russnewcomer

I agree. But that usefulness can be deceptive, especially when one thinks enough context has been captured to prevent misunderstandings. An LLM (or human, to be clear) can easily go down the wrong path from their own assumptions, and now you have three problems.

My main complaint is that articles like this lead people to think they they can avoid those three problems, without understanding why there are three.

I can’t tell from the text if the first paragraph of your response is meant to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek, but it certainly works that way.

It feels hard to recognize that you agree with me from the following paragraph of your post > This is similar to asking Sarah why the team went for A over B, but without the imperfections of human memory, and available to agents as well. When an agent reads it, the decision isn’t an arbitrary historical fact - it’s the conclusion of an argument the agent can now evaluate and extend.

I definitely agree that human knowledge is imperfect, and that documentation is needed. But I just cannot get around the fact that the following sentence, out of context, can refer to football, American football, and basketball : ‘I passed to the center, and we scored’ and without more context, each of those can have multiple meanings even in each of the sports I named.

const hello = ‘world’

Is valid in so many programming languages that need more context.

No, the agents don’t ask Sarah, but maybe they should. And maybe I’m on this soap box because the thing is that I write internal line of business software and the technical stuff is easy. But when Sarah is the inside sales manager or the industrial engineer a continent away who speaks a different language, the reality of adequately capturing context for decisions that others have made that our software has to implement, and in a context rich enough for documentation to be succinct, is enough to make me frustrated with articles like yours that hand-wave that into ‘trivial to capture in documentation.’

None of the three can easily be captured in code, but are trivial to capture as documentation.

Posts like this frustrate me. Not because of what they ask, but because of what they incorrectly assume. They assume that documentation can provide enough context, and that human knowledge is not needed.

Every bit of written documentation can and will be misinterpreted. And perfect clarity is impossible. A well-written ADR does not eliminate all ambiguity, because there is too much cultural context around the writing of the ADR that attempting to read it from some other cultural vantage point leads to bad assumptions. We can find this basic lesson from reading law (2nd, 14th amendments to the constitution), history (what did happen after Muhammad died?), philosophy (what in the world is Plato's cave talking about?), or theology (how should we translate Ephesians 5:22-33 and what does that mean) outside its original context with other people.

Just writing things down and thinking an AI is going to later perfectly understand what the intent of the author is... patently ridiculous. I do not intend to dismiss the idea that we should probably document more, but the idea that the AI can just take our documentation and competently understand all the decisions represented in them is ludicrous.

You're not entirely wrong that double-entry accounting doesn't add much to keeping track of one balance. And the example provided in the article was very simple, just like mine was very simple. Transactions do help, but if you are trying to keep track of a balance and understanding how that balance is changing, double-entry accounting is helpful.

I'm not sure CRDTs are actually the right answer here for your example of #2, Marco. A double-entry accounting system might actually be more ideal. In that case, what you are keeping in sync is the ledger, but depending on your use-case, that might actually be easier since you can treat them as a stream-of-data, and you would get the 'correct' answer of 100.

In this case, you would need two accounts, a credit and debit account, and then device A would write +20 to the credit account and -20 to the debit account, device B would write -20 to the credit account and +20 to the debit account, then using a HLC (or even not, depending on what your use-case is again), you get back to the 100 that seems from the description of the problem that it is the correct answer.

Obviously, if you are editing texts there are very different needs, but this as described is right in the wheelhouse of double-entry accounting.

It's Wargaming who owns the IP and assets, and I doubt they release them, if they even have them. DrDeath or Mavor might have copies, but neither of them would likely release them.

Similarly, TA's source code never got released, and while Spring is great and ArmoredFish made good progress with RWE, I wish that code hadn't gotten lost either.

That’s one of Peter Watt’s Rifters trilogy, I think maybe the second one? Been a few years since I read them. I think it’s a biological neural net, not an Ai per se. Lots of big ideas in those books, but not a lot of optimism and some rough stuff.

I wonder if part of this has to do with the more complex, piecemeal nature of medical debt and these buybacks.

How I understand several of these groups (I'm not certain of the one in the article) do these debt purchases is that they purchase debt that has already been bundled together and resold. So when a person owes medical debt to a hospital, a doctor, a surgeon's practice, a pharmacy, etc, they may owe 15k in total, and these buybacks only cover one resold debt, they may have their hospital debt forgiven, for example, but still own 10k in total to the 3 or 4 other creditors.

Contrast that to a mortgage debt, for example, where paying off the mortgage relieves all anxiety around that debt, and I can see how the difference in complex, multi-creditor debt versus simpler, singular-creditor debt could help address the findings of this study.

The web is crying out for true RAD. GridWhale is promising, I have been casting around for a project I could use it with.

If you can pull it off, I guess we'll grudgingly forgive you for not finishing Vault of the Galaxy yet. :)

When we both worked at an NGO in a mountainous desert country in a relatively peaceful period.

My advice is always, find the kind of thing that you want to be doing and then do it. In my case it was do something more meaningful with my life, in my now wife's case it was walk with the people in the country we were in. Our overall life aims were relatively close, and so one thing led to another.

An acquaintance did basically this a few years ago on a vBulletin.

My memory says there was a project to be a vB->Discourse converter that didn't rely on DB access, but I can't immediately find it.

I took your using the word literally to mean you were saying that the physical characteristics changed, which is apparently not what you were saying.

I think this is a difference in language expectations, because when and where I grew up, some Protestants thought that Catholics believed either that the physical characteristics of the Eucharist changed during the blessing or consumption of the Eucharist, which your link seems to demonstrate to me that you are not agreeing with.

I wouldn't really characterize the Catholic Church's official doctrines that way or that flexibly, but again, I am a Protestant with a number of overall disagreements with them and less personal experience with them, and it is easy for me to read your post as someone with much more personal experience. And since HN isn't really the best place for extended religious discussions, if you are interested for any reason, my email is always open.

I'm a Protestant, but that explanation of transubstantiation may be the popular understanding but is not the actual official doctrine of the Catholic Church. I'm not versed enough to explain it except by way of terrible analogy to software development - everyone knows what Agile is, but no one really knows what Agile is, and once you start to read the Agile Manifesto and think deeply, you realize that.

Zero-k is based on Spring Engine, that started as a community project to be a 3D engine for TA. So you are very correct.

It’s still some of the same folks - SJ and some of the other SYs wrote the Spring Engine that Zero-K uses.

I myself learned how to code writing .bos scripts and hanging out at Annihilated, TAU, and #gnug

If you want to see some of the stuff still possible and being done in the TA engine, check out TAUniverse.com

Hard for me not to conclude that hoarding can happen more easily now, and that it is more prevalent because it takes a surplus of money and a surplus of goods available, plus some relatively remarkable social and political stability (that the U.S. has had since the 1870s...) Other times and places haven't had the critical combination of lots of available goods plus so many people with enough money and space to store it. Go look at stories of hoarders from the 1800s, they are all very wealthy (even for the time) people.

Now, with mass production and vastly increased purchasing power, this is what we see in America. You cannot tell me that a mental health issue in places like Yemen, Syria, or Guatemala can manifest itself in the same way, because people do not have the money, available goods, or social stability for this disorder to become widespread.

:)

Not celebrities, but a little bit of whimsy makes life fun!

As far as rewinders, he has a huge collection of VHS cassettes and VHS decks, but they are all getting old, have already had a long usage when they get to him, and VHS is not a precise medium so not great condition in many cases. The part that usually fails is the motor, and so you have the rewinder to save the motor on the VHS deck. However, the rewinders are also usually low quality and old, and so what happens a lot is that the latches that hold them closed while the rewind fail because they were not great quality plastic (either in composition or design accuracy) that have been subjected to a lot of rattle during their lifetimes and then they break, and it is cheaper/more convenient/fairly environmentally friendly to buy them from thrift stores for ~$3 than to order a ‘new’ $20 one from Amazon/eBay.

Now, this of course leads to a lot more lines of questioning, but I think the answer of ‘because they don’t sign autographs’ is probably sufficient especially since this answer amuses me and is likely to be unseen.

This doesn't feel like an archive to me, it feels usable.

When I was 16, my parents got a new answering machine. My dad's recording of the message was yelling into the machine "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. Leave a message" It was aggressive. I re-recorded saying, not yelling, "You have reached xxx-xxx-xxxx. We don't sign autographs, but you can leave us a message." He did not like that I re-recorded it. His father, however, loved it for some reason. (never could figure out what Grandpa found funny.)

20+ years later, when my sister got them a new answering machine (yes, you can still get new ones, my parents still have their landline), the message has now changed to "... we don't sign autographs or send texts, but you can leave us a message."

We also buy my dad VHS auto-rewinders whenever we see them at thrift stores.

The library in the city near where I grew up had some variant of this book in it. Unfortunately, the variant of BASIC was something that didn't compile on the 286 my parents had purchased and either I didn't ask or they couldn't help me at age ~5/6 to get around the compiler errors, and I thought I wasn't smart enough to be a programmer for about 8 years.

Then I got into the mid-wave mod scene in 1998, and I realized I had the wrong compiler, but man, I just thought I couldn't follow directions right.

If that is the takeaway you got from my comment, I am sorry for bad phrasing on my side. I was trying to short, pith, koan-like. Can I try again?

Almost no one want to use the tool. They want to use the tool to do the thing they want to do. For example, it is rare that someone would buy a piece of wood just so they could cut with their new saw. They might decide to make a table so they can cut with their new saw, but they are not going to use a tool to use a tool, it has to provide clear value to them. In this case, for this person, they were willing to learn new technologies (as I think evidenced by using DosBOX on an iPad in 2012, though I didn’t say that in the original comment, this was a very very clunky system then. I think they didn’t use an external keyboard) but not for the thing that was on their critical path, if there was not a clear improvement in outcome.

I didn’t provide a clear improvement in outcome, I just provided a better tool. After this person had been doing their job for as long as they had, using the tool they had, investing in a better tool for that job didn’t make sense. They also knew whoever came after them would probably not want to use their tool there, so why change it?

Put yet another way (since I didn’t do a great job the first time, I’ll try again), nobody wants to use business software. I have written line-of-business, not consumer, software most of my career. Even now, where I work and we have a solidly engineered, designed, custom CRM/glue software that was been improving since the late 90s that really fits the business well, no one goes into work in the morning thinking, ‘yay, I get to use our CRM today!’ And definitely no one thinks, ‘yay, I get to use JIRA and SAP today!’ They may think, if they even think about our software at all, ‘hey, this doesn’t stink’ but a recently I found out someone was exporting a table of data to Excel and then spending 4-8 hours a week creating a report, and I was able to turn that into the press of a couple buttons and picking a few values in a day, and now they get to do more of the things that bring our company value and make their job more interesting and they love that they get to use my software to do it. They don’t care that I used a mini Vue app with an AJAX call to create the interface instead of our older form/POST paradigm, they care about what the tool let them do.

That’s the value that I see computer systems, when thought about and executed well, providing to users everywhere. Not doing tasks better, but doing the right tasks, for the right people, at the right time.

To extend this yet another way, and hopefully establish my point firmly, I was thinking of the above situation as a win-win. I got to say just use Excel, they got to use a modern piece of software, what would be better? In the same way, the guys in my company’s IT Operations group see saying that the new hotel desks in the office are all double 24 in monitor setups. I do not really like using double monitors, I prefer one large monitor, like the 32in that is still kicking at the office from the pre-COVID times. I asked them to just give me one flex desk that had the large monitor, that I could use when I came in, we already have the monitor, please! But they feel like it would generate more tickets, and they are already overworked(and they are!) so no single monitor for me. They see it as win-win, they reduce their ticket burden, have more time for other things our manufacturing conglomerate needs, most people like dual monitors, so overall win-win. But I don’t like it and now my weekly trip into the office is a little less comfortable because my ergonomics are wrong, my muscle memory for where my windows are is wrong, and yes I can learn new things but the tools are made for man, not man for the tools.

I know that was long, hopefully that helped clarify my comments.

Somewhere between 2010 and 2012 when doing small business IT support, for a client, I spent some time installing 1-2-3 on an old, mostly disused machine in a corner of their office, then connecting to the machine via LogMeIn on an iPad (I think DosBOX because it better supported something on LogMeIn, I honestly don't remember why not CMD.EXE) so that this customer, a medium sized construction sub-contractor, could continue to use the 1-2-3 based estimation spreadsheet that had been developed in the early (yes, early, it might have been converted from visicalc) 80s. I offered to instead convert it to Excel since it wasn't really that complicated, but the response was basically "That's probably better, but I've been doing this since the 70s and I'm going to retire soon, I don't want to learn more new things that I don't care about instead of getting jobs done as fast as possible."

It's not that 1-2-3 or a TUI was better, but that if you know it and you don't care about it, you care about it.

Worse is better.

And so it goes with apologies to Mr. Richard Gabriel, but that experience helped me more deeply understand what software should do is do important things for people, not do things better.

I lived in the relatively safe stable part of a war zone as a foreign civilian for a few years, and had friends who were frequently in the less safe/less stable parts.

So much of our modern world is designed for modern infrastructure, and when that infra falls down, you either have to do without or accept a level of danger that is probably higher than the modern world takes, but lower than what our ancestors 100 years ago took.

My dad's bank switched to $COMPANY in the late 90s and to this day, when I run into people who work for them (which happens from time to time since they have offices in my city), I have to suppress my inclination to dislike them, since it was such a brutal two years for our family when dad was working 70+ hours unendingly.

My father, controller at a mid-sized regional bank, was involved in a couple of these when I was growing up, and worked at the FDIC as an examiner in the 80s. My memory from the last takeover he did shortly after this NPR article was that the FDIC had given him the vaguest of hints that his bank was on a list that could be selected to takeover a bank in the next month or so, then called him on a Wednesday afternoon, told him he needed to be half a state over by Friday morning (which I also gathered was a little out of norm but the FDIC person was someone my Dad had dealt with for a while and there was mutual trust) for a meeting, and then they took over the bank on Friday. There was the impression from my dad that they could have tried to refuse, but his bank wanted to expand in that area anyway, the FDIC knew that, and decided it would be best to have a larger, not-in-the-market-but-near-it bank take over this smaller community bank.

My dad also was the lead in his bank purchasing other banks in the 90s, and that was a months long, tiring and stressful process that they knew how to manage, and he said that receiving a bank from the FDIC was a different level of acute stress.

Edit Just unlocked a memory, I think one of the reasons that my dad's bank got selected was also that they ran the same backend banking software, since it was going to be a crash acquisition.

Congratulations on that position! A sibling did a masters' in organ performance, and getting an Organ Scholar position is a solid achievement for an undergrad.

I would not worry too greatly about your skills not being viable, depending on what you are wanting to get back into later. If not in a SV/startup world, there are a lot of tech-adjacent companies who will look at you, see someone with an undergrad in math, a masters in something, and dedication to a technical craft, and strongly consider hiring you. Plus, you have something really interesting to talk about in an interview, and that's not worthless. I know the last time I was looking for a job, I got at least two interviews because of a very interesting previous job overseas (because the interviewers openly said, "you mat not have the typical experience we look for, but you had this job and tell us about that).

And thanks for your gifts to the congregation!

Top three (sorry)

Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism by Kathryn Tanner. A really good look at how capitalism has been expressed in our modern world, and how Christianity should not enable the worst excesses of capitalism.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro. This one actually took me about 6 months between reading and Audible, because it is in some ways too detailed, but the naked use of power for maintaining power for a singular vision is illuminating. Even in an antagonistic biography, Moses leaps off the page as a bright, energetic, flawed human. I enjoyed this a lot.

Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women by Lucy Peppiat. A persuasive, intelligent, and solid look at how Christianity in America has taken many unfortunate turns away from reading Scripture as a document of equality and elevation, and toward a document of hierarchy and repression. I think Peppiat does a good job of discussing all theological avenues of thought and while clearly disfavoring some, not stooping to ridicule, caricature, or personal attack.

You are absolutely correct that authenticity is hard to find, and that foreigners do not truly experience the culture as the locals. I hope I didn’t give that impression in my post. And my intention is not to argue, but rather to point out that someone transiting through a place in just a few years does not know that place deeply. The method of life that Chris describes has value, and is good. It’s just not the complete picture (nor am I saying that anyone has a complete picture)

Hey, Chris - I think one of the difficulties I had with your article(and with other writing like it), having lived outside the US and trying to travel like this occasionally then, is that we don't really get to live as the locals live. I spent most of my time in one specific corner of the world, and I see a difference of thought process in people who are tourists, people who travel, and people who live in another culture. I think you're in the second category, which is not bad, but I think that there is a real sense of particular place missing from your writing, while there is a distinct mindset missing from my place (the third category) that lead to both intrinsically lacking the full appreciation of the other. When we travel, we live like some facsimile of local life if we stay in an AirBnB and go to local places, but we still are relatively rich, white (?male?) people with the option to leave the place when we want to, and don't get a good, deep sense of the culture. It's hard to be a real regular somewhere, for example, when it's clear that you are a rich visitor who will be coming regularly for a while, spending a good amount of money, and then leaving. From your writing, for example, I felt like you misunderstood the compliment that Jamal, the Turkish restaurant owner, gave you when he complimented the economic status that has allowed you to gain weight. I lived somewhere in a decent amount of privilege while working for several years, and it was only after regular, constant, and questioning exposure to the culture that I began to understand it past the surface. I don't see how your wide travel to many different cultures lets you get a deep understanding of any specific one.

Put another way, (which can seem attacking, not my intent, I just can't think of a way to say this better in a short comment) the tourist has an experience an inch wide and an inch deep, the traveler has an experience a mile wide and a foot deep, and the person who goes to live in a third country for a term that includes the word years has an experience a foot wide and a mile deep. We just should all recognize what our experiences are.

Solid writing, rolling is the way for clothes, one backpack where at all possible(mine was larger than yours, but still so much easier to just carryon when going to visit somewhere), and I greatly enjoyed my visits to place I described as 'Wichita, $COUNTRY', just not as much as living somewhere for years.

- The Pragmatic Programmer - helped me see some common pitfalls and figure out how to avoid them. Also gave me some good language for working with others.

- Coders at Work - hearing how some very experienced people thought about software was perspective altering for me in a good way.

- Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks about - Knuth has a depth to him and his thinking that freed me to have depth in my own thinking. While not strictly a software engineering book, the integration of all areas of life was and is inspiring.