kohsuke

I hear you. I think a lot of people are asking some variants of that existential question. The question itself isn’t new, but you are right, AI has been a catalyst for many to ask this question.

I don’t think humans ever had “a coherent philosophy of what we’re doing” for anything. That shouldn’t be a surprise because we all act on our individual philosophy and motivation. People pushing AI forward certainly has those.

Personally, I’m finding a lot more joy lately outside tech. Riding a bicycle. Cooking. Painting. There isn’t any point in any of those, aside from the fact that I’m having fun doing those.

I think I get the genuine fear of mathematicians like Steve, that the understanding of math might be about to slip from the hands of the humans. That is an uncharted territory.

OTOH, at the individual level, for 99% of humanity, the frontier of math has long escaped their understandings. Collectively, we function as a network, and guess what this network uses to communicate, languages!

This network has been incorporating non-human intelligence for a while now, so I'm failing to see how math is special and different.

But that's beside the point of the paper. They are talking about how the humans perciving the "socio-emotional capabilities of autonomous agents" change their behavior toward other humans. Whether people get that perception because "LLMs hack our brain" or something else is largely irrelevant.

I don't think the point of SLO = flakiness out of control. The point of framing it as SLO is the realization that neither extremes are good. Flakiness cannot be allowed to get out of control that some efforts must be spent to contain it, but it's also unnecessarily perfectionist and thus the waste of precious engineering bandwidth to eliminate them completely. The whole point is to avoid "bureaucratic games", as you call it.

My theory is that the lack of easy mechanism to measure the flakiness is stalling the progress. If the overall flakiness can be measured, and the top offending tests identified, then I think it becomes no brainer to spend efforts curtailing them back when the flakiness gets too high, but otherwise exclude flaky tests from, say, PR merge gate.

This is indeed a religion, because in my experience people tend to feel strongly holding very different positions. You can already see it in this thread.

I think quantifying and prioritizing is key, like you wrote. Respected engineering organizations like Google and GitHub all came to the same place. Flakiness is often unevenly distributed, so find & tackle ones that are the worst. Don't try to eliminate the flakiness because that's not economically viable.

I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is... we'll see how it goes.

I forgot which book it was (maybe "the three body problem"?) but there was a science fiction story where a Chinese king makes his soldier act as a logical gate and his army becomes a computer. I was like, wow, I didn't think about that, but it totally makes sense!!

Hi, I'm Kohsuke, the creator of Jenkins. I'm sorry to hear that you had a bad experience.

Would you be willing to letting me interview you so that I can learn where it failed your expectation? I'm honestly trying to learn where we can do things better, and often what's obvious to one person is completely incomprehensible to another. So I think this is a great opportunity for me to learn a fresh perspective.

My contact information is in my personal profile.

Thanks for your thought. I took your main question to be "why bother?"

I think a part of it is that I fundamentally believe in an extensible system. The world of software development is so diverse, and we have smart people everywhere. So I always felt that the best thing a geek like me can do to other geeks is to give them a shoulder to build on. I don't think that's a solved problem, and to me, that'll always be an important value of the Jenkins project, more so than any code.

I think a part of it is the responsibility to users. Jenkins is very widely used software, and it's an incredibly important part of the software development process for many. I appreciate that kind of trust, and I want to deliver better software for them. I think people in the community shares the same passion.

As CTO of CloudBees, serving our users and customers, and broadening the adoption base are an obviously important business goal. So the interests are aligned there as well.

And finally, I think this kind of "reinvention of the brand" happens all the time. Windows got reinvented from 95 to NT, Firefox got reinvented a few times. There are many other examples less famous but closer to my part of the universe, like Maven 2, GlassFish 3, ...

Thank you for the encouragement.

Indeed I wanted to capture the shortcomings correctly, because I truly believe in the power of the community to solve them. Looking at this thread, I feel my summary is largely validated.

We've been working to solve those, and we'll step up even more so. Exciting times!!