mpyne

People complain about the imbalance between economy supply and economy demand leading to inflation and debt concerns.

The complaint isn’t that the economy is “circular”, how else could it work with 3 or more people engaged in commerce? Neither of those things get fixed on different ways to manage the money supply either, it’s not as if they didn’t have national debts or inflation while on the gold standard.

The comment wasn't about binary profitability.

It doesn’t help Google to create an AI-powered business which turns $1B in profit annually if it results in them losing a search/ads business which turns $5B in profit annually.

The CapEx spend for AI not only makes AI itself more expensive (and thus less profitable), it’s now driving everything else in technology to be more expensive (and thus less profitable).

AI is a profitability tax on the entire tech sector and it remains unclear if the profit AI will deliver is going to be worth that.

I would say they should slow down on build-out to balance supplier/labor availability with available cash flows, but I suspect all the Big Tech companies are worried about falling behind the other and being put in the position to need to rent out compute.

I encourage it! I think having to deal with switching between mouse and keyboard actually accentuates why the terminal is nice as an interface so often. If it does nothing more than make someone building a terminal app think just a bit harder about where to be intentional about user workflows so that a mouse is not even required then it may even have helped keyboard-only uses.

The introduction of the mouse led to developers paying less attention to keyboard shortcuts and function keys, but I don’t see anyone seriously saying computers should not have mice.

Or for that matter, that adding support for game controllers (something that has actually happened with Linux desktops) would led to curtailed development of non-controller parts.

> The world at large makes all sorts of trends, and that by itself doesn't make them smart.

I never said it was smart. Or dumb, for that matter. Just that many product teams have been made to merge testing responsibilities as an internal responsibility, in line with having end-to-end ownership of the product from development to its operational deployment. And usually without any dedicated test engineer member of that team to do this.

> It is only weird to have dedicated QA on your team if you don't give a fuck about releasing shit with bugs in it for the user to bump into.

Well, has the behavior of software companies led you to believe they care strongly about this? I always got the impression they cared more about either maximizing feature velocity given a certain team size, or minimizing labor cost for a given feature velocity.

It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.

But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).

Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.

> That's no surprise, "unreachable()" is basically an instruction to the compiler to stop generating code from that point on, and the compiler obeyed.

It's not a command to compiler to stop generating code.

It's a permission slip that allows the compiler to assume that code that follows is dead code, eligible to be optimized out, including eliminating potentially dead stores and loads.

Which is to say, it's precisely what any other UB is, which is why deliberate use of UB is very bad idea.

> There's no standard terminology I'm aware of to distinguish the two. But the distinction exists.

This distinction exists, but not to the compiler. And the compiler is the thing building your binary. You can complain if you like about how UB that could potentially instead have been implementation-defined is UB instead.

But until then, the compiler will mangle your code either way, whether you feel it is fair or not.

eMudhra does stupid things, NSA does not. Not with NC2.

The solution is to avoid UB. std::unreachable() is just an easy-to-invoke way of hitting UB, mentioned for the sake of the discussion. They did later take your advice “Let’s say we change std::unreachable() to int* ptr = nullptr; *ptr = 99; in the previous example.”. They still got improper codegen out of the compiler.

Though, it would be better if programmers read deliberate instances of UB as if they literally said "std::unreachable()" at that point in the code, as that would better convey how the optimizer passes will see things after dozens of frontend and middle-end passes have run before it.

If that's a hassle, imagine how much more of a hassle it is to install uv and ty and ruff.

> I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later.

Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.

No, they were carrying on the analogy about artisanal home builders being replaced by mythical robots that do it perfectly.

In this analogy, we human software devs are the artisanal homebuilders and the fancy LLMs are the robots.

And yes, there's quite a cost to build all the datacenters for all the AI that Big Tech believes that people will want. But as you mention, the cost savings are enormous for even despite that, and will make a much larger set of problems accessible to real software solutions, that previously either stayed on paper, in peoples' heads, or maybe an Excel sheet somewhere.

> Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers

OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.

But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.

I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.

It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.