GeePawHill

GeePawHill, 11 months ago to random

@agilealliance

You're doing a conference in Florida?

You truly represent the apotheosis of "Agile".

For reals, yo.

You're cool with your 3,000 person venue where no one who isn't a cishet white salesperson/john man is welcome?

Jesus fucking Christ.

I was already estranged, I freely admit it, But this is beyond the pale.

Fuck the Agile fucking Alliance. They aren't what we wanted, they never have been.

GeePawHill, 7 months ago to random

I use the abbreviation "RORA" fairly often, which means "Runs Once, Run Away!". I'll mention RORA process, RORA style, RORA product, RORA code, and so on.

But what do I mean by this?

Tonight, while this second beer kicks in, but before the fourth one does, let's see if I can sketch out a first pass at it.

GeePawHill, 9 months ago to random

Okay, what the hell, we have an hour. Let me tell you of my very strange medical odyssey.

(It is not a sad story, tho it is a complicated and ongoing one.)

GeePawHill, 15 days ago to random

CurryTree: Gotta get back up on that horse. It has been a hard month for me, morale-wise, hence no work on my joy project. But I am shooting for a bit of a reset this afternoon.

I will say this: in spite of the fact that I haven't been coding, I've been meaning to work on it, and as a result of the break, I've had several ideas I think are good.

GeePawHill, 1 month ago to random

One of the key facts here keeps getting sidestepped by a mixture of scam marketing and common language usage out there.

LLMs don't sometimes make shit up, they always make shit up.

That's what an LLM is: a piece of software that makes up plausible sounding shit.

What's impressive about this is the extent of improvement in the plausibility.

What's horrifying about it is the extent to which so many people don't care to distinguish between plausibility and correctness.

GeePawHill, 9 months ago to random

Age-old question, Artie Shaw vs Benny Goodman.

Here's the thing.

Both astonishingly good.

Artie, I think, stronger, but Artie could not collaborate, his "sidemen" were uniformly shit. My take is that was by his choice.

Benny, a hair less gifted than Artie, had sidemen who were both stunning in collaboration, and afterwards world famous.

GeePawHill, 5 months ago to random

BREAKING: Corporations do bad things all the time.

Corporations lie, cheat, steal, and hurt & kill humans.

It is not because corporations are evil. It is not because corporations are thoughtless. It is not because corporations are ignorant.

It is because corporations are not conscious beings.

Corporations were developed (and partially designed) for one purpose and one purpose only: the systematic economic exploitation of resources.

Stop expressing shock.

Start tearing corporations down.

GeePawHill, 10 months ago to random

My approach to helping folks make changes, in the software trade and everywhere else, can be expressed in three very broad abstract ideas. 1) Take many more much smaller steps. 2) Optimize for the humans. 3) Make change normal.

Taken together, these three ideas can give us the means to create and develop the plans and tactics we need to support real change in the real world.

Let's take a little closer look.

GeePawHill, 1 month ago to random

The only possible responsible position is to stop telling people that LLMs are "AI".

If you are doing that, or if your org is doing that, please, please, stop it.

Marketing is one thing. I don't care for it, but it's at least somewhat of a gray line.

Telling people an LLM-based system is "artificial intelligence" is a) a fucking lie, and b) doing great harm to people who do not know better.

You oughta be ashamed of yourself.

GeePawHill, 3 months ago to random

CurryTree: Okay, let's do that stuff we said we'd do yesterday.

(Side note: I am saving all these threads, and will, in due course, put them somewhere. I really enjoy "live-coding on social media" and would do it a lot, but there's no good way to handle sharing code snippets.

Gists work, but are flow-breaking for me.)

https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/111863506148975121

GeePawHill, 2 months ago to random

Oxygen Not Included: Continuing on from yesterday.

It's c37.

So far, I am keeping my word pretty well, and doing one thing at a time.

https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/112145675719619807

GeePawHill, 3 months ago to random

CurryTree: Continuing on from yesterday's thread, I want to refactor that long method that is the init.

https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/111993331176949053

GeePawHill, 7 months ago to random

OH MY GOD I AM ASTONISHED THAT A TRADED CORPORATION BEHAVED IMPROPERLY!

Oh. Wait. No I'm not. My bad. Sorry.

GeePawHill, 9 months ago to random

Anyway.

I am a strict pacifist.

No. Stricter than that.

No. Stricter than that.

I believe it is better to die than to kill. Radical, innit?

I dint invent it, of course. Gandhi formulated it. King borrowed and enhanced it.

i am well aware it has approximately zero mindshare out there.

But it is what I believe.

GeePawHill, 8 months ago to random

Well, getting gradle+intellij+multi-module+junit5 to have a run that shows all the tests only took two hours.

jfc. I am so tired of second-rate tools.

GeePawHill, 1 year ago to random

Here's a true story. Back in caveman times, I did some contract software for an engineering company in satcomm.

The work was to take a Forth app that was written for RS-232 to a satellite modem and convert it to RS-422.

(The difference RS-232 is full-duplex, and RS-422 is half-, so the conversion requires one side of the line to always be waiting for permission to speak from the other side. The change isn't hard, knowing where to look to make the change is hard.)

GeePawHill, 1 year ago to random

Much of what I teach about midwifing change depends on a grasp of spectroscopy and spectrographs.

If you hold a prism up to the sunlight, you get a rainbow.

Each (visible) color is a separate bar.

BUT. All the bars are the same height. That's cuz the sun's light is so rich, it's slammin' slammin' slammin' all the separate (visible) colors.

What if the light isn't coming from the sun?

GeePawHill, 7 months ago to random

Mmmmm. A contemplative mood, a tad pensive, has struck me.

I have spent three days, maybe 15 or so hours, doing what some observers might think of as, well, dilly-dallying.

I had the ability to wipe a folder of everything but a possible .git subfolder on Saturday.

I could have forged ahead, wiping the destination folder is just one step in a bunch of file manipulation the app does, and this isn't even the hard part of the app.

But I didn't.

GeePawHill, 3 months ago to random

CurryTree: I have a working visual tree. The nodes that have children can be opened or closed. When you select an item, we are changing the middle column to reflect the title in that item.

That's fine. Now what?

The repo is here, for those who like to follow along: https://github.com/GeePawHill/currytree

A short video of a window with a tree. The tree has open and closed elements that work, and it handles selection. The tree is dynamic, and there's developer button that changes it on the fly.

GeePawHill, 3 months ago to random

CurryTree: Alrighty-then. Today, we've got the UiTree rendering, but the data is a) hard-wired and b) not being dynamically loaded from the server. Let's get that data where it belongs, then load the UiTree on the fly.

The repo's here, if you're following along. https://github.com/GeePawHill/currytree

GeePawHill, 3 months ago to random

CurryTree: Okay, then. After a long weekend and a couple of days getting ready for a new cohort of my class, it's time to get back to this.

Let's get this damned treeview treeviewing.

Step: Move the tree classes out of business and into common.

I think we'll wind up using them on the client side.

GeePawHill, 10 months ago to random

So I wrote this program a few years ago, called "kontentment". It's at github.

kontentment is a system for producing animations with a particular look and feel. Here's a video made using it:

https://www.geepawhill.org/2018/01/18/five-underplayed-premises-of-tdd-2/

There are a few others there at the site, too. Why only a few, you might ask?

Well, it's, mmmmm, it's not very good, and it's not-very-goodness precludes me being able to take it all the way to what I really wanted.

So, kontentment2 is afoot.

GeePawHill, 10 months ago to random

Do you ever play the "what career would I be if I had it to do over" game?

GeePawHill, 7 days ago to random

Here's a question for a select few of you:

Have you ever had a really great psychopharmacologist?

I have had many health issues, and suffered from horrifically debilitating depression from at least age 25 to age 55 -- diagnosed, medicated, therapped, all that -- and have had many psychiatrists who were drug specialists.

In that time, I only had 1 guy who tried really hard but wasn't quite it, and 1 guy who was stunningly good at understanding my situation and supporting me through it.

GeePawHill, 2 months ago to random

Watching this TV show, I have another half-hour before bedtime, I am admiring this actress who is playing an extremely unlikable person.

I grew up in the theatre, 4-8 productions a year from age 6 to age 19.

When I was 18, I had a role in the play A Thousand Clowns.

And that role was as "Chuckles the Chipmunk", a children's TV star, the boss of the protagonist.

He's a complete asshole. And in a script full of change, he's the only unchanging constant, asshole from start to finish.