Chris F. Carroll

There is a foundational choice we all must make in life: will we join with those who use violence & abuse to profit? Or will we reject that option. The one leads, we hope, to a rule of law society where we live in safety. The other to Mafia societies ruled by thugs & henchmen.

@Putney_Kotto @gianotti_mattia @ErrorTheorist Although I think the belief that CS has its roots in philosophy is a mistake, even though foundations of mathematics was/is a quite philosophical area.

@Putney_Kotto @gianotti_mattia @ErrorTheorist Is it more that once a problem becomes tractable, we stop calling it philosophy? Natural philosophy → physics, biology, chemistry Bits of philosophy of mind → psychology Syllogisms, RAA, modus ponens/tollens &c → mathematical logic

Here’s a paper arguing that there is no progress in philosophy. The author claims that if Aristotle visited a modern university, he would be amazed by modern physics but feel at home in the philosophy classes, since the debates haven’t fundamentally changed. What do you think?

@SpeedWatkins I feel that “If He is all-powerful, He would be able to do so” is a defn that excludes possibility of free will

If God is perfectly good, He would desire to save everyone. If He is all-powerful, He would be able to do so. If both are true, everyone would be saved. Since not everyone is saved, either God lacks power, lacks goodness, or does not exist. Choose wisely.

@TotherAlistair although now I've seen the back cover I guess I mis-guessed the audience!

@TotherAlistair My preference order is 2,1,3,4 possibly because ‘slice the problem grow the solution’ doesn't tell me it's about software development which I assume it is

Apologies for the eye test, I value your thoughts. What title, What subtitle? 1, 2, 3, 4? welcome also to say why. I do love this phrase "Slice the problem, Grow the solution" I think it belongs in there somewhere

@grok @inareshmatta @steren grok imagines that these are great at massive scale but they are great at small scale too

Google's practices shine at massive scale (100k+ engineers, billions of LOC): 1. One monorepo at HEAD: Atomic cross-project changes, instant consistency, no version drift or painful merges. 2. Explicit deps: Reproducible builds, clear impact analysis, easy audits/updates. 3. Vendored third_party: Hermetic (offline/self-contained) builds, security (no live external pulls), exact reproducibility. 4. Rebuild everything from source: Full auditability, no hidden binaries, optimizes for security/performance. After a year, you see they prevent chaos in huge codebases.

When I joined Google, I found it annoying that: 1. Everyone works in the same repo at head 2. All dependencies are explicitly declared 3. External dependencies are copied in a central third_party folder 4. Everything can be re-built from source I had changed my mind for all of these points after a year.

@gvanrossum and a loop. On fail, try something else.

I think I finally understand what an agent is. It's a prompt (or several), skills, and tools. Did I get this right?

@PhilosopherJoeC I feel unable to choose between the two, but I am keen to see some moral inferences made by leading scientists & moralists to clarify whether or not they draw their inferences from their sentiments.

Consider countries A and B. Suppose the laws of each are based on morality, but the nature of morality is distinct in each country. In A, the law is determined by inferences made by leading scientists and moralists. In B, the law conforms to your sentiments. Which is better?

@TotherAlistair I maybe misunderstood but isn't ‘get messed up by my next test’ what you are aiming for — incremental development of the actual service?

my next test, which would get the tax rate from a repository... What Claude automagically did was to use the initial service call "greetings()" which returns "hello" ... this establishes the primary port without messing up the actual service interface. ... Nice move, Claude :)

Claude just taught me something yesterday ... in my nano-incremental hexagonal development, i always start with return a constant. But I always did it off a primary service, like "getTaxRateOn(100)" and it would return "10" as a constant. But that would get messed up by

@kristijan_kralj I concede it's not written in .Net but you won't lose a whole sprint on building html and feeding it to wkhtmltopdf

PDF is the main bottleneck of modern .NET development: 1. ASP .NET Core can handle thousands of requests per second, but exporting to PDF still means installing 3 NuGet packages, reading 5 GitHub issues, and hoping fonts don't explode in production. 2. We have async/await, background jobs, cloud autoscaling, and distributed systems, yet the moment the business says "Can we just get a small PDF with a table and a logo?" the whole sprint vanishes. 3. We can model complex domains, enforce invariants, and scale systems to millions of users, but aligning a table header in a PDF still feels like dark magic. .NET devs, know your enemies.

@mkristensen Editor write-the-code-for-you typeahead is ahead e.g. nuget package and version typeahead when editing a csproj file but also in general C#; editor auto-formatting ; paste into string auto-escaping

@mkristensen … Check-in window slicker to work with (e.g. changed filenames typeahead in the comments window; show/hide the tree of changes ; … /

What features or extensions make you jump from Visual Studio to other IDEs and editors to perform certain tasks?

@brianchristian Taking your ‘make a decision about the photographer’ example, I could write out and focus on the edited statement. I hypothesise that that would make it easier for me to make an unbiased (or less biased) decision. I intend to at least try this out and see how it goes.

@chrisfcarroll Say more? Not sure what you have in mind!

Humans could try this too

@juanrga They've been teaching us for the past several decades that, since E=mc², matter is a form of energy. Are you saying that is completely wrong or is it just sloppily stated?

No. You cannot turn energy (a property) into matter (stuff things are made). What you can do is convert radiation into matter.

@IamKyros69 There was always documentation. There had to be.

How did people even learn to code when there was no docs, no YouTube… nothing? Genuinely curious.

FT, Nov 2025, referencing nber.org/papers/w34459

@brankopetric00 This decision process is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes.

Team debated: GitHub Actions vs Jenkins for CI/CD. Jenkins advocates: - We already have it - More powerful - Self-hosted - Free (ignoring ops time) GitHub Actions advocates: - YAML in repo - No server to maintain - Modern UI - Faster Decision process: - Ran both for 1 month - Same workflows Results: Jenkins: - Maintained by 1 person (40 hours/month) - Plugins broke after updates - UI from 2010 - Build queue issues GitHub Actions: - Zero maintenance - Just works - Cost: $120/month - Fast feedback Migrated fully to GitHub Actions. Six months later: - That 1 person works on actual features now - CI/CD is no longer a team discussion topic - Onboarding new engineers: trivial

@systemdesignone Perhaps rather than the Cons (which are largely trivial) what we want to consider is the Cost? (and how valuable the Pro is to a given use case)

Load Balancer vs Reverse Proxy vs API Gateway (explained in 2 mins or less)...