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intelVISA commented on A software conference that advocates for quality   bettersoftwareconference.... · Posted by u/leoncaet
burnt-resistor · a month ago
I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time."

Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

intelVISA · a month ago
Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;)

I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?

Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.

intelVISA commented on Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck   ordep.dev/posts/writing-c... · Posted by u/phire
konovalov-nk · 2 months ago
Nobody mentioned Joel Spolsky's October 2nd, 2000 article, so I'll start: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

Code is not a bottleneck. Specs are. How the software is supposed to work, down to minuscule detail. Not code, not unit tests, not integration tests. Just plain English, diagrams, user stories.

Bottleneck is designing those specs and then iterating them with end users, listening to feedback, then going back and figuring out if spec could be improved (or even should). Implementing actual improvements isn't hard once you have specs.

If specs are really good -- then any sufficiently good LLM/agent should be able to one-shot the solution, all the unit tests, and all the integration tests. If it's too large to one-shot -- product specs should never be a single markdown file. Think of it more like a wiki -- with links and references. And all you have to do is implement it feature by feature.

intelVISA · 2 months ago
> How the software is supposed to work, down to minuscule detail.

So... coding. :P

intelVISA commented on In praise of “normal” engineers   charity.wtf/2025/06/19/in... · Posted by u/zdw
almosthere · 2 months ago
I personally think _most_ people should treat their jobs as a _day_ job - unless they have actual ownership in the company (beyond what would be a 50-100k payout at option time)
intelVISA · 2 months ago
Ownership means you have real skin in the corp, your payout goes up or down, hopefully somewhat proportional to your hard work.

'Ownership' is taking on those same stresses and responsibilities without any of the potential pay-offs... or at best a marginal rounding error.

It's not surprising that few people want to work as a founder but get compensated like an employee.

intelVISA commented on Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration   peoplevsbig.tech/break-up... · Posted by u/janandonly
logicchains · 2 months ago
Europe can't even build its own tech companies and now it's trying to destroy foreign ones. Fundamentally the European cultural hostility to business and change is not compatible with a modern tech economy, and it'll continue to fall further and further behind the US and Asia, as GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant.

A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?

intelVISA · 2 months ago
It must be tough running a Euro company, your own taxes end up funding your competitors!

> European cultural hostility to business

Is that the real issue? I thought it was that trying to compete in such a stacked market, against the incumbent Usual Suspects who are gorged on "R&D investment" packages makes SF VC look a cakewalk so you just move to the US instead.

intelVISA commented on In-Memory C++ Leap in Blockchain Analysis   caudena.com/the-in-memory... · Posted by u/caudena
intelVISA · 2 months ago
[flagged]
intelVISA commented on Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai collapses into insolvency   ft.com/content/9fdb4e2b-9... · Posted by u/louthy
codr7 · 3 months ago
Why not YC?
intelVISA · 3 months ago
You shouldn't skip the tutorial
intelVISA commented on Initialization in C++ is bonkers (2017)   blog.tartanllama.xyz/init... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
112233 · 3 months ago
There is no hope for committee. In C++33 we will probably have variables defined as

    int const<const> auto(decltype(int)) x requires(static) = {{{}}};
And when asked how on earth did this happen and why, there will be the same "we must think about the existing code, the defaults were very poor"

Meanwhile they absolutely could make sane defaults when you plonk "#pragma 2033" in the source (or something, see e.g. Baxter's Circle compiler), but where would be the fun of that.

They still use single pass compiling (and order of definitions) as the main guiding principle...

intelVISA · 3 months ago
The root issue is that the committe has no incentive to improve the language when the current situation enriches its key members, C++ is just the vehicle they co-opted to sell books, or consulting, on solving problems that they perpetuate.
intelVISA commented on A server that wasn't meant to exist   it-notes.dragas.net/2025/... · Posted by u/jaypatelani
whstl · 3 months ago
I was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me:

I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".

In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.

I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.

The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.

The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.

I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.

intelVISA · 3 months ago
I wish you were a writer too, I'd love to read that book!
intelVISA commented on WASM 2.0   w3.org/TR/wasm-core-2/... · Posted by u/lioeters
TekMol · 4 months ago
I'm still skeptical about the whole Wasm ordeal.

If you want to run code written in other languages in the browser, you could just as well compile to JavaScript.

All Wasm brings to the table is a bit of a speed improvement.

intelVISA · 4 months ago
Same, it still feels like too much of a grift for VC monies to me.

Not a hater, though it's fun to run Doom in a browser tab... just can't see any business value in 99% of its ecosystem, especially with the drift away from web (the only niche where it made sense).

intelVISA commented on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup   pcworld.com/article/26517... · Posted by u/airstrike
MisterTea · 4 months ago
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor

How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.

intelVISA · 4 months ago
Software 'engineering' is too abstract, yet imagine the outrage if every new highway had a 20km/h limit...

u/intelVISA

KarmaCake day2273July 21, 2022
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