"Bad abstraction is worse than duplication"

Oh shit, thank you so much for this part ! I don't even count number of time I had to face enthusiasts developers saying "These lines of code are very similar, let's factorize them ! "

And that's how MathManagerHelper class is born...

Here is my "Tuesday evening 15min before leaving work analysis".

Before COVID, IT market was stable. After COVID, there was WAY too many IT offers. Then, market collapse supposedly because of AI:

(Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE)

In blue line, actual curve. In green line, what should have been IT market without COVID and AI.

For IT market to get back to equilibrium, red area should be equal to blue area. If I do some patchwork, I ended up with this:

So my conclusion is that it indeed slowly starting to recover and should be back to normal ~mid 2027.

Time to go home, bye 😁

Asking to cyptography experts. Would it be possible to flood a discussion with AI generated slope ? The discussion itslef would not be encrypted, but would be lost in millions of other generated discussion. A "private key" mechanism would be use to identify which message are part of your real discussion.

I suppose this would be compliant with Chat Control, as message are not encrypted. But without private key, you won't be able to identify which message are the good ones.

I use AI for small, atomic, stuff that don't bring any intellectual value to spend time for.

Like "Typescrit. Find smallest element in an array". "Python. Simulate keboard event to avoid computer going to sleep mode". Or copy/past error message because I missed an import and I just want to know which one.

I also use it sometime for well identified algorithm that could be interesting but are not the core of the problem. Like "C#. Clustering algorithm to group points together in a point cloud".

The generated code is catastrophic in term of performances/memory, but it's good enough 80% of the time.

But eveytime I tried to use AI for higher level stuff, or that require several interdependant concepts, it ended up into hallucination pit.

• I have this problem
• Cool ! Use solution A !
• Doesn't work
• My Bad, use solution B !
• Doesn't exist
• Indeed ! For this problem you should apply method A which will work !
• (-_-)'

It works. You have hammers and nails. Then, someday, a dude come with the new Hammer23, with better ergonomical grip, colored high density 3 sided head, and so on. Yeah, cool, but I still have the same nails to nail, and my current hammer do the job perfectly. And I drilled a hole in my workbench ten year ago that have the perfect size for my current hammer.

Developers still write code by hand the same way mason still uses shovels, even though excavators exist. Not because you have a new hammer means everything suddenly becomes a nail.

Everytine I've seen a pre-commit hook in my job, it was something that should have been in integration pipeline.

You should not run linter, test or any static analysis tool in a pre-commit (I'm looking at you husky 😡). Why ? Because:

• It takes time. A commit should be instantaneous.

• It may change the content of the commit or of the repos without explicite action of the developer.

• The developper's branch is the developper's mess. He don't have to respect any convention, any quality gate or any workflow on its branch. Quality gates should happen only when integrating into trunk.

I always commit and push on Friday afternoon before leaving as "WIP", in case my computer crash during week end. I don't want to address issues of a WIP job. I just want to backup my work.

I may commit several time per minute, and do a rebase latter. I don't want to spend 2min each time waiting for eslint to parse the repos. I don't want to fix styling because I now I will fix it later and rebase -i before pushing.

You can use custom pre-commit in your own workflow, but forcing all developer to have the same pre-commit is a bad idea.

You mean that a company whose business rely on collecting user data actually collect user data ?

I was prepared to use my Cunningham Law mental model to correct your article, but no. I have nothing to say 😊

I've seen way too many wrong usage of git merge/rebase in lots of article but you get the point and clearly explained it.

Maybe just at the end, instead of

git checkout main
git pull
git checkout feature-branch
git rebase main

I would just do:

git fetch
git rebase origin/main

This avoid checkout main and checkout back to working branch, which may takes times on big repos.

I'm really sad that after 20 year we still have to explain that commit message is not a summary of code modification.

Commit message is here to gives information's that are not visible in the diff. The context, the side effects, the decision that were made, etc... All of this cannot be generated by LLM.

I don't know if the last part "What do these software developers actually do all day? ;->" is ironique or not.

Anyway, from my experience, industrial software developpers generate around 10 to 100 loc/day. For mobile game or shitty web stuff, it can go up to a few hundreds. For DO178A certified aeronautic code, this is closer to several days per loc 🤪. To know what's going on when manager try to increase this metric, just have a look to Boeing.

I wonder how many people get this ref nowadays.

I gave a try to jj. It's fine for personal projects or small team and make the workflow a bit easier. No more "git add; git commit; git push" each time you do a modification. You just "jj git push" and everything will be automatically pushed.

However, the biggest criticism I have is that he doesn't encourage to push every time. It really encourages you to keep your modif locally and push only to create a PR, and that's not a good approach.

Even if you code is WIP, even if everything crash, you really should push your code to backup it. Who cares ? As long as it is not on master branch, it's your own mess.

It can. Silverbullet can do quite anything, that's where it's name comes from. You can code your own logic directly in markdown through lua like code, get pages tags, generates tables etc... but the tool is very "hacky". Either you love it, either you hate it. And if you are not a hairy nerdy guy, you will hate it.

I'm quite convinced AGI cannot be achieved on a Turing machine, whatever its size or complexity.

Arguments against it are mainly based on Gödel's incompleteness theorems and are described in books like "Minds and Machines - Alan Ross Anderson", "Consciousness in the universe. A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory" or even "Mind" from Alan Turing himself.

I'm not claiming I understand all the arguments written in these books, but it seems that Gödel's incompleteness theorems also apply to universe and consciousness. To briefly summarize Gödel's incompleteness theorems, it states that a formal system cannot describe everything. There will always be thing which are beyond his reach. A Turing Machine is a formal system. This means that a Turing Machine will never be able to simulate our universe or replicate consciousness, and thus to replicate a human brain.

However, it could be feasible with Quantum Computer that are not based on formal system.

I never really understood the advantage of worktree over having just several clone of the repos on different folders.

Can someone explain me ? I should have missed smth.

I'm still convince that polish notation was the biggest mistakes of Lisp. At some point, the guy who create Lisp language decide to get rid of 2 centuries of mathematic convention just because of a technical limitation that last for maybe 2 decades.

Oh, and no one to talked about (1- x) ?

Yes, unfortunately, we don't have time to learn everything, we have to choose. Sys engineer is a rabbit hole which is too deep for me, I prefer spending time on other things.

Currently, I'm into quantum computing. I'm configuring the uConsole so I can easily edit my blog on the go.

Ok, fine, what's the point of generating commit message based on what's already inside the commit ?

Commit messages are supposed to give informations that are not in the modfied code. It's supposed to be the "why" you did this, not the "what" you did !

In this case, I don't think silverbullet is the right tool. It's not like if an "admin" can hide all the complexity for end users by creating its own frontend. The complexity will still be visible to end users. As long as someone can edit a page, he will see the lua script behind.

If readonly, it just look like other wiki. The https://silverbullet.md/ site is itslef written in silverbullet. You can have a look to video to see how it works: https://silverbullet.md/Manual

Out of the box, there is no really "Admin" portal and "User" portal. It may be doable, but I cannot describ a workflow. I use it as a small wiki for my homelab because I like overcomplicated tool. I'm on neovim btw 🤣