Matt Russell

@aiDotEngineer have you got any updates / information?

AI Engineer Europe in London has started off pretty terribly. Long queues to get in only to be told the venue is full and to come back in the afternoon. #aiengineer

@browserstack your onboarding experience is grim. Do you have some kind of internal competition to see how many popups, notifications, and banners you can jam onto the page for the first time a new user visits? My first impression is "malware site".

@NatCryptoMuseum What a beauty!

On this day in 1924, Edward Hebern received a patent for his electric coding machine, the first U.S. cipher machine to use a wired rotor, shaping the future of encryption. Learn more about Hebern’s contributions, and what landed him in jail at the #NCM.

@mrdanmetcalfe I kinda understood it when a lot of tech friends liked him a few years ago because of the cool self-driving cars and space stuff.

I'm not a sycophant but it just so happens that the simplest heuristic I have for if someone is like-minded is whether or not they like Elon Musk.

@WellsAndrewM I would love to see how you might do some proofs for simple program properties for the puzzles.

Decided to do Advent of Code in Lean to hopefully help people learn Lean. Starting off a bit slow for now, but I'll try get into proofs a bit more as we go along.

@olafurpg Yeah, there's a strange preference for austerity around tooling sometimes! There are other reasons people are cautious though. A code formatter brings very little risk from careless use, it isn't as simple for AI assistants.

Resistance to AI coding tools today is reminiscent of resistance to code formatters about eight years ago. The value creation and joy in programming doesn’t come from the labor of typing characters in an editor, it comes from solving problems.

@FuriousSheep .where(...)

@jdegoes It's almost a cliche in maths to declare things as trivial or obvious that ... some of us mere mortals definitely don't find it to be. I don't hate a style suggestion to avoid that vibe in software documentation.

It blows my mind that some organizations spend good money developing and implementing these bullshit language-policing 'guides' for open source development. Put those same resources into something useful, like mentoring new OSS contributors, or even bounties!

If you're triggered by reading the word 'easy' in developer documentation, you may want to consider resolving your issue with a therapist before pursuing a career in software engineering.

The single most important thing I have learned about software development over my career is that if you do not aggressively fight complexity, it will eat you alive.

@int_index I think I grew out of the stage of sneering at people who haven't learned the super niche things I really like a long time ago, mostly after meeting countless amazing devs who could not give the slightest shit about monads.

If you can't understand what a monad is (or you believe that monads = input/output), all your programming opinions are invalid.

@kerckhove_ts @mpeytonjones I'm happy to discount an adversarial reader! Or make it probabilistic. I'm sure there'd need to be a lot of loophole closing, but is the principle that contentious - that we can't aspire to kindness because it's too ill-defined?

@MattRussellUK @mpeytonjones That means no public writing whatsoever, especially if you consider adversarial readers' interpretations of kind. I'm not saying that's a bad solution, it works, but it's definitely a lot less useful than it sounds.

The four questions I was taught to ask before writing something are: - Is it clear? - Is it true? - Is it necessary? - Is it kind? They're not all needed at all times, and they conflict, but I think you should think carefully before dropping any of them. Especially kindness.

@kerckhove_ts @mpeytonjones Perhaps for an operational definition, it's sufficient to say that the person reading the writing ought to perceive it as kind?

@mpeytonjones People have very different, dare I say incompatible, ways to define kind. I'm afraid you'll have to specifiy who needs to think the writing is kind in order for this advice to be useful.

mac is like "we're intuitive" but then they have this fuckass install window

@MuseumCommodore Captive

@BrianGoetz It seems for Holub, every idea he likes is absolutely and exclusively correct, and anything else is definitively wrong. There's no room for nuance or trade-offs or any of that. It's all a bit tedious. A shame, because he might otherwise have interesting thoughts to share!

Allen has said some pretty stupid things in the pursuit of engagement, but this takes the cake. You can’t be a team if you are not colocated or won’t mob? There are great teams that don’t work your favorite way. Saying those aren’t teams is disqualifyingly stupid. And insulting.

Lol, remember back when people were convinced it was super important to stick a massive copyright header on top of every source file for no good reason

🔥 Rajan took action alongside Niamh at Stonehenge earlier today. 💬 "Either we end the fossil fuel era, or the fossil fuel era will end us. Just as fifty years ago, when the world used international treaties to defuse the threats posed by nuclear weapons, today the world needs a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to phase out fossil fuels and to support dependent economies, workers and communities to move away from oil, gas and coal." 💸 Support people taking action — chuffed.org/project/just-s…

@Lambda_Coder @jdegoes What is a 10x musician?

@jdegoes We readily accept 10x musicians, actors, singers and doing the same anywhere talent is developed and practiced. Why should programming be any different?

Doubt the existence of 10x programmers? Phooey! There are infinity programmers: programmers who can complete challenging tasks that many (most) programmers could not complete in a lifetime.

@carlosedp @guizmaii I quite like it in isolation, e.g. if it were the original syntax. Adding it as an alternative was a big mistake, because having a plurality of styles has some unfortunate pragmatic consequences - such as friction reading the code of others and worthless debates over syntax.

@guizmaii I love it and use on all my projects. Also it's optional... It shouldn't bother that much. If you don't like it, don't use it.

I will never understand the new braceless syntax of Scala3. Such a regression. Such a useless change. Such a useless things to have to discuss about.