Hasu

I think you are poor moderator acting in bad faith, if you think I violated all those guidelines.

Is that a personal attack? Is that against the guidelines?

I'm not interested in being a part of a community that finds my previous post objectionable. What I said was true and needed to be said. It wasn't kind, but the OP did not deserve or need kindness, he needs a reality check.

It should be clear that this kind of conduct is not acceptable

It isn't.

I've considered this, and I don't agree with you. This was not a personal attack (the guidelines you posted also don't forbid personal attacks, they discourage name-calling).

Not my site, so please ban my account.

The HR department is going to say that’s out of policy and then the developer jumps ship.

If you work for a company like this, you should jump ship.

As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).

Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.

This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.

It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.

For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.

Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.

(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)

If anything it's been replaced with a far more naive and gullible cohort, not a more skeptical one.

I love it when my counterparty's breach of contract is my fault because I foolishly trusted that they would do what they said they would in exchange for my money.

I'm sure you also believe that she was asking for it because she was wearing a short skirt and your dad was right to hit you because you wouldn't shut up.

This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.

I think we're talking past each other.

I took a small company that was living contract to contract into a world where they started making millions in annual recurring revenue.

There's no secret, magic bullet. All I did was make sure we were delivering progress at a regular cadence. Kept communication channels open. And tried to, but ultimately failed at, training the sales team to stop with the secret deadline negotiation

This is what I call hitting deadlines.

The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion.

There is no value equation for "the theories and knowledge" that developers build in their heads. Value in software happens when customers pay for software. That's how business works. It happens to be true that developers need to build theories and knowledge in their heads, but that isn't unique to software engineering and doesn't prevent deadlines from being effective.

"It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.

I understand the argument, having heard it from teammates ten thousand times in my career. I'm somewhat sympathetic to it, but it is not a full picture of the software business. A business that fully adopts such a strategy has no long-term plan and can't make promises to customers. That can work if you lucked into all the money in the world (Google), but most of us are not so lucky and need to deliver to customers within reasonable timeframes or the customers go to someone else who can.

I get that estimation can be hard, conversations about scope can be hard, and managing expectations can be hard. I don't care. If you still have a job in this industry you are extremely well compensated to overcome those difficulties.

This makes no sense at all. The business needs to make money to pay you. Your time is the development cost of the software. It is completely reasonable and rational for a company to say, "This is valuable to us if it can be built in three weeks, but if it takes longer, we don't want it." Because three weeks of paying your team costs a certain amount of money, and a cost higher than that puts the value of the work underwater.

If you cannot forecast whether it can be built in three weeks and then deliver against that forecast, you aren't doing your job.

Wasn't agile created to solve this BS?

Agile sets regular deadlines for shipping to customers, that is literally the core idea. Instead of one big deadline 6 months from now, you have a small deadline every two weeks for the next 6 months. It's still a deadline.

But let me tell you…last month I sent several hundred million requests to AI, as a single developer, and got exactly what I needed

There are 2.6 million seconds in a month. You are claiming to have sent hundreds of requests per second to AI.

Checks my notes from 3 years ago, 2.5 years ago, 2 years ago, 1.5 years ago, 1 year ago, and 6 months ago when we had this exact same discussion

It says here that it'll only be another 6 months!

You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988

George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.

It's not tricky at all. When you're the richest country in the world and you have a lower than average tax rate, there is one very simple trick that gets rid of the debt problem.

If you think that community needs a group of strangers to con them into coming together and being more than the sum of its parts, you are more cynical than I am.

A couple of thoughts:

1) The story of stone soup is the story of how some grifters got a free meal. I don't think it's moral instruction, or an example to be learned from, unless you are a grifter.

2) In the stone soup example and in cases like Wikipedia, the soup is freely shared with everyone, regardless of their contributions. Is AI like that, or in the AI stone soup story, are the travelers charging everyone for a bowl of soup? Doesn't that change the story quite a bit?

You ask this as if there are no competing companies that are more aligned with artists.

Tidal pays them more.

Bandcamp pays them even more and lets them run their own storefront.

I bemoan the fact that we must sometimes use a human language instead of a programming language. Human languages are imprecise and full of ambiguities. Using a human language to describe something as precise as a program is very hard, and fraught with many opportunities for error and inadvertent misinformation.

This quote from Uncle Bob is shameful, considering that he has made 100% of his career on writing English, not code.

You can save one life for a lot cheaper than the countless billions poured into OpenAI. This might be the least efficient life-saving intervention in history, and that's before calculating for harm caused.

I always felt like war rooms are a place for some leader to scream at you and not much else. The reality is that debugging some retry storm, resource exhaustion or whatever won't happen in a room with 18 people talking over one another.

I once walked out of a war room (at a much smaller company that I wouldn't be at for much longer) that had devolved into finger-pointing and blame games. Half an hour later, my boss came out to find out what I was doing and I pointed at my screen and said, "This. This is what's wrong. Ship my fix and we're done here." The entire war room came to my desk to see and discuss the fix, which we shipped, which solved the issue.

At my next job, I had to hold back laughter when the VP of Engineering, who was pushing mob programming, said, "Think about it. When we have an incident, when something is really important, what do we do? We all get in a room together. No one leaves the war room to go solve the incident on their own."

The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author

This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss.

This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.

If you think an executive that ignores court orders is going to survive for a long time in America, I am willing to bet any amount of dollars against you at any odds.

It's a good bet for me, because if I lose, dollars won't be worth anything anyway.

I always worry whenever I see people telling me how to feel - rage in this case.

No one told you to feel rage.

Throw in the complete dismisal that anyone not scared of this is ignorant, shuts down discussion.

Weird, there are a lot of comments doing discussion in reply to the parent comment. It hasn't been shut down at all! You read those words and disagreed with them, and wrote your own words in response. You're doing the discussion you're claiming is being shut down! What are you even talking about?

If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...

I think if they could find a way to make their software good, instead of bad, like it increasingly is, that would be a good use of that money.

The efficiency argument isn't really about macro-efficiency, it's about micro-efficiency. It's not, "with my lightning fast editing speed, I will drop 10k lines today", it's about writing this method faster so I can run tests and see if anything changes, getting me to the next thinking step that much quicker while the problem is still fully loaded into my head. It's about keeping flow state flowing. It's about reducing the iteration time between working code states, so your cycle time gets tightened.

You are making an important and fatal mistake: you are confusing law and power.

Caesar's civil war was illegal under the laws of the Roman Republic. Caesar successfully took power, so there was no one to enforce those laws, but he did break them, and ultimately, the Republic. As far as I know Caesar never even bothered legitimizing his war or self-pardoning - he didn't need to, he won and the Senate made him dictator for life.

So while the exact details of "Title 10" and "Posse Comitatus" are very important to an army before they cross the Rubicon - if they do cross the Rubicon the law will suddenly turn out to be far more flexible than anyone expected, and it'll turn out their actions were legal after all.

This is very important: only if they win will their illegal actions go without punishment, and winning is not guaranteed.

There is a reason we generally prefer the rule of law to the rule of power.

The Twitter Files also conveniently omitted that Twitter also got requests from the Trump campaign and accepted some of them.

It got requests from both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign. Joe Biden was not President in 2020. Donald Trump was still running the government that was "censoring" social media.

I don't know why this never comes up when people talk about the Twitter Files. .

Yes, it's also a wealth transfer, and slaveholders (other than in DC) were not compensated.

If you're ignoring that huge economic event in your analysis of the economics of the latter half of the 19th century, trying to replicate it today is going to be very rough.

Given your other replies in this thread, you're not interested in arguing honestly and I'm not going to continue engaging.