A team manager once called and asked me if anything changed in the hypervisor (I used to support and make local modifications to some virtualization software) because her team's daily data processing job failed, which previously had run with no issues and nothing changed at their end.
I commented back, maybe with a little too much confidence, that if their input file changes daily, then their program changes daily. That is, from one day to the next, it may take different paths (or a different combination of paths) through the code's logic. In that way, I claimed, her program was like a language interpreter, and her input files were like programs.
She didn't seem completely convinced, but apparently they got the job running again because there was no follow up on that particular issue.
In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do.
I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the project would have a pull request for that kind of ticket in just a few hours, whereas I would need at least a week to figure out the root cause and another few days to craft a fix and a test.
So I started looking at ignored tickets, i.e., tickets that had been sitting around for weeks or months with no activity. Those often turned out to be very poorly written tickets with either very little information, or a huge wall of text with much business domain-specific info. If those tickets contained repro examples at all, they were often complex and very long, using external libraries I never heard of, and devoid of table schemas and example data. Sometimes I could get the author to provide more information, sometimes the author would not respond. I might have to infer schemas and make up my own data, try different things based on a stack trace, install libraries I would have preferred to not install, etc. I would work on trying to reproduce the problem for a few days, and at least a few times I struck gold. Then I would work on a self-contained, minimal reproduction case, followed by a week of sussing out the root cause. It was pretty time-consuming, but I was able to get a few fixes merged using that method, such that I was no longer a total stranger on the project (which helped me get other things merged into the code base).
This is from my memory of listening to the full interview a few days ago, not just this snippet: I am not sure he is advocating that people should avoid AI, as long as they recognize its limitations and dangers, and he admits it can boost productivity.
His argument is specific to himself only:
"Many programmers come at programming at a much more business oriented perspective. Their goal is to make a specific thing and sell it ... or release it as a piece of free software. And the goal is just to have the software. They don't really care how they got there. So if you're coming at it from that perspective, whether you programmed it line by line, or whether you use AI, doesn't really make a difference.
...
But for me, I just like the act of programming. That's always been kind of why I did it. It's just kind of a happy accident that I lived in an era where I got paid well to do that. But that wasn't why I did it ... It's not an argument about quality. It's not an argument about productivity. It's about a fundamental love of the act of programming."
I am in the same boat as Casey. I like to program more than I like the finished product (and for me, that's just fine, since I don't work for anyone, so I am not screwing up any company's productivity).
The discussion over work-from-home now seems like such a quaint topic from a different age (even though I was very much in favor of it when it was a hot topic).
>The supreme court ruled last year that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
Since stuff like this occasionally happens[1], and sometimes needs to be rectified long after a guilty verdict, I don't understand why any state would support the death penalty. Glossip is still alive only because there was a snafu related to the lethal drugs intended to kill him. Had that snafu been overcome, there would be no defendant to retry.
[1] "Occasionally" describes only the cases we know about, of course.
I wish I could go back in time and tell my 10 year old self to knock it off with the polish jokes (which were all the rage at that time, although I can remember only one now).
I worried this blog post was going to pivot into a marketing pitch for some product, but no, it just describes the issue where the AI tool that generates your code probably won't document its reasons for the choices it makes. That documentation problem exists in the pre-AI era too, except that the reasons might exist in the heads of your co-workers and could possibly be teased out.
I know nothing about AI code generation (or about AI in general), but I wonder if you could include in your prompt a request that the AI describe the reasons for its choices and actually include those reasons as comments in the code.
I stopped going to McDonald's (which I previously visited about once per month) mainly because they got very expensive, and the price does not match the quality of the food (and they also are not that fast anymore). If I am going to spend that much, I could spend a little more a go to a much nicer mom-and-pop place.
A secondary reason is that they are American. Although I am American, I am currently a resident of another country that is targeted by American tariffs, so I am trying to buy local as much a possible.
My US-based car has an "O"-like character in my license plate number, and honestly I could not figure out whether it was the letter O or a zero (even after searching the state's DMV site for information on how to distinguish one from the other). The character is very square, so maybe that means it's the letter O.
If the headline is more correct ("Because Police Cameras Cannot Tell the Difference Between a Zero and the Letter O") than the article content (which contradicts that claim), then I am alarmed. Otherwise, I am less alarmed.
As a closeted gay kid, I had zero interest in the nude ladies in Playboy.
However, I remember being absorbed in the fantastic interview with John Lennon (in an issue that came out weeks before or weeks after his shooting death) and being blown away by the things the interviewer got Lennon to talk about (a song-by-song analysis, and Lennon's shocking claim that McCartney tried to sabotage some of his best songs during the recording process, in particular Strawberry Fields Forever).
The essay Choose Boring Technology covers some of this ground. From that essay:
"One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort."
Another nice thing about the above essay is that it uses dark text on light background (as opposed to this blog post, which I had to print to PDF in order to read).
I have to say, though, that I really miss the days when I was the excited young programmer dying to use the new language, the new framework, the new paradigm or even just some design pattern. Lots of fun! Luckily, during those years, I was always in a team with a more level-headed and experienced developer who would bring me (and the other team members like me) a little closer to earth. And the level-headed developer was learning from us while he/she was moderating our technical ambitions.
I'm not worked up at all about the auto-pen. But presidents should not be pardoning friends and family (although friends seem to get pardoned quite frequently). If a president feels it's important to do so, that president should wait until they are an ex-president and petition the next person in power.
I guess I wasn't paying enough attention, for what would she get charged? I know about the illegal appointments of US attorneys, the vindictive attempted prosecutions against Trump's perceived enemies, and some problems with the Epstein file releases, but I thought all those were under the category of "incompetency". Did she lie to congress or something like that?
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