German has a habit of creating new words by stringing together existing ones.
Think “Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften” for “legal protection insurance companies”. Just one word, complex meaning.
One of the most hilarious pieces of C# code I have ever seen was one where names of all types - classes, methods, objects, etc. - were taken to the logical extreme.
Not camel case. Not snake case. Not Kebab case. Not pascal case.
Literal single words more than several dozen characters long accurately describing the item in question. Some were more than four dozen characters long, all one word.
>The people who are upset by this change, in my experience, are all the people who would answer that a programmer's job is to write code. The people who are happy about this change, are those who would answer a programmer's job is to produce value.
Think of it another way:
You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.
Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.
The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.
Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?
I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.
At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”
> You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.
I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.
We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.
Yet you can look for accountability in all the data breach, Windows ME, GIMP, or unreliable bluetooth. I would take bricklayers that can reason and say "yeah, we need to delay because the nearest brick factory is currently in low supply", instead of a robot that will yeet bricks that no one can understand why. I value the human.
You can look for accountability. You probably won’t find it. But I’m also not saying there isn’t value in humans.
I am saying that we all have worked on projects where “artisanal software development” bore as much resemblance to our process as an abstract art painting does to reality. We’ve all worked with plenty of coworkers (and maybe have even been that coworker ourselves) who just punches the clock. We’ve all worked with developers who have had 1 year of experience for 30 years in a row. Everyone knows the average piece of software being produced is a buggy mess and it’s amazing it all works at all. Hell our industry coined the phrase “worse is better” and “move fast and break things”. To turn around now and pretend that we’re actually all master craftsmen, regularly constructing artifices of pure beauty and logic that will stand the tests of time is a bit silly.
Sure I would take a real human over a YOLO coded piece of software any day. But I’d also take a real application over an excel macro monstrosity any day too. That doesn’t mean excel macros don’t have their place or that they aren’t used to produce things of real value.
>Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years. This is the most turbulent time to be a software engineer I can remember. We’ve had it relatively easy up until now, but there’s an increased feeling that the whole craft is going through a huge shift and every individual needs to decide how they respond to it, which is very hard without the benefit of hindsight.
I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out.
Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage.
But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.
Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.
I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
I want a solarpunk future, even if it means fewer personal devices and a simpler Internet. A place where everyone has roughly equal economic potential (sub-10× between wealthiest and poorest) but everyone lives healthy, vibrant lives with plenty of resources to draw from. A post-scarcity world, if you want a label.
Unfortunately we are hurtling into a future where 80+% live lives of grinding poverty with no real viable future to hope for, while another 19% have actual options and resources, and that final 1% exist in unimaginable opulence and wealth that is built entirely upon the labour of the other 99%. As in, true parasites in every economic way.
I stop breathing all the time. At least once or twice a week.
Luckily I’m awake at the time, relaxed in a sitting position, and have no problem starting back up. I just get “petered out” on an exhale with my trachea fully open and unblocked, just no burning need to inhale at the moment.
Plus, I usually hit a mild panic at the 30-45s point, and force myself to inhale again.
And no, I don’t get sleep apnea. My GP has checked.
Think “Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften” for “legal protection insurance companies”. Just one word, complex meaning.
One of the most hilarious pieces of C# code I have ever seen was one where names of all types - classes, methods, objects, etc. - were taken to the logical extreme.
Not camel case. Not snake case. Not Kebab case. Not pascal case.
Literal single words more than several dozen characters long accurately describing the item in question. Some were more than four dozen characters long, all one word.
It was glorious.
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