So this is a post from/for a group of livecoding music jammers, but I think there's value in considering it in broader contexts. In particular, the parts about "let code die" and not being afraid to remove/rewrite large blocks of code really resonated with me because--regardless of the author's intent--they suggest to me a level of competency and familiarity with one's tools and languages that many people have not reached, and may not even realize is possible.
To me, some of the most impactful parts are the ones that talk about how sometimes someone will delete their code, and they'll just. Rewrite it! By hand! From scratch! Because they wanted it to be that way!! How different that seems than the more typical world of issue trackers and code reviews and having just enough time to figure out how to do something once before it's on to the next feature. How tightly we cling to working code, lest it be lost and we have to do it again! Whomst among us has the time?!
But what if we did have the time? What if instead of figuring something out once and then moving on to the next ticket, we erased it and started over? Like an improv sketch ("do it differently!") or learning to paint ("scrape your canvas clean and begin again!") exploring alternatives and reinforcing in our minds what works and what doesn't.
"Do it again" is much less scary, more invitation when you're on the hundred-and-second rewrite rather than the second. You know where the pitfalls are, you've internalized which shortcuts will work and which offer false hope. You can practically do it with your eyes closed, in a matter of minutes rather than days
That's when you can start to get really creative--because the risk of exploration and experimentation is practically zero: if you try something new and it doesn't work, it's trivial to throw it away and replace it with something that does.
author here: yes this is exactly my intent, but i would have given some more signposting and context if i knew this was going to hit a larger audience :)
Few people understand this way of thinking, and even fewer are actually able to practice it.
I always thought that games and the people who made them were the real leaders of the mentality. I myself have been more or less hooked on competitive games since I first started playing them -- Counter Strike, TF2, Dota, Rocket League. I loved that what you built by playing these games was not digital wealth but physical skill, and I love/d that it was the players themselves who were always driving the other players to get better and better, which in turn often forced the game itself to adapt, which then kept things interesting and kept a community alive (and made it worth gaining skills)! My dream is to be able to create a piece of software that is imbued with this spark of life.
Net worth isn't equity - mortgage + 401k. Net worth is assets - liabilities. Equity is not an asset; the house is. So is the 401k. The mortgage is a liability. So Joe's net worth is 100k (IRA) + 300k (value of house) - 200k (mortgage) = 200k positive net worth.
(Another way of thinking about equity, specifically, is it is the real estate contribution to net worth, because it is what is left when you subtract the real estate liability (mortgage) from the real estate asset (value of house). That's why you shouldn't subtract the mortgage from the equity: equity is what's left after you've already subtracted the mortgage.)
(Edit: Adjusted sign in first equation to subtract mortgage. It's probably more technically accurate to keep it as addition and consider the mortgage to be a negative value, but I believe it's more straightforward and intuitive for most people as it is now represented.)
It's for letters/numbers. The mechanical keyboard community has adopted phrases like "chord" and "arpeggio" because they refer to analogous things in the typing world ("pressing multiple keys at the same time" and "pressing multiple keys in quick succession", respectively).
In keyboards with a limited number of keys (such as in TFA) they become especially crucial to being able to express the full complement of "standard" letters, numbers, and symbols.
The issue with DND is that it blocks all incoming notifications as well. That's not what I want at all times. A push notification doesn't take over my device like a phone call does, and I want to be able to get notifications from chat or email even though the sender isn't in my white list.
The whole system underlying phone calls is broken in the same way that the internet is, i.e relying on a level of trust that just isn't there. There is no argument I will accept that will persuade me that any device should be able to contact any other device at all times. There is no need for such a synchronous type of communication, now that we have had the internet for over 40 years.
Maybe it's spite-driven development, but I'd love to hear about someone who, upon learning that LLMs are suggesting endpoints in their API that don't exist, implements them specifically to respond with a status code[0] of "421: Misdirected Request". Or, for something less snarky and more in keeping with the actual intent of the code, "501: Not Implemented". If the potentially-implied "but it might be, later" of 501 is untenable, I humbly propose this new code: "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong"
It's really more about how when I say "I am a teapot", I want people to think "Oh, he's a teapot!" and not "He might be a teapot, or he might be chiding me for misusing llms or he might be signaling that the monkey is out of bananas or [...]"
What would be an appropriate response code for "He might be a teapot, or he might be chiding me for misusing llms or he might be signaling that the monkey is out of bananas or [...]"?
Each of those should have a clear, unique response code. There should be no "maybe it's this, maybe it's that". A real-world example is login forms that tell you something like "Invalid e-mail or password".
Are you joking around with me or is my point just not as obvious as I believed it to be?
Edit: Not sure if that last bit sounds confrontational, please know that it's a genuine question.
So we've gone down a bit of a path here, and thats cool :-)
Thank you for taking the time to respond and ask. My original 418 message was very much intended as a light hearted joke, in the spirit of "if we wanted to return cheeky responses to previously nonsense APIs that AI invented" I actually like this idea of subverting AI in inventive ways.
Now to the point where we've got here, yes I 100% agree in real-world, production applications, you should return response codes which accurately represent the actual response. But there also a place for fun, even in production, and 418 represents that for me.
If they do it properly and walk through it with you afterwards, it can be a good opportunity for you to assess cultural fit as well based on the conversation that you have; are they hypercritical of unimportant details? Do they acknowledge good design and decisions? Do they offer their own insights, and if so, what do you think of those insights?
Also, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position of looking to find a job without already having one; many people find that a compelling reason to "jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation"
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