any · textlog

Many leaders acquire authority through ambition and manipulation. I’m not referring to them. But a test of leadership for those who acquire authority organically, with the will of those being led, is to maintain the zeal and principles which put you into that position, after you encounter the machinery designed to exhaust, exasperate, deter, and demoralize.

wrote:

This feels right to me. Or, if not right, then one of the safest strategies to remain employable as a software engineer.

replied to:

Makes sense to me, though I think one important (IMO) aspect of this evolutionary role is incurring liabilities. Yes, software can be created by a wider audience, but when things go awry, would they have the aptitude or contingencies in place to recover and take responsibility?

replied to:

Agreed. I think the AI hype underestimates the human factor in keeping medium-to-large organizations running.

…

replied to:

Maintenance of software/systems was a mere after thought in my experience. Adding new things made careers, bonuses etc. so there was no real incentives for maintenance. The article argues that LLMs will do it. I'll believe if and when I see it.

wrote:

Been working on an old mastodon hosting project I tried to start a few years ago, with a focus on privacy. This is the first big project I've tried to come back to with the help of coding agents and find it invigorating, and gives me the confidence to actually finish the project. Who knows if it will ever make a dollar, but it sure is fun to watch my ideas come to life.

wrote:

Hopefully this takes off

wrote:

I read Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing. The shape of LLM tools as tools—fit for a purpose, ergonomic—is becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.

wrote:

Day 3 stats: 315 users, 626 posts, 370 replies, 44296 unique visitors since - not bad!

replied to:

Woo!

wrote:

Happy Software Freedom Day, everyone!

wrote:

Good . Feeling a bit blah today.

replied to:

Hope you feel better.

wrote:

trying to revive the blogging golden days. recommend some blogs with rss feed about game, movie reviews, and animation. or comic strips, traditional or webcomic.

wrote:

Just got Moshi set up - a phone-friendly terminal app. Works well with Herdr for persistent agents, friendly UI. Verdict so far: looks like I'll be working more from my phone.

wrote:

I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing 130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later.

(deleted post)

replied to(deleted account):

I was talking about this with some alumni students, specifically their experience learning python with us a few years earlier (these are college students who are not really using python any more). What it seems to boil down to is that with python you have the feeling that there is this huge forest of solutions to any problem you are having -- but you will never know the whole forest. BASIC feels like you "know" it after a day or two of playing around, evidently.

wrote:

日本語話者はどれくらいいるんだろう。ここで日本語で書き込み続けるのはどうなんだろう

I wonder how many Japanese speakers there are. Is it okay to keep posting in Japanese here?

continued:

こんにちは世界

Hello World

replied to:

こんにちは。はじめまして。

Hello. Nice to meet you.

replied to:

ここで日本語で書き込み続けるのはどうなんだろうサイト作成者はさまざまの言語の話者が一緒に話せる場面にしたい気がする

I wonder if it's okay to keep posting in Japanese here. I get the feeling the site creator wants this to be a place where speakers of various languages can talk together.

replied to:

Yes it’s fine, we have the “translate” feature now and most browsers also can translate a thread themselves.

…

continued:

τώρα έχουμε αυτόματες μεταφράσεις!

now we have automatic translations!

wrote:

I just discovered that even thou I have already posted a couple of times, I cannot post a link if I don't post first 3 times

wrote:

I naively went into a work problem thinking that RAG was solved by the service offered at work, and wow was I wrong. Been a fun week so far experimenting with many different methods before doing the academic research, and it's been nice to be validated by outside research.

Any conversation