I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day. But would generally lean towards one. I know I do. And one is not better than the other, they could both be very smart and well meaning. And you need both for success in a for-profit business. It’s been discussed ad nauseam but one particular metaphor I like is Jesus Christ vs James Bond. James Bond would win most of the time. Most people tend to think like James Bond, and if they don’t, the organization strongly nudges them in this direction, promotions get decided and it becomes self reinforcing.
Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.
Depends what you’re doing. Constraints are different between projects, and advice given for how to utilize AI rarely takes that into account.
Don’t sling when you need to craft, and don’t craft when you need to sling. Knowing the difference matters more, and you can spend your entire career on one side or another.
Craft was premised on the idea that a good writing and composition matters because it would be easier to read and comprehend (sometimes accepted by orgs because it was sold as cheaper).
Now AI can read the code so the craft-leaning people would need to somehow sell it as 'fewer tokens will be spent on a well factored code' or 'well factored code reduces AI hallucinations'?
Now a Slinger (using your terminology) can just ask AI to make the code look 'craftier' - and that is the best case scenario.
In other words, they will not buy what we sell and if they will they can now produce the results for cheaper. Overlooking the devil in the details, as usual.
Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting.
I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.
Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.
Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.
A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.
Etc…
The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.
For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!
Requiring backward compatibility doesn't imply the code quality needs to be low. Nothing prevents them from improving their code base except the organization itself - the incentives, promotion driven development etc.
I think agents have the capability to multiply this problem times 10. It doesn't have to be that way though. I think a skilled person will create great software regardless of the tools they use.
If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
Yes that intuition is correct, though the reality is much more complicated. The actual share to the bank is roughly proportional to the risk of the transaction/ tied to the type of credit card
I've seen cards with 1% chargeback in the EU though. How does that work?
And it wasn't just a temporary marketing promotion. I've used such a card for many years.
(It was issues by a big bank that had almost no presence in my country... so maybe they were eating the cost just to build up a bigger presence and potentially enter the country?)
Duo screen: 7.6" vs iPad mini: 8.3". Duo will support Apple Pencil later. I wonder if many people with iPhone+iPad combination can now replace it with one device.
In the FAQ it says "Yes. iPhone Duo will work with Apple Pencil (USB-C). Coming later this year."
It kinda sounds like it's a new model of the Apple Pencil coming soon (rather than support coming soon), and older Pencil and Pencil Pros will not work at all. Which, if true, boo.
> but the study conflates both into the same bucket if they both make, say, $400K/yr
Annual income is easy to measure, net worth isn't. People like to measure things that are easier to measure. :P This is part of how 'millionaire' has gone from 'someone who has a million dollars' (for some value of has) to 'someone who has a million dollars of income per year'
I guess annual income also hints at annual expenses which should be important for the study. There are people who constantly spend all they make, and probably score low on self assessed happiness. Also income != wage, can be passive.
I think for a study like this, a money-happiness correlation would need a more sophisticated definition of money, to account for peer pressure and spending.
For a given zip code - take p75 of pre-tax income, multiply by 50% - this would be a proxy of how much someone needs to spend per year to be comfortable with local cost of living and their peers. 50% takes taxes and savings out, call it spend/burn. Then someone's wealth could be a ratio of net-worth/burn. The higher the wealthier - people 25 and over essentially not needing to work, and people with < 3 are essentially in indentured servitude, even with high income. Control for age.
I’m hearing that Lexmark/Unicomp keyboards were/are a cost cutting project compared to original Model F. Interestingly there is a company that resurrected true, pre cost cutting, model F: https://www.modelfkeyboards.com
I guess the point here is that a huge percentage (7% just for Vanguard) of votes was not decided by the actual share holders. These shares are passively invested because Tesla is included in indexes like S&P 500. So the decision on the 7% of the votes was made by a few Vanguard execs. I'm not arguing for or against the decision, just stating the fact that it is much easier to convince a few Vanguard managers instead of 7% of the actual share holders.
Yes, but Vanguard is very large and has a significant interest in the success of Tesla. This certainly wasn't a decision they took lightly and their vote in favor of Musk shows that they have a significant amount of trust in him.
Tesla’s second-largest shareholder, Vanguard, voted against the pay deal in 2018. BlackRock, the third largest, voted for it. Both declined to say how they were voting this time.
I actually think that for VTSAX manages, the fact that they have to vote is sort of a liability for them. My guess is that they would rather not vote at all. They own the whole market anyway, and should only care about tracking the underlying index as accurate as possible with as low fees as possible, its bureaucratic. Now they have to publicly vote in a dubious popularity contest and take sides in a battle they don't care about.
>Vanguard also has significant interest in the success of all Tesla competitors that are part of the index.
They don't really. They own GM and Ford stock, in smaller quantities, nothing from the other largest auto makers. Do you know something I am not aware of?
Most of Vanguard is a large bureaucracy with two goals: accurately track an underlying index and keep the cost low. They do have some actively managed funds but those are insignificant compared to their passive funds.
Now a new powerful tool shows up and I think it is time for the Jesus Christ camp to throw in the towel.
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