Toots from 2024-05-09#
@thudfactor Deep Work has entered the Fedi…. In an imagina…#
@thudfactor Deep Work has entered the Fedi….
In an imaginary world where AI handled all toil and people were liberated to engage in unpredictable, unmeasurable problem solving, I imagine we’d see a lot more articles like this:
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@dandean Yes. It will enable more artifacts that are easy to …#
@dandean Yes. It will enable more artifacts that are easy to create and hard for people to understand.
Until at least AI hooks up with Erlang and starts self-evolving it’s own live codebase and no one is expected to understand.
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@thudfactor An oldie and evergreen goodie. The problem I’m h…#
@thudfactor An oldie and evergreen goodie.
The problem I’m hearing is that developers would like more opportunities for creative problem solving (which seems reasonable). How could that be directed to reducing the current levels of toil, rather than assuming the toil is undifferentiated and can be delegated to future AI with perfect substitutability?
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I don’t agree with the pervasive belief that AI will reduce toil. What’s stopping us from eli…#
I don’t agree with the pervasive belief that AI will reduce toil. What’s stopping us from eliminating it with our current tools?
“We also heard from developers that they want AI to support simpler tasks and reduce toil, allowing the developer to focus more of their energy on the complex problem solving and creative aspects of their jobs.”
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2024/03/10493171/1VTvfCwygyk
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Similarly:
“The top hindrance is consistently technical debt, and the following two most common hindrances are interesting opportunities for AI: 1. poor or missing documentation and 2. learning a new platform, infrastructure, framework, or technology (see Figure 1).”
- Require docs and hire technical writers; 2: Hire teachers
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“The top hindrance is consistently technical debt”
I suspect that AI, shifting developers from authors to proofreaders, will not reduce this hinderance.
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“What if a bug was deprioritized for triage and repair because it affects a smaller user group,…#
“What if a bug was deprioritized for triage and repair because it affects a smaller user group, but that group is disproportionately disabled, or female? This might motivate an effort to collect bugs from more diverse user groups, and opportunities to discuss differences found through this process in research papers.”
http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08165.
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@davidthewid - thanks for writing. Whether behaviors are “bugs”, “omissions”,or “requests” is often unclear.
Some other dimensions your paper prompted me to think about: accessibility, internationalization, cultural-iconography/colors, low-bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, low-power devices.
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@davidthewid Related empirical resources you might enjoy:
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“I think we’re entering a period of churn where there’s going to be serious competition on …#
“I think we’re entering a period of churn where there’s going to be serious competition on storage price and performance. Which, by the way, is crucially relevant to the Fediverse.”
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/05/05/On-Storage
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For me, Scala almost offers too much flexibility and expressiveness. I still remember frustrati…#
For me, Scala almost offers too much flexibility and expressiveness. I still remember frustrations with implicits.
“But Scala also has its set of challenges when it comes to writing lean code. The language is both very flexible and very expressive. Its flexibility allows code bases to be written in many different styles. Its expressiveness can encourage over-abstraction. This means that trying to find your way in an unfamiliar Scala codebase is sometimes difficult.”
https://odersky.github.io/blog/2024-04-11-post.html
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“Even if the whole paradigm isn’t useful to you, you can pull out some isolated ideas, throw aw…#
“Even if the whole paradigm isn’t useful to you, you can pull out some isolated ideas, throw away the rest, and still benefit from it. These paradigms are the ones that are most likely to spread, as opposed to paradigms that require total buyin.”
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/paradigms-succeed-when-you-can-scavenge-from/
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“You do not prove something’s correct. You prove conformance to specification.” <https://but…#
“You do not prove something’s correct. You prove conformance to specification.”
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/testing-can-show-the-presence-of-bugs-but-not-the/
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@thudfactor “I’m unable to provide an answer because your…#
@thudfactor “I’m unable to provide an answer because your question has been rejected as off topic.”