randusername

> the big wins come from specialists learning to code as the vanguard, then a few engineers taking over for production

The best places to work are ones with high mutual respect between the 'R' and 'D' of R&D. When either camp dismisses the value of the other and everyone stops giving a little to make the handoff easier it just makes everyone miserable.

I think Brooks' ideas of conceptual integrity or the surgical team are more interesting in the context of AI than the man-month.

Certain projects will really benefit from one person being able to more fully impose their vision for longer.

I disagree with DHH on a lot, but he's definitely going an interesting place with Omarchy because he can do so much "himself".

We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.

An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.

Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.

I see comments on posts like this complaining that Apple has the money to make software as high-quality as their hardware so they must be dysfunctional.

I'm not sure it's so easy. I think you have to compromise on hardware or software and Apple makes a choice.

My whole career in embedded devices, software is always under schedule pressure from hardware. Not because hardware is sloppy or evil, but because doing new things is hard and hardware has deadlines that software doesn't.

Like, I think the lessons are that all the money in the world still can't buy you time and even Apple can't keep a lid on feature creep.

It takes an uncommon breadth of perspective and depth of intellectual humility to contradict evidence it is your job to collect and interpret.

Sometimes the trends of tomorrow just aren't in the data of today.

What modeler in the late 19th century, when children were still economic assets on farms and in factories, could have predicted they would become extraordinary economic liabilities?

Don't let any news outlet convince you the story of humanity is exclusively one of war, pestilence, exploitation, and ignorance when we also find time to engineer meat cannons and give them silly names

Some cars, if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it.

Other cars, if you have to ask where the government will allow you to drive it, you can't afford it.

The value of moving dirt is that someone paid for a hole. They don't care how it was made.

The value of written communication is in whether people decide to read it. There is nothing controversial about readers rejecting content they perceive is low-effort.

Lots of programmers match the right language to the right job, I think the zen of C++ is embracing the ugly as a feature; there are so many subsets of that language you never have to leave it.

I have to say the messaging around passkeys is bad. So many providers show modals with big friendly lock logos superimposed on a smartphone to announce the change without offering any explanation about why the change is happening, why the change is happening now, or how the technology works.

I don't know when it started, I don't know who is to blame, but we've definitely arrived at a conceptualization of "the user" that is passive, uncurious, and incapable of being talked to like an adult.

I see this style of framing a lot and it always seems like turtles all the way down to me:

- Smart people recognize that some people are stupid

- No, real smart people recognize that behaviors are stupid, not people

- No, real smart people don't label others, including calling themselves smart, based on a small sample of observed behaviors. They leave the dichotomy behind.

- Wait, you still called yourself smart...?

- You are all wrong, all labels are generally meaningless and unhelpful in describing dynamic people in a dynamic world, though let's not be dogmatic about it, sometimes a dolt is a dolt and a genius is a genius

Cost is the exception to how LLM learning curves have dropped off and in some ways rewarded late adopters. (e.g. prompt engineering is hardly worth the bother when the models now think so hard about user intent)

It continues to be an uphill battle to help people at $DAYJOB understand that the relationship between turns and cost is nonlinear. And many still don't understand the idea of a system prompt, that they can control how chatty all responses are.

Length is inevitable

- the algorithm rewards it

- livelihood is parasocial community that is helped by length

- creatives seek challenges; ambition becomes length

Can you elaborate?

There's a lot of awkward folded her arms beneath her breasts for sure but I never understood this criticism. Some female characters were trope-y, but so were many of the male characters.

I went in hearing about controversy online and guess I ended feeling like I'm miscalibrated from fantasy that is so much worse.