ScotterC

Yes, there's certainly more to it. Just to jump on the uncanny valley vector, I'd argue that the artist having a coherent message they're trying to get across and the viewer having some affordance primed for receiving that message is critical.

Fantastic! I think you've read me right in terms of interests. I'll check it out. Thank you!

Right on. In my experience across different art fields, I’d say the only generalizable facet of ‘good’ art/music/etc is the “it sits just outside of what we expect”.

These days I liken it more to the idea of ‘surprise’ in information entropy which denotes an informative signal then to revealing any sort of objective truth.

The book will not let you down

My kids are at a Waldorf school currently. I would not be surprised by your experience from what I’ve learned. However I’ve also seen a truly incredible environment at my school and zero cult adherence to Steiner. My best explanation is that each Waldorf school is very much its own island - it seems to be a very federated system.

Thank you for your work in this arena and trying to add clarity. As a business owner and longtime rubyist, I'm very happy Ruby Core is taking stewardship here and that maybe we can put this tempest in a teapot behind us.

I lol'ed too but then thought - at least he actually wrote this!

I’m surprised that I don’t hear this mentioned more often. Not even in a Eng leadership format of taking accountability for your AI’s pull requests. But it’s absolutely true. Capitalism runs on accountability and trust and we are clearly not going to trust a service that doesn’t have a human responsible at the helm.

Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the belief anyway.

Agreed.

Regarding some of the ‘layered architecture’ discussion from the OP, I’d argue that having many modules that are clearly defined is not as large a detriment to cognitive load when an LLM is interpreting it. This is dependent on two factors, each module being clearly defined enough that you can be confident the problem lies within the interactions between modules/components and not within them AND sharing proper/sufficient context with an LLM so that it is focused on the interactions between components so that it doesn’t try to force fit a solution into one of them or miss the problem space entirely.

The latter is a constant nagging issue but the former is completely doable (types and unit testing helps) but flies in the face of the mo’ files, mo’ problems issue that creates higher cognitive loads for humans.

Looks like a solid post with solid learnings. Apologies for hijacking the thread but I’d really love to have a discussion on how these heuristics of software development change with the likes of Cursor/LLM cyborg coding in the mix.

I’ve done an extensive amount of LLM assisted coding and our heuristics need to change. Synthesis of a design still needs to be low cognitive load - e.g. how data flows between multiple modules - because you need to be able to verify the actual system or that the LLM suggestion matches the intended mental model. However, striving for simplicity inside a method/function matters way less. It’s relatively easy to verify that an LLM generated unit test is working as intended and the complexity of the code within the function doesn’t matter if its scope is sufficiently narrow.

IMO identifying the line between locations where “low cognitive load required” vs “low cognitive load is unnecessary” changes the game of software development and is not often discussed.

Many would be quick to argue that they are interlinked but I strongly agree with you - particularly in the context of this thread.

For me, optimism still provides a lot of value in my worldview. The beliefs that have changed the most for me in the last 25 years is the limits and boundaries of what tools can do for us.

Technology ‘fixing humanity’ (when that ‘fixing’ is based on your own personal value system) is certainly a fools errand. But that limitation shouldn’t get in the way of imagining a utopia which is worth having.

Sure, I miss my childhood feelings of the 90s. But I also never expected a techno utopia to be ‘easy’.

Missed opportunity to have

> Have 1516 cats for meow

instead of now