also how I found an interesting bug
10.03.2026 15:10
👍 3
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
also how I found an interesting bug
somehow this is my 4th top post of all time
Trans coding is when you're wearing programming socks, right
Info panel in a park with text on the top in Chinese and the bottom in English. It ends with "humans have liked to challenge nature, however as time goes by people get to know how powerless we are in front of Mother Nature"
Me: ahh relaxing in nature
Park sign: Never forget. Nature can crush stone. Nature can crush you.
I always ask people who want to build some nonsense:
- how will you know that it worked?
- what can you do if it didn't?
The answer is usually: we won't, and nothing. It never occurs to them that the idea might not be an inevitable success, despite ALL prior experience to the contrary.
People always get mad when I remind them there are parts of software development that aren't coding
Oh that? That's my dueling scar (papercut I got from a Yu-gi-oh card)
Finally managed to cut down the 20 minute talk to a trim 35 minutes
in almost every scenario in enterprise software, the best design choice to support an understandable and efficient user experience would be to remove at least half of the features and options.
Kids these days think there was just one baby boom
200 years ago today, Alexander Graham Bell became the first Boomer to call someone younger than them for absolutely zero functional reason at all.
Mario and Luigi (RIP) sausages
Today is Mario Day (Mar10) so let us all take a moment to remember both Mario and his brother Luigi. They deserved better than this...
I am routinely struck silent by the fact that we can stop HIV in its tracks, literally zero transmission, and as a society we just choose not to.
This relates to why a college instructor I know would stop reading submissions if they went beyond the word count limit. The true challenge wasn't showing what you know; rather, it was showing you could carefully select from the near-infinite knowledge space and concisely to respond to the prompt
Output was always king, that's why AI has been adopted so enthusiastically. It is the perfect fit for an environment that already values slamming LOCs into prod over everything else.
I wrote about this on Sunday:
It's about the dishwasher, for me
Related: I allow a sheet of notes on quizzes. Students who put the time into determining what's a useful summary based on the stated learning goals do well; students who don't bring notes or bring every word in a wall of handwriting or 6 point font don't benefit from the review and editing process.
Solution is simple: run your brain through the rock polishing machine
The biggest change in software development is not AI code, but a permission structure for disregarding quality in the pursuit of velocity
I read this as brunch experts, and it still kind of works
in fact you could argue that art is pretty much all cutting. You have *everything* that you know and think and see and imagine. You know all the notes and all the words. Making art is about deciding which ones you're not using.
It's much easier to pitch adding stuff to stakeholders, too. You can get budgets for features and acclaim for shipping.
Who gets resources and incentives to take things out? And yet, there is broad consensus that shit is too bloated and NEEDS trimming.
This is not a shitpost, I'm serious. Adding things is so easy that any computer can do it. Determining whether it improves the whole (and leaving the whole intact when removing the excess) is purely human, because it requires a point of view.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
A few weeks ago it was: "trans ideology is making teachers trans the effeminate gay boys, can't you see we're actually looking out for the gays?"
Today: "teachers must report any effeminate gay boys to the gender police"
Taking things out is more work than putting things in, and deserves more praise.
Unsurprisingly, a rag that keeps firing human writers needs to convince its audience that perfectly smooth texture-less slop is preferable.
"Why do you enjoy the texture of human writing? Accept the perfectly smooth AI text, perfect for your perfectly smooth brain."
—The literal New York Times
If I had a dollar for every time a booster told me AI was actually unbiased and I was just prompting it wrong...
The funny part is that if they had left it at "cool thing computers can do" most people would be ambivalent like "oh yeah I guess someone finds that feature useful."
But nothing seems good enough short of everyone using AI for everything, so ambivalence is predictably turning into hate.
