Probably wrote software you rely on | Younger than I look, but older than I am
Austin, TX
Joined June 2010
- Tweets11.3K
- Following107
- Followers543
- Likes307K
Pinned Tweet
“To be able to raise a well-armed militia, which is necessary for the defense of the State, the rights to keep and bear arms by the People shall not be infringed” is the more modern way of writing the 2A
I actively avoid updates because I’m sick of them.
For several reasons.
There's this notion surrounding AI-assisted coding that the entire process should be infinitely fast. People gnash their teeth and wring their hands because review takes longer than the generation, and testing even more so.
So, as a thought experiment, imagine that all those bottlenecks go away. The process is now frictionless, and you can spit out eight months' work every eight hours, all day, every day. Eight months' work involves many UI changes, feature modifications and additions, etc. Let's say that 10% of the program changes during those eight months. As a user, do you really want to sit down every day, only to discover that 10% of the things that worked yesterday don't work anymore, that you'll need to learn 10% of the program all over again from scratch? A program like that is literally unusable. You spend 100% of your time dealing with the changes and 0% getting work done.
The fact that software is released gradually over time makes changes palatable. The speed of change has to be within our capacity to deal with the change. A firehose of AI output is simply impossible to deal with.
Nathan Harris retweeted
How do I say this...
You don't want to use AI when you can reduce something to a deterministic solution.
What do I mean?
You don't want to use AI to fill in fields in loan documents or operating agreements.
Instead you want to use AI to build the software that does it for you. And then you don't need the AI tool again for that task.
It's a subtle difference, but a really important one.
Nathan Harris retweeted
I don’t know how Crusades work, precisely, but if the Pope called for the sacking of Silicon Valley solely for its hubris … we’d have to at least hear him out, right?
Nathan Harris retweeted
Pienso que si Marín tuviera twitter sería de la sprimeras en hacer cosplay de Fem Malfoid
#Malfoid #Harrypotter #Dracomalfoy #Fanfiction
Just submitted first actual build for beta review so I can get this in front of people.
Super excited!
First app in nearly 10 years of iOS dev
Thing with this rapid iteration phase… I keep forgetting to deploy the backend changes
And then I wonder why the app doesn’t work with staging.
Gotta spend time this weekend doing behind the scenes cleanup
Nathan Harris retweeted
Google: “[Swift] has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance.” Announcing their Swift-based cloud SDK for backend services: cloud.google.com/blog/topics…
Nathan Harris retweeted
A sociopath who knew he was one, and so he tethers himself to people with strong moral cores to keep him on the straight and narrow.
And also, as the Roci crew become family, his sociopathy lessens as broken parts of him heal
Nathan Harris retweeted
I’ve survived Perl, SOAP, XML, the microservices hype cycle, and four distinct eras of JavaScript frameworks. You cannot intimidate me with a new build tool.
Nathan Harris retweeted
Our ancestors had it right when it comes to executions (and many other things). They didn’t try to sanitize it. If you’re convicted of a horrible crime, you’re gonna die. They’ll hang you from a rope or shoot you or chop off your head and that’ll be it. They won’t pretend it’s something other than what it is. It’s ugly and violent, because killing someone is an ugly and violent thing, but it’s the fate you chose for yourself. It’s justice. Don’t want to suffer that fate? Don’t commit the crime. It was much more honest. Much simpler. And I think far more dignified for all involved, especially the condemned.
Nathan Harris retweeted
"If we kill a killer, we're no better than they are."
False. They killed an innocent. We killed a killer.
"But it won't bring the dead person back."
True. But it will send the killer to the land of the dead.
"But what about mercy?"
I'll extend the same mercy to the killer as the killer showed the victim.
As Tennessee steams ahead with plans to execute their first woman in more than TWO CENTURIES, Death Penalty Action and community leaders around Tennessee ensured that there was visible and vocal opposition to the planned execution of Christa Pike.
On Sunday we Marched 4 Mercy, carrying with us a letter to Gov. Bill Lee from the men on death row inviting him to simply come pray with them. That shouldn't be too much to ask for.
bit.ly/ChristaPike
#SaveChristaPike
Nathan Harris retweeted
The innocent parent of child murder victims should not be harassed and slandered.
The lone juror who believes the defendant is guilty should not be doxxed.
The attorney defending the accused murderer should not be made into a celebrity.
This all feels so dystopian.
Nathan Harris retweeted
Despite literal decades of claiming that carry permit holders will cause tons of crime if may-issue is struck down, anti-gun states still don't have any evidence of it to bring to court four years after Bruen
"...little if any admissible record evidence has been presented that law-abiding individuals who otherwise have satisfied the requirements of receiving a concealed carry permit in New York State... pose any regulation-warranting threat whatsoever to the safety and tranquility of others in the challenged locations."
Business names is the part I hate the most about a new endeavor.
Racked my brain for like 48 hours, but pretty excited about it now.
Now to build…
I’ve had 2-3 instances in the last year where frontend E2E tests caught breaking changes on the backend, and another 2-3 instances where we would’ve caught problems had we ran the tests or had test coverage of areas
Nathan Harris retweeted
Can we actually get AI to pick plastic out of the ocean, or do all the robots have to become screenwriters?
It’s awesome to see him get all these big franchises after watching The Totally Rad show for so long.
