I think we've moved on from the times where you brought a printout to the change control board to talk it through.

But are we better off?

I'll just take the very first example on the list, Internet-enabled beds.

Absolutely a cooperative game - nobody was forced to build them, nobody was forced to finance them, nobody was forced to buy them. this were all willing choices all going in the same direction. (Same goes for many of the other examples)

There's a slight caveat here that you are sometimes forced to effectively buy and use internet-connected smart devices if you live in rented housing and the landlord of your unit provides it. This is probably not an issue for an internet-connected bed, because conventionally a bed isn't something a landlord provides, but you might get forced into using a smart fridge, since that's typically a landlord-provided item.

I lived in a building some years ago there where the landlord bragged about their Google Nest thermostat as an apartment amenity - I deliberately never connected it to my wifi while I lived there (and more modern smart devices connect to ambient cell phone networks in order to defeat this attack). In the building I currently live in, there are a bunch of elevators and locks that can be controlled by a smartphone app (so, something is gonna break when AWS goes down). I noticed this when I was initially viewing the apartment and I considered it a downside - and ultimately chose to move there anyway because every rental unit has downsides and ultimately you have to pick a set of compromises you can live with.

I view this as mostly a problem of housing scarcity - if housing units are abundant, it's easier for a person to buy thier own home and then not put internet-managed smart furniture in it; or at least have more leverage against landlords. But the region I live in is unfortunately housing-constrained.

You'll need to understand that <blatantly political actor does stupid thing> is a criticism of the actor's stupidity, not the political faction.

If it consistently happens more often for any given political faction, then it's still not an ideological statement, just a realization that not every political direction has an equal commitment to facts and reality.

So, mostly, I'd like the alt-stupids to not take over.

Wait till you work in a corporate environment, where Project Fuzzy Mustard triggered a violation of the ElastoFish metric in the Yellow Hills subsystem, leading to a Code Mild Lavender with a side of Pink Sprinkles.

I worked in one that had lettuce, tomato and celery in the stack.

We have a boulangerie and a fromagerie

I need scissors! 61!

I no shit once worked on 'Project Magenta Lobster'.

That's nothing, we have an initiative called Pink Glove.

It is extremely funny to me that the list thinks the mistake about !important was using the exclamation mark sigil, and not the concept of a single priority level.

In the words of one of my CS profs, from a few decades ago: "There are only 3 numbers - zero, one, and infinity. And 'one' is often a mistake"

As opposed to the 15 levels of priority available in Chef.

5 different types (default, force_default, normal, override, force_override)

which can be in 4 different places (attribute, node, environment, role) but not all of the types can be in all of the places

PLUS the "automatic" type, which is from somewhere else entirely

Oh and there's inheritance and merging which does not behave intuitively at all because it's not exactly inheritance.

In other words I have early career trauma from someone's extremely unwise priority implementation and am deeply suspicious of ANY priority override system which isn't just code I've written in a normal programming language.

This is what Cascade Layers was designed to solve:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

A lingering bit of weirdness is that all !important declarations, no matter the layer they appear on, are interpreted as being part of their own implicit layer.

An excellent illustration of the German word "verschlimmbessern"

There is no need for more priority levels, because precedence is already defined by inline > #ID > .class / [attribute=""] / :pseudo-classes / elements / ::pseudo-element / universal selector (*). And the order they're written, if both have the same priority. The !important just exists to override that order.

You can go faster once you understand the domain reasonably well that you could have written it yourself. This allows you to write better designs, and steer LLMs in the right direction.

"Vibe coding" though is moving an ever growing pile of nonunderstanding and complexity in front of you, until you get stuck. (But it does work until you've amassed a big enough pile, so it's good for smaller tasks - and then suddenly extremely frustrating once you reach that threshold)

Can you go 10x? Depends. I haven't tried any really large project yet, but I can compress fairly large things that would've taken a week or two pre-LLM into a single lazy Sunday.

For larger projects, it's definitely useful for some tasks. ("Ingest the last 10k commits, tell me which ones are most likely to have broken this particular feature") - the trick is finding tasks where the win from the right answer is large, and the loss from the wrong one is small. It's more like running algorithmic trading on a decent edge than it is like coding :)

It definitely struggles to do successfully do fully agentic work on very large code bases. But... I've also not tried too much in that space yet, so take that with a grain of salt.

A git bisect where you can't easily check whether the feature is broken (because the testing step isn't easily described as code) would be killer

Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system.

But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg

It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.

I mean yes, if you waste time on worked that does not bring value, people tend to get cranky. If you then take longer than you said, it's not a mood enhancer.

That's not a people problem though. That's failure to recognize that a company pays its employees money to make more money, not to have a pretty code base.

Yes, that means communicating the value, but that's not a people problem. That's a skills issue.

"anyone above senior engineer level needs to know how to collaborate cross-functionally"

If you can't collaborate xfn and deal with other people in general, you are not a senior engineer, despite the title inflation.

The difference is that PE firms own firms as investment vehicles, while Valve is owned by people who see making games as their calling.

No, I don't think Gabe's averse to the nice checks, but he is in a business he deeply cares about on an emotional level. He doesn't just want to milk it to the last drop, he wants to leave his mark on gaming.

Passion matters.

But does he have a plan for when he retires?

Is it good enough or should we be monitoring his health and hoard torrents of our steam collection just in case?

This is the problem of governance by “the good king”, and no, there isn’t a clear succession plan, so things will probably get worse in a post-gaben world