davidrupp

I learned the term at ThoughtWorks (consulting company), where it was a play on the phrase "on the bench", which itself meant "not working on a billable project". The "bench" version comes from sports like (American) football, where "on the bench" means "sidelined" or "out of action", which has a mildly negative connotation compared to the "beach", which sounds pleasant and fun.

> Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.

Alt: Be Aragorn and wrest control of the Orthanc stone from Sauron.

I used to tell people there that my favorite development technique was to sit down and think about the system I wanted to build, then wait for it to be announced at that year's re:Invent. I called it "re:Invent and Simplify". "I" built my best stuff that way.

> A modern compiler embeds a considerable degree of probabilistic behaviour.

Can you give some examples?

I'm intrigued, as this article did not trigger my (clearly as yet underdeveloped) GenAI spidey sense. Will you share some specifics of what triggered yours?

Separately, do you have any thoughts on the subject matter? Whoever or whatever put these words in a row, they resonate deeply with my lived experience of the last several years.

I agree that it wouldn't cause the doors to open any sooner for deplaning, but once they did, people could just ... leave. The people standing in the aisle with their luggage out of the compartment are the ones who started in the aisle seats. People in the other seats need to get out, reach up, pull down, get organized. Sometimes they have to salmon their way back from their actual seat to the compartment several rows behind them because that's where they had to stow their carry-on because the people seated in row 30 put their bag over row 16 when they boarded[1].

Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.

[1] Based on a true story.

One reason that I would value is that it would speed up boarding and deplaning. As you correctly point out, the prevailing overhead luggage system provides a benefit to some travelers, potentially to the detriment of others. It's a tradeoff.

I do the same substitution for “ML”. :-)

Whenever I see the term "AI" or similar, I mentally substitute the phrase "a lot of math, done very quickly", which is more concrete, and typically helps me sort out the stuff that still seems plausible, as in the sentence you quoted.

SDE, just passed ten years at Amazon; opinions my own, obvs. The three best managers I've worked with in my career have all been at Amazon (you know who you are). Also the three worst (ditto). And the respective bars were pretty [high | low] coming in. Just like everywhere else I've been, it comes down to the individual. Amazon, as far as I can tell, have never tried to homogenize management. Your team delivers? You're in.