s amazing. Had a new CEO open a meeting shortly after he started with a story about visiting an apiary (bee farm) with his family. His unironic takeaway which he shared with us, somehow missing the poignant relevance of what he was saying - “It turns out the drones just don’t do very much”.

It was like he intended an ice breaker with a personal anecdote, and it started out fine, but he couldn’t help but just tell literally all of us how he really feels. Amazing.

I like my genes pure, unmodified whatsoever - just the way they arise from the primordial soup.

What do you do instead for dynamic values that are needed at runtime and inappropriate to check in to version control?