You've probably heard the opposite from those annoying corporate types with a shiny and popular LinkedIn profile. Guess what? They don't have a clue because they have never evaluated a system for its technical merits. They are the "product owners" in an ever more enshittifying world. Code represents the data transformations and data dependencies in a system. Code has formal syntax and well-defined…
Almost every piece of text you can consume online is now having this syntactically-shiny, perfectly-spelled package with a rather shallow and unoriginal semantic core. You probably wanted to read something about a place or a culture you've never encountered, and it reads like something you've read hundreds of times before. You probably watched a YT video about a hobby you practise, and it follows…
Conventional wisdom tells you that LLMs are good at automating the generation of boring, repetitive boilerplate code. I can agree, but why do we need to write that boilerplate again and again in the first place? Isn't that a failure of our industry as a whole? Why do we need to translate short sentences of lousy and imprecise human language to thousands of lines of syntactically-correct formal…
Rust encourages a rather different "high-level" programming style that doesn't suit the domains where C excels. Pattern matching, traits, annotations, generics, and functional idioms all sound great on paper, but when you're building low-level systems, they create an environment where everything becomes verbose, ceremony-driven, and semantically dense. You write more code about the code than about…
We use these tools as know-it-all assistants that can answer questions in all areas of human knowledge. Their answers are never grounded in the empirical world of the senses. They don't have "skin in the game" and will happily change their opinion diametrically if you present the same question from a different light. They reinforce conventional wisdom by offering generic solutions to local…
Being rational with regards to the surrounding natural and physical world is undeniably good for our survival. We learn the effects of touching a hot stove and never attempt to do it consciously once we are older than 4. We know that driving on ice makes a vehicle hardly controllable, and tend to avoid it. This cause and effect paradigm is incredibly helpful for navigating the natural world. We…
I can remember my first teenage attempts at learning programming in an imperative OO style with C++ in the late 1990s. That was the pre-stackoverflow, pre-Web 2.0 era when the web generally consisted of a few keyword-based search engines and millions of weird personal pages with those nasty "blink" tags. Any educational material covering my interest in programming was sparse and hard to come by.…