> The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be _hard to maintain_.
In some organizations, maintainability may be the biggest risk being mitigated in a code review. But for me, that's selling code reviews short.
In my experience, code reviews are the single most important quality control process in the entire development life cycle. Engineers often don't have a lot of influence over the quality of requirements. Engineers often don't have a lot of influence over the competence and thoroughness of the QA process (and it often doesn't exist at all). But engineers frequently have total control over code reviews.
If I can't depend on the rest of the organization for QC, code reviews are the first place I look to mitigate that risk. That means code reviews find bugs. That means code reviews identify code smells. That means code reviews pressure test requirements and whether the implementation matches the assignment. That means code reviews transfer knowledge and serve as a teacher for both the PR author and the reviewer. And so on.
Thorough and pedantic code reviews are challenging and tedious, at least at first, but the team adapts and both the code and the review process gets better.
> Now back in the 80s? Back in the 80s, despite being aligned with the West, they were perceived a lot like China is today. Everyone was scared that they were going to start eating the West's lunch and various negative stereotypes and exaggerations started to bubble up: it was a futuristic land, but a futuristic land of suicides, with little drone-like salarymen crammed into little shoebox apartments the size of a Western bathroom, working 20 hour days.
Yep. A lot of cyberpunk fiction from that time that demonized corporate influence and power was inspired by the rise and perceptions of Japanese technology companies.
I can remember one of the American news magazine shows, maybe 20/20, showing a Japanese school with long hours and intense discipline and contrasting it with fat, illiterate American kids (the same stereotypes were made about the Soviet Union).
A lot of the perception of Japan, especially among Gen X and younger, is influenced from exports of Japanese culture. Nintendo, JRPGs, Manga, Anime, and even the quirky stuff reflects well on the Japanese though American eyes. No propaganda is needed.
That's not been my experience at all. I only view the "Follow" list because I don't care about the "algorithm". I keep my follow list pretty tight and am pretty aggressive about removing people that post too frequently or without focus. It works just fine for me, but I'm very casual in my usage.
I've also played both roles myself at times. I've been the wise consultant. And I've been the Cassandra that nobody would listen to. My wisdom was never as good as presumed when I was the consultant. And my wisdom was far better than was assumed when I as the Cassandra.
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown."
- Luke 4:24
It's why people often trust consultants over the people inside the organization. It's why people often want to elect new leaders even if the current leaders are doing a decent job.
The baby almost always gets thrown out with the bath water.
The speed of the chatbot's response is startling when you're used to the simulated fast typing of ChatGPT and others. But the Llama 3.1 8B model Taalas uses predictably results in incorrect answers, hallucinations, poor reliability as a chatbot.
What type of latency-sensitive applications are appropriate for a small-model, high-throughput solution like this? I presume this type of specialization is necessary for robotics, drones, or industrial automation. What else?
Most execs I've worked with couldn't tell their engineering team what they wanted with any specificity. That won't magically get any better when they talk to an LLM.
If you can't write requirements an engineering team can use, you won't be able to write requirements for the robots either.
Midwits love this kind of stuff. Movie critics heap praise on forgettable movies to get their names and quotes on the movie poster. Robert Scoble made an entire career in tech bloviation hyping the current thing and got invited to the coolest parties. LinkedIn is a word salad conveyor belt of this kind of useless nonsense.
That's true on there being lots of terrible practical effects out there. The parent lauded Raiders of the Lost Ark for its practical effects. In contrast, Last Crusade was a great movie that had a few practical effects that were terrible. The scene with the tank going over the edge of the cliff is so bad and so fake that I could help rewind and pause to laugh at it when I was a kid.
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
It's my favorite movie of all time, even though it's one of those movies that I don't expect anyone else to like. It's just a shot of joyful nostalgia right into my veins every time I watch it.
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.