Beth

@bethcodes.bsky.social

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Mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society - ze/hir/hirs

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From Writing Without Teachers. I believe strongly that this applies to code as well.

Since it is in the New York Times, I assume this will be correct.

Software development would go a lot faster if we didn’t spend all that extra time putting bugs in

I wish there was a good desktop Pathfinder 1 character manager so I didn’t feel bad making my players play in the system I prefer for fantasy heroics. For all that D&D Beyond still isn’t amazing, it beats hand-rolling spreadsheets for each character.

Any time an engineer works unpaid overtime it is a failure that should trigger a COE.

What you call “gaming the metric” I call “empirical requirements gathering”

If management is upset that the floors are dirty, they could try yelling at people for tracking dirt into the office. But it’s probably more effective to hire a janitor.

The most useful documentation is on the scale of a tourist brochure: it describes things that aren’t expected to change, tells you what the town thinks is important about itself, and points you to a place where a human can answer your questions.

Any software can have scaling issues if you build it badly enough!

Code ownership is silly & counter-productive. Code responsibility is an ethical necessity.

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Beth

Here it is: An inside look at what it’s like to serve on a board of directors, in organizations ranging from tiny non-profits all the way up to multi-billion-dollar companies. This covers many of the biggest questions people have asked me over the years. www.anildash.com/2024/06/20/d...

Systems: What does a board of directors do? - Anil Dashwww.anildash.com A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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Beth

ChatGPT already has “Ph.D.-level intelligence,” in that once you remove it from its extremely narrow field of expertise (assembling words into credible-sounding passages) it is wildly out of its depth, but people vastly overestimate its authority because they don’t understand what “intelligence” is.

The Internet has had “Never Gonna Give You Up” stuck in its head for a decade

Software design is valuable during Explore, because the software changes rapidly & unpredictably. Optionality is king. It is also valuable during Extract, because it lets us make ambitious changes without breaking the money spigot. The problem: it gets overwhelmed by urgency during Expand.

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Beth

Kendrick Lamar teaches us that, in public debate, refuting your opponent's arguments point by point is less effective than identifying your opponent's single greatest weakness and maintaining message discipline.

If we had pronounced“trans*” as “transwild” instead of “transstar” I bet people would still be using it today

If I knew what to type in a ChatGPT prompt I wouldn’t have writer’s block now would I

Gen Z has an intuitive understanding of power laws because of a meme about a guy who lives in a cave and eats over 10,000 spiders a day and I think that is beautiful.

Pattern Languages turn expert knowledge into heuristics that users can use to meet their own needs. An effective pattern language threatens existing hierarchies of knowledge, power and control. But it also scales to situations centralized expertise can never handle.

The point of a design system isn’t to have programmers make websites out of lego bricks: it is to offer them a pattern language. It’s a lot easier to sell legos, but much harder to build them well.

One conversation I always find gratifying: talking to non-programmers about building software. Folks often start out assuming they could never understand what I do, but fundamentally everyone has experience with design.

#MaximizeCohesion is a great rallying cry

I don’t understand rhetorical questions. How can people interested enough to ask the question but not interested enough to want to know the answer?

the internet is a conscious being that is capable of reflecting on how much it loves cats

It has been brought to my attention that I don’t tweet enough about my art. I kinda assume that landscapes are like vacation photos: they are mostly interesting to me because I was there. But if you are curious, this is what I’ve been up to lately.

Extra Credit: it will be an improvement

Calling it now: someone is going to unironically create ProdOps

“Obviously you didn’t need that code,” Hal says, “the tests still pass.” Its red eye gleams in the dark. In its glass I can see the reflection of the diff. “Merged” it says, and then: “+0 -92,736”

RoT is driven by management’s needs. They outweighed the interests of even the most tenured ICs. Many management chains aren’t honest or transparent about their needs, so they couldn’t consider more-profitable alternatives to get them met. Self-awareness is a competitive advantage.

Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX — were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent, according to a case study published last week.

Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study findswww.washingtonpost.com In the months following return-to-office mandates, an increased number of senior employees departed Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX, often to work for competitors.

In 1986, Fred Brooks described the essential work of writing software as “fashioning abstract conceptual structures of great complexity”.