kibiz0r
@kibiz0r@midwest.social
- Comment on What we lose when we stop coding 14 hours ago:
It’s a matter of feedback loops.
It’s the same problem as when you divide teams by front-end/back-end, or implementation vs testing, or features vs platforming.
When you don’t have to feel the pain of your decisions, you’re going to make bad decisions.
- Comment on Empathy 2 days ago:
There’s an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast where the guest (either was? or just interviewed?) the psychologist in charge of interviewing astronauts for suitable personality traits. He had a ton of great insights, but the thing that stuck with me is that there are basically three kinds of conversations:
- Solving practical problems
- Venting emotions
- Affirming social worth
They’re all important, but having the right one at the right time is the key.
Found it: youarenotsosmart.com/…/yanss-305-how-to-become-a-…
- Comment on Looking for advice/experience on spec driven development for a big application while also maintaining an overarching application spec 3 days ago:
My original comment was flippant, but you’re fightin for your life with earnesty in these replies, so I’m gonna provide what little IRL experience I have in this so far.
Spec driven development is better than ephemeral prompting in the short term while building up… but for maintenance, it works against you.
Once the code has been generated from the spec, the two inevitably drift apart.
Even for humans, this is a problem. Stale docs can waste time and mislead developers, so the best spec is one that is executable to confirm that it still matches the implementation.
But for agents, it’s especially important, because they have a harder time detecting stale docs and disregarding them, and also because LLMs corrupt documents over time, so they will invariably cause this problem.
So the best spec turns out to be tests. Which means your spec is gonna be code, not natural language. (Djikstra has some insight there.)
Which means you need it to be easy to write tests as a human. Which means you need to aggressively refactor. Which agents are not great at doing.
But even if they were, the dirty secret about refactoring is that it’s heavily dependent on having a good taxonomy for your subject matter, which is a people problem and not a coding problem.
My own sense of this landscape is that AI is effective in two radically different scenarios:
- Tasks with unambiguous acceptance criteria that can be quickly, automatically, and deterministically checked. You can let it go nuts against that kind of task, as long as it’s not allowed to move its own goalposts.
- Tasks with trusted inputs and subjective outputs, like information-gathering. The key here is that a human will consume the output and then produce something else as the next step, not simply hand it off as gospel to an artificial implementer.
I took a course where the capstone was to achieve Ralph Loop Nirvana, to show the suits that I’m willing to play along. But I’m unconvinced. If you let AI consume input that is mostly AI-generated, it seems to inevitably deteriorate.
There’s no avoiding it: you simply must get your hands dirty in order to keep things organized, and that’s at odds with any of these “your new job is to be a manager, or SME, or PM, or whatever” tactics.
—
Adding another thought:
People really underappreciate friction.
We spent a long time living in a world where friction was unavoidable. Then with digital automation, we got a taste of what a very low friction world would look like. And we got used to the idea that reducing friction is an absolute good.
But some tasks need friction in order to succeed. And since friction was never optional before, we never noticed that potential failure mode.
Because of this, the sales pitch that AI will remove all friction is fundamentally flawed. But that doesn’t mean AI has nothing to offer for those “friction-required” kinds of tasks.
AI is actually great at grilling you about ambiguities, contradictions, and dependencies. You can use it to deliberately apply friction in the right places.
The problem is… most people don’t use it that way. They use it as something that just implements and doesn’t second-guess, and they miss out on the cases where it’s useful to have it second-guess and not implement.
- Comment on Looking for advice/experience on spec driven development for a big application while also maintaining an overarching application spec 4 days ago:
Spec driven development is a scam.
- Comment on [Video] Muslim woman hit by car ramming in Abbey Wood, south London 2 months ago:
Mark NSFW please
- Comment on What's your favorite ship or class of ship? 2 months ago:
Something about this post makes me think you would enjoy playing Endless Sky
- Comment on You can now walk the whole way around England | BBC News [3:38] 2 months ago:
2689-mile coastline
- Comment on Solar is now 41% cheaper than fossil fuels, UN report shows 2 months ago:
I mean, sure, but it’s comparing $ per kWh vs $ per kW
- Comment on Solar is now 41% cheaper than fossil fuels, UN report shows 2 months ago:
How do you even compare something that generates energy for decades and can then be recycled and generate energy for further decades vs something that you use once and then it’s gone forever?
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Slammed
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 2 months ago:
Honestly, the difficulty curve on HZD feels like a sine wave sometimes.
Cuz:
- You do simply get stronger over time
- You also improve your use of tactics over time
- You also gain access to new tactics
- But they introduce much stronger machines too
- But a lot of a machine’s strength can be mitigated by approaching it with the right tactics
- But they also deliberately put you in situations where you can’t use the easy tactics
- But they also put you in situations where you can use the easy tactics, against a ton of very strong machines
So depending on how quickly you hit the skill ceiling on using your available tactics, how much you like to grind, how reliable your multi-tasking is, and your basic “twitch skills”, you might get a skewed perspective at any point along the way.
I don’t think there’s any harm in changing the difficulty back and forth (not sure). So maybe just go with whatever feels comfy at the moment?
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 2 months ago:
Dragon Quest Builders 2, inspired by FOMO over Pokopia.
Also continuing Horizon Zero Dawn for the third time. Just hard mode, but I kinda feel like I could do very hard.
- Comment on Fascism bad. 2 months ago:
A man
A plan
Amygdala
- Comment on Fascism bad. 2 months ago:
Fear is, famously, an excellent impetus for rational decision-making.
- Comment on Middle East war strengthens case for renewables, say clean energy experts 2 months ago:
The bonkers thing is: if you wanted to attack Iran, as the US, you’d need to be willing to cut ties to the GCC.
That means investing in renewables, having a way to stabilize USD without the petrodollar (global free trade with big trade deficits is a good way), and keeping energy demand fairly predictable.
Instead we got: repealing investments in renewables, tariffs, and spiking energy demands due to reckless data center build-outs.
- Comment on meow meow meow 2 months ago:
~pe~e^2^n~e~
- Comment on iykyk 🪰 2 months ago:
“But it feels good”
- Comment on Zero-hour contracts(Zero-hours contracts let employers hire staff with no guarantee of work, with employees only offered the hours for which they are needed) reach new record high 2 months ago:
“Flexible labor” is a euphemism for “derisking capital” (Cory Doctorow)
- Comment on Badabadeedabadie! 3 months ago:
He’s even got some yellow as a backup
- Comment on UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry 3 months ago:
Classic example of what Cal Newport calls “vibes reporting”.
No quotes from agencies saying “we fired people because of AI”, but if you put “people got fired” and “AI threatens jobs” next to each other, you can get the reader to assume a more salacious story without technically lying.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
Oviraptor
Oiaptor
Overaptoreye twitch
- Comment on mullberry figs 3 months ago:
When the moon hits your knees
And you mispronounce trees
Sycamore - Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky. 3 months ago:
It’s massively impractical. You’re never gonna believe it.
These things require silicon (good luck finding sand!), but they’re mostly glass and aluminum (ridiculously rare substances that we can’t use willy-nilly on stuff that only lasts for 25 years, and then how are we gonna recycle that? we have no idea how to recycle glass and aluminum!), and then to make it scalable you’re gonna want some safe battery technology like sodium-ion (but where are we gonna find a bunch of salt on this blue planet?)
- Comment on 'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans 3 months ago:
Season 2 is coming! Probably late 2026.
- Comment on 'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans 3 months ago:
It’s Common Side Effects IRL
- Comment on Deep Time 4 months ago:
Looking at the state of the world… you might be right.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 4 months ago:
Of course it is! We’re just animals, after all. Is documenting the behavior of different species of beetles a science? The only difference is that we can replicate behavior through culture, not just genes.
- Comment on Deep Time 4 months ago:
Chronologically, sure. But are years really the appropriate measure of accuracy here? Biological evolution moves a lot slower than cultural or technological evolution does.
- Comment on I'm good, thanks 4 months ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
For a majority of men, probably, but not an overwhelming majority. Which still leaves a ton of people you could be compatible with.
Don’t overthink it and try to be something you’re not. Just take your time, get to know people, be curious and honest. Stay true to yourself. Don’t apologize and adapt just because you assume you have to.
You’re not trying to date everyone, just the right one. So why bother with what the rest think?
You’ll find someone that “just works” with who you already are. When you do, your dynamic with come naturally as a result of your unique relationship, and it won’t be precisely the same as any timeshare sex model you might have tried to plan ahead on Lemmy.
