I would like some Russian Literature recommendations related to this. I vaguely recall We by Zamyatin addressing something like this a good few decades ago.
I'll post a comment snarkily mentioning how tedious Russian Literature is, then you flag my comment to attract dang's attention, and hopefully he will manifest and reply with some excellent Russian Literature recommendations and links to relevent hn discussions! It's one of his many special interests.
Not only that, dang is also a proud card carrying member of the Klaus Nomi Fan Club. (I shit you not!)
>"I remember Pat Gibbons, who was Bowie's manager at the time. He comes up and he goes, 'Well you're going to have to have something. You're going to have some costumes.'"
>"And he whips out a big wad of cash, and he goes, 'How much do you need?', and he starts peeling off bills. And Joey and Klaus look at him, and their eyes widen, and they look at each other, and they go, 'We're going to need shoes, too.'"
If you're going to do this: start with: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and "Doctor Zhivago". These are the Poe/Twain/London for Russia (to some extent).
I highly reccomend Russian film as well: Stalker and Solaris (Not Cloonie, the Russian version) are also great. I have a bit of a love of Sci Fi, may not be your tastes.
You should also hunt around for anything and everything you can find on early Russian computing, Cybernetics, their efforts and thoughts on central planning, and the ternary computing projects they did.
If you're looking for examples critical of humanity you have lots of options (mostly from the last two centuries). Notes from Underground and The Death of Ivan Ilyich fit the bill.
I reread the former relatively recently (first time since college). It's dark, not for the easily affected.
Isn’t the latter an excerpt of The Brothers Karamazov? When I read it, it felt more like a criticism on certain economic theories, rather than people specifically.
Nope, separate work! But indeed, it can be considered both... The emptiness of bourgeoisie/wealthy values and the superficiality of the humans that host them
Russian Literature is so tedious. There is no Russian writer better than America's own Adam Sandler.
People dismiss Jack and Jill as Adam Sandler in a dress, which is rather like dismissing The Brothers Karamazov as some men being upset about their father.
Dostoevsky's The Double concerns a man tormented by another version of himself. Sandler advances the inquiry by asking: what if that version came for Thanksgiving and wouldn't fucking leave?
Casting himself as both siblings makes Jack's disgust at Jill an unmistakable act of self-loathing. He longs to exclude her from his comfortable bourgeois existence, yet everywhere he looks, there is his own face. Critics complained that Jill was unbearable, apparently unaware that estrangement from the self is supposed to be uncomfortable.
Al Pacino, appearing as Al Pacino, completes the study of fractured identity. His pursuit of Jill suggests a desperate attempt to encounter something authentic beyond performance. This culminates in the Dunkin' Donuts commercial, where even his name is consumed by capital: Al becomes Dunkaccino.
When Pacino demands that the commercial be destroyed, he finally achieves the moral clarity denied to the other characters. The audience has generally reached this position much earlier.
It's so unfair that Sandler won both Worst Actor and Worst Actress, while Pacino won only one award: Worst Supporting Actor.
Those countries, like the UK, didn't have much slave ownership to begin with. They just had slave trade, so much fewer stakeholders to complain about abolishing it, and even those had a more profitable replacement: colonialism.
I work at a hyperscalar and we just send it, if something breaks the model can just open a ticket and fix it automatically and write a new test. This is much cheaper than spending a bunch of money and stalling things with human CI/CD
Whatever happened to the principle that finding a bug during design is best, finding it during development is a little worse, finding it during QA is even worse, and finding it in prod is the least acceptable?
"Let's break prod and fix it later" is a terrible attitude. It didn't start with LLMs but boy LLMs seem to be making it widespread. Would it kill developers to find problems before deployment?
The principle you suggest is idealistic and has no grounding to reality. If the cost to fix something in production is close to none, and the consequences are close to none, the principle does not reflect reality.
The breaking bugs we shipped have went up about 40% year-to-year, but the engagement, user counts and revenue has grown much more than before because of the new features that got shipped. So overall its a big net win.
AI has really laid bare how little software is valued as a craft—it's been true for time immortal but some SWEs really buy into the idea. And occasionally we're able to trick leadership into believing it too with terms like "tech debt." But now that the business has for the first time literally any other option and can trade quality for speed they're starting to skip dev entirely the way they skipped QA before.
Wouldn't the cost to fix something in production be expensive, because many things won't be reported until one of your users got pissed off enough to report it (hopefully accurately) enough to fix?
In other words, you are shifting cost onto users doing your QA now.
Its much cheaper to have the users verify the systems if they have problems with it. We have not found a decrease in engagement, monthly use of the tools and revenue despite this switch.
In general it seems like the average user does not really care about these things. Some bugs like partially broken features are live for weeks with growing engagement before someone reports them.
Functionality is secondary to engagement of the user, its much, much more important to serve the right output that will keep the user on the feature than it is to have it working 100%.
I guess if his users are somehow fine with QAing constantly broken software, then he can get away with it. As a professional who cares about my work product, I wouldn’t accept the practice. But if it’s working for some companies, I guess more power to em.
I think the fact that defective products don’t make a difference speaks to how deeply unserious much of the software industry has become.
"Unserious" is a completely subjective idealistic take here.
Let's say you're are a "serious" baker, who always puts egg wash on top of his buns. You see another baker open up shop that does not do this. You say that he is unserious and does not do things with "care" while he outsells you, it's you who are unserious and will have to close down shop when you get outcompeted.
A better analogy is if the competing baker had such poor quality control that once in a while his buns tasted like chicken, once in a while they came out green, and once in a while they made customers sick. I would call that baker unserious, even if he was making more profit.
In the food prep world, we have Health Departments that come in and shut down unserious businesses like that. In software we don’t.
Everybody is trying to copy the companies who have either already-established dominant market position or such compelling products that a bunch of paper-cut bugs don't really matter as long as they aren't catastrophically fucking people over.
you dont just get to ci/cd your way to nirvana. your ci/cd are only as good as your tests. your tests are only as good as the understanding of the tests. left to AI nobody knows what the code or the tests are doing they could just be hardcoding passes for all you know.
You could say this about 99% of articles posted here. One might even say VCs are in the business of wasting peoples' time.
But, my time is not wasted, and my cortisol managed not to spike at the presence of a tool. I suggest therapy or meditation or some way to mediate the stress of interacting with reality.
That must be the difference between me and the “skilled” prompt-brained “junior developers” (allegedly) that I work with that revert to a pre-historic ape brain if they don’t have copilot. They’re just on another plane of “skills” that’s so far beyond me my puny brain can’t comprehend putting some text in a box and running a loop.
I’ll try to remember that the next time I ask one of them to explain something the agent vomited out and they just start drooling and stare blankly into space. Must be some new language I’m too dumb to comprehend.
TIL That's what xAI named their super compute cluster after, what an incredible tribute to such an incredible act of innovation. Let's hope the New Colossus lives up to its name sake.
Can you please explain why it is depressing? This feature is widely celebrated in the accessibility user groups in India, since the traditional sign-in methods have been proven to be a major friction point for users with special needs.
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