Yes but ... people will sign that paper for almost any severance. Consider the alternative (don't sign, get a lawyer etc) -- many folks will just sign to get whatever's on offer
OMG I forgot all about cucumber, but wow the "cucumber cycle" of old sounds a lot like LLM psychosis of today. As in, the solution to cucumber problems was always to invest more into cucumber! Add more operations! Integrate more things into it!
Did cucumber go away? I never hear about it anymore.
> I was waiting for the "so I tried coding something with an LLM myself, and I found..."
Why? Most of the article was about the productivity of teams.
> This is a very academic approach to the subject - read what other people have written about it
Meta-studies have tremendous value. He's asking a simple question: if LLMs are changing the world, let's look at what studies are showing.
> My experience has been remarkable, and, like others, I'm finding real joy in being able to move past the code to actually design and play with whole systems and architectures
Great! What does that have to do with the age-old problem that software development doesn't scale to teams well? It is indeed a "50 year old problem", so please tell us how LLMs solve it.
I had to go re-read the article to make sure, but it doesn't address teams or scaling to teams at all, so I'm not sure why you're asking about that?
The article is talking about inherent vs accidental complexity, amongst other points, and if the author had actually tried developing with an LLM, they might have worked out how LLM coding does address some of this.
- The DORA report is about organizations not individuals
- Mythical man-month is about organizations not individuals
- No Silver Bullet: "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation." Clearly he's NOT talking about the 10x dev building the whole thing themselves, which everybody knows is faster, better, probably doesn't even need a spec. Organizations are who need specs -- they have clients, business people etc. An organization with a single developer moves at light speed -- but this doesn't scale.
Nobody's disputing that LLMs give multiples for certain development tasks. The main thrust of the argument centers on how unimportant coding time is ... for organizations. Coding time is a HUGE lever if you're the one dev building everything, but that's not a repeatable pattern.
Meh, I'll concede that Fred Brooks was mostly writing about developing software within an organisation, and therefore writing about teams.
Coding time is important if it gates experiments and spikes. If you have to work out your architecture on paper because actually coding it up is a serious expense, then it becomes harder to experiment with different designs. In an LLM world where coding time is very cheap, it becomes easier to experiment and try things out. Developing an entire architecture and then abandoning it because it turned out that it didn't scale too well, or couldn't handle some edge cases, is not a major mistake or problem any more. There's no pressure to keep old code because it cost a lot of money to develop. You can spike an entire system, decide that it was a useful experiment, but didn't work, delete the repo, and go get lunch. This is new, and important.
I guess it's what you think the work of sw dev is.
> Developing an entire architecture and then abandoning it because it turned out that it didn't scale too well, or couldn't handle some edge cases, is not a major mistake or problem any more.
Cool, but I can count on one (two?) hands how many times in a 30yr career I had the opportunity to do this, except when I "made the opportunity" by coding the solution fast enough that the PHBs couldn't say no. LLMs should be even better for this of course.
But it's rare, and those times I forced the issue were good for my career but not always for the team. Most of the time, once an organization has a working product, you want to stay in the lanes, roughly, of that product, which is IMO where the coding time advantage vanishes.
My question is whether espresso-method coffee has all the same properties. The study itself clearly states "brewed coffee" and they brew the crap out of it ("extraction in boiling water for 8–10 min"), I can't take brewed coffee on the regular b/c it upsets my stomach.
Not sure about Ocaml but with Haskell you can use ghci/`cabal repl` and get blazing fast reload of a web app as you develop. Tbh a lot of haskellers don't take advantage of this IMO.
Ocaml seems to have a REPL as well, not sure how it works outside of Emacs (in Emacs with utop looks good what I am trying).
Haskell is so so correct that it tends to get a bit on the way and you tend to encode everything in the type system. This is a blessing for correctness and a curse for other stuff (tracing, debugging, adding side-effects).
This is the reason why I am looking at Ocaml instead of Haskell: not so pure, more pragmatic and supports imperative programming well.
I would counter that it was probably their startup-oriented fintech focus and execution that led to their success. I love good tech culture as much as the next HNer but I've seen companies with great tech die because of bad biz focus.
I might further argue that the startup-y fintech culture led to good tech culture. The fact that they didn't start as a bank (as opposed to say SVB) means that they didn't have to be as conservative, or integrate with some horrific ancient tech stack.
I'm pleased they've had such success with Haskell, but much like Jane Street and OCAML, I think the language choice is almost accidental*, as much as the companies would like you to believe otherwise.
I would like to know however what they're doing for front-end. I would guess that all of this Haskell is back-end only.
*EDIT by "accidental" I mean to the business side. Jane St had some good trades, Mercury had great focus and execution. They also have some good tech :)
That wouldn't apply here, since as the article says they hire "generalists, and most of them have never written a line of Haskell before joining."
In any case, I think the "Haskell tax" concept (where you can pay well-paid programmers less if you have a Haskell shop) is stale by now. Rust attracted away a lot of FP-ers, plus mainstream langs like C++, Java and even Typescript got smarter. Haskell's biggest problem by far is the tiny labor pool, which Mercury seems to wisely avoid.
Been over a decade since I used Clojure in anger, but at the time it really seemed like IDEs made it hard to use a REPL with a large codebase -- they seemed more to want it to be like a javac/maven stack. I assume that got better?
The story behind the numbers they present clearly demonstrates that X is censoring/shadowbanning them. Going from 600MM to 13MM impressions/yr -- losing 98% of their impressions! -- is no accident but clearly Musk's thumb on the scale.
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
It's not necessarily shadowbanning (although it could well be), given that it's been turned into a cesspit where huge numbers of users left and the ones still there are probably not the demographic that would engage with the EFF, it could just be a natural consequence of Musk's wrecking it.
That may be the case, but the EFF’s Twitter alone is enough to explain their poor performance.
Their last post did quite well, and it is characteristically different from their other posts.
I don’t think Elon Musk personally needs to put his thumb on the scale in this case. I don’t even understand why he’d be involved here and not say anything. Like wouldn’t he say “EFF sucks” or something? I dunno, I don’t really keep up with that kind of thing.
It’s fine if the EFF wants to leave because they aren’t reaching people.
On a decent social platform, it shouldn't even matter if their posting sucks or is lazy. If I followed them, I want to see their stuff. If I'm not seeing the posts of the accounts I follow, the site is not worth me using - same if ppl who explicitly followed me aren't seeing my posts.
Maybe, I haven’t been keeping up since the cracker machine stuff. I thought EFF was a GNU-adjacent thing any generic tech person supported. I guess I was wrong.
The GNU-adjacent thing would be FSF, and I'd say many EFF supporters are antagonistic towards the FSF (and/or RMS) because of their "extremist" stances. I'd characterize EFF as "corporate Open Source" vs. FSF/GNU "Free Software."
The thing is, unless their posts have only gotten bad recently, it's reasonable to assume that the drop in traffic is unrelated to post quality. Algorithms, changing audiences, etc. become better explanations.
Leaving out key parts of a quote is a disingenuous way to attempt to make a counter-argument, especially when the full quote clearly contradicts your second sentence.
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