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Yeah, it's a really bad take. And there is no proof that what killed Nokia was iPhone... I've seen a pretty solid argument that what killed Nokia was Elop / the Microsoft deal.


Absolutely. Even when it had been abundantly clear that WP was a flop, many people including me were hoping Nokia would just pivot to Android, which they didn't (until HMD; too little too late).

It was almost like Elop had the assignment to run Nokia into the ground, and I'm still wondering why no one of the shareholders cried wolf.


IMHO WP or alternatively their own OS (but Nokia famously sucked at software so hardly a viable option) was their only chance. They couldn’t compete with Samsung and later on Chinese manufacturers of Android phones. HTC, LG and a bunch of others failed despite of pivoting to Android “in time”, why would have Nokia done any better?


Why are github issues not a proper ticket system? E.g. rust uses it, seems to work fine for them...


For example, we don't have a clear analogue for "triage nurse". What would be it? Oncall engineer for production issues; "product owner" maybe for the regular tickets?

Thing is, software engineering is still (relatively) young. And more of a craft than true engineering. So the "good practices" are _somewhat established_, but at the same time, not quite. Like, we have glimpses into what works and what doesn't, but not a universally-established workflow to follow. And AI is upending what we already knew; it's really not surprising that people are looking elsewhere for workable metaphors.


> For example, we don't have a clear analogue for "triage nurse". What would be it?

Triage nurse seems well defined in software engineering, perhaps just without a single title. There are certainly engineers that focus on triaging GitHub issues and then fixing immediate showstopper bugs and/or prioritizing the issue for further attention from other engineers.

That role can be communicated to agents by writing down that description. The risk with saying that the role is “triage nurse” is that you can’t be sure what other roles and allowances the agent will infer it has.



That’s Bahkmut which is still close to the frontline. They were talking about Mariupol which the Russians have actually rebuilt already, see here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mariupol,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...


"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting

Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other


Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)


No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."


> The earlier you can find an issue the simpler it is to fix, so waiting until the last moment (e.g. PR) means you're spending far more time fixing issues than necessary.

Wait, does that mean that E2E tests that catch bugs are a strong signal that the team isn't doing well? How about component tests that catch bugs? Wouldn't they be better caught at the unit-test level? Do you see how your argument is flawed? - nobody is "waiting until PR to catch all bugs" but that doesn't mean that PR review can't/ shouldn't catch bugs! Sometimes even significant ones, yes.

You don't eliminate E2E tests because "you have good unit tests". You shouldn't just eliminate PR reviews because "we communicate inside the team".


does that mean that E2E tests that catch bugs are a strong signal that the team isn't doing well?

Yes. E2E tests are there to give you confidence that future changes haven't broken things. They're not there to catch bugs before the feature goes to production. Unit and integration tests should do that though.

You shouldn't just eliminate PR reviews because "we communicate inside the team".

You should eliminate them as soon as they're not giving you any real value, but if you don't eliminate them before that team's will stop trying to get that value in a better way because they believe the PR process catches bugs. It doesn't though, so all it really achieves is stopping the team trying to improve.


> are there to give you confidence that future changes haven't broken things.

> They're not there to catch bugs

What's the difference between those 2 things? I genuinely can't tell. Are you saying "E2E tests are only useful if they are *always* green"? No - of course they'd ideally be always green - but it they would be guaranteed to be green, only then they would become completely useless.

It's like saying "ideally you shouldn't write code with bugs in the first place". Sure. Ideally we shouldn't. Now back in the real world...


> That's because an LLM thinks in terms of language, while we think in a different way, then convert the ideas to language

Do we? I just learned from a speaker[1] that we literally need words to recognize emotions. People who have a poor vocabulary have lower emotional intelligence because without being able to attach a word to an emotion, the brain is unable to recognize & process it.

[1] Dude seemed to be knowledgeable about the subject. He's a specialized trainer, should be educated in this exact field. So hopefully I'm not lying to anyone here :)


I can't agree about the "unable to recognize and process it", simply because that idea is totally contrary to my own experience. I have in fact many memories which have emotions in them, without words or other external elements. However, seeing that language serialization seems to enable a vastly extended memory (entire sagas remembered as songs), it is understandable that something is gained by serialization of emotional experiences, just as something more immediate is lost.


Sounds uncannily similar to the pseudofacts you hear a lot in Neurolinguistic Programming training courses for sales reps. Would ask for a scientific publication reference on that one.


It seems to me that idea is rooted in social consensus.

Someone expresses an emotion but doesn't know how to react to it, their inner group all have an opinion about it, and the consensus is selected as the "appropiate" reaction to it. The individuals who react this way will claim this consensus is the same as emotional intelligence.

Just as there are also people who react in one way, and completely disregard any external opinion about it. They simply have firm opinions and don't need the consensus.

I will not comment on who can belong to each group, that's an exercise for the reader.


If your assertion was true, it logically leads to "camera quality doesn't matter man, only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures"

There are details, all of these are details; but saying that "iphone5-level-cameras are good enough form most people" is both true (obviously it sold and millions were satisfied with it) and false (most people would notice today that iphone5s take worse photos than latest-gen). All the details add up to image quality that _is_ noticeable even to the laymen.


> only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures

This is largely true, when it comes to photos of other people/people they care about.

I'm a wedding & family photographer part time, and at nearly every wedding I shoot, the photos the clients and their guests favorite the most from the galleries are usually the quick candid snaps where the subject has an expression they like or are doing something fun. It could be a blurry, grainy, dark mess of a photo and it will consistently be their favorite photo of the day.

For most non-photographers, the subject of the photo is what matters and is all they will notice. Almost no one is making a distinction between bokeh shape, or noise (unless its so obvious as to completely ruin the photo), composition, etc.

All that to say, photo quality is only one very small part of the equation.


> Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.

---

and then

> Those rethinks are load-bearing parts of your voice. Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored.

---

Are they wrong in the first paragraph? Or are they simply not following the advice they dispense to others?


I thought that was a joke.. Like how I used "delve into" back in 2024 or so lol


It might be a joke, but I'm sure there are lots of people who don't perceive it as such. For me, it pulled me out of the article and diluted its advice.


What do you mean? Virtually all humans have access to the internet. That's literally "a significant cross section of human knowledge available in real-time".

Oh, the median human can't process that in realtime, you say? Looks like they can't compete with the capabilities of the frontier AI then.


> We can easily train a LLM to pass the Turing test if we wanted to, but then it would just sound dumb or biased.

Interesting idea. "This is not dumb and biased enough, probably not a human".


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