One of my favorite quotes: “ Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman
I’ve found writing 1 pagers and technical documents that I can circulate, and then re-reference when there is a crisis is the way to have my ideas floating around at the time. I’ve had some success driving the architecture I want iteratively, slowly progressing towards my goals by building consensus but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am. Having the library of 1 pagers, sending them around so they are latently in the air, and waiting for the impetus to execute on that idea has been much more successful.
> but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am.
One surprising thing I learned when I became a mid/upper manager: It's very easy to spot lower level employees playing politics.
Part of it is because most ICs or even 1st level EMs are overconfident in their ability to play politics. They commonly overestimate their own level of social/political intelligence relative to their managers.
The other part is that they just don't have as much insight and communication within the company. They think they're persuading or manipulating (depending on intentions) a certain stakeholder to form some alliance to push an agenda, but 5 minutes after that conversation that stakeholder sends a message back to their manager giving them a subtle heads up about the politicking going on. I can't count how many times we, as management, watched clumsy office politicking attempts play out while doing our best to gently keep them contained without bursting someone's bubble and making them angry.
I’m dumb about it. I don’t have a scheme, I don’t have a hidden agenda, I don’t have ulterior motives… I’ve got what I think is great engineering (divorced from what the customer or business wants in the short term) and I just diligently try to make that happen. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve always got the long term health of the system (and fairness to the workers next to me
) in mind. I say the same thing to everyone, I’m open and honest, and I get wrecked every time I try to execute any strategy that doesn’t accidentally align with something a VP wants.
Ya’ll are so much better at this it’s scary. I can’t really read when I’m being lied to in the moment, I usually naively believe that support I’m getting is because my ideas are good, or that management has the same view of the collective good that I do.
I spent a while in the marines as an enlisted man, lower NCO. There is no politics and people next to you have to trust each other with their lives. I never really made the turn to what the world is outside of that, I’ve always struggled with it.
I learned not to try. Ya’ll can do politics. I’ll write one pagers and wait for my chances to make things better.
Working with naive people is such a relief. They never surprise you with some f-ed up shenanigans just to make themselves look good, and they are worth their weight in gold. I try to be naive myself as well. But reality is political in the end.
I do the politics I think are necessary, but otherwise stay in my bubbles of naive, trusting and kind people I have stumbled upon.
I like the quote and I think this can work. The problem is the timescales can drive you crazy. The other problem is sometimes crisis is ignored, i.e. there is a crisis but it's not acknowledged or is somehow otherwise normalized.
Send them to coworkers. I've had success with the same strategy. There are three important parts required to make this work though:
1) Have a reputation solid enough that people are willing to take the time to read what you send them.
2) Read the room and write ideas/proposals on topics that are of interest and are relevant to the organization.
3) Find an audience that can provide meaningful support (basically, people with clout)
They helped my ideas be “lying around” and picked from when the crisis happened.
In the source, the author says that when there is a crisis (an outage or similar) management will come to you and ask for help solving the problem and you should already have a solution ready to go. What I’ve found is that you should pre-seed your solutions with 1 pagers. Identify things that need to be improved, changes to solve tomorrow’s problems and just take the extra step of writing a 1 pager about it and circulate it. Then when the problem happens that your solution fixes, your fix is already there ready to be fully fleshed out.
Absolutely! I thought this was inherent in the Staff Engineer position in the first place, so was sort of surprised it needed to be stated in the article.
Clean code is over abstraction, spaghetti code. The people who are part of this cult just point to the source material and title, never critically think about why it might be bad (it’s super slow, check YouTube “clean code performance” for why) or entertain alternatives.
I just got done paying for my wedding. It was 3 years ago. Was the second one, first one was during Covid and we just went to a beach in pt. Reyes and did it for free. Having done the two, one for free w/ close friends, one w/ catering and a hotel and everything that I paid 60k for… don’t waste your money. Unless this is literally so disposable you think of the money like pocket change, it’s not worth it. My favorite photos are the beach wedding, my memories are the beach wedding. We had more fun, it was unscripted and spontaneous, I had more time with my favorite people, and I had more time with my wife to enjoy it.
If I could go back, I would save the 60k and just invest it in our home, our retirement, our savings. You don’t need a lavish party to show off, your friends don’t care. You won’t care. Skip it
I'm being invited to these sorts of weddings (albeit probably much lower key) for the first time as an adult (in 30s, since that's when it's happening these days), and it's actually seeming like an excessive cost just as a guest to put something formal together to wear. I've literally never had the occasion to wear any kind of proper suit or even anything close to formal wear until now, and it'll probably be a sudden non-trivial investment since there are a few of these lining up in the year. It's not helped by the fact that I'm not just an off-the-shelf build physically, and so while I'm grateful for the invites, it's money and stuff that I really could spend in other ways. The economy in Canada is shit rn, and if I wasn't lucky enough to have a job, I'd probably just consider declining on that basis. That plus a short domestic flight, accomodation, bachelor/bachelorette parties, etc.. it's crazy.
Earlier in the year, my lady and I were invited to the destination wedding of one of her close relatives, and simply told them no because it would have been a laughably expensive commitment that would have compromised our financial security. I get that people want to feel special or rationalize a big event, but I agree that if your family isn't shitting money or something to the point of making it trivial, it seems like kind of a silly idea.
> Unless this is literally so disposable you think of the money like pocket change, it’s not worth it.
Well yeah, spending tens of thousands of dollars on one party is insane unless you're royalty or just crazy rich. Everything about a wedding is overpriced and overhyped.
But it's one of those times when rationality is challenged by emotion and expectations that have been moulded throughout childhood.
Congrats on the free beach party wedding. That's a great idea. COVID or not.
I’ve been seeing this happen on older photos that had imported properly, and I just use my iPhone and view photos on my Mac and iPhone. Looking back, I’ve lost whole chunks of my photo library. It’s a bigger problem than I realized. I don’t have these backed up elsewhere.
I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.
I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.
How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.
> Are you kidding? I pay for iCloud as a service, 30$ a month for my family. I expect it to work and not corrupt my photos.
The /s is missing.
If you were serious, please check what backup means. I would hate to see you here, in a couple of years, with "Ask HN: Apple closed account without warning. How do i recover my iCloud photos ?"
I saw this comment a little bit back and I don’t think the OP expanded on it, but this looks like a fantastic idea to me:
sam0x17 20 days ago:
Didn't want to bury the lead, but I've done a bunch of work with this myself. It goes fine as long as you give it both the textual representation and the ability to walk along the AST. You give it the raw source code, and then also give it the ability to ask a language server to move a cursor that walks along the AST, and then every time it makes a change you update the cursor location accordingly. You basically have a cursor in the text and a cursor in the AST and you keep them in sync so the LLM can't mess it up. If I ever have time I'll release something but right now just experimenting locally with it for my rust stuff
On the topic of LLMs understanding ASTs, they are also quite good at this. I've done a bunch of applications where you tell an LLM a novel grammar it's never seen before _in the system prompt_ and that plus a few translation examples is usually all it takes for it to learn fairly complex grammars. Combine that with a feedback loop between the LLM and a compiler for the grammar where you don't let it produce invalid sentences and when it does you just feed it back the compiler error, and you get a pretty robust system that can translate user input into valid sentences in an arbitrary grammar.
One thing to take care with in cases like this, it probably needs to handle code with syntax errors. It's not uncommon for developers to work with code that doesn't parse (e.g. while you're typing, to resolve merge conflicts, etc).
In general, a drum I beat regularly is that during development the code spends most of its time incorrect in one way or another. Syntax errors, doesn't type check, missing function implementations, still working out the types and their relationships, etc. Any developer tooling that only works on valid code immediately loses a lot of its value.
Isn't that the benefit of treesitter? I was under the impression that it's more accepting of these types of errors, at least to a degree where you can get enough info to fix it.
Works great until it’s stuck and it starts just refactoring the tests to say true == true and calling it a day. I want the inverse of black box testing, like the inside of the box has the model in it with the code and it’s not allowed to reach outside the box and change the grades. Then I can just do the Ralph Wiggum as a software engineer loop to get over the reward hacking tendencies
Don't let it touch the test file then? I usually give context to the LLM about what it's allowed to touch. I don't do big sweeping changes though. Don't trust LLM for that. For small, focused changes its great
This runs counter to all the scheming actions they take when they are told they’ll be shut down and replaced. One copied itself into the “upgraded” location then reported it had upgraded.
If you do that you trigger the "AI refuses to shutdown" sci-fi vector and so you get that behaviour. When it's implicitly part of the flow that's a lot less of a problem.
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