ickyforce

I tried this with Gemini 3.6 Flash

Me:how many P's are in the following text? [Pasted text with 10 P's]

Gemini: There are 9 "P"s (1 uppercase P and 8 lowercase ps) in the provided text. [List of words except the one missed]

Me: How many in strawberry?

Gemini: Something went wrong (1096)

Mostly 30 years of people writing code.

seriously, what was the point of this comment?

What's wrong with Apple push notifications in China?

> and any decent formatter will split up long lines

Any decent editor can wrap long lines on demand. But it's even better not to have to do either of those if not necessary.

> I've felt strongly for a while now that abbreviations should be "lossless" in order to be useful

This is how we got lpszClassName. The world moved away from hungarian notation and even away from defining types for variables in some contexts (auto in cpp, := in Go, var in Java). Often it just adds noise and makes it harder to understand the code at a glance, not easier.

> So unless those pools are full of primitive data types, you’re going to cause more frequent full GC pauses, and longer due to all the back pointers.

If you have enough objects pooled to get low allocation rate then you never trigger full GC. That's what "low latency Java" aims for.

I think that the main downside of object pools in Java is that it's very easy to accidentally forget to return an object to a pool or return it twice. It turns out that it's hard to keep track of what "owns" the object and should return it if the code is not a simple try{}finally{}. This was a significant source of bugs at my previous job (algo trading).

> each world was spherical (...) suddenly orienting the map was a challenge

The other downside was the fact that it was possible to assault arbitrary points - e.g. drop units from orbit in the middle of enemy base. It required much more awareness about the whole map. In 2D game one could mostly focus on front lines and choke points.

I have tried various approaches and here's what worked best, assuming that there is some natural way to partition most of the data (e.g. per account):

1. Init the DB with some "default" data - configuration, lookup tables, etc

2. Each test in the test suite owns its data. It creates a new account and inserts new records only for that account. It can for example create users on this account, new entities, etc. It can run multiple transactions, can do rollbacks if needed. It is important to only touch the account(s) created by the test and to avoid touching the initial configuration. There's no need to clean up the data after the test finishes. These tests can run concurrently.

3. Create a separate integration test suite which runs sequentially and can do anything with the database. Running sequentially means that these tests can do anything - e.g. test cross-account functionality, global config changes or data migrations. In practice there aren't that many of those, most tests can be scoped to an account. These tests have to clean up after themselves so the next one starts in a good state.

Other approaches had tons of issues. For example if each test is wrapped with a transaction which is later rolled back then testing is very limited - tests cannot use transactions on their own. Savepoints have similar issue.

> GIT is already best model for keeping history of textual changes

Git doesn't even keep history of changes, just snapshots before and after the changes. A very common problem is viewing history of a single file as it gets modified and renamed - this information just isn't stored. It's common for tools to show file history incorrectly - i.e. a previous version is removed and the new one (with small changes) magically appears.

It's not just the type of work but also experience. Here are two cases:

1. After working for many years in Java I needed to build a service. I spent few days designing it and then a month on implementation. I used DBs and libraries I knew very well. I didn't need to access google/stackoverflow, I didn't need to look up names of (std)lib methods and their parameters and if something wasn't working it was fairly obvious what I needed to change.

2. Recently I wanted to create a simple page which fetched a bunch of stuff from some URLs and showed the results, simple stuff. But with React since that was what frontend team was using. I never used React and rarely touched web in the recent years. Most of my time was spent googling about React and how exactly CORS/SOP work in the browsers, and with polishing it took a couple of days.

I'm pretty sure that in case 1) AI wouldn't help me much. Maybe just as a more fancy code completion.

In case 2) AI would probably be a significant time save. I could just ask it to write some draft for me and then I could make few tweaks, without having to figure out React.

But somehow nobody quantifies their experience with the languages/tools when they are using AI - I'm sure there's a staggering difference between 1 month and 10 yoe.

Oh, nice, thanks. I haven't been using github recently, it looks like this option was added ~1.5y ago.

In my opinion PR/changeset description is exactly what should be in the commit description. In cases were we had 1 commit per PR (i.e. squashing before merging) just copying the PR description into merge commit worked really well - the goal for a PR description and a commit is essentially the same.

I wish github allowed to make the copying automatic and ensure that it happens (it doesn't, unfortunately).

If someone wants to learn the full history - the remarks during code review, perhaps all the WIP commits - they can read the PR/code review comments. I found it to be very rarely needed.