rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
rlamacraft
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That people are taking ChatGPT seriously for coding tells you more about the state of software engineering as a discipline than it does about the state of machine learning as a technology.
I hate Java. I've literally spent the entire day chasing down an issue caused by a null pointer. How, in 2023, is this just accepted as normal?! I honestly find it quite depressing how much better software development tooling isn't given a chance because most devs are just too lazy or incapable of learning anything new. Companies that adopt better tooling eventually move away from it because it makes hiring and mergers much more difficult. So instead we're all stuck using tools that were garbage decades ago
Love to hear stories where technology is genuinely improving lives. Apparently smart speakers are very popular amongst traders in India who can neither read nor write https://restofworld.org/2023/india-sound-boxes-paytm-phonepe/
"Buckingham Palace also unveiled a new emoji, of the St Edward’s crown, to mark the coronation weekend." I didn't realise the Palace was a member of the Unicode Consortium... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/09/king-charles-iii-coronation-procession-route
@freemo as I understand it, the issue is not that money was paid but that because his lawyer paid the money and her going public would have damaged the campaign it is being seen as undeclared campaign finance
@fitheach I‘ve been aware of it for some years but only recently did I realise it’s a fully fledge programming language, with some pretty handy syntactic sugar for assignment
rlamacraft
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In a world where developers can get a lot of help from Copilot, ChatGPT, StackOverflow, etc., there are still certain coding skills that characterize the best software developers. As just one example, real developers use data types in a way that makes their code cleaner and more reliable -- they define types like "heightInCm" or "widthInPixels" instead of floats and ints, and suddenly code is 10x easier to reason about.
In your opinion, what are some other hallmarks of top 1% developers?
rlamacraft
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Any experienced programmer worth their salt will tell you that •producing• code — learning syntax, finding examples, combining them, adding behaviors, adding complexity — is the •easy• part of programming.
The hard part: “How can it break? How will it surprise us? How will it change? Does it •really• accomplish our goal? What •is• our goal? Are we all even imagining the same goal? Do we understand each other? Will the next person to work on this understand it? Should we even build this?”
I hate flow.js. In what world is this acceptable typed code??
```
function foo(x: string): boolean {
return x === 0;
}
```
Normally TypeScript isn't any better but in this case, TypeScript does correctly complain.
rlamacraft
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rlamacraft
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Use-cases for comments in code imho:
- Documentation for interfaces
- Explaining something unintiutive about your code
- TODO: something that should change later
- XXX: something which is acceptable but weird and might be a good thing to improve
- 20-100 lines of prose adding context to a large amount of code
t. someone who OpenHub characterizes as writing "a very low number of comments"
rlamacraft
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rlamacraft
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"Everything Everywhere All at Once" would make a good title for a blog post about prioritization at tech companies.
rlamacraft
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Cryptocurrency is a cancer that feeds on the desperation of youth and drives them into a gambling addiction. They think they are fighting against the "system", but they become suckers who fight each other in a giant decentralized casino manipulated by a handful of rich assholes: the new landlords.
The whole rewriting of Dahl’s work controversy simply wouldn’t be an issue if copyright wasn’t so damn long. These pieces of literature should be in the public domain for anyone to publish, with or without alterations, just like Shakespeare.
rlamacraft
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Gauging someone's interest in ChatGPT is a good way to filter for people I don't want to talk to
Perhaps not entirely a coincidence that a follow-up question about cryptocurrency yields similar results
rlamacraft
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1983: "If you want to know something, your best bet is either a friend or a library."
2003: "If you want to know something, your best bet is a well-formatted Google search."
2023: "If you want to know something, your best bet is either a friend or a library."
rlamacraft
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Being a designer or dev and having the time to make something accessible without leadership support is extremely difficult sometimes.
Which is why leaders absolutely need to make accessible conformance a part of their definition of done.
rlamacraft
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There are 1×2×3×4×5×6×7×8 minutes in this month. Since every hour has 2×5×6 = 60 minutes, every day has 3×8 = 24 hours and this month has 4×7 = 28 days.
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
