James Cox-Morton

No Speed Without Control: A disciplined approach to LLM-augmented software development analogmoment.com/post/no-speed-… Some thoughts on two years of LLM-assisted programming

@eszter_cs @fabfrohlich It would be worth checking if any particularly esoteric software you require is compatible with the arm64 Apple Silicon architecture the newer machines use.

@eszter_cs @fabfrohlich RAM is probably a bigger factor, but it’s hard to say without being familiar with the workload - sequencing can be demanding but the optimisation of the software is vary variable.

👋 Apple fans.. Any strong opinions on MacBook vs Pro? I dream of carrying around <2kg daily but I also need sthg reliable: I use displays, I code, I like to multitask and I’m lazy with tab closing. Will I make do with the MacBook? Or should I empty my bank account for the Pro?

@eszter_cs @fabfrohlich If you’re coming from an Intel Pro any of the M series processors will be a big step up. The Air does throttle under extended periods of very heavy load, but that’s not most use cases. What sort of code are you running?

@fabfrohlich Yes sorry that’s what I meant by MacBook. Is good to hear this since YouTube reviews are very mixed about M2 air performance. I’d rather get an Air if it’s reliable and doesn’t catch fire. I’m just used to a Pro so rather be sure. Shame about the ports though.

How important is it to understand the mechanisms behind our technology?noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-third-ma… by @Noahpinion

If you’ve not seen it already, this really is quite a compelling argument against peer-review experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and… via @matter

This is a great introduction to prediction markets, and includes an angle I hadn’t considered: they provide a skin-in-the-game answer to the challenge of trust in institutions astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-m… via @matter

Reminder: learn C, use it in anger, implement complex things that you know from other languages. Software will make a lot more sense afterward.

I resigned from Meta, and my internal post got leaked to the press, resulting in some fragmented quotes. Here is the full thing: facebook.com/permalink.php?…

“Managers will say they want to make data-driven decisions, but they really want decision-driven data.” ryxcommar.com/2022/11/27/goo…

@tokumin I can’t believe you’ve done this

@th3james mea culpa

omg it's raining in Suzuka. this is going to be an amazing race

If you throw plastic waste in the bin in the UK, it ends up in reasonably safe landfill. If you throw it in recycling, it not infrequently ends up exported and thrown in the sea. Eye-opening piece from @RoyalStatSoc award-winning writer @TomChivers inews.co.uk/opinion/landfi…

y tho?

Hamilton can still win his 8th title this year. He just needs to win every remaining race with Verstappen scoring no more than 22 points in total #DutchGP #F1

> If Apple can’t make professional-looking settings panels with SwiftUI, how can anyone be expected to? Given the threat to the platform from cross-platform JS apps, they can’t afford to be dropping the ball like this on developer tooling daringfireball.net/linked/2022/08…

I wrote a post about “Don't Mock What You Don't Own”, trying to make explicit the benefits of what is often a subtle and difficult to understand system design principle. analogmoment.com/post/wrapping-…

One core insight from it should be that you can trivially write a multi-billion dollar tax into society with a single sentence that sounds good to most educated people and will never appear on any list or calculation of taxes.

Fascinating overview of Britain’s 19th failure to keep pace with American growth, and a reminder that there’s rarely one factor or methodology to growth which can avoid change happening. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-decl…

This is because it’s far easier to write a test that asserts based on an expected data structure rather than a test that verifies a state change. Systems which describe their state changes before applying them are typically far easier to debug.

Perhaps the most underrated benefit of TDD is that it rewards you for writing functions that return data structures that describe state changes, rather than binding the rules for determining the state change to the application of that state change.