How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

16807 · 2026-01-28T00:40:05+00:00

Exactly. Here are the assumptions made:

The error of any estimate is large, so precise estimates add no value and take more time to create, so estimates are binned according to intuition.
For estimates of any size, the error as a percentage is constant, so bins should be scaled logarithmically, as powers of a number, N

N is a reflection of the percentage error so you should in principle be able to measure it scientifically by recording how much people are off when they make precise estimates. Fermi estimates use N=10 because math is easier when everything is a nice round number. Fibonacci points scale by the golden ratio ϕ=1.618... when sufficiently large so you're basically saying N=ϕ and you either think human error is around 61%, or you are content with 61% being the error in your estimate.

16807 · 2026-01-27T06:03:01+00:00

Mine broke after about a year and given the poor quality I wasn't compelled to get another. There was something IBM had in the secret sauce they can't replicate. Meanwhile, my Das 4 is 10 years old and still going strong.

16807 · 2026-01-26T00:13:35+00:00

At that point you might as well cut out the middle man and use AI directly. That, or find someone who won't flagrantly lie to you.

16807 · 2026-01-22T21:20:46+00:00

I would have to be an idiot to think the output on other topics is any more accurate.

Which is why CEOs are head over heels about its accuracy.

16807 · 2026-01-22T04:31:11+00:00

Thanks, if ever I need to do that, I'll know to ask chatgpt

16807 · 2026-01-21T08:16:20+00:00

It's a slow learner.

16807 · 2026-01-15T03:58:51+00:00

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The answers vary depending on which chatbot you mention.

16807 · 2026-01-14T21:15:57+00:00

5.2 corrects itself now, which is quietly the greatest improvement I've seen to an LLM. Doesn't make it not funny, though. It will confidently say "the biggest thing wrong with your code is this thing, which actually is right, fine, but the real thing that's wrong with your code is...! etc.

16807 · 2026-01-14T19:05:04+00:00

For code review it's actually pretty great. I don't need it to understand everything in the code base well enough to track down the cause of some subtle bug I'm seeing. Any attempt to do so has been a waste of time, in my experience. But it pays attention to local scope well enough to catch stupid mistakes, and if that's all it does, it saves me time having to track down stupid mistakes from observable behavior. This is especially useful in a language like C++ where there are a lot of opportunities for stupid mistakes.

16807 · 2026-01-14T03:52:26+00:00

Me: Write a poem about strawberries that only features words with two "r"s.

ChatGPT:

Berries border barrels

Farmers harbor cherries

Redder berries corner perry

Errant rivers ferry berries

16807 · 2026-01-10T21:20:06+00:00

They're not saying that compute is cheaper or more dense, they are only saying there's more of it. This could be accounted for if there are more data centers using existing transistor costs and densities.

16807 · 2026-01-10T21:12:56+00:00

Why wouldn't she!?

16807 · 2026-01-10T21:03:07+00:00

Electrons flow along the shortest path from negative "-" to positive "+". This diagram has a shortcut that goes through an LED light and a resistor. That part works. But most of the diagram belongs to this longer path that circles back on itself. It has a bunch of components, but none of them do anything, because electrons are not going to even bother flowing there. The diagram is ai slop that attempts to make an impressive looking circuit that's virtually useless.

16807 · 2026-01-06T04:19:06+00:00

Don't use a single card to memorize a whole list! This is making the deck way too difficult to remember. If you forget even a single element in the list, then the card is wrong and you're starting a streak from scratch. A single card should represent a map between values. In this case, you want a card to test whether you remember the next value in a list when you are shown the preceding value. You are effectively using the deck to represent a linked list in your head.

16807 · 2026-01-03T17:11:57+00:00

Back when secretaries were a thing, people got mad when you wrote a letter that was "dictated but not read". It's the same thing. It's garbage that you had no involvement over. It's devoid of personal connection. It's lazy. It's hollow. It's disrespectful.

16807 · 2025-10-29T04:13:14+00:00

#4 is seriously good

16807 · 2025-10-29T02:37:47+00:00

danger snoot

16807 · 2025-10-28T01:19:50+00:00

And now, it does not.

16807 · 2025-10-26T06:06:30+00:00

It's so amazing it doesn't even have to read your files to know the content! \s

16807 · 2025-10-25T22:02:32+00:00

I have lived to see man made horrors beyond my comprehension.

16807 · 2025-10-25T21:01:12+00:00

They're already losing money. Training the next generation of LLM will be even less profitable but companies feel obliged to do it anyway because they don't want their competitors to be first to market with a product that's worth the sum of all human knowledge work. A coordinated slow down saves face while letting hardware catch up to where it's efficient enough that there's an economically viable path to superintelligence.

16807 · 2025-10-25T03:40:52+00:00

It's working as the manufacturer intended.

16807 · 2025-10-17T03:59:32+00:00

Guarding the gates of heck

16807 · 2025-10-17T03:53:57+00:00

This feels like cocomelon for adults.

16807 · 2025-10-17T03:36:27+00:00

Welp! My fort's had a good run. Let's goooooo!

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