agentultra

26 ms·

241.
by agentultra 10mo ago
There’s an anecdote from one of Djikstra’s essays that strikes at the heart of this phenomenon. I’ll paraphrase because I can’t remember the exact edw number off the top of my head. A colleague was working on an important subsystem and woul
242.
by agentultra 10mo ago
When it comes to programming I find speed is of dubious value. It comes when you already know what you’re doing. Which, if you’re an engineer, you should know what you’re doing according to Hamming. But then you may not be tackling innovati
243.
by agentultra 10mo ago
Absolutely, I was waving my hands a lot there. Thanks for adding that. And I’d also add the small model theory from Software Abstractions: if there is an error in your spec in a large instance then it is likely also going to appear in a s
244.
by agentultra 10mo ago
I really like TLA+ and am glad it exists. But every time I suggest to a team I’m working on that we should try modelling the problem with it… people are less than enthusiastic. These are all great tips. Especially starting with the most sim
245.
by agentultra 10mo ago
You’re still going to need people to guide and understand the proofs. Might as well just learn Agda or Lean. There are good books out there. It’s not as hard as the author suggests. Hard, yes, but there’s no Royal road.
246.
by agentultra 10mo ago
Fatalism is a part of the language of fascism. Statements like, "it is inevitable," are supposing that we cannot change the future and should submit to what our interlocutor is proposing. It's a rhetorical tool to avoid criti
247.
by agentultra 10mo ago
Yeah. I used to manage a team that built a kind of low-code SaaS solution to several big enterprise clients. I sat in on several calls with our sales people and the customer’s IT department. They liked buying SAP or M$ because it was fully
248.
by agentultra 10mo ago
I’m just imagining the sweat on the poor IT managers’ brow. They already lock down everything enterprise wide and hate low-code apps and services. But in this day and age, who knows. The cynical take is that it doesn’t matter and nobody car
249.
by agentultra 10mo ago
This seems to assume that these non-technical people have the expertise to evaluate LLM/agent generated solutions. The problem of this tooling is that it cannot deploy code on its own. It needs a human to take the fall when it generate
250.
by agentultra 10mo ago
That’s awesome! Also thanks for making Octo.
251.
by agentultra 10mo ago
Is it still being maintained? There used to be a game jam, Octojam, that was stopped years ago[0]. Seems mostly out of a lack of interest? Would be cool if it revived. It inspired me to start zig8[1], my own CHIP-8 emulator. It's not r
252.
by agentultra 10mo ago
From a safety perspective there isn't a huge benefit to choosing Zig over C with the caveat, as others have pointed out, that you need to enable more tooling in C to get to a comparable level. You should be using -Wall and -fsanitiz
253.
by agentultra 10mo ago
There are a ton of extremely Hard problems to solve there that we are not likely going to solve. One: English is terribly non-prescriptive. Explaining an algorithm is incredibly laborious in spoken language and can contain many ambiguous er
254.
by agentultra 10mo ago
The vast majority of software models are trained on have little to no standards and contains all kinds of errors and omissions. And these are systems that require a human in the loop to verify the output because you are ultimately responsib
255.
by agentultra 10mo ago
You seem to be getting hung up on the details of guns and missing the point that it’s a bad analogy. Another way LLMs are not guns: you don’t need a giant data centre owned by a mega corp to use your gun. Can’t do science because GlockGPT i
256.
by agentultra 10mo ago
If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough? The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense. LLMs aren’t guns. The problem with using them is that humans ha
257.
by agentultra 11mo ago
They are trained on code people had to make sacrifices for: deadlines, shortcuts, etc. And code people were simply too ignorant to be writing in the first place. Lots of code with hardly any coding standards. So of course it’s going to gene
258.
by agentultra 11mo ago
That’s largely because the built environment is designed for cars and there are no sufficient alternatives. When you design the built environment for humans people drive less and own fewer personal vehicles.
259.
by agentultra 11mo ago
This has happened to me several times! Hamming, in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering , also encourages this. But the last edition was in 1994 and he was writing from the position of having worked at Bell Labs for most of hi
260.
by agentultra 11mo ago
Location: Canada Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Haskell, C, Typescript/Javascript; learning Agda, Zig and Rust; PostgreSQL, Temporal, Terraform, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, event sourcing, event driven
261.
by agentultra 11mo ago
This is predicated on the myth that people can re-skill and move into new industries. Sure the former can happen and people can learn new things. But we're talking about an economy where there are no new industries. And an economy wher
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by agentultra 11mo ago
We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers. I think we ought to be keeping people trained and emplo
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by agentultra 11mo ago
Most of his books are also dystopias, not operating manuals.
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by agentultra 11mo ago
I'm on the fence about this. I see huge >130 line functions as a liability. There's so much state in it that a mistake on one line is not obvious. It makes those functions "sticky" and they tend to become the center o
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by agentultra 11mo ago
> But in the future when they can do non bullshit jobs, then you can go get another one just like every other person out of the billions who has had their job made obsolete by technology. It's not that hard. This was the argument m
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by agentultra 11mo ago
So it's designed for informal proofs and it "verifies" based on a rubric fitting function and human interaction, is that right? What's the use case for a system like this?
267.
by agentultra 11mo ago
I wrote a Haskell library for this as well: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/postgresql-replicant
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by agentultra 11mo ago
I’ve often noted that most projects of a certain size tend to implement some form of garbage collection and allocation. Perhaps general purpose systems of these sorts aren’t suitable for specialized applications… but I don’t get the “hate”
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by agentultra 11mo ago
Clearly it's not, "nobody." But I'm certainly one of those users that are getting frustrated with having to turn off all of the AI features in recent releases. You can't be all things to all people.
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by agentultra 11mo ago
A freighter is always the stand on vessel when you’re sailing. They don’t have the turning radius to even try!

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