michaelchisari

8,063 karmajoined 16 tahun yang lalu

Full-Stack Software Engineer

https://michael.chisari.us

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Software Engineering at the Tipping Point

17 pointsby michaelchisari2 bulan yang lalu38 comments

comments

4 jam yang laludiscuss

The first point is solid. The loss of craftsmanship means that the labor cost of those who remain has skyrocketed. That's an irony of devaluing labor is that those who hold on to their craft end up in very high demand.

That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).

The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.

5 jam yang laludiscuss

The biggest boosters of modern decor are the nouveau riche. Their homes look like hotel lobbies because they're uprooted in a way that old money wasn't.

5 jam yang laludiscuss

If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.

The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.

8 hari yang laludiscuss

And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.

9 hari yang laludiscuss

Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.

9 hari yang laludiscuss

The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

The question I answered was:

Which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in

> I actually can't stand you people.

Unnecessary. People who want a basic middle class existence are not greedy and should not receive disdain. Many have responsibilities to their elders or others, have kids or want them, etc. so avowed poverty is not realistic.

Especially when bohemian poverty is an increasingly vanishing option on a practical level.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

Nepo baby.

Joking (sort of).

I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.

There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.

I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

Seems like a great field to get into if you can make it to the top 5-10% skillset.

The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.

10 hari yang laludiscuss

Moving fast was a huge moat for a long time, but now moving fast is easy. Quality might be the new moat.

Important to note that fast never meant much to open source and for good reason.

13 hari yang laludiscuss

It's a common enough experience that it shouldn't be dismissed.

13 hari yang laludiscuss

| type errors, scope issues, import resolution, dependencies.

I write code myself and use the LLM to find mistakes then fix them manually. I recommend inverting the conventional wisdom on LLMs:

  1. Don't use it to write code. It's a terrible
     programmer. But it's an intelligent rubber duck
     and a solid analysis tool.

  2. Write the code yourself. It'll go faster than
     figuring it out as you go along. It's just typing
     if you have a plan.

  3. Use an LLM to sanity check what you wrote.
     It can find potential design issues or future
     problems or breaks from convention. Decide based on
     your experience how much you want to address these
     issues before moving on.

Is this as fast as AI writing the code? Not at first but possibly over time. Maybe faster. Certainly better quality.

Plus you don't lose any of your skills in the process.

You're still doing the gruntwork necessary to keep your skillset.

And the token cost is a small fraction of what it takes to get LLMs to write good code.

18 hari yang laludiscuss

I'm set up to use Qwen 3.6 locally if needed. It's solid, it does what I need, it runs on my laptop and it's free.

But that's because I never got on the "run three dozen agents in a ralph loop" trend or other high-token usage methods. The way I use AI is discrete and targeted and it seems that's how it will be for everyone once the economics settle.

22 hari yang laludiscuss

It was about controlling actions not emotions.

The stoics cried, they laughed, they expressed joy, they were by all accounts emotionally expressive.

The control was about what actions were to be taken in the face of those emotions and other considerations, not suppressing or controlling the emotions themselves.

It's not a small distinction.

23 hari yang laludiscuss

In 1970, median rent was $108 a month, utilities included.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/108-a-month-rent...

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The complexity required of a basic CRUD app versus a client-side optimistic update are worlds apart.

Exhaust all other optimizations before lying to your users about what just happened.

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Anyone worth their salt looked down on copy/paste from Stackoverflow, let alone blindly doing so.

Where does this idea come from that good programmers were ever cool with that?

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My comment was more "all things being equal."

Though the market so far has had a lower limit on "worse". We're finding out how low we can go before consumers start valuing quality again.

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I disagree. At some point of complexity, building it yourself is faster, better and (as we're finding out) cheaper. And more fun, although that varies person to person.

Wrestling with a code generator also creates a sunk cost fallacy where progress grinds to a halt but you still try and use the tools to fix the problems the tools created. Or you go in and fix things yourself, in a codebase you don't truly understand. A single developer can recreate the contextual nightmare miasma of a large corporation all by themselves.

There's also an emerging market consideration: MVP are easy to build so time to market is no longer hard to achieve. It's not a differentiator.

X was built in 3 days but is slow and riddled with bugs and security errors. There are also A, B, C, D and E which are effectively the same thing built just as fast.

Z was built over six months and is rock solid and performant.

Who wins the market share?

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Delighted to see a "brew install dusklight" option.

Curious how this is different from a generalized emulator. Wouldn't this be able to run any GC game that used the same registers as Twilight Princess?