wpietri

10 ms·

151.
by wpietri 10mo ago
I feel like I've already answered the how question elsewhere. But the short version is a product-driven kanban-ish approach with frequent releases, small units of work, and engaged product management focused on actual real-world goals.
152.
by wpietri 10mo ago
If you're saying there's some sort of wisps-and-moonbeams notion of estimation in everything that we do, sure. I'm not going to argue with that. One world, brah. What I am talking about here, though, is a practice of software
153.
by wpietri 10mo ago
On the contrary, constraints often mean you don't need formal estimates. (I'll come back to prioritization in a sec.) Startups are a great example. When you raise your first chunk of money, the size of that isn't really drive
154.
by wpietri 10mo ago
Thanks. It was hard won. I spent maybe a decade naively thinking that if we just made software methods that worked in service of stated business goals and values, they'd get adopted and we'd all live happily ever after. It took me
155.
by wpietri 10mo ago
Right? For those who want to check, the four values: https://agilemanifesto.org/ And the 12 principles: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html But to my dismay, the Agile world quickly got colonized by
156.
by wpietri 10mo ago
I have had many successful projects where we spent approximately zero time on estimates. The fact that a successful approach is culturally seen as illegitimate to even talk about is a great example of why I wrote that last paragraph.
157.
by wpietri 10mo ago
I can say with some confidence, having been involved in the movement since before the term "Agile" was coined, that it requires neither. I grant that both of those are common, but that's because the median "Agile" i
158.
by wpietri 10mo ago
And starting in the late 1970s, there were tools available to simplify building LoB CRUD apps. [1] That has continued with things like Rails and Salesforce and no-code tooling. If something is truly boring in software, it gets turned into a
159.
by wpietri 10mo ago
And I'd add that the need for them is a sign they aren't worth doing. As you say, worthwhile software is usually novel. And to justify our expense, it needs to be valuable. So to decide whether a project is worth doing, we're
160.
by wpietri 11mo ago
Personally, I came here for the articles. And then like @tqbf, I discovered I had a debilitating case of "someone is wrong on the Internet" syndrome. I'm mostly better, but now I come back for the articles, and post because t
161.
by wpietri 11mo ago
Plenty of people are on the spectrum and able to talk about this stuff well. Please don't smear the rest of us with RMS's nonsense.
162.
by wpietri 11mo ago
Oh, please. This sort of anonymous, hopelessly vague character assassination does not belong on HN. You have of course given no idea of which people you're objecting to. But the people I know who were upset at Stallman a few years ago
163.
by wpietri 1y ago
That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference. Also possible is that t
164.
by wpietri 1y ago
It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar, but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be s
165.
by wpietri 1y ago
> It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”. On a site that gives people attention and points for saying strident things that emotionall
166.
by wpietri 1y ago
CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_... Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I&#x27
167.
by wpietri 1y ago
Thanks! If I can make it I will. (The pinball museum project is sucking up a lot of my time as we get toward launch. You should come by!) I think that is one interesting question that I'll want to answer before adoption on my projects,
168.
by wpietri 1y ago
In the last paragraph, I did specifically answer the question. I even started that paragraph with the question so that people wouldn't miss it. But I'm not obliged to directly answer questions with wrong assumptions. If you think
169.
by wpietri 1y ago
It's because claims of true merit have for a long time been used as the justification for the exclusion of people systems have been rigged to exclude. Just to pick the most obvious example, the US's slave states systematically kep
170.
by wpietri 1y ago
Thanks for saying so. I'll add that if people want a historical perspective on the dynamics, CS Professor Ellen Spertus long ago wrote the paper "Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?" It helped me see a lot of the
171.
by wpietri 1y ago
The feminist perspective is rooted in the massive amount of sexism and misogyny that necessitated the development of a feminist perspective. If you'd like to know about CS in specific, here's a good paper from one of the few women
172.
by wpietri 1y ago
If you substitute, say, "being president" for "designing programming languages", then the answer is a pretty obvious yes. After the US revolution, some places in the US allowed voting for men and women of all races. Whit
173.
by wpietri 1y ago
> You'll not only never know this, it's IMHO not very useful to think about at all, except as an intellectual exercise. I think it's very useful if one wants to properly weigh the value of LLMs in a way that gets beyond th
174.
by wpietri 1y ago
Oops, this was a reply to somebody else put in the wrong place. Sorry for the confusion.
175.
by wpietri 1y ago
I definitely believe that you don't see it. We just disagree on what that implies.
176.
by wpietri 1y ago
> Generally speaking, I find it suspect when someone points to failed predictions of disruptive changes without acknowledging successful predictions. I specifically said: "But anybody with enough experience in tech can count a lot m
177.
by wpietri 1y ago
I could not have, because my standards involve more than a five minute impression from a tool designed to wow people in the first five minutes. Dude.
178.
by wpietri 1y ago
The stake they and I were referring to is a financial interest in the success of AI. Related is the reputational impact, of course. A lot of people who may not make money do like being seen as smart and cutting edge. But even if we look at
179.
by wpietri 1y ago
I think it depends a lot on what you think "wrong position" means. I think skepticism only really goes wrong when it refuses to see the truth in what it's questioning long past the point where it's reasonable. I don&#x27
180.
by wpietri 1y ago
> You'll not only never know this, it's IMHO not very useful to think about at all, except as an intellectual exercise. I think it's very useful if one wants to properly weigh the value of LLMs in a way that gets beyond th

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