Toots from 2024-04-10#
“Don’t work on anything that doesn’t help you ship the headline. Once the headline is shipp…#
“Don’t work on anything that doesn’t help you ship the headline. Once the headline is shipped, switch to the next headline in the stream and repeat. That’s all, you can fire your agile consultant.”
https://www.spakhm.com/headline-development
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“But The Dog and the Boy wasn’t just a threat to artists generally. It targeted background ar…#
“But The Dog and the Boy wasn’t just a threat to artists generally. It targeted background artists specifically: a class of animation workers that is particularly vulnerable to automation and downsizing.”
https://restofworld.org/2023/netflix-anime-ai-artists/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
The subtext I’m reading is that Rust is more likely to produce secure code than C++ (which seems …#
The subtext I’m reading is that Rust is more likely to produce secure code than C++ (which seems reasonable), but the security improvements weren’t enough to motivate the language change. The headline is that Rust teams are twice as productive than C++ teams and felt more confident in the correctness of their changes.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/31/rust_google_c/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
This applies to C++ to Rust rewrites, so it might be attributed to extracting and re-implementing the functionality, the beneficial psychological effects of group learning, and/or the Hawthorne effect. But - this productivity gain is only after a long period of reduced productivity: “That is, in two months about a third of devs feel they’re as productive in their new language as their old one. And in about four months, half of developers say as much, based on anonymous internal surveys.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Whether a technology change “increases productivity”, which in itself is less important than whether we’re “increasing effectiveness”, often depends on when and how it’s measured. There is a version of this story that proclaims that “Teams that adopt Rust are less productive than C++ teams…After Two Months”. This could be enough to thwart the migration in organizations that didn’t reach consensus on intermediate checkpoints and directional signals.
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Compared to improved security (which often exploits FUD or counterfactuals), promised dev productivity improvements are more likely to receive organizational funding. But those big bets have big risks, so it’s critical to make sure in advance we agree how long things might take and the signals we’ll use to pivot, proceed, or pause.
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“First, some leaders ignore ways of working as a potential differentiator. They are too quick t…#
“First, some leaders ignore ways of working as a potential differentiator. They are too quick to assume that ways of working spring from hiring (or not hiring) “the best”, instead of a set of capabilities you can support, grow, and strengthen.”
https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-281-stop-chasing-unicorns
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“In the case of artificial intelligence, training large models is indeed expensive, requiring l…#
“In the case of artificial intelligence, training large models is indeed expensive, requiring large capital investments. But those investments demand commensurately large returns. The investors who pile billions of dollars into a huge bet are expecting not just to be paid back, but paid back a hundredfold.”
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/ai-has-an-uber-problem/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“Things do not become better if you do the wrong thing more efficiently. They only become bette…#
“Things do not become better if you do the wrong thing more efficiently. They only become better if you correct them, i.e., start to make them right. So, we are back once more to the point that the challenges is not to become more efficient but to become more effective.”
https://www.ufried.com/blog/software_fallacies_7/