Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before:

- During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "good catch, I'll fix that" (also reminiscent of an LLM).

- The time spent on trivial issues went down a lot, almost zero, the remaining issues were much more subtle and time-consuming to find and describe.

- Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This breakdown of pattern-matching compared to "organic" code made the overhead much higher. Spending decades reviewing code and answering Stack Overflow questions often makes it possible to pinpoint not just a bug but how the author got there in the first place and how to help them avoid similar things in the future.

- A simple, but bad (inefficient, wrong, illegal, ugly, ...) solution is a nice thing to discuss, but the LLM-assisted junior dev often cooks up something much more complex, which can be bad in many ways at once. The culture of slowly growing a PR from a little bit broken, thinking about design and other considerations, until its high quality and ready for a final review doesn't work the same way.

- Instead of fixing the things in the original PR, I'd often get a completely different approach as the response to my first review. Again, often broken in new and subtle ways.

This lead to a kind of effort inversion, where senior devs spent much more time on these PRs than the junior authors themselves. The junior dev would feel (I assume) much more productive and competent, but the response to their work would eventually lack most of the usual enthusiasm or encouragement from senior devs.

How do people work with these issues? One thing that worked well for me initially was to always require a lot of (passing) tests but eventually these tests would suffer from many of the same problems

In the case of Harvard, I think the current observations are most consistent with the following: the Board of Trustees, faculty, and students have currently aligned in their goals - which we might summarize as (1) maintaining independence from the government and (2) the ability to hold/teach specific "controversial" viewpoints (benefits of diversity, anti-colonialism, potentially other "progressive" concepts). I suspect that within the factions the relative importance of these two goals is not balanced. The fact that the coalition has survived much longer than, e.g., Columbia, is somewhat surprising.

My suspicion is that the answer to your question is that the persistent "smacking around" is only in part due to the external factors other replies have mentioned. I think a major piece of the situation can be explained by a change in the power dynamic with the alumni. Under normal circumstances, the faculty presumably hope to maintain long lasting influence over their alumni, which the board of trustees leverage to bring in more money and influence to the university. The current situation suggests that the high-power/high-$$$ portion of the alumni who are in a position to leverage the public conversation about what's going on are not doing it. This implies that the strength of that edge of the power graph is much weaker than it was expected to be. I think it remains to be seen whether this is true. Further observations that would support that would be reduced donations, public complaints, etc. Conversely, increased fundraising and more public support would suggest the opposite.

The key point about the university power network is that USUALLY, the best situation is to avoid situations that actually reveal too much information. Everyone would prefer to believe they have more power than they do. Obviously the alumni are composed of factions, and presumably a large fraction of the potential participants are also members of other organizations with latent power networks and participating in this particular situation would involve expending capital in these other networks with potential reduction in power. Some alumni that have spoken up (i.e., Ackman) are clearly unaligned with the current coalition, and this MAY reflect the fact that the wealthy/powerful group of alumni that have sustained Harvard are really unhappy with the current stances of the university and would like it to shift (return?) to a different set of ideologies. But it's also possible that he represents a minority, and the rest are just nervous about getting involved.

My conclusion from this analysis is that things will persist as they have, with everyone who might be involved hoping that lawsuits will be successful in resolving the situation with the minimum of their involvement. If this approach is unsuccessful, I think we'll end up in a situation where we get a much better observation of the power balance between alumni, faculty, and board (I think the students rarely have as much power as they think they do!).

If an arsonist threatened to burn down your house, should you only call the police once the house is on fire? Is it possible by taking action earlier you could prevent disaster and loss of well being.

The people who wrote the plan this administration is following said: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."[1] The threat has been credibly made and they appear to be successfully carrying it out with minimal forceful resistance.

People who study Fascism, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Russia, and Eastern Europe are fleeing the country including Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder.[2]

Trump has stated he wished he had Hitler's generals.[3]

A second in command of the United States armed forces as well as America's top military advisor have both called him a threat to the constitution. [4][5]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun... [2] https://archive.is/jb23b -- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-... [3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/12/mark-milley... [5] https://archive.is/d6f9J -- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-m...

You think you are a citizen today because you've always been a citizen, you have papers to prove it. It's never even been questioned. What if those papers get destroyed? What if the officer interpreting your papers is employed by someone who doesn't like you because you're disobedient. Without rule of law your status as a citizen doesn't protect you. Without a functioning judiciary capable of providing consequences to those who violate rule of law, you have no one to appeal to.

This administration complains about single judges restricting their actions. That should literally terrify you. The judges are not stopping the administration, they are ruling that the law is stopping the administration. When the administration says it is judges stopping it, it is claiming that there is no law, only the actions of loyal or disobedient men.

We are in a constitutional crisis. We are effectively lawless. Right now, we cannot depend on the law to restrict powerful people's actions. We have no way to predict what is possible for someone with a gun who is loyal to the president to do without consequences and therefore no way to act as if the law protects us.

Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not able to solve basic algorithmic questions like linked lists or binary trees during interviews)..

I've seen code written by so-called "senior" engineers that should never have made it past review; had they simply paid attention in their CS 101 courses, it wouldn't exist.

On top of that, as long as poor software quality doesn’t hurt a company's bottom line, why would executives care if their app takes 20 seconds to load?

Consumers have become desensitized to bloat, and regulators remain asleep at the wheel..

I'm sure the march of LLMs will continue eating into this pie, and that's a good thing (most of it is a distraction from the real work), but I love polishing a library on my laptop in a cafe. It's like working on a painting or something.

1. As their brief makes clear, they have been using the "challenged marks" for over a decade, including a period when you were an investor. You have given no evidence publicly that they changed anything recently - indeed, you publicly stated that the reason for the trademark infringement actions was because you thought they weren't a good contributor to open source, not that they did anything different with the marks.

2. Your recent attempt to trademark "Hosted WordPress" and "Managed WordPress" are pretty bad, and blatant, attempts to rewrite history. If the courts let you trademark this nominative use of a term, it would be a first.

3. Your actions have only targeted WP Engine, not any of the other WordPress hosts that use the marks in the same way.

I definitely am not cherry picking the above - I'm just presenting what I know has been irrefutably announced publicly, and again which I assume you would have already countered if you could given all your other public statements.

Here's more:

- Be direct, Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing

- Be brutal, Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app app.saas.com/billing

- Be honest, Hello xyz, thanks for the feature request. We'll put it in our wish list but can't guarantee it will make the cut.

- Be generous, Hey xyz, thanks for pointing that out. We have identified that as a bug and have pushed a fix for it. In the meanwhile, I've extended your trial by 7 days, on the house.

Couple of other tips:

- Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't, throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.

- Unless a support issue is very basic, reply after a few minutes if you're near your computer. Usually users figure out things on their own if given some time.

- But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.

- Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours, but most responses take 2-3 hours.

- Make your terms and privacy policy pages clear. People do read this. getharvest.com is a gold standard in this area.

The problem is that with civil engineering you're designing a physical product. Nothing is ever designed to its absolute limit, and everything is built with a healthy safety margin. You calculate a bridge to carry bumper-to-bumper freight traffic, during a hurricane, when an earthquake hits - and then add 20%. Not entirely sure about whether a beam can handle it? Just size it up! Suddenly it's a lot less critical for your calculations to be exactly accurate - if you're off by 0.5% it just doesn't matter. You made a typo on the design documents? The builder will ask for clarification if you're trying to fit a 150ft beam into a 15.0ft gap. This means a bridge collapse is pretty much guaranteed to be the result of gross negligence.

Contrast that to programming. A single "<" instead of "<=" could be the difference between totally fine and billions of dollars of damages. There isn't a single programmer on Earth who could write a 100% bug-free application of nontrivial complexity. Even the seL4 microkernel - whose whole unique selling point is the fact that it has a formal correctness proof - contains bugs! Compilers and proof checkers aren't going to complain if you ask them to do something which is obviously the wrong thing but technically possible. No sane person would accept essentially unlimited liability over even the smallest mistakes.

If we want software engineers to have accountability, we first have to find a way to separate innocent run-of-the-mill mistakes from gross negligence - and that's going to be extremely hard to formalize.

Also, this is inconsistent:

> large commercial airplane technology has developed to the point that the planes practically fly themselves

> We think stick and rudder skills are definitely a necessity for airline pilots flying hundreds of people on board for the extremely rare cases where emergencies do happen and many people's lives are at risk

So which is it? Do modern airplanes fly themselves or not? Pilots need to be able to fly. All pilots. Otherwise everyone's at risk.

Some of the worst recent accidents happenend when under-trained (AF 447) or misinformed (737 MAX) pilots didn't have a clear mental picture of what the airplane was doing.

It would seem this is solving for the wrong problem.

And the whole paragraph about "sexyness", aluding to sports cars and iPhones, seems very wrong to me. What makes flying sexy is the nerdiness, the skills involved, not shiny control surfaces.

"Perhaps the worst thing about being a systems person is that other, non-systems people think that they understand the daily tragedies that compose your life. For example, a few weeks ago, I was debugging a new network file system that my research group created. The bug was inside a kernel-mode component, so my machines were crashing in spectacular and vindic- tive ways. After a few days of manually rebooting servers, I had transformed into a shambling, broken man, kind of like a computer scientist version of Saddam Hussein when he was pulled from his bunker, all scraggly beard and dead eyes and florid, nonsensical ramblings about semi-imagined enemies. As I paced the hallways, muttering Nixonian rants about my code, one of my colleagues from the HCI group asked me what my problem was. I described the bug, which involved concur- rent threads and corrupted state and asynchronous message delivery across multiple machines, and my coworker said, “Yeah, that sounds bad. Have you checked the log files for errors?” I said, “Indeed, I would do that if I hadn’t broken every component that a logging system needs to log data. I have a network file system, and I have broken the network, and I have broken the file system, and my machines crash when I make eye contact with them. I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS. My only logging option is to hire monks to transcribe the subjective experience of watching my machines die as I weep tears of blood.”

Driverless cars don't seem to be programmed to break laws in the first place. They're incapable of making a choice to break laws to save time. They're simply programmed not to speed, not to run through red lights. And when they do, it's not out of some "choice" -- it's just a bug or deficiency in their code.

Driverless cars absolutely do need to be held to safety standards. But the way to do that isn't through issuing tickets. It's simply for a governmental regulatory agency to set statistical limits for the manufacturer's software for mistakes like running a red light, and if the whole fleet of cars goes above that limit you require the software manufacturer to fix it, risking fines if they don't fix it quickly, or losing the ability to operate at all.

Issuing tickets for driverless cars makes as much sense as issuing tickets if pharmaceutical companies put the wrong amount of a drug in a pill. Tickets are for individuals who make choices; safety regulations with fines and revoking licenses are for corporations and things like driverless cars.

Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.

Why do I bring this up? Because this is how most worker's experience their organization. Stay in your lane, get that promotion, best case you get your boss's job. But how did that job come to be? Who setup the training that you took? Most people can't even describe where the money in their business comes from.

It is a tremendous advantage to explore your organization fully. Visit its other offices and learn what your colleagues do and why they do it. Especially as an engineer. You can literally write your own ticket. Last year I was bored and I started to break down our cloud spend. This took me on a little detour. That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.

Anyway.

Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.

It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.

I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.

Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.

"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.

I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.

If you do want to go through the trouble of converting to another language, JavaScript would be the natural choice because it can run directly in the browser with just “a few static assets to host”. A template like the following would probably work fine as something simple and functional. (This should be a working example if you save the files to a directory and load foo.html in the browser.)

foo.js:

  function foo(a, b, c) {
    // do calculations and return output
    return a + b + c;
  }

  <!doctype html>
  <meta charset=utf-8>
  <title>Foo Calculator</title>
  <link rel=stylesheet href=https://cdn.simplecss.org/simple.css>
  
  <main>
    <h1>Foo Calculator</h1>
  
    <label for=a>A</label>
    <input type=number id=a>
  
    <label for=b>B</label>
    <input type=number id=b>
  
    <label for=c>C</label>
    <input type=number id=c>
  
    <label for=z>Z</label>
    <output id=z></output>
  </main>
  
  <script src=foo.js></script>
  
  <script>
    // calculate output when any input changes
    a.oninput = b.oninput = c.oninput = function () {
      z.value = foo(
        Number(a.value),
        Number(b.value),
        Number(c.value),
      ); 
    };
  </script>

simple.css could also be replaced with other classless CSS frameworks.

http://craftinginterpreters.com

They might be fun for random exploration if you're killing time, but not really a tool

WebAuthn is an open standard. It's a way for you to prove to a website that you have a specific private key. There's no lock-in, because the key is portable (unless you don't want it to be). There's no privacy issue, because the key is unique per website. There's no security issue, because it's unphishable and can be unstealable if it's in hardware.

If you don't like Google or Apple, use your favorite password manager. All it will have to keep is a private key per website, and you're done. No usernames or passwords. You visit a site and are automatically logged in with a browser prompt.

This is amazing, it's the best thing that's ever happened to authentication. It's something the end user cannot have stolen. Can we be a bit more excited about it?

EDIT: If you want to try it, I just verified that https://www.pastery.net/ works great with Passkeys even though I haven't touched the code in a year.

That means that django-webauthin also works great with Passkeys, for you Django users:

https://pypi.org/project/django-webauthin/

Also, the latest Firefox on Android seems to work great.

- You have an S-Corp and have a 401k attached to that

Let's say you had a contract of $300,000 and the default tax bill is going to be close to 40% for a California resident (-$120,000, leaving $180,000)

- contribute $60,000 to the 401k, since the S-Corp allows you to do both employee contributions ($20,000) and the separate employer contribution maximum ($40,000, when your employers have various matching schemes there actually is a limit to what they could do, which practically none of them do.) Note, that self-directed 401k's contribution limits are also dictated by your revenue, of which 20% of it can be contributed up to the dollar maximums, hence the simple example of $300,000 as 20% of the revenue is $60,000 - the current total contribution maximum for the year

This reduces the remaining taxable income to $240,000, with the governments only getting $91,000

- Next step is to double dip, borrow against the 401k. You can borrow half up to $50,000. If this was the first year of having a 401k then that would be $30,000. Otherwise borrow the entire $50,000

- Donate that $50,000 to charity. There are two or three types you can control yourself. At these proportions of your remaining taxable income, the deduction is 1:1 and the same. The same money, two deductions.

- This brings your taxable income down to $190,000, with the governments only privy to $69,000, and now you have dry powder in your non-profits to donate compliantly.

As you might notice, you also have less discretionary income, for now. If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, the point is to follow the government's incentive model of pursuing certain kinds of transactions, and your failure to do so results in the remainder being taxed. The government incentivizes spending - the movement of money at a high velocity - and penalizes and cripples saving in multiple ways, velocity is more useful for the economy as well. Said another way, the goal is to not let the government have any of it, but there are really good state-approved rationales for that which have nothing to do with having an opinion on its spending habits or a misguided sense of "duty". The roads and schools you care about are still going to be built from other capital sources the state figures out, or property taxes they already levy.

so $69,000 is still too much to send over.

The S-Corp likely has QBI qualified income, and that's another 20% tax deduction

But lets fast forward, your overhead costs and business expenses are another 1:1 tax deduction, and if you have any lines of credit or external money (savings) that you spend on the overhead costs and business expenses then you can spend more than you have made and the tax can go to $0 and you may have losses.

Your net operating losses carryforward to future tax years. And also your charitable deductions are not applied if you have no income and those carryforward for several years as well. Starting your next tax year already in a privileged position.

Right, but now you have no money for the house, car, vacation and consumptive spending, what's the point? Again, this is for now. What you can do is grow your 401k tax free and invest in nearly anything. You can grow your non-profit nearly or totally tax free and invest in nearly anything as well as donate, just like you could if you were using those same funds as an individual. These two vehicles can vastly exceed the financial firepower in your own name.

For your goal of having money for the house, car, vacation and consumptive spending: hopefully the business continues growing. At your discretion you can absolutely spend on consumptive things you like. But ideally you can sell shares in the future and get the long term capital gains tax rate, which is way lower than income. Or you can convert to a C-Corp and sell shares tax free under the QSBS tax rate, if qualified. (QSBS is distinct from QBI, and also California state tax would not be nullified) and in those years you are still rolling over tax deductions from the other years to reduce any outstanding income you recognized in your consumptive spending. You can even convert balances from your 401k to a Roth 401k those years tax free, because the prior year deductions can push that income tax event down to zero as well.

YMMV talk to a CPA to confirm or learn relevant realities.