jacques_chester

It did, in at least one way: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/reference/web/webmvc...

That ... wasn't the kerfuffle

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

In a shocking twist, the prompter works in VC.

It was a choice. I chose it and I wish it was never a choice I considered.

I was unemployed before Meta.

As I learned while burning through all my savings in the 2023-2024 timeframe: You are free to have principles, but principles aren't free.

I am ashamed I worked there.

Basically:

1. You smash out rubbish as quickly as you can.

2. You get credit for "shipping" and "moving fast".

3. It is later learned by management that the rubbish is rubbish. But crucially, they do not view bugs as arising from how the work was done. Rather, it is treated as if it is an uncontrollable natural process.

4. Fixing high-profile rubbish is prioritized.

5. The rubbish is smothered with still more rubbish that moves the observable rubbishness to elsewhere in the codebase.

6. You get credit for "better engineering" and "moving fast".

Nobody is properly incentivized to prevent rubbish. Only to produce it and then to produce more of it.

Focusing on your first point: Memorization isn't everything. But it's not nothing either.

Sometimes it's nice to be able to just bang out some code without looking everything up. IDEs in an IDE-friendly language make this awareness accessible in the immediate frame, but don't necessarily help with having a mental menu of possibilities to choose from.

That said: I find spaced repetition utterly crushing, so I only use it very sparingly.

I do not understand how can someone with so much money produce such a low quality products.

It's what management rewards.

Exciting. Honestly I expect this will do more to advance bitemporal design than decades of jawboning has.

And really, ranges are an amazing substrate for this. I've had to do this by hand in a ... less featuresome ... SQL-speaking DB and it was clunky and performed fairly unimpressively.

The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse. You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement to be monotonic and costless.

AI slots quite neatly into the capability trap model, actually.

Which loop it belongs to in the model is left as an exercise for the reader.

You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.

Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.

Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.

questions: WHY has it become the standard?

1. It coincidentally aligns with the interests of the C-suite. They are mostly compensated in stock, and compensation mostly set by other members of the C-suite elite. And gosh darn it wouldn't you know it, they all think it's a jolly good idea.

2. It is taught in B-school, so most of the C-suite believe it or have never thought seriously about its deeper meaning. "Shareholder value" is easy to mouth, but breaks down almost immediately after trivial scrutiny. Which shareholders, pray tell Mr Babbage? What is value to them? Are they just are hivemind with perfectly identical interests, opinions, attention span, background knowledge, experience, access to capital, prestige, ...?

Thanks, I appreciate it.

It is ... problematic ... to lead with "anti-AI" and then bury terms like "judicious in our use of it" in the fine print.

IMO a team like yours can either:

* Use LLMs, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".

* Not use LLMs currently, but the non-use is not due to following a principle, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".

* Not use LLMs and promise never to do so.

I'm happy you are trying something new. But you hurt yourself by engaging in something very old: disingenuity.

(edits for presentation and grammar)

Mate until last week I had quite literally unlimited, unmetered access to frontier models from every major lab. No quotas, no brownouts, none of the stuff civilians gripe about. Chairman Mark had handed out the titanium amex and said "go forth and multiply my expenses".

What I saw was not ~ * ~ actual work ~ * ~. It wasn't "real stuff" either. What I witnessed was the most spectacular immolation of surplus I have ever seen. So much time, money and intelligence being pissed up against a wall in order to show the boss what a jolly good job you're doing.

When I tried to use it for actual work -- with, I repeat, utterly limitless amounts of tokens to burn -- it sucked balls. No matter how breathless the hype that this generation had finally cracked it, they all sucked. It produced flabby, buggy code by the gallon. It routinely fucked up and wasted my time. More than once I would wrestle with something for two or three days, give up, then bang a good solution in about an hour. Yes, I used rules and skills and .md files and and and and and and. Skill issue, you say? Well look, if hammers shot spikes through my hand one time in 20 then the skill issue is using the bloody doomhammer in the first place.

The actual work being done here is manic bullshitting and pissing in the village well. Shipping clanker clinker isn't productivity.

When I see a complex socioeconomic phenomenon described as "just" I know for certain that someone is about to spectacularly fail to have read books.

This is value stream mapping. No, business process reengineering. No, systems dynamics. No, a Krebs cycle. No, ...

People could always do these things. It was never a sword that only AI enthusiasts could draw from the stone. By god people, the AI has read books, can't you give it a bash too?

I recognize all these words, I can sense, perceive, parse and reason about all of these words. Yet I cannot derive a sensible meaning from them. The pragmatics is of a flailing fish singing Waltzing Matilda to a teleporting cucumber.

There's nothing transparent or inspectable about a sparse fog of floating point numbers. Rendered as a picture it's the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel. As a sound: ksssshhhhhhhhh. If you see anything in it that you believe is a real discrete phenomenon then I have a face on Mars to sell you.

You know what is an inspectable algorithm? An algorithm. The old-fashioned kind that were intensional and not gigantic quasi-extensional stews connected to nervous cats in boxes. I'm so tired of this madness. So entirely bloody exhausted. Out of all the manias I've lived through in this trade the current one is by far the most absurd, wasteful and destructive.

Management is waaaayyy ahead of you on all of those suggestions.

Hard to say, lots of things I guess. One was that I was never good at the current interview triad and needed to practice it a lot. Another was my resume, not impressive to a certain kind of hiring manager and recruiter.

Still another was that I asked blasphemous questions like "will I get to sleep?" and voiced controversial views like "teams focused on quality move faster".

The thing is that you sometimes get quite daft reasons back. One place said "you gave more examples from Pivotal than Shopify". Well yes, I was at Pivotal about thrice as long, that's how time works. I just let it slide.

I work at Meta (though after next Wednesday, maybe not).

I signed the petition.

Am I hypocrite? I think another version of me would think so.

I signed up because nobody else would take me on by the time they offered me something. After having only 3 months of work out of 18 months, with savings depleted to zero, facing the prospect of losing health coverage and having to fall back on family, I took the deal.

Hate me if you like. But I have a 40-odd year head start on hating me, so I doubt you'll make any kind of dent.

------

In any case, pushing back, anyhow, anywhere, is better than nothing. Let's not get stuck in HN's favorite argumentative shortcut, the Nirvana Fallacy.

There aren't enough things an executive can go to jail for.

Fines don't do anything to deter bad behavior. Either:

* The company pays

* They pay and the company mysteriously increases next year's comp / grants a "loan" / etc

* D&O insurer pays

In all three cases the money comes out of the shareholders' hides. It provides zero personal deterrence. The payoff matrix, as seen by a sociopath, makes it rational to always defect against the common good.

The only punishment that can really focus attention is physical imprisonment in a facility they can't choose.

SOX did this for financial reporting and gee shucks it turned out executives can follow the law after all!

More accurately, PostgreSQL features ChatGPT is excited about.

For those wanting to do it for web pages, I've been keeping an eye on https://www.gomponents.com

If it's not in an 8K filing it isn't real.

with tools that aren’t well supported

This is an odd thing to say about the backend choices. Spring is ... well let's just say there are a few folks in and around that area.

Maybe he was a great guy. But people change. It seems as though having your brains marinated in money is highly neurotoxic, no matter how you started off.

(Anyway: the main offence is using the term "jerk" instead of "wanker").

"Compatible" isn't mentioned on the homepage, though, despite multiple opportunities to do so -- "Create, manage and query serverless PostgreSQL", "Run history, status, and metadata live in Postgres", "Full Postgres. Fully typed.".

This lack of detail may cause folks to form the incorrect impression that this is PostgreSQL, or a fork of it, or some module or plugin for it. Folks will be upset to learn that they were misinformed. Some will assign deception as the cause, whether that is true or not.

I think your interests would be best served by trying to make that distinction clear and prominently so. So for example "A PostgreSQL-compatible, fully serverless database", or similar.

I hope I have explained better.

db9 is a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database. Your data is stored in a distributed TiKV cluster, and each database (tenant) gets its own isolated keyspace. [0]

I feel like the lede is a bit buried here, bordering on deceptive.

That or the architecture doc is wrong. Both plausible I guess, in this day and age.

[0] https://db9.ai/docs/sql