✧✦Catherine✦✧"are software engineers Real Engineers or not" is a pointless distraction. software engineers who don't know how to deal with guilt love to self-flagellate with it and other than that there's no basis in reality for that discourse. do something useful instead
tautologico
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Andrei Formiga
Alex RussellA conversation with a coworker re-triggered an intrusive thought that I find myself returning to regularly while working in a firm in the grips of AI influences:
Teams and engineering processes are like fish in tanks. There's a careful balance of the nitrogen cycle that keeps delicate organics alive; above a certain pH, it's just not plausible to believe things will keep working. But to understand effects, we have to take into account causes and add the effect of time.
@melissawm also Chinese has other words that are similar, like "size" being "大小" (the characters mean "large" and "small" in isolation) and "how many" being "多少" ("many" and "few")
@melissawm my Chinese teacher said it kinda implied "everything between east and west", that is, "things"
DmytriI hereby coin the term "Ptolemaic Code" to refer to software that appears functional but is based on a fundamentally incorrect model of the problem domain. As more code is generated by AI, the prevalence of such code is likely to increase.
1/7
@melissawm eu geralmente penso que eu deveria me informar menos
@brandewinder I installed Linux Mint on my wife's laptop after she got a lot of trouble with Windows on this machine. This was years ago and she's still using Mint, though she's not a heavy computer user
@HauntedCheeseburger @brandewinder these days with Proton you can run most games just fine, some games even run better than they run on Windows. the biggest exception are multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat software
Jeremy Gibbons@sree Thank you for that suggestion! The question from @lindsey sent me on my own dusty filing cabinet rummage, and I dug out our copy of "Design Considerations for a Functional Programming Language" by Rod Burstall from 1977. This is the paper that introduced NPL, a predecessor to Hope and hence to Haskell; it's an early published source for algebraic datatypes and pattern matching, and also for list comprehensions. When I have time, I intend to write a blog post about it. I couldn't find it anywhere else online, so it is now at https://archive.org/details/burstall-design-considerations-for-a-functional-programming-language
Burstall Design Considerations For A Functional Programming Language : Rod Burstall : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Scan of the paper Design Considerations for a Functional Programming Language by Rod Burstall, from the Proceedings of the Infotech State of the Art...
GusRe: last boost https://chaos.social/@dpk/115589097803252590
That OCaml PR is textbook open source in the era of vibe coding...
It's got everything:
- PR submitted without the author acknowledging they didn't write it and don't understand it.
- Copyright laundering.
- "I just wanted to get it done!" versus maintainers who know they have to live with code contributions for years.
- Zero-effort pasting LLM output as reply to real people's thoughtful questions. (At least the author acknowledged what they were doing that time.)
- It doesn't matter that it's hard to review because "AI has a very deep understanding of how this code works."
- "Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it."
If this is our new world then it's going to turbocharge maintainer burnout. 
(If you don't want to read a quite long often depressing thread, would still recommend reading this well reasoned comment by one of the maintainers:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556593972 )
Daphne Preston-Kendal (@[email protected])
Fucking. Hell. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369