This page is a rip-off, check out Bryce Alexander Lynch's .plan file. See also Gwern's page on epigrams.
The history of software production as a profession (as against computer science) is essentially a series of incremental increases in the size and complexity of systems (and teams) that don't fall apart under their own weight. There isn't much evidence we have approached the limit here, so it's a pretty good bet for at least the medium term.
You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call 'politics'. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.
The only thing required to be a grifter, inadvertently or not, is to have your presentation skills outstrip your technical skill
A billionaire may never be held accountable. Therefore, a billionaire must never make a management decision.
If I can’t rely on the data on the screen being accurate, it might as well not be there. So now we begin the most beautiful process in software - starting from scratch.
You can tell quite a lot about a person by looking at what they choose to write in close proximity to the word "experience".
"You are what you eat" also applies to information diets.
Poor, sad, misbegotten, incredibly effective, massively successful PHP. Reading PHP code is like reading poetry, the poetry you wrote freshman year of college.
I know I'm the last committer, I committed atrocities
TypeScript is an entire language backed by a trillion-dollar corporation with the sole purpose of reducing the likelihood of undefined is not a function popping up in error messages.
I write the above in pencil, not pen
It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!"
A story is essentially just a rather entitled hypothesis
Go is not much fun but that is by design
fandom is a wiki website (allegedly)
DJs are not even close to fungible
Blog posts are written, not defecated
As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface
Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line
Don't let OpenAI steal the art for you, steal the damn work for yourself
Tristram Oaten original (privated) video
You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.
Remember the Internet of Things? Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code, your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some unlicensed beans.
When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Your soul might occasionally emit statements that are legally actionable,
Existential crisis aren't funny but aren't they... comedy flavoured?
Resources are limited, but resources are less limited than they have ever been before.
as well-detailed in Hazel's memoir (and mercilessly abbreviated here),
This is a hack and if you use it and something breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utlititarian one. There's nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.
First, that algorithmic curation commonly depends on numeric thresholds which are very often poorly understood.
It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass
We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.
Sure, if you’re based in San Francisco and you go to your adult daycare—sorry, I mean startup office
Test what you detest
ughh idk this video
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
couldn't actually find a good source, first saw here but appears in many other places
Software isn’t a thing, it’s a craft. A chair maker doesn’t develop a single chair for years on end. They make more and more chairs, better chairs. And they don’t pass on chairs to future generations. They pass on skills and knowledge and experience and expertise. We should see software the same way.
And these kind of conflicts is how you end up with the microservices pattern. Your backend gets carved up into parts maintained by different teams. In an ideal spherical cow reading of microservices, every microservice has a well-defined API that it uses to communicate with other services to help a user request turn into a response. Does this happen? Scholars continue to debate to this day.
In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.
as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head
Prof.dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Notes on Structured Programming Ch. 1
If you've never seen it before, Evangelion is a terribly depressing anime. It is the kind of thing that disturbs the comforted and comforts the disturbed.
The age of humans compared to the earth, now that's some nothing shit
yes, i understand you can't buy happiness. but can you sell it
being human is about to come back in style
For another thing, as a document this is very incomplete: I am only too aware of the fact that it ends in mid-air. Yet I have decided to have these notes duplicated, besides some practical considerations mainly to show what I have thought to those who expressed interest in it or to those whose comments I would welcome.
Prof.dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra, Introduction to Notes on Structured Programming
Inspiration can convince you something is interesting or worth doing, or from time to time get you some really good sentences. But by the time you're, say, 80% of the way into something, it's kind of like an old relationship
a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory
I am an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read but by what we are ashamed not to have read.)
Everyone falls into creative ruts, but two people rarely do so at the same time.
I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way. A day of programming might involve constructing an elaborate regular expression, investigating a file descriptor leak, debugging a race condition in the application you just wrote, and thinking through the interface of a module. Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed.
Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
This is biology.
Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
The world of computing, I came to learn, is vast but organized almost geologically, as if deposited in layers
Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
Yea as long as you do all the work and watch all the lectures you’ll be chilling
XML is dead, the millennials’ best kill so far.
networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice
With woodworking you actually get to hold your creations.
Zain Rizvi in Why Software Engineers like Woodworking
its study break, and just like its name suggests we study till we break
@randomtako. on UWA Computer Science discord
On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.
Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.
If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
Girlfriends are temporary, ex-girlfriends are forever
/u/UnemployedTechie2021 (maybe)
Algorithms are human-directed and humans are algorithm-directed in ways we do not fully understand.
Speaking as the most senior member of my team, nothing useful starts with that phrase
Tom M: Entropy's #1 enemy
Today, you're either above the API or below the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do.
Engineering is the art of finding the solution that only sucks in ways that don't matter
I do not collect your data. Stop sending it to me.
Joyce Kilmer and most computer scientists agree: there is no poem as lovely as a tree.
A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
Internal IBM Presentation 1979
"Proof" for thousands of years was whatever was written down, and that was even easier to forge.
There was a brief time (maybe 100 years at the most) where photos and videos were practically proof of something happening; that is coming to an end now, but that's just a regression to the mean, not new territory.
The most important output of senior engineers is more senior engineers.
security budget:
- $1 looking into languages that don’t trivially buffer overflow
- 50¢ looking into enabling exploit mitigation features
- 1¢ research into things like compile-time diversity
- $10M hiring a disgraced CISO from a FAANG company
- $100 hiring a red team to ignore feedback from
someone who is good at the economy please help me. my enterprise platform is dying
Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.
Xeact remains open-source software to this day where it is used by thousands of milli-developers.
Linear algebra churned through the sand in a remote data center
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam
Frederik Pohl
My robot girlfriend walks in with the crop, I'm already tied to the bed. "what's the safeword?", she asks. I respond by saying the letter "A" for 90 seconds straight followed by a short hex string.
calc.exe opens up on her eyes. Finally, a PoC!
Shouldn't have used fixed length buffers without bounds checking, babe. This is a rookie C mistake.
NO MORE IDEAS
WE HAVE ENOUGH
(merge them instead)
Treating Sunday as the first day of the week is a religious tradition going back thousands of years.
However, I know only one god, and his name is ISO 8601.
I think that’s the real danger, that you can do that and then nothing’s original anymore. Everything’s just a copy of something else. The problem is, that’s what readers like.
The courts are like the doors to the Ritz, open to everyone!
monkaiju (my favourite phrasing of a much older aphorism)
The computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work and it was a serious problem we were trying to do. The disease with computers is that you play with them.
Richard Feynman, Los Alamos from Below
@jerry@infosec.exchange:
Hi all. Fedia.io is going to be offline for a while during some open heart surgery on the database. If you are a religious person, praying might be in order.@sehugg@infosec.exchange:
ALTAR TABLE
We kill people based on metadata. But that's not what we do with this metadata
who called it object oriented programming and not class struggle
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cory Doctorow, TikTok's Enshittification
You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them
There is a floor on how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don't have that.
I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
The site will live or die by how it handles its first porn of misty from Pokemon
Written on cohost, though I came across it in their pre-emptive autopsy of cohost.
An industrialist might soon purchase Twitter, Inc. His substantial success launching reusable spacecraft does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science.
Web scraping is an absolutely despicable practice and if you want to learn how to do it at an industrial scale check out this video on my second channel
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem
Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.
You can't imagine how much harder it would be to be a JavaScript programmer in 1882
Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users.
In Unix everything is a file. Files are files, folders are files, disks are files, your keyboard is a file, your mouth is a file, the air is a file, you can't breathe, your file lungs fill with files and you try to scream but only files come out oh god Dennis how could you do thi
The only technology that you need is deadlines.
Paul Ford, here (allegedly, I came across the quote here)
You can't have art without resistance in the materials
William Morris
In ISO C, file handles (of type FILE) cannot be safely copied as their addresses may be magic
Wikipedia - Magic (programming)
Miyazaki said he can feel it every day, the limit of his ability, and he was talking about getting older but I think that's something a lot of us have experienced. Personally I can feel myself straining against the limit of my ability as though it were a brick fucking wall and my true potential, whatever the hell that is, is some amorphous shape on the other side that I can't quite reach.
Look I'm an atheist, but when God sends me to hell I want him to hesitate
Technoblade
lambdahas the benefit of making the code compact and foreboding. Plus, it prevents people from trying to add meaningful names, documentation or type-hints to the thing that is about to unfold.
This code is free as in mattress. If you decide to use it, it's your problem.
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Woodie Guthrie's Anti-copyright notice.
More on this on the Creative Commons site
It's easy to say with hindsight that NFTs are a stupid scam but it was also easy at the beginning to say that and through the middle too
@IlllllllllllllI on 2022-06-14