In what world or frame of reference would doing TDD have "little" bearing on output quality? If you build a system around satisfying some set of requirements it seems logical that output quality would have pretty heavy correlation.
It's possible to satisfy a set of requirements with code that's low quality. There's the maintainability of the code, for example, or the performance of the system.
This is talked about all the time in the US as a huge impending problem with articles about all the time. You have segment of population with higher education and higher wealth that are having fewer children and later in life as it takes more time to get secured financially and also children are very expensive in terms of maintaining what used to be a middle class life style.
why is "solving" the issue somehow the bar? software engineering has more practices rooted in psychology than engineering, its a moving and ambiguous target. Using conventional commits gives you a framework and mechanism that undoubtedly improves contribution semantics.
In what context does wasting your first characters on fix vs feat matter?
PRs are going to have an explanation that has way more detail than necessary to figure that out quickly.
One lines tend to be (for me) in a situation where the difference is immaterial. If I am rapid firing through history I need to know what you did not why you did it.
Again I am not claiming that these are bad or even that they aren't good.
I am specifically disagreeing that any change is automatically good, that isn't true.
> Using conventional commits gives you a framework and mechanism that undoubtedly improves contribution semantics.
I do not want to contribute to a project using conventional commits. I have consistently found, that I am unable to decide what the "type" of a commit even is and I feel unnaturally caged in into how I would split up commits, by having them be restricted to types (it doesn't help that the conventional commits I've seen appear to decide the type by fair dice roll).
Discouraging contributions does not "undoubtedly improve contribution semantics".
From my own experience in big tech and various OSS things, the crux of this piece rests on this whole scope not being focal point misses that in general the other practice is making sure PRs have limited scope in general so it's marginalized, i.e. reducing blast radius or too big of a change at once by design is implied.
That only seems plausible if whatever corpse of xAI is around is giving them engineering time. I don't know if they hired a bunch of ex frontier lab staff but its unlikely they have the technical capability to train their own frontier models especially the pretraining. Because the thing is if its not competitive with claude/codex it will be panned.
Hmm, I read the situation a little differently. Grok is not a slouchy model. It’s not the best, but it’s not the worst. X currently has one source of proprietary data, Twitter, and grok is by far the best at all the things you might imagine there - today’s zeitgeist, who’s saying what, current news, etc.
Cursor adds in a large corpus of proprietary coding data — I think this is actually fairly hard to acquire right now, because claude and codex are so good.
I bet there’s enough talent at the Grok team to work with the cursor team and data to get something good out the door.
That said, I don’t track Grok’s engineering leads — I’m not sure who’s currently around, and who is not.
Unlikely, given that large swathes of talent have already left xAI, ostensibly due to poor leadership management. Simply throwing money in to build the biggest datacenters in the world doesn't do much good without bright minds to back it up.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91531084/inside-the-xai-exodus
Be careful taking the headlines at face value - that list of people leaving was mostly product and redundant senior execs to my eyes, post spacex merger. You’d expect those folks to be asked to leave as part of a re-org in any event. I don’t think it’s dispositive one way or the other on the tech org.
They were world-class senior developers and AI engineers most renowned in the AI research communities
(e.g. Jimmy Ba the legend, Christian Szegedy, Igor Babuschkin, Greg Yang),
poached from other companies to join xAI and they were getting very high salaries.
The mass exodus has been happening way before spacex merger though.
Post model 3 launch, Tesla had a number of senior folks leave almost immediately. My read at that time was they had hit or exceeded pareto-optimal on the suffering:wealth scale —- Tesla was clearly going to make it, and they had already vested 90% of the value they’d receive from Tesla ownership: why go suffer through the massive build out?
And in fact, in that era, Tesla did bring in a bunch of auto industry types to help scale, who as it happens also certainly did very well, but order of magnitude less well than the early peeps.
There might be some similar economics here: change of control will often fully vest early founders. Combined with incoming SX IPO, these guys are done financially — as in, already multibillionaires pre-IPO. You’d have to want to stay and the company would have to really want you to stay as well before it made economic sense to re-up.
People say a lot of things about working for Elon; things like “hardest work I ever did,” and “he made me extremely rich”, but you don’t read “that was easy” very often.
I have no idea if there’s enough talent right now at xAI to go build a foundation model, but in the immortal worlds of Carl Icahn: “don’t bet against Elon”
is that really what people want? The fact that people say why not have 50 story concrete blocks everywhere to get more people feels like exact thing that would destroy what makes living in the city nice... Tenement housing sucked, why add thousands of people to crammed parts of city. We should be incentivizing sprawl and better transportation.
I am a New Yorker, people want more housing but there is still NIMBYism because they want to preserve the charm, and I'm mostly only talking about manhattan. While people are not fans of the low density luxury skyscrapers popping up in places, I've not seen people who currently live in the place think we should add massive housing blocs carte blanche. Sure there few scattered places for a few projects but not like advocating to tear down to build bigger. That mentality comes from people who are definitely not new yorkers or live in fringes.
I currently live in Manhattan, have lived here for years, and I support relaxing zoning at least to the point where most Manhattan neighborhoods can ~double their building heights. YIMBYs are everywhere. Not everyone can be fortunate enough to get a stabilized unit (like me) or to have bought decades ago when prices were low.
> add massive housing blocs carte blanche
IMO this is dichotomous thinking that is actually brought on by zoning rules.
It is very difficult and very expensive to get construction approved, so the only projects that make sense to fund are towers full of units, which can attract more rent and therefore higher returns per lot, justifying the risk and expense of permitting.
If you just deleted zoning restrictions carte blanche and made it much easier to build (an automatic "Yes" if you meet basic criteria), then a lot of sagging and old 1-3 story buildings which are everywhere in Manhattan would get naturally replaced with six- to eight-story buildings. This is the natural evolution of a built environment.
The amount of additional housing and commercial space that comes online from this is huge, and there's no need to dot the city itself or even Brooklyn/Queens with commie blocks
> Would paving over all of Central Park to fill the area with residential skyscrapers be a good idea?
As a moderately wealthy former New Yorker? I say no. If we put it to a referendum? I’d give it even odds. If the referendum were for developing part of Central Park into public housing? I’d guess it would pass.
Relaxing the zoning requirements that unnaturally force huge swaths of the city to be under-built would fix this without sprawling housing into existing greenspace.
You are missing the point. Of course people want to live in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. People also want a vacation home at the beach or in the mountains thats private and beautiful and easy to get to. Except if we built giant monstrosities and condos in the hamptons and make all ski homes tenement housing it will be much less desirable to go to them. No ones asking to make more apartments and housing in rust belt cities.
This. We don’t have a housing problem. We have a “I want to live here problem.” And if we could snap our fingers and everybody in the world who wanted to live in NY could, it would be the same second nobody would want to live in NY.
It just does not scale like people think. And that is why the price has to go up, and that is the forcing factor for max capacity of any given parcel of land.
The fact is we all can’t live in the same city. And people need to do what we did in the past. And that is move to new locations that are cheaper.
Every hot spot today once was a crappy place, it was over time that it became the desirable place. That is just how it works. You got to move and live where you can afford.
Every city has a max amount of occupancy, and density. It’s so silly to even think about this on the individual level. I can find 1BN people who want to live in NY today if told today they could have a place today for $500 a month but 1BN other people are also joining would instantly turn down the offer.
it's more straightforward to write safe rust when rust owns everything, In real world you often are interfacing with underlying libs or systems etc, which you need to treat as invariants but also handle yousrelf manually to make guarantees to compiler. unsafe exists in tons of codebases it's just you have to make sure you encapsulate it properly, which is what this bug is.
Very hyped for this and updates. Have been using my own workarounds for a while with own WAL things and then sort of generating snapshots which with duckdb is so cheap was simpler than really implementing concurrent writes and mutations but this will make it so much easier.
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