What I find to be the normal pattern (by intuition) is that the condensed leading text belies the expansive following text. This is likely lazy (a shortcut) and I am open to correction at your effort. If a call to your effort (I apologize) is unpalatable then I concede.

If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion.

For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds.

I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title.

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Okay, I got through the first paragraph of Walter’s writings. While I nod to the bitterness (I assent to the existence of it), I do not bow.

A lot of the information (blogs, tweelches, plosts) that I consume seems to be converging on the idea that we all depend on the models. However. It seems to me that the exact opposite is true. The models depend on us, and _desperately_ so.

There must have been stories, books, movies, made about this intellectual (and propositional, legal, factual) inversion.

The majority need the minority. Has always been the case, I now think. But what has newly developed is that the majority can take a dependency not on the minority, but on a select few companies who are abstracting and compressing the minority into latent spaces.

What counts as “works” is the important bit, I think.

They do not say why in the returned html.

I do not approve of such blockage.

Nevertheless. Knowledge is knowledge. So I post for everyone’s sake.

Is that accurate?

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

“Play” is what produced at least two (likely more) generations of attentive (and therefore competent) programmers. The hype around LLMs is painful, yes, but attentive human minds will ultimately bust through it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264071

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It’s not my normal cup of tea. I will never forget it.

That is an absolutely lovely resource. Thanks for sharing! Concise, useful, references like this are great “core drills”[0] into the ever-expanding deluge of human knowledge.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_drill

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31786230

Points: 2

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https://archive.org/details/HogbenMathematicsForTheMillion/p...

From the Wikipedia article he linked for software rot:

“[software rot] is not a physical phenomenon: the software does not actually decay, but rather suffers from a lack of being responsive and updated with respect to the changing environment in which it resides.”

The software doesn’t physically rot. Its relationship to something (the world) does.

I attempted to draw a parallel of this to a database because, for many folks, the immediate environment of their app is a database of some kind. The world is kind of like a database, too, because it is read from and written to. But unlike an in-house data store, it changes without regard for dependant applications.

In the second paragraph I attempted to distinguish two kinds of programming endeavours. One is like chopping wood for fire, the other like retrieving and then cutting a hard substance. Whatever the purpose of the latter, it takes planning, experience, and the result is both intended to last a long time, and to be versatile. But the former is cheap and short and for the moment. You’ll have to do it again, many times, and in slightly different ways, depending on where you are, who you’re with, what the weather is like, and so on. Dijkstra’s seeming dismissal of rot may be directed against the latter, but not the former.

I guess my third commentary is that many, many software systems are not designed at the time of their construction, because they are sudden and their manifestation is opportunistic. This lack of design at the point of construction is an implicit assertion against the expected lifetime of any such system. It admits rot as a matter of course.