ScotterC

The book will not let you down

My kids are at a Waldorf school currently. I would not be surprised by your experience from what I’ve learned. However I’ve also seen a truly incredible environment at my school and zero cult adherence to Steiner. My best explanation is that each Waldorf school is very much its own island - it seems to be a very federated system.

Thank you for your work in this arena and trying to add clarity. As a business owner and longtime rubyist, I'm very happy Ruby Core is taking stewardship here and that maybe we can put this tempest in a teapot behind us.

I lol'ed too but then thought - at least he actually wrote this!

I’m surprised that I don’t hear this mentioned more often. Not even in a Eng leadership format of taking accountability for your AI’s pull requests. But it’s absolutely true. Capitalism runs on accountability and trust and we are clearly not going to trust a service that doesn’t have a human responsible at the helm.

Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the belief anyway.

Agreed.

Regarding some of the ‘layered architecture’ discussion from the OP, I’d argue that having many modules that are clearly defined is not as large a detriment to cognitive load when an LLM is interpreting it. This is dependent on two factors, each module being clearly defined enough that you can be confident the problem lies within the interactions between modules/components and not within them AND sharing proper/sufficient context with an LLM so that it is focused on the interactions between components so that it doesn’t try to force fit a solution into one of them or miss the problem space entirely.

The latter is a constant nagging issue but the former is completely doable (types and unit testing helps) but flies in the face of the mo’ files, mo’ problems issue that creates higher cognitive loads for humans.

Looks like a solid post with solid learnings. Apologies for hijacking the thread but I’d really love to have a discussion on how these heuristics of software development change with the likes of Cursor/LLM cyborg coding in the mix.

I’ve done an extensive amount of LLM assisted coding and our heuristics need to change. Synthesis of a design still needs to be low cognitive load - e.g. how data flows between multiple modules - because you need to be able to verify the actual system or that the LLM suggestion matches the intended mental model. However, striving for simplicity inside a method/function matters way less. It’s relatively easy to verify that an LLM generated unit test is working as intended and the complexity of the code within the function doesn’t matter if its scope is sufficiently narrow.

IMO identifying the line between locations where “low cognitive load required” vs “low cognitive load is unnecessary” changes the game of software development and is not often discussed.

Many would be quick to argue that they are interlinked but I strongly agree with you - particularly in the context of this thread.

For me, optimism still provides a lot of value in my worldview. The beliefs that have changed the most for me in the last 25 years is the limits and boundaries of what tools can do for us.

Technology ‘fixing humanity’ (when that ‘fixing’ is based on your own personal value system) is certainly a fools errand. But that limitation shouldn’t get in the way of imagining a utopia which is worth having.

Sure, I miss my childhood feelings of the 90s. But I also never expected a techno utopia to be ‘easy’.

Missed opportunity to have

Have 1516 cats for meow

instead of now

Is "FN" Fox News? Or is that separate from News Corp?

My immediate instinct here is they need cash. Or are dealing with a lot of fraud which is a pain to limit.

hey this is awesome. I'm using it and I think it's got some wheels. But please add a quick link to submit feedback in app! Here's what I got so far: - specific issue: I updated the triage text before submitting to the planning stage. Although the triage text maintained my edits I'm pretty sure the prompt that went into the first Plan generation did not include my edits. - rough idea: Plans are long and take awhile to regenerate. There's fear of submitting for a regeneration when all you want is it to understand something different about the high level thoughts. Maybe keeping a history of plans or even diffing them could be useful.

Both items above coalesce into a desire to 'rewind' back to the top of the process and try to get the context understood at the beginning, and have that clearly reflected to the user so that as you move through to details it gets easier to handle the nitty gritty without as much editing.

Great. I’ll give it a try today

Hell yea!

I’m really excited to try this. Your design process reflects my own. Please support indexing ruby files.

Wonderfully written. Thanks

Re: Ecology in Scifi

The interactions between Ants and Spiders gave me some associations with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith's Brood). Particularly, I loved how both were painting an alternative evolutionary path but 'grafting on' to existing notions and understandings of what we know to be true in species development. I wish there was more of this! I felt Children of Ruin was weaker in this regard, maybe because the conflict for the species was absent. The Spiders vs Ants and then Spiders vs Humans being conflicts which created a fanstatic narrative to explain alternative solutions to prisoner's dilemma (spiders choosing to co-opt their enemies' strengths or in Lilith's brood, Oankali being a hybrid of alien/human). I'd be curious to learn if there's more examples in zoology/ecology of species choosing this route instead of competition every time - and also, what factors might impact this.

I could have written this same comment. I fully understand where the mental irrationality comes from. I’ve done therapy etc. But what I call “the hearth of the city” means it’s hard to ever really relax. Caring for a family accelerated it.

The more I've thought about this quote the more value it has given me.

I imagine what I’m missing most is how he handles those huge obstacles. We all can turn on sheer force of will for a set amount of time but keeping it buoyant in the face of huge obstacles is another matter entirely.

I’ve talked to Sam once a long time ago which gives me a rudimentary answer to your curiosity. PG’s notes on Sam in that 2009 essay ring true to me (http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html).

there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.

We discussed nuclear power which was an industry I left but dreamed of building a successful startup in. Sam asked me why I wasn’t building a startup in nuclear power if I thought the technology was so powerful. What I realized in what he was conveying was that if he had the same conviction he would have no doubt about the ability to drive it to success. The more experienced I get the more I value that type of conviction and determination. The more I also see that behavior being rewarded with results.

Have my first child, now 7 months old. If I could only say one thing it's make sure to have a trusting & productive relationship with your partner. Problems or going to come up every day and solving for them is a function of how well you two collaborate.

I had the benefit of co-founding a startup with my partner so we had already cut our teeth on this. A child is like a type of startup. Identifying and managing problems/complexity is a daily activity. If you have a good working relationship there than you can have a blast being parents together.

Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa

Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.

We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.

Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.

I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with us https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer

Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa

Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.

We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.

Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.

I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with us https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer

Asana (asana.com) | New York, NY | Software Engineer | Full-time | Onsite | Visa

Asana's mission is to enable all teams to collaborate effortlessly. We're taking on the work management space and I have a fundamental belief that technology can help us all self-organize more efficiently and in return allow us to work more in our genius, achieving a state of flow more often. Asana delivers on this with our product and our culture.

We're looking for Engineers who are passionate about creating a phenomenal culture that enables autonomy and responsibility while striving to building the best product possible because that's what we compete on.

Our tech stack: Typescript / React and our own version of GraphQL (we built it before GraphQL was open sourced). Our version of GraphQL executes all queries as "live" by default. This means you do not need to worry about data changes when designing a feature.

I joined because I was convinced that the incredible collaboration experiences I had in a small startup could be scaled up to big companies. Come work with me https://asana.com/jobs/apply/1163890/product-engineer

Probably because there's so much potential if it's achieved

You're absolutely right. A mindset needs to accompany any tool in order for it to be successful - or direct relationship to how successful

There's a great book on this topic from the first dot com age. Necessary but not Sufficient (https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-But-Sufficient-Eliyahu-Gold...). The idea being you can adopt a tool but if you don't understand the mental models that go along with that tool then you won't fully reap the benefits.

As a company, this is still our responsibility. The best products educate as well as enable.

Not worried at all. Our value of transparency internally extends to this raise as well.

Yes employees have equity packages and we're well informed of what the terms of this raise are, the dilution and our leadership team has worked hard to get employee-friendly terms. We believe in this because our team members are the main function for Asana to grow and hit these expectations so it must be a trusting and win-win partnership in order for it to last.

I work at Asana - Site Lead for NYC

What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.