One thing that this misses is that in many fields, career retirement chooses you before you choose it. This is often true in development as ageism catches up with you. At some point, you keep doing interviews and nobody says "yes."
Then, even though you have enough money for retirement (or even if you don't), you are answering these questions simultaneously with handling rejection.
I'm so glad YouTube and other podcast players have moved to support 3.0 speed. As I get comfortable with one, I move it up some. For things like sports and "did you know" content, I can go 2.5 if I'm not multitasking. For technical content, sometimes I'm stuck at 1.0.
You can get browser extensions to do it for all media controls on any site. YouTube's "Premium" for 3x is laughable when it's an internal browser function.
For people who did not grow up with hershey's, the butyric acid is what makes it taste off.
This is not a question of safety - it is a question of results. They stayed with old technologies and have optimized for cost, not flavor. (And yes, that processing was necessary in the days before a reliable milk source.)
You’re confusing two different things. The “sour taste” objection to Hershey’s chocolate has nothing to do with “cost optimization.” You’re thinking about the 2006 recipe changes, which never applied to Hershey’s solid chocolate bars (and flagship products like peanut butter cups). That sour taste is in Hershey’s original recipe. If you got rid of it, it wouldn’t be Hershey’s chocolate anymore.
If you grew up with European chocolate the unfamiliarity maybe makes it taste off. But characterizing it as tasting like “vomit” and the result of over “processing” is spin. Butyric acid arises from processing milk products, which is why the compound is in Hershey’s chocolate and also in parmesan cheese. The opposite marketing spin: “Hershey’s chocolate bars use traditional techniques that result in a hint of parmesan with the sweet” would be equally correct.
> But characterizing it as tasting like “vomit” … is spin.
It really isn’t spin- It’s a common perception for people who aren’t accustomed to it. Search for “Hersheys chocolate tastes like vomit” and as a control, search for some other brand of chocolate tastes like vomit (I did lindt but you could use anything I’m sure). All the hits I got on the lindt search were references to hersheys tasting like vomit. On the hersheys search I got (for example)
A reddit thread “Does Hershey's taste like vomit, or are all Europeans snobs?” (Which, why not both?)
…etc etc lots of similar hits all for the same sort of thing.
Now for calibration I didn’t grow up with fancy European chocolate. I grew up in Africa with bloody horrible chocolate but even so I was genuinely shocked and disgusted the first time I tasted Hersheys. I had expected something, well… something that didn’t taste like vomit.
Versus the first time I had, say Lindt or Godiva or Leonidas or Guylian chocolate I was surprised and delighted by how much better it tasted than the chocolate that I had grown up with.
I get this is 100% a question of cultural norms and acquired taste, but to say it’s spin is definitely not true.
First, no matter what you do, if a human has write access to the production database, the database can be deleted.
Second, there is a legitimate reason to destroy a database in development and automation. The biggest problem I see is often treating your development data like pets not cattle. You absolutely need to have safeguards that this cannot be run in production, but if a human has access to the credentials to run in production, the agent has access.
So, then, what do we do? In a larger organization, we can depend on the dev/ops split to maintain this. For a solo developer, or a small team, it takes a lot more discipline. Even before AI, junior and even mid-level developers didn't have the knowledge to segment. And senior devs often got complacent because they thought they knew enough.
But at that point you're past vibe coding. And from what I can tell, the successful vibe coders are quickly learning that they need to go past it pretty quickly with all these horror stories.
You don't need the same permissions in prod and dev.
And in both cases, the humans don't need direct access to the raw CSP API. Use a local proxy that adds more safety checks. In dev, sure, delete away.
In prod, check a bunch of things first (like, has it been used recently?). Humans do not need direct access to delete production resources (you can have a break-glass setup for exceptional emergencies).
Most IAM policies start as "whatever made the deploy pass." Need rds:CreateDBInstance? Fine, rds:* it is. Ship it. Months later that same role can wipe the cluster and nobody remembers why it ever had that permission.
Separate accounts help, but only if someone actually goes back and cleans it up, which… yeah, doesn't really happen.
A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.
A corporation is made of people. GitHub cannot exist but for the people who continue to work for it. And they’ve already said, multiple times, that restoring availability is their top priority.
A corporation is made of people, but its ethos is the product of decision-making. If a corporation is consistently, say, unethical, is it because they hire only unethical individuals? Or because unethical people somewhere along the chain of command make unethical decisions?
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with this question. It seems to still conflate corporate-level decisions with boots-on-the-ground work.
Are you suggesting that whatever decisions their upper-level management makes that you consider unethical irreversibly and irrevocably taints all the difficult and honorable work that their engineers and operations people are performing?
I’m saying their lower-level employees are probably honest, hard-working people like everyone else. But the detachment that comes from a large corporate structure makes the higher-ups decide things that aren’t as honourable.
“Corporations are made up of people” is a strange way to excuse the reality that the ‘bad’ things that corporations do are often decided by top management.
Ah. I didn’t intend to excuse the decisions of upper management when I said that. My intent was to counter the notion that a corporation and its workers can’t be analyzed independently.
A corporation is just a business formation, and businesses are made of individual people working for it. Those people’s motivations and efforts can, and often should, be evaluated separately from the decisions of management.
> Like, if waterfall of a project can be done in 2 weeks, is it agile now?
Sure. The thing is, the waterfall guys would tell you it's impossible to do it in 2 weeks because you need to have written down everything first. "Thousands of pages" was the terms they used.
Agile guys would point you to the Agile manifesto which would lead you to "working code over documentation" and "people over process".
A 2 week period to go from initial spec to product in a user's hands to capture feedback and make changes from there is much closer to agile than to waterfall. In fact it's more or less exactly some older versions of Scrum (which didn't permit deviating from the planned sprint user stories midway through the sprint, instead changes influenced the subsequent sprint).
The DoD's 2167 standard from the late '80s mentions the following documentation that should be produced as part of the development process (section 6.2 and Appendix D):
This is a particular artifact of the government system process. These are contracted pieces of work that Company A would deliver, Company B would administer, and Company C would be contracted out for additional work. Further, all specifications were created ahead of time because changes would cost extra. (Anyone who has done government contracting can talk to the shenanigans involved with it - I have not lived in this world for a long time.)
That said, we still do ad-hoc versions of many of these. For example, a system/segment specification today is an OpenAPI document between microservices. Most larger SaaS companies have the equivalent of a Software Configuration Management plan - Who can change terraform or a GHA, what are the standards that they conform to (linter, peer review standards).
> This is a particular artifact of the government system process.
Yes, a government process meant to implement the waterfall approach.
If you look at Dr. Royce's paper which originated the concept, he was very explicit that it required upwards of thousands of pages of documentation to be written up front, if you were doing it "right".
By the time the required documentation had all been written, there should be essentially nothing left to do but to actually type out the punch cards as specified and turn then into a system of compiled programs.
Now, this appealed to government because it put documentation in place that was felt to be more viable for contracting processes, but ever since Dr. Brooks chaired a 1987 Defense Science Board study on the issues already facing the DoD trying to implement waterfall methods, they've been trying to restructure their software acquisition methods to pursue better outcomes rather than more concretely defined outputs.
Of course it's still a tremendous challenge for them even now, and it remains common to see defense acquisition projects that will say "Agile" to the right people even as they prescribe a full waterfall-style 'system engineering V' approach behind the scenes.
The ad-hoc responses that the commercial space often involves is usually more appropriate, believe it or not. They get process added when process is helpful, but not before it is helpful.
(and my link to the Royce paper isn't working anymore - I need to fix that!) - I am planning on a followup that takes the last 3 years of change in mind.
Yes, that's why his paper essentially said "you're going to have to build two." One to figure out the mistakes you can't predict ahead of time, and the second for the real deal. Do your best to get through the first one as fast as you can, but still deliberate enough that there won't be any bugs left behind for the second one.
But a third or subsequent iteration was definitely a failure in his mind, and even building two (or one-and-a-half, depending on your framing) was simply a concession to the reality that actual implementation would run into unpredictable issues, for much the same reason computer science had already learned the halting problem was undecidable.
I have a book with his paper and to the extent he speaks of iteration as desirable, it is only iteration between succeeding steps of the overall 'waterfall'. E.g. in an ideal world you iterate between system requirements and their decomposition into software requirements (updating the system reqs as necessary to ensure the software reqs you're writing are accounted for). Likewise for system requirements to software analysis, and so on.
As you point out, he mentions that this concept is “risky and invites failure”, and goes on to allow for re-refinement and re-implementation of the software requirements and program design phases based on experience from the testing phase. But he goes on to emphasize: “However, I believe the illustrated approach [waterfall with reimplementation post-test] to be fundamentally sound”.
The rest of his paper then goes into the detail of these phases, and he specifically notes early on that there is a natural question, of how much documentation is enough? And he gives a very clear answer: “My own view is ‘quite a lot’; certainly more than most programmers, analysts or program designers are willing to do if left to their own devices.”
It's not an accident that the DoD software acquisition requirements based on waterfall as mentioned by the other comments were so numerous or onerous. As Dr. Royce puts it:
- “The first rule of managing software development is ruthless enforcement of documentation requirements”
- When asked to review software projects the first thing he does is review the documentation. If the documentation is seriously lacking his recommendation is to replace the whole project management and shift 100% of work to fixing documentation.
- “Management of software is simply impossible without a very high degree of documentation”
- If procuring a $5M hardware device he'd expect a 30 page spec to suffice. If procuring a $5M software system, he'd “... estimate a 1,500 page specification is about right.”
I wasn't pulling "thousands of pages" from thin air. It's right in his paper and he's extremely clear about this. It's not an off-hand remark, he goes on to justify why he thinks that mass of documentation is required.
I want to emphasize that he's writing from the problems he was facing in his era. Computer systems necessarily were room-sized installations, interactive computer time was incredibly expensive, but paper was cheap. There was no Internet to speak of to share powerful and efficient open-source libraries. There was no "continuous deployment" or "continuous integration".
The system had to work well pretty quickly after the subsystems were built, installed, integrated and tested or this newfangled computer system that cost millions in 1960s dollars to run per month would be nothing more than a money sink while the nerds tried to troubleshoot.
Nowadays we don't develop under those kinds of strictures and we've put tremendous investments into allowing real useful systems to be developed using the simpler processes that even back then were much easier to develop around, when it could be used (Dr. Royce's paper even leads off by describing the 'nice' process as he explains why you can't use it as system size grows). The voluminous test documentation he's propose are things we pretty much do write today, but we call them test suites and we grow them along with the program, rather than write them all months before coding.
I think there's a lot to be said for what a modern-day waterfall process might look like with the technologies and iteration speeds available to us now, the only problem is that I think it will still resemble agile more than it would resemble the process Dr. Royce described.
Indeed, I came across this not as a contractor but in my university textbook :) I wanted to collect the document list that forms the "thousands of pages" mentioned above in the waterfall model.
Yeah and that's helpful too, because we typically talk about caricatures about both agile and waterfall and I think people truly don't realize that waterfall isn't simply "think about what you do before you do it" and nor is agile "code first; think later".
If people truly understood what waterfall is and how it's supposed to be carried out, they'd be less apt to recommend it. Nothing prevents a team from employing planning in an agile effort, but doing this doesn't turn it into a waterfall project and you shouldn't describe it as such.
If anything, teams that refuse to use agile (thinking it inherently means meetings, story points and not looking beyond 14 days) often send up choosing something even simpler, like cooking up a simple design doc of 4-6 pages before implementing it.
But that's still not waterfall, it's just another of the infinite renditions of agile methods that are out there, just without the consultancies issuing formal training certs.
at one point or another in my career (gov contracting) I had to write or co-write or review every one of these. and without fail, within 6-12 months they would be stale/inaccurate/obsolete/… the truth is, even on projects where sufficient time is allocated to write these, there is never (literally) time allocated to keep them up-to-date
Oh certainly - I'm conflating the adjective of agile with the manifesto of agile. I've been on projects with multi-hundred page design docs and multi-week UATs. And nobody wants to go back to prince2 for example.
The point I was trying to make is we should be diving back into the older methodologies and accumulated wisdom and re-evaluate some of the older dead ends with new context.
Missing here: some organizations were rewarding high token usage as productivity without critical evaluation. People were afraid to be in the bottom because outcomes weren't being measured.
Give your agent a perfectly working code, insist that the output is not what it should be. Go to lunch. By the time you come back, the poor thing will evaporate a small lake trying to figure it out.
"i'm in aisle 32 of the data centre. please evaluate the previous query using exclusively servers 2438-2458. and quickly, it's f-ing freezing in here".
What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive. I'll just set up some burn jobs to kill tokens unnecessarily and then everyone else will too and the company will go bankrupt in 10 days. It seems inconceivable for a company to set up a "who can spend the most of our money" leaderboard for any other context
I have friends at two different companies that are taking a stick, rather than carrot, approach to this. They've set monthly minimums for token usage. Anything less than that gets you dinged in your next performance review. Imagine hiring a carpenter and writing a bad online review for them because they didn't use their hammer enough, even though the end product was on time, on budget, and worked well.
I was at a company 20 years ago that took this approach to automated tests. Everyone must write 2 a day, even if that's the only code they write that day. Once it was clear that this was being checked with automation, scripts were going around to generate and commit tests that 1 + 2 == 3 (replace with random numbers). Of course tokens are being burned this way at companies like this.
I think a better analogy would be "didn't use enough nails", since it's consumables. To which the response would be "nailgun. pop. pop. pop-pop. pop-pop-pop. pop. 'Those damn squirrels sure can move'".
What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive.
Given that all of AI is built around the premise that whoever sets fire to the most money wins, it's just users following the lead the vendors.
Humans have some repeatable bugs in our wetware, and it can be predictably exploited in a way that is hard to correct. It isn't "some people" - it's all of us, and the moment we think we're immune is the moment that we are most easily affected.
Yes, even the smartest of us are idiots in some very predictable ways.
Business/Enterprise accounts are billed at $20/seat + API prices, not subscription prices. You can give them a monthly dollar quota or let them go unlimited, but they're not being subsidized like in team. And team can't get a 20x plan from what I can tell.
Then, even though you have enough money for retirement (or even if you don't), you are answering these questions simultaneously with handling rejection.
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