wduquette

6 ms·

1.
by wduquette 15d ago
It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.
2.
by wduquette 15d ago
The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived th
3.
by wduquette 18d ago
A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.
4.
by wduquette 18d ago
Agreed. In my view, using AI to write code is neither engineering nor craftsmanship, but an abrogation of the responsibility to deliver a quality product. It isn’t engineering, it’s management, and these days (given the quantity of code age
5.
by wduquette 21d ago
To be fair, Borland pushed MS out of the way first, IIRC. Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not. I miss Borland; they did good work.
6.
by wduquette 22d ago
It occurs to me that letting AI agent process your incoming e-mail really isn't that different in principle than letting incoming e-mail include scripts to run at your console. Why are people so eager to rush into this brave new world?
7.
by wduquette 22d ago
I anticipate a lengthy series of catastrophes initiated by AI agents with too much power and too little sense. Today the agent accidentally deletes your repo; tomorrow we lose a day's worth of banking transactions; Friday the cell phon
8.
by wduquette 22d ago
This isn't Intercal, this is an advanced version of AppleScript.
9.
by wduquette 1mo ago
Have you a source for "billions in profit" as opposed to "billions in revenue"? If so, I'd be interested to see it, especially relative to SCE's current maintenance budget. I don't object to being proven w
10.
by wduquette 1mo ago
I have every sympathy for the folks who lost homes here in California last year; it could easily have been my house. But what a lot of discussions miss regarding SCE's role in the Altadena fire is that SCE is a public utility, and Cal
11.
by wduquette 1mo ago
The problem here isn’t the rewrite, the problem here is toxic management, massive feature creep, unrealistic expectations, etc., etc. You’d have been doomed without the rewrite.
12.
by wduquette 1mo ago
Datalog could handle it, though.
13.
by wduquette 1mo ago
This is one of those perennial ideas; let's get rid of hierarchical file systems and just keep all the files in a database. Speaking as a user who knows how to keep things organized, I like hierarchical file systems. Store the data i
14.
by wduquette 1mo ago
The TCL community experimented with an idea like this many years ago; they were called "structured documents" or "starpacks". What we found was that (A) it's usually more convenient to keep the data in a separate fi
15.
by wduquette 1mo ago
Young Americans have been fed a constant diet of “the Modern World is Awful” and “You Are Doomed” for quite some time now. This is just the next round, and as always it is overstated.
16.
by wduquette 1mo ago
I'd not seen the spelling "sike" until today; but I've been spelling it "psych" since I was in grade school in the early 70's. Definitely derives from "psyching someone out", i.e., confusing the
17.
by wduquette 2mo ago
The ecosystem makes it feasible to use the language or not. For my personal projects, I won't use a language that doesn't provide some kind of straightforward cross-platform GUI toolkit (nearly) out of the box—which narrows the f
18.
by wduquette 2mo ago
I had at least one Gateway 2000 desktop and several laptops over time. All but the last laptop were lovely machines. The last looked good on paper, but it was thicker and heavier than it should have been, and start losing keycaps fairly q
19.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Me, too.
20.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Fair point.
21.
by wduquette 2mo ago
To be clear, I greatly disagree with Clean Code’s notion of what constitutes readable and maintainable code.
22.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Make it work, then make it "clean" (that is, readable and maintainable); then make it fast, and only if measurement indicates that it matters.
23.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Using `switch` is not a better approach if the design allows for outsiders to add their own shapes at a later time. Using `switch` probably is a better approach if the range is shapes is fixed and new shapes can't be added, especially
24.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Using the proleptic Gregorian calendar for historical dates is only a problem if you want to compute the day of the week (which those missing days will throw off prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the relevant country) or t
25.
by wduquette 2mo ago
I stopped reading Eddings because after a while I realized that all of these fun, bantering characters I so enjoyed were (except for Garion, mostly) truly awful people and that I didn't want to spend any more time with them. That was a
26.
by wduquette 2mo ago
The loss of 3rd places is a big deal; but it seems weird to wax nostalgic over the remarkably brief period that movie rental stores were actually a thing. Blockbuster Video opened in 1985, was overtaken by Netflix starting in 2000, and died
27.
by wduquette 2mo ago
I was exposed to Z notation in the late 80's, and could not for the life of me see how to apply to my work as a junior programmer. But the distinction the OP makes between Design and Code Specification was lost on me then (and, I think
28.
by wduquette 2mo ago
What GUI would one use with SBCL? Is it cross-platform, Linux/Mac/Windows?
29.
by wduquette 2mo ago
I'm mostly a solo programmer, and I often have to go back and look at code I wrote five, ten, twenty years ago. And every time I do, I give thanks that I used comments to document my intent. My memory's good, but it's not t
30.
by wduquette 2mo ago
Re: Mr. Martin's agreement, whether he agrees or not is not nearly as important as the impression his book gives and whether your "Clean Code"-reading co-workers agree. I know people who genuinely try to get rid of all commen

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