FartyMcFarter

I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore.

Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress, decisions you need to take etc.

You can start with something as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...

I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something you can use to get started again.

It's quite freeing to not have to have all the context in your head all the time.

Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.

Given his seniority, it could also be that he picks whatever bugs he wants to work on. Whether that is from personal interest, frequency of crashes or any other criteria.

When you're at that level in a company, it's rare that someone would be micromanaging what you work on at all times.

As someone who has debugged his fair share of tricky low-level issues, the parts that I find impressive in his blog posts are things such as "then we look at the bytes in memory and oh yeah, this looks like an exception record". I would usually not think to do that (or be able to recognise it as easily as I presume he did).

Quake 1 was worth it even if just for the multiplayer. It was so good that people were having fun online even on just the "start" map with the shareware version. Quakeworld was especially great and very playable even with a modem. Then you add the moddability (including QuakeC) and the groundbreaking renderer, it's one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming history.

The single player was weaker than the multiplayer, but still enjoyable with its strange variety of map atmospheres.

I'm glad Quake happened even if it made id Software a worse company thereafter. I would understand if the people involved feel differently though.

Is the title a reference to "will it blend"?

They were so close to getting it right.

The philosophy of C++ is to not introduce unnecessary overhead, and to trust the programmer. This design choice is prevalent throughout the language. They were never going to make an exception, especially for something as prevalently used as references.

There are countless examples of this "no unnecessary overhead and/or trust the programmer" choice:

- primitive types and standard containers are not thread safe - it's up to the programmer to know this and use them accordingly.

- std::unique_ptr lets you grab the underlying raw pointer, in which case it's no longer a "unique_ptr". But there are cases in which it's useful to do this (e.g. interfacing with C code), so they let you do it, and trust that you do it in a safe way. They could have made unique_ptr not support this, but then it would be less useful (or force you into copying data unnecessarily to call an API that requires a raw pointer).

But there's no enforcement.

There's no strict enforcement, but it is undefined behaviour, so compilers can randomly choose to act as if it's enforced and simply crash your program or make it act weirdly.

Programmers are notoriously nitpicky, and avoid making absolute statements in most cases (wait, I'm doing it too!).

This is because we've been trained to be humble by the machines we work with. Computers expose a lot of our mistakes, and over time they remove any illusion that we can be quickly confident about things.

I would take the qualifiers in his post as an indication of his general disinclination towards making absolute statements, not as a lack of humility.

That still doesn't make it a good comparison. The salt emitted by desalination plants is already in the sea now, it's not salt that went somewhere else.

Why is it akin to that? Doesn't the salt come from the sea in the first place?

Yeah. Worrying about salt in the sea is like worrying about oxygen in the air. Can too much oxygen in the air sometimes be a problem? Yeah, in some corner cases. Is it a major problem that we can't solve? Not at all.

Android Java apps' memory consumption is definitely a relevant concern.

I may have missed this in the article, but:

What was the net effect of the optimisations? How much faster did it get?

The mindset of law breaking probably carries across jurisdictions.

As long as there's an RPC connection established and a partially sent request, I think it would count.

If any company announces that they use token consumption as an employee performance signal, for me that's close to a red flag to stay away from that company.

No company with good engineering leadership should act like this is remotely a good idea.

Everything about this story is so satisfying, that if I read it in a lesser source I would be doubting it.

The person finding the baby was the person who eventually adopted him. The judge asking the guy to adopt the baby was the same judge that performed the wedding of the couple doing the adoption. Just so many great details.

https://archive.is/0wi6J

Both of them contained a search algorithm that explored some moves from each considered position, usually not all moves. Both of them contained logic (learned or programmed) to evaluate moves and/or positions.

The differences between them are many, but brute force doesn't enter into it in either case.

Yeah, and back then people moved the goal posts too, saying Deep Blue was just "brute-forcing" chess (which isn't even true since it's not a pure minimax search).

One in three employers spent more on restaffing than they saved from the original layoffs. That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.

Well written :)

It seems this particular company makes a payment for completing those tasks, so it might not be that bad.

As someone without strong feelings on Linux vs Windows (I've used and developed on both about equally): this kind of news, along the way Windows has been changing has me wondering if I should change my primary desktop environment at home to Linux.

In my eyes, Windows used to be the desktop environment that "just works and can run almost everything". Lately it's becoming enshittified, with weird bugs showing up more and more frequently (a memorable one is not being able to launch Notepad from the start menu!!). I think Microsoft is losing its best attributes when it comes to consumer software. Linux may not be perfect but it's looking more and more attractive in comparison, even with its imperfections.

That's true, but I don't know if this one was ever a good measure in the first place.

People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities.

Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.

The old open-source bargain had a positive feedback loop. You pick Python because it’s easy. You find a bug in a dependency. You fix it.

Agents broke that loop in a specific way: the unit of contribution shifted from the patch to the port.

What does this even mean? Every time there's a bug we port the whole code to a different language instead of patching it? This sounds like absolute nonsense, and makes me wonder whether a human actually wrote this.

Thicc floppy disk.

The "Oomerd" button is probably the debugger by the sound of it?

It got to the point where people were sarcastically posting "An update on <myself>" when sending goodbye emails.

The FOMO is real with execs and AI.

$1000 budget doesn't mean you spend $1000 if you use nothing.

If you type 2 asterisks it's rendered as one, it's an escape character mechanism:

This text has one asterisk on each side

*This one has two on each side*