bunderbunder

4 ms·

31.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
As someone who mostly only applies math, that strikes me as a peculiarly academic take. Intuition is more important for me because it’s what enables me to know what methods are most applicable to whatever practical problem I’m trying to sol
32.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Your unstated major premise here is that their intent was to make a universal statement about how proofs work and not just talking to humans about how they teach humans. That premise seems unlikely to be correct.
33.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Network effects were also nowhere near as strong as they are now. BSD is a killer example of that point, too. Using a BSD Unix got to be pretty difficult after Linux containers became hegemonic.
34.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
You would have a heck of a job convincing a court that 60% domestic market share in a two competitor market constitutes a monopoly.
35.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Cyclomatic complexity is funny math, though. The article demonstrates how. They took a single function that makes state changes to an object, and scattered that logic across four different functions that make the same set of state changes.
36.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Agreed. I also don’t really agree that the refactored code is any easier to test. ProcessOrder’s behavior hasn’t changed, only its implementation details, so the minimal test surface is the same for both: just test ProcessOrder. You could a
37.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Sure. It’s just that there’s also so much research that has found that cyclomatic complexity is theoretically ill-founded, and that it tends to underperform other ways of measuring complexity. Most notably, just counting lines of code. (Not
38.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
It’s not obvious to me because cyclomatic complexity is not a straightforward proxy for the number of systems that are being combined. It’s also the case that some of the most common sources of vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, introd
39.
by bunderbunder 7d ago
Overall cyclomatic complexity is a useful metric, but it does have one shortcoming when used with modern languages: it was invented before polymorphism really became a thing. That means that it really only counts explicit branching. So, f
40.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
I've seen it too, and it seems to be getting worse as companies move more and more communication onto Slack, ticketing systems, Confluence, etc. Modern channels are a huge high velocity dumping ground. The only way anyone can even pret
41.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
Yup. This is coming from the top, and it's very much because the AI sales pitch that executives bought into is, "Automation can help you reduce head count." That means that they really don't care if, right there in the m
42.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
I somewhat agree with your point, but also I find that the major agent harnesses work really hard at tricking you into leaning back and not letting a proper understanding of what you are building to develop. This isn't a new problem. I
43.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
And what you describe doing is also very in line with Cursor's published recommendations. Though of course every single element of their application's actual UX is pushing hard in the opposite direction. The cynical part of me can
44.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
Yes, love that paper. Anecdotally I have a bit of a track record of 10xing slow systems’ throughout by converting them from distributed to single-node or from multithreaded to single threaded. Heck I once even sped up a number crunching ope
45.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
Though also, parallel processing strings and other non-numeric data on that level of granularity is, IME, typically less performant. The parallelism rarely manages to offset the performance penalties incurred by decomposing the problem in a
46.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
“No options” simply isn’t true. Here’s a guide to many of the options: https://hasufell.github.io/posts/2024-05-07-ultimate-string-... Now if you’re asking why the basic prelude String type remains as it is, that’s bec
47.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
It sounds like the crux of the issue here is that you don’t want formal verification in the first place. Your last paragraph sounds more like code contracts, which is also a thing that already exists.
48.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
Although, I have known using an LLM to do your prior research to itself be a trap. The searches it runs, and the summaries it provides, are all incredibly sensitive to your choice of words. Words you chose from a state of minimal knowledge.
49.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
And if the deadlines really are hard, then you should be actively managing the critical path from the get-go. The very existence of upstream critical path dependencies that, as the parent poster’s story demonstrates, weren’t even necessary
50.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
I think it might be even worse than that. In tech you get ahead by gaming the system. The last product I helped launch, I raised concerns about the long term maintenance cost of some unnecessary bells and whistles that early access customer
51.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
> Of course I know that the original (real estate) developers did the cost analysis, but when you see those abandoned places - very much objectively you can conclude that they made an error. A miscalculation, or an error in judgement. Or
52.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
It really isn’t. Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s just doing what you need to do to keep your job. If you have ever worked in a maybe organization like this you might have done that kind of thing yourself. You might not even have realized it
53.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
True, it would not have happened back in the day. But oftentimes what would happen is that sane, sensible leadership would have a talk about delays on the critical path and adjust the schedule accordingly. Maybe not as satisfying to people
54.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at. I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and
55.
by bunderbunder 8d ago
I'm not so sure about that. For a while now I've worked at companies where PC users could use desktop Office but Mac users had to use the Web version. I think that Office for Mac might actually be a largely separate codebase - the
56.
by bunderbunder 9d ago
Yes, and if the things I learned in my university class on the subject still holds, forecasts are incredibly sensitive to modeling decisions such as what independent variables you choose and how you believe they might mathematically relat
57.
by bunderbunder 9d ago
Like you said, he wrote "agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure". 10 years ago, if someone had used similar wording to describe a computer virus "taking over" computers and adding them to a botn
58.
by bunderbunder 9d ago
I don't think he's implying that they'll start doing stuff like this of their own volition. Fowler's a smart guy, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he already knows that AI agents have human operato
59.
by bunderbunder 9d ago
I see no conflict. He's explaining why he has a visceral reaction. He makes no attempt to suggest that this is a logical conclusion. Des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas. Nor does the assertion that the LLM is "making a pr
60.
by bunderbunder 9d ago
I have a hard time believing acquiring so many locks you don't need is particularly harmless. Won't every single one of those introduce a memory fence? Which will then stall out every CPU core on the server.

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