khendron

Claude is helping me learn French right now. I am using it as a supplementary tutor for a class I am taking. I have caught it in a couple of mistakes, but generally it seems to be working pretty well.

When I was in grad school my faculty advisor joked to me that to accurately estimate any medium to large software project, take your best estimate and multiply it by 3. If hardware is involved, multiply by 8.

Yes, he was telling me this tongue in cheek, but in my actual experience this has been eerily accurate.

When I first tried an LLM agent, I was hoping for an interactive, 2-way, pair collaboration. Instead, what I got was a pairing partner who wanted to do everything themselves. I couldn't even tweak the code they had written, because it would mess up their context.

I want a pairing partner where I can write a little, they write a little, I write a little, they write a little. You know, an actual collaboration.

> You've spent so much time explaining why enterprise software is terrible, we're starting to think you might be the person who designed Salesforce.

That's a low blow.

You are right, but it doesn't take many extroverts not understanding this concept to make it feel like it's everybody :)

My mother, for example, is a serious extrovert. When I explained to her that socializing seriously drains me and I need to, for example, spend time alone after attending a party, her response was to ask if I'd seen a therapist about it.

No, I just avoid it.

Not for me. Coffee, anything caffeinated actually, makes me sick like I have the flu. The older I get, the more sensitive I become. I can't even eat chocolate anymore because of the caffeine content.

You don't. Explaining what happened is not going to help the user at all. You can only explain what options are available to the user. Something like the following

"Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message before discarding it if you will need access to it later."

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right.

When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.

I resigned shortly after.

> but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote.

Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that.

No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.

Perhaps everybody in the world needs some sort of signing key, so they can officially "authorize" public media that contains their likeness.

> There is almost no atmosphere for friction so basic Newtonian mechanics should be able to make a decent landing

Actually, I think that is the one of the biggest challenges. No atmosphere to slow you down means you have to rely entirely on rockets to slow down from orbital speeds to zero.

I remember reading a sci-fi story in which aliens who are covertly observing the Earth see this happening and secretly rescue Laika just before she dies.

One of the advantages of functions is that a well-named function is self-documenting. If you can take a bunch of lines and wrap them in a function whose name summarizes exactly what it does, then you have improved readability in my opinion. In this example, I don't really need to know the details of how the query parameters are extracted. I just want to know I've got them.

I always did best at the exams I had nightmares about. To the point where having an exam nightmare would make me feel better about an upcoming exam, I would actually start to worry if I had a big exam coming up and I hadn't had a nightmare about it yet.

Still today, 30 years later, I get these dreams. Usually when I have a big work or life challenge coming up. And the nightmares still boost my confidence (though the nightmares themselves suck).