rho4

Thank you, I really needed to read a sane voice. The relentless hype-onslaught is not easy to cope with.

Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI:

Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.

Absolutely, I was purely reacting to the "not". Every variable named not-something will lead to difficult-to-read code with double-negation like "if (!isNotSomething()) {...}".

I just wish the variable was called "has_been_viewed_much".

I'm not sure people are reading comment chains deeply enough to be swayed by two strangers arguing online

HN comments sway me more than any other source nowadays. Reading comments not directed at myself probably makes it easier because my ego does not feel attacked.

I really liked the specific actionable steps in the TLDR.

You can only serve the 3 closest levels to a lobby with stairs or escalators.

I guess I wanted to say that no tool/technology can prevent people from creating chaos (or make up for bad/non-existant processes). People need to do that. Of course, systematic people use tools as well. But you can't expect to buy or mandate a tool/technology and expect your system to then automatically have these qualities.

Not sure if tools and technologies can solve accidental complexity.

In my opinion, a system that has been stable for years isn't 'mature' in a good sense. An exceptional system is one that can still change after many years in production.

I believe this is almost impossible to achieve for enterprise software, because nobody has incentive to make the (huge) investment into longterm maintainability and changeability.

For me, consistent systematic naming and prefixes/suffixes to make names unique are a hint that a person is thinking about this or has experience with maintaining old systems. This has a huge effect on how well you can search, analyze, find usages, understand, replace, change.

A few of my favorites:

- "Not-Boxes": Negatively formulated text (disable... / don't...)

- "Button-Checkboxes": Checkboxes with verbs that trigger actions

- "Radio-Checkboxes": Radios that are actually checkboxes (not mutually exclusive)

- "Toggle-Checkboxes": Checkboxes that are actually toggle buttons and can't decided wheter the text should show the current state or the state that will happen when you click.

Same for me. Add a 'paste text to clipboard'-button top center.

I meant it more as feedback, to be aware that some people might have this reaction. I do believe it is sincere in the beginning.

I developed an aversion to "with love"-marketing. I've seen too many products come full circle from idealistic "ad-free-forever" "will-never-sell-your-data" "open-source-forever" "customer-first" student-times to selling out everything.

The author makes beautiful concise statements that make me feel like he has a deep, big-picture kind of understanding of computing.

I think this person would be very satisfying to work with, because decisions would be based on a discussion of tradeoffs, and an awareness of similar technologies and approaches throughout computing history.

Ouch, so painful to read.

Or when you're too lazy to hunt down the sources, both for internal and external dependencies. Just Ctrl+click the method and have a quick look at the decompiled implementation, usually good enough.

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

I like the AI-disclaimer :). This might become a thing for blog and news articles: (c) all words written by <editor> on <date> without AI. And then there will be a robots.txt directive that allows collection of this self-declared human material for AI training. And a google search option: "ai:no" :)

Well said. Sad how that reflex starts kicking in for HN comments as well (ps I'm not getting any signals from your comment).

Yes, I feel the same recently with Google results. But I think I would still like to see the immediate 10 results, along with a big button "Try harder - not feeling very lucky".

I understand your point, but I still prefer instantaneous responses.

Only when the immediate answers become completely useless will I want to look into slower alternatives.

But first "show me what you've got so far", and let me decide whether it's good enough or not.

This. Speed determines whether I (like to) use a piece of software.

Imagine waiting for a minute until Google spits out the first 10 results.

My prediction: All AI models of the future will give an immediate result, with more and more innovation in mechanisms and UX to drill down further on request.

Edit: After reading my reply I realize that this is also true for interactions with other people. I like interacting with people who give me a 1 sentence response to my question, and only start elaborating and going on tangents and down rabbit holes upon request.

I really hope hacker news does not also turn into a Bash-Elon-Club like electrek.co (used to love that blog). But this comment section does not bode well.

Isn't SpaceX now part of the military industrial complex?

Nice pattern detection.

The system should support this, e.g. via // @formatter:off/on tags

Not caring about formatting also signals to me that:

- they have probably never worked on a codebase where files are edited by more than 1 person

- they have never done any significant amount of merging between branches

- they have never maintained a large codebase

- they have never had to refactor a large codebase

- they don't use diff/comparison tools to read the history of their codebase

- they have never written any tooling for their codebase

- they are not good team-players and/or only care about their own stuff

I for example do not understand how it can be possible that Ukraine transports Russian gas on its pipeline network. Not sure if that's still the case though.

I have a colleague at work who also has to get within 6" of the screen.

2 years ago I switched to a 55" 8k TV as my primary monitor.

While everyone was giving me the usual crap about it, this guy, when I showed him what it would look like with 400% Zoom, he went and bought one for himself at home.

He thanks me every few weeks, but still didn't dare to set one up in the office.

(ps I have mine standing on a normal height-adjustable table, so you wouldn't have to hunch at all)

I feel the author. Very often when I report issues to open source projects, the first response is "why don't you submit a patch?", followed by subtle hints that I am a leech profiting off the backs of volunteers. I am also at the point where I seriously ask myself whether I should invest the time to report and provide minimal examples for reproduction.