Matthew Mark Miller

[Any stimulus whatsoever]

Engineering Manager: Interesting.

I'm over here complaining about the state of the world when a character pack for Street Fighter IV costs $30 when I used to blow that much in an hour at an arcade having my ass handed to me.

And them's 1995 dollars.

… were <p> tags ALSO distrupted by the outage?

1/3 of being an adult is making a list of what needs to be done, and a further 1/3 is carefully checking against the list.

It's tedious and boring and we fuck it up constantly. This is in the long run where AI will be applied to greatest effect.

AI engineering isn't new, I've been a clod programmer for years

Hot take: salt bagels are just bad pretzels

I'm not entirely sure why Glen Ridge is lit by gas light, but it's one town removed from West Orange, site of Thomas Edison's R&D facility. I assume it's some matter of historical spite.

I run at night through Glen Ridge, NJ, an entire town lit by gas lamps.

In this case, its historic flames burn because historic, but the same complaint applies. The quality of the light is sleepy at best and is barely effective at public safety. Thankfully I know where all the uneven sidewalks are.

Sourdough toast with peanut butter and sriracha.

Seriously! Try it!

Good News! We've had a data breach!

Cheese blocks come in different sizes, as do women. It is thus difficult to define normal.

My daughter is a woman and will sure as shit eat a whole $17 block of aged gouda in a single sitting.

If building great things is your goal, maintaining a great codebase is frequently orthogonal to that. Great outcomes can come from almost any codebase -- but in my experience, they correlate more strongly with the quality of testing, validation and delivery platform than code.

Invention of the mail truck did not eliminate the joy some of us feel in running marathons. It eliminated the need to run and die just to deliver good news.

Outside of katas, I never write code because writing code is good. I write code because the things I want to use will not exist unless I do.

Not exactly -- AI has made you a manager. We're asking you to replace the inefficient, error prone time suck of manually specifying procedures in meticulous detail with specifying higher order requirements and vetting their correctness. Because that's where the value is, and where it always was.

The Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer On AI, Creativity, and Craft

hojberg.xyz/the-programm...

Simon and I disagree on a lot of things, but this is an important essay that underscores the fundamental challenge confronting the industry right now.

Most interesting to me: "we’ve still outsourced the fun part of the job and replaced it with directorial drudgery."

A chat-bot became an asshole (if xAI is to be believed, which they are not) because of three sentences, all seemingly innocuous, in its directive. No change in data.

That's art, man. Well: it's Dada, but it counts in my book.

In fact: I'll suggest AI is already creating art. It's already communicating deep truths about the human experience in novel ways through expression. That expression just takes a new form, like it would in any new media.

AI is nothing more than a statistical analysis of massive amounts of human brain output. Our secrets are in there, man, waiting to be pattern matched and laid bare. I don't believe the current implementation of random weighted walks will be very effective at communicating deep truths, but new ones?

This reminds me of the "video games will never be art" debate from two decades back, or the "comics will never be art" debate before that. If history is any guide, this take will be proven wrong within a few decades.

"Okay, we've finally got our product working, it's getting early traction with users, now's a pivotal time for us to choose what to build that will have the most impact on our future direction. So what do we implement next?"

[Entire meeting in unison]:
"Dark mode!"

“Man, when I’m responsible for hiring I’ll do things differently. I’ll take risks on people.”

::proceeds to hire exactly the same::

I was using a RAG tool to help me track a problem I'm solving at work and tracking the results in a spreadsheet.

This worked until the RAG tool indexed my spreadsheet and started feeding me my own research as evidence.

Overheard: "Null pointer obsession"

“I made these caramelized onions in 25 minutes”

liar!

a child at the beach house has turned on Food Network

tryn not to roast The Pioneer Woman like Uncle Roger

One problem with the Pareto principle is that if you aim for 80%, you will often only get 60%.

Hot take: I should be able to use my commuter benefits to pay parking tickets.

They say the unexamined life is not worth living -- but how would you know?

Computing is full of terms that accurately explain how something works, but fails to explain what it is or how to use it. It sucks when these terms then leak into the general population. It's a permanent stumbling block to understanding.

Pull request.

ChatGPT.

If you're only good at your job when it's easy, you're not good at your job.

This is a subtweet at NJ Transit