hinkley

6 ms·

61.
by hinkley 2mo ago
We are just as bad or worse with charts. I don’t know whether finding Tufte when I was still relatively young saved or harmed my sanity. Maybe both. Everyone’s charts are awful, including at least half of mine, and I was trying to be objec
62.
by hinkley 2mo ago
No longer true. Rhetoric is now an epithet and when used as such means sophistry. Most people use it as an epithet.
63.
by hinkley 2mo ago
One of the first managers I had who studied management theory commented once that if estimates were accurate, we’d get them done earlier than expected as often as we got them done later than expected, which is not true and thus we are doing
64.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I hate that I have to talk to so many people about Russian Roulette just with more chambers. But it’s the only analogy that hits.
65.
by hinkley 2mo ago
The word “most” is a mess. Strictly speaking the person with “the most” has the plurality, not even half. “Most people” can mean more than half, but is often used to mean or imply anything from a supermajority to “almost everyone”.
66.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Chesterton's Fence. Why on earth do we need this thing here? Oh, that's why.
67.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Some people either want to solve a whole problem or none of it. There's art in knowing what parts of a problem can be solved now without screwing your chances of fixing the rest later when you actually fully understand the problem, and
68.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I find there's some overlap between being good at Root Cause Analysis and realizing that 3 of your most common problems are really all a 4th problem, some aspects of which have not hit you yet.
69.
by hinkley 2mo ago
You always are going to have coworkers who don't see half the stuff you see. Sometimes convincing people which problem to let you solve in peace is the hard part. So many places only fix a problem after they've already reaped the
70.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I confess that when I work at controlling places, I engage in conspiracies. But I can only pull the subterfuge off for about 3 years and then I have to move on before I get PIPed for making their entire engineering staff more efficient, and
71.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I think in general maintainers would be better served by declaring Performance is a Feature earlier in their projects and rejecting contributions that add surface area to the API at the expense of throughput on the existing surface area. Wr
72.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Snitches get stitches.
73.
by hinkley 2mo ago
And every time you have to tell it to do it again, they get paid.
74.
by hinkley 2mo ago
For resolution of a problem you can’t prevent categorically, you have to spend a good bit of time pretending to be the computer before you can trust the computer to do it. A run book is a draft of a requirements doc for a program to do the
75.
by hinkley 2mo ago
That is certainly an interesting case for thinking things but not typing or saying them out loud. Problem is, they all read the same books we do.
76.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I wonder if they’ll ever find that someone has tricked the models into doing work off the books. If they did the incident report might look like this, especially if someone got greedy instead of keeping it small. Or screwed up.
77.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Somewhere in that wall of text is a single statement that might sink the entire project...
78.
by hinkley 2mo ago
My question is always, "Am I willing to maintain this code?" Sometimes that's a yes, even if AI generated it and I can tell despite someone making half an effort to be a human for a minute during the PR process. But sometimes
79.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I told someone this week, who (or whose AI) chose to do a problem the hard way that it's usually a bad sign if you need more comments than code to solve a problem, and then suggested a couple lines of code that accomplished the same th
80.
by hinkley 2mo ago
This has really started to hit my radar because people are filing PRs with AI generated commit messages that read like a bill being presented to congress. Holy shit, give me a summary. I don't know if the contributors are writing any o
81.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Rare books tend to be out of copyright, true.
82.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Am I too old now, expecting someone to make a Rainbows End reference? Vernor Vinge predicted this 20 years ago. (Also the person who coined Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil really wanted everyone to think it was his idea.)
83.
by hinkley 2mo ago
did understand?
84.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Yeah I ended up finishing a Lava Flow Antipattern, where someone started wrapping of stdout and never finished it. We replaced every value for a key of 'token', 'password', 'secret' with 8 stars in the logs. We
85.
by hinkley 2mo ago
If you open source it you can increase the payback multiplier by a couple orders of magnitude, or at least use the same solution at your next gig.
86.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I have on a number of occasions wondered if there's some way to make something like the 2 key system for nuclear launch protocols work for making destructive changes in production. I request an action, and it only takes effect if someo
87.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I'm screwed because I am part of an ecosystem that all lives in github. I'm not happy about the fact that GH doesn't show my when new issues or PRs are filed against projects I maintain despite the notification settings imply
88.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I saw a Bruce Eckel talk one time after Thinking in Java became a best seller. I expected him to talk about Java, and lessons learned about it writing the book (he did not start nor end in Java and documented a number of programming languag
89.
by hinkley 2mo ago
One of my sci-fi future ideas, every time I hear about someone thinking of a new way to make warp drives, is that if we ever sort it out someone will make TARDISes for the filthy rich - a static warp bubble that moves space into a ground fl
90.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Everyone is addicted to bad data. The Red-Green-Refactor pattern is a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that if we want a change to work and the build process tells us we didn't break anything, we bowl right past any subtle hints

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