msteffen

7 ms·

31.
by msteffen 4mo ago
> I'm not sure how you get from "LLMs work in mysterious ways" to "So we need more discipline" to "everything is fine." Are you referring to this part: > I am not worried, at least in the near term,
32.
by msteffen 4mo ago
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts. Yes! I love t
33.
by msteffen 4mo ago
I liked this article, and I see a lot of other commenters didn't, so I'll give my take: When starting on a new codebase, how do you make yourself into a helpful contributor as quickly as possible? I go straight for the humans and
34.
by msteffen 4mo ago
> The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, confident, felt I could do anything. You know, I had a sim
35.
by msteffen 4mo ago
IIUC, the most basic version is when you have a log where every entry has both “date added” and “effective date,” so you can add stuff to the log retroactively. For example, “the user just informed us yesterday that they moved last year” -&
36.
by msteffen 4mo ago
Yeahhhh…this is not really how Linux works, though. Most of LLM world is kind of anti-linux right now because the most popular LLMs are walled off by these huge companies and hella expensive. At some point, a nerd will realize they could ha
37.
by msteffen 5mo ago
I've never heard this before, but it seems very insightful to me.
38.
by msteffen 5mo ago
I mean the headline is great! I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about "you can't execute your way out of a bad strategy" (which I claim the original "you can't exercise your way out of a bad die
39.
by msteffen 5mo ago
> One of the current trends in modern software is for developers to slap an API call to OpenAI or Anthropic for features within their app. Well there’s your problem, control needs to go the other way. If you want your app to be AI-enable
40.
by msteffen 5mo ago
I wrote a series of blog posts about this a few years ago: https://creating.software/essays/theory_of_a_program/ , some of the few I ever actually finished, lol. Most of my posts have aged terribly in the age of AI
41.
by msteffen 5mo ago
For that matter, here's a thread from a few days ago recommending the practice of scheduling status meetings for the purpose of pressuring the attendees to work on your project in addition to their other work: https://news.y
42.
by msteffen 5mo ago
Yes! So much of professional software development is about assisting the nominal job of management—planning and budgeting—rather than users or even business fundamentals. Why am I awake at 1:00am, ruining my brain and body, trying to get th
43.
by msteffen 5mo ago
My point being, in case it’s still unclear, that “I’ll create pressure on everyone and then progress will happen,” is IMO bad management. Sometimes the problem is not enough motivation, though I think that if you hire well, that’s rare—th
44.
by msteffen 5mo ago
You know what, I read it again and I don't even disagree with the concrete advice in the post—weekly meeting, starting with open tasks from last week—which I would characterize as a basic, ubiquitous, almost anodyne organizational coor
45.
by msteffen 5mo ago
IMO this is such a manager-brained take. If your long-term strategic goals aren't being advanced, you have to figure out why. Talk to your team and figure out what the deal is. Talk to other teams too, while you're at it. You mi
46.
by msteffen 6mo ago
A lot of this is about knowledge debt if I’m reading it correctly (people not knowing things that they should know, or knowing the wrong things). In my last few jobs, I’ve maintained an Anki deck about facts relevant to my job (who certain
47.
by msteffen 6mo ago
I think about this a lot, though one paragraph from that article: > Many assembly programmers were accustomed to having intimate control over memory and CPU instructions. Surrendering this control to a compiler felt risky. There was a se
48.
by msteffen 6mo ago
> Millions and possibly billions of dollars just assuming average SWE compensation rates Yeah, and average kernel devs are not average SWEs
49.
by msteffen 6mo ago
IIUC this kind of thing is usually called “managed deployment.” Minio used to have a slick implementation of this, and I think databricks does as well. Usually it’s less “execute arbitrary commands on customer hosts,” and more “send metrics
50.
by msteffen 6mo ago
Next week: “we are right-sizing the organization”
51.
by msteffen 6mo ago
Five bucks it’s this: Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode” Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”
52.
by msteffen 6mo ago
Very nice thread by the former CEO of Reddit about online behavior, moderation, etc: https://x.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 Per the thread, it’s possible this problem could’ve been solved by burying the s
53.
by msteffen 6mo ago
Honestly IMO this kind of thing just depends a lot on tone. “That won’t work because” tends to piss people off and they usually do the thing anyway. “Cool idea! What about …? We tried … years ago and failed because of that” works at least s
54.
by msteffen 6mo ago
Earlier this week, the NYT also published this (to me, very moving) account of a nonverbal autistic man going to graduate school and publishing a novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/books/review&#x2
55.
by msteffen 6mo ago
> what happens is that, as in software, certain ideas get ossified. That’s why, for example, every OS has a POSIX layer even though technically the process/namespace/security model could be radically reimagined possibly to crea
56.
by msteffen 7mo ago
Price increases tend to be regressive—the poor person who needs a little fuel to get to their job is hurt more than the large business that uses a lot more fuel but has much, much more money overall. There are things you can do to try and e
57.
by msteffen 7mo ago
> Collaboration isn't a process or a management technique -- it is a communication style. If you want collaboration, you can't take random people and use process to "make them collaborate" -- you need to build your te
58.
by msteffen 7mo ago
I think “iterating more quickly” is good for the company doing the building. But if you’re the customer, having a new piece of shit foisted on you twice a day so that some garbage PM can “build user empathy” gets old really fast. Before AI,
59.
by msteffen 7mo ago
I mean, not judging other parents doesn’t come from thinking that all other parents are doing a great job, it comes from knowing that you’re doing a terrible job in your own, special ways. Parenting children is impossible, therefore all par
60.
by msteffen 7mo ago
Yeah, I like this framing a lot. There comes a point, after working on a system for a while, when there are no details: every aspect of how the system works is understood to be in some way significant. If one of those details is changed, yo

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