<p>big day: did a code screener interview,<br />coding in a browser deal, but no trick questions </p><p>&quot;can you write a toy spreadsheet evaluator&quot;</p><p>please understand, i have been making jokes at my now former job &quot;any excuse to write a topological sort&quot; and lo and behold &quot;please write a topological sort&quot;</p><p>i went for the showboat option: here&#39;s how excel does it</p><p>it&#39;s nice to feel good at my job</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@film_girl" class="u-url mention">@<span>film_girl</span></a></span> oh shoot I have that book, haha!</p><p>It&#39;s in my to read pile, been there for like a year 🥲</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://cosocial.ca/@timbray" class="u-url mention">@<span>timbray</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://toot.cafe/@baldur" class="u-url mention">@<span>baldur</span></a></span> a different way to think of it is treating a specialist + a tool as a single unit of comparison, not one or the other. Like, you can&#39;t compare programming languages to each other even for a similar task, because a lot depends on whether a programmer or a team likes the language and is efficient at it.</p><p>Another analogy is racing: it&#39;s long established that you can&#39;t compare drivers or cars in isolation, only a particular driver driving a particular car as a whole unit.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://toot.cafe/@baldur" class="u-url mention">@<span>baldur</span></a></span> Baldur is really right that most issues in software engineering are horribly science-free. For any nontrivial “best practice”, an experiment to test it would require two teams, doing nontrivial work, approaching the same problem with practices that are closely equivalent except for the one under study. Which is probably never gonna happen.</p>

<p>Here’s a person, Baldur Bjarnason, <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://toot.cafe/@baldur" class="u-url mention">@<span>baldur</span></a></span>, who thinks I’m really wrong about LLMs and coding. I mostly don’t agree but the argument is well-presented: <a href="https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trust</span><span class="invisible">ing-your-own-judgement-on-ai/</span></a></p>

<p>When you cherry-pick data to support findings that serve your political goals, it’s no longer science.</p><p>It’s propaganda.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@film_girl" class="u-url mention">@<span>film_girl</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy" class="u-url mention">@<span>geerlingguy</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://sakurajima.moe/@yon" class="u-url mention">@<span>yon</span></a></span> one of my prized books. It came out great in print form.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> *squints* smcprintf? Ok I guess, interesting choice. </p><p>Oh wait, more coffee required.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy" class="u-url mention">@<span>geerlingguy</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://sakurajima.moe/@yon" class="u-url mention">@<span>yon</span></a></span> yeah this was the book! <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story/dp/0596007191" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-I</span><span class="invisible">nsanely-Great-Story/dp/0596007191</span></a></p>