twitchard's comments

same for me

Shameless plug for my conference talk on why I prefer a "compiler" approach vs a "template" approach to API library generation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgRreyw-Nlg

Based on experiences with the same generator at Stripe that Alex (founder of stainlessapi.com) built.

My big question is "what's for lunch?"

Also, appeals to authority is "person X says Y, person X has a PhD, therefore Y". There is no "Person X" here. The authority, if there is one, is a mysterious authority possessed by the form of the argument itself. Or, you might say, a "mystical" authority.

Ignorance of what? Bias against who? Religious mystics?

That's like saying it's wrong to use "charismatic" to mean "attractive" because that word needs to be reserved for religious charismatics, or that it's wrong to use the word "agnostic" to mean "noncommital" because that word needs to be reserved for the religious gnostics and agnostics, or that it's wrong to call have "developer evangelists" because that word needs to be reserved for religious evangelicals.

Hmm, medical scientists experiment on rats and then make medical predictions about humans based on analogy from rats to humans. At least, I classify this as an analogy, and wouldn't forbid analogies from having predictive power.

Re: "reveal aspects of interactions in the system I was not aware of" I think this is an interesting point. I definitely am willing to give persuasive force to e.g. theoretical microeconomics, which like system dynamics operates by analogy from a mathematical construct to humans. I think in principle I could believe a non-obvious prediction made by a system dynamics model where I felt that the mathematical constructs in the model were a good analogy to humans -- but the prediction would have to be robust, i.e. it shouldn't vanish if you change the parameters of the model or tweak the assumptions of the model.

Theoretical economists tackle this by making their results super general using abstract math and characterizing the solutions to systems of inequalities in the most general form that they can.

This is a fair criticism.

I think, if I had stopped at "hey look, Will Larson's model in this post wasn't realistic, this proves there's a bunch of people out there being mystical about system dynamics", this would certainly be a straw man -- but my argument went further. It's "hey look, Will Larson's model in this post wasn't realistic -- in fact, it's impossible to use stock and flow modeling to tell a realistic story about this subject matter, yet nevertheless here is system dynamics being peddled as useful in basically all contexts as a fundamental skill of leadership" which is not a straw man.

That's not what resource contention means. Resource contention means two people (or processes) want the same thing and only one can have it at a time.

Words can have multiple meanings, my friend.

The word's root just means "full of mystery", which is completely appropriate in this context -- describing people who accept the authority of fancy equations as a mystery, instead of delving deeper for a justification from first principles.

It's true that mysticism also has a more specific meaning i.e. describing particular strains of religious or philosophic thought and practice that are tied to the idea of "mystery" in a different way, but I see no reason this meaning should have a monopoly on the word, considering the etymology, see https://www.etymonline.com/word/mystic?ref=etymonline_crossr...

That's pretty silly. What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? It's not like "oops, I can't deploy to the QA environment now, it's in use by somebody who left in 2015"

Also all the remedies he suggests (keeping your responsibility assignment matrix small) would make absolutely no sense if "communication costs" was dominated by the cost of communicating with developers in the past. By any reasonable reading communication costs refers to developers simultaneously working on a task (in analogy to parallel processes).

Merriam-Webster gives a definition "vague speculation : a belief without sound basis"

My latest side project I've been doing on glitch.com using node.js, React Hooks, and theme-ui.

I miss my Vim bindings, and I wasted a little bit of time trying to get HMR to work with parcel, but other than that it really feels like the tools mostly just get out of the way and let me build my idea, and when I'm done coding I think I'll be happy to just leave it on glitch. (I paid for "boosted apps").

Still competitive with "sending husband out to get groceries"

A general-purpose library able to hide the necessarily specific logic of how network events and a poker game should interact seems... unlikely?

My team at the Node Knockout hackathon implemented an editor-agnostic version of this feature last weekend. I guess it is an idea whose time is come.

https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

For me, the editor-agnosticism is the most important feature I would want my live coding experience to have. My team uses a mixture of Vim, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, and Atom, and we have configurations we are comfortable with. It's too bad that this seems to be happening well within the confines of each editor's ecosystem, and not by some common protocol that all editors could share.

My hack-a-thon team did it in 48 hours this weekend, lol. https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

My team at the Node Knockout hackathon implemented an editor-agnostic version of this feature literally last weekend. https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

This becomes more fun if autonomous vehicles broadcast their ethical setting. Then you could overcome the prisoner's dilemma with something like tit-for-tat.

"Prioritize anybody else over myself only if they would prioritize me over themselves, given I prioritize them."

To me knowing the CLI is a little like knowing how to read sheet music. It makes analysis and collaboration a lot easier.

You can put down a sequence of git invocations in a text file or script, stare at them, reason about them, tweak them as appropriate for your use case, copy and paste them to another developer, write about them in a blog post, include them in a README.

It's harder to do this with a sequence of gui actions.

Sorry -- more precisely a "straw man" is usually an argument which you do not advocate yourself, that you construct -- usually in order to argue against it and strengthen your own position.

When the author of the comment says "straw man, not my own view" in parentheses, he is saying "hey, this is what I imagine somebody who likes Java and not functional languages might think".