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Please, stop with the building metaphors. Source code is a design document interpreted by a toolchain to produce the product people actually care about.

The inconvenience of implementing correct safety measures is part of the cost of undertaking certain activities. When an activity's ratio of cost versus benefit is too high, there's no way to juice the benefit, and the last place to cost-cut is in safety measures, the responsible thing is to refrain from the activity in the first place.


> (No, compilers are not deterministic)

Having used, designed, and written compilers, this is news to me. Please, elaborate.


tldr: Race conditions when building on multi-cpu systems (which is all of them these days), and timestamps sneaking in everywhere.


Oh, no. Timestamps. Truly the sign of higher level reasoning.


Suppose I do something myself. I reap all the benefits, but it takes a lot of time, I may not have the expertise to do a good job, and I get all the blame if something goes wrong. Suppose I go to the park and find one of several guys who would do it for free. I get all the of benefits, he might do an excellent job, but, because there's no contract, I still take all the blame.

Suppose I actually hire a professional to do it. I receive fewer of the benefits. However, he's much more likely to do a good job, and the legal system provides a variety of ways to hold him accountable for the work.

Suppose I hire a professional, but then insist that he use legions of guys from the park to do the actual work, since that's going to be some much faster and cheaper per quantum of work. I also tell him that if he's unwilling to do that, I'll find someone who will. I also tell him that, since he has so much more unoccupied time now that the original work is in the hands of all those other dudes, he gets to supervise still more work done by other swarms of guys from the park.

At this point it should be clear that I'm not interested in quality work, but in having someone poised to absorb blame. I want a patsy.

Now replace "guys at the park" with LLMs, and replace "free" with "nearly free, but with no warranty."



My phone is turned off for roughly half my waking hours. The remaining waking hours, I have access to a real computer, or I have reason to not touch a phone or computer at all. A smartphone would be pointless.


That's cute. Your records are yours. Barring some agreement to the contrary, I have no right to mess with them or inspect them, even if they contain information about me.


That's an interesting opinion, but EU law says the opposite.


EU law only matters to those subject to it.


Which is why I questioned American websites complying with GDPR, and pointed out that HN doesn't feel any need to.


[intentionally blank]


> If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.

My kids do not have a social media presence, we have parental controls set on their devices, and the router only lets them online for a small window of the day. They still manage to communicate with friends via email, shared Google docs, phone calls, and actually meeting up. (Remember when people would agree to meet at a particular time and place, and then just show up with no further discussion? It still works.)

I think they'll be fine.


Wait till the school, wife, neighbors, and friends, all undermine that.


I wonder, how close can we get to a reasonable simulator for testing software engineering practices before inflicting them onto the real world?


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