Ad delivery services don't care about the user experience because it's not their site, so anything goes. The host justifies their decision because hey, look, money. That money is quantifiable while user experience is less so.
You talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny.
AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
I don't think GP disagrees. They are (I think) stating that AI-assisted TDD is not as reliable as human TDD, because AI will invent a pointless test just to achieve a passing outcome.
I lack the level of education and eloquence of the author, but I have my own notion that I think agrees with them: Specification is difficult and slow, and bugs do not care whether they are part of the official specification or not.
Some software needs formal verification, but all software needs testing.
On another subject...
> Tests are great at finding bugs ... but they cannot prove the absence of bugs.
Unless people therefore decide that testing unnecessary... Which has happened a lot in academia. One of the reasons testing is not being taught that well on some universities...
You didn't, but I'm taking your stance to its logical conclusion.
GP:
> they shouldnt be paid at all. they're in prison for a reason. they have a debt to society.
Your response:
> Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".
Be that as it may, this is our system. Through a series of laws we have defined due process for our people, and people who end up in prison are a result of this due process. Like it or not this is the best we were able to do.
If we are going to say prisoners should be given more privileges because some prisoners do not deserve to be in there, then why are we holding them in a prison to begin with? Being confined to prison is a thousand times more punitive than not receiving pay for making a license plate.
A better reason for arguing that prisoners should be paid for their work is because it is more humane. That's a better argument than some people are in prison unjustly.
I'm actually in favor of prison reforms. Prisons' number one goal should be to reduce recidivism. I see that as the entire point of the prison system: reducing crime. If a person leaves prison and re-offends, we have failed to do our job.
This. When the bugs come streaming in you better have some other AI ready to triage them and more AI to work them, because no human will be able to keep up with it all.
Bug reporting is already about signal vs noise. Imagine how it will be when we hand the megaphone to bots.
> very few people can correctly articulate requirements
This is the new programming. Programming and requirements are both a form of semantics. One conveys meaning to a computer at a lower level, the other conveys it to a human at a higher level. Well now we need to convey it at a higher level to an LLM so it can take care of the lower-level translation.
I wonder if the LLM will eventually skip the programming part and just start moving bits around in response to requirements?
My solution as a consultant was to build some artifact that we could use as a starting point. Otherwise, you're sitting around spinning your wheels and billing big $ and the pressure is mounting. Building something at least allows you to demonstrate you are working on their behalf with the promise that it will be refined or completely changed as needed. It's very hard when you don't get people who can send down requirements, but that was like 100% of the places I worked. I very seldom ran into people who could articulate what they needed until I stepped up, showed them something they could sort of stand on, and then go from there.
Mythical Man Month had it all--build one to throw away.
> I very seldom ran into people who could articulate what they needed
The people with the needs and ideas are often so divorced from the "how" that they don't even bother trying to nail down the details. I think in their mind they are delegating that to the specialists.
This question of who writes the requirements is so ubiquitous you would think we'd have better solutions for it. I know some people solve it with processes like BDD but personally I think we'd be better off if we just had clearer role definitions.
For example, in a waterfall project the requirements usually land in the lap of the Business Analyst. Well when you look at Business Analyst roles you see they are expected to do a lot more than documenting requirements, so it's viewed as acceptable when they are somewhat bad at it. They also spend most of their time with the business so they are unaware of the limitations of the team who is expected to implement the changes.
For another example look at Scrum. It talks a lot about good requirements in the form of user stories, but it stops short of assigning this responsibility to any one of the formal roles, presumably making it a team activity or expecting it to be organic.
When we want someone to write code we hire a programmer, and writing code is what they are expected to do. Where is the role that is strictly requirements and nothing else? Considering how often I hear complaints about bad requirements, it seems overdue that we establish one.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with institutional investors buying tract homes and renting them out. Nothing! It brings the benefits of living in such homes to people who otherwise would be excluded from them by the financial credit system.
The article linked in the OP, and many posters in this thread, present arguments to the contrary. The main one seems to be that although institutional investors are happy to let people “benefit” from renting their homes, they are precluding many from ever owning those homes themselves.
I understand the arguments, and I understand that they are morally vacuous arguments. It is simply an advancement of the interests of the bourgeoisie. They are annoyed that renters are effectively able to influence the market, even if by the second degree through large-scale renting. They believe that having scraped together a quarter million dollars for the down payment makes them a special class of people. It is a stupid position to defend.
Doubly so when they themselves lobby for policies that keep housing prices high, which is the primary thing preventing more people from owning rather than renting.
Well really I was just trying to explain the GP's post, not adopt their views, but I think I can play devil's advocate here for the sake of discussion.
The problem with institutional investors is that in making it big business you drive up home prices which in turn drives up the rental prices. Since they can have a wide portfolio of homes, they are less likely to lower rent prices when demand drops, because they can afford to take the short term hit if it they think the market is going to pick back up again. AND they can play games like grabbing all available homes in an area in order to artificially inflate prices.
I see that you did your best, but it should be obvious that the people who want to buy homes also have a massive financial machine on their side, and that it also drives up prices. If the insured 30-year mortgage did not exist, homes would be a lot cheaper.
Wait, you're not answering his question. "Institutional investors" rent out houses at a scale individual owners can't, and have more resources to maintain those properties and respond to renter complaints. Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?
>Why isn't a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders a good thing?
Is there a good example of this?
Every corporation I've rented from have all fought me tooth and nail when I needed maintenance and did basically everything possible to ignore any and all complaints (because it costs them money, obviously). I have had to have a lawyer send a letter on my behalf more than once.
But that's just my experience, which has jaded me. Perhaps you can show me a non-hypothetical example of the other side and open my eyes up a bit? Any countries, laws, specific corporations which demonstrate a carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders I should look at?
It has not been my experience that individual owner landlords have been better than institutional owners!
Anyways, I was just calling out that your logic didn't appear to hold. The right response to the comment that roots this subthread is "institutional landlords are not generally a thing". Again: the median number of properties a California corporate landlord lets out is 1.
Not sure the median makes sense for this argument. Say 51% of corporate landlords let out 1 property, and 49% let out 100 - most people will live in a property owned by the 49%. The absolute number of landlords in the 51% would be mostly meaningless.
Must be. In particular: the only landlord I ever got a security deposit back from automatically was a corporate landlord.
More broadly: if your concern is that the landlord isn't going to fix the furnace or whatever, you can address that without distorting the market just by creating causes of action, penalties, and fix-and-deduct ordinances to shift incentives.
Banning corporate landlords reduces the supply of housing (larger institutional investors are the primary builders of dense multifamily), and privileges individual owner/landlords who do not have a better track record or better incentives or better resources.
Right. I'm not advocating for a banning of corporate landlords. I just wanted to look at the regulations/ordinances/etc. of a "carefully-regulated market of institutional single-family-home lenders" to take some inspiration from, and perhaps advocate for some of the sensible rules in my area. I know you participate in your local politics, and have a different viewpoint than mine, so I thought I'd ask.
Fair enough! Hard for me to answer, because my priors are that non-corporate landlords are generally worse than institutional landlords, if only because the structural incentives favor scale.
Private equity is the gamification of everything, in a compressed time frame. A company focused on longer time frames will cultivate their reputation. This takes the form of quality products and good customer service. PE has no need for any of this nonsense. They are looking for a quick return on their investment; to trade in all reputation and goodwill for their immediate value in cold hard cash. The more immediate the better, so they can move on to their next acquisition.
Funny, because you hear the same hand-wringing about how public companies (ie. the exact opposite of PE) only care about next quarter's earnings report. By that metric, PE is better than public companies, because their source of capital is more secure and don't have to worry about flighty shareholders dumping their shares.
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