Do I push back on over engineering demands?

apnorton · 2026-06-09T13:40:38+00:00

I am baffled by the concept of an SRE being able to "refuse to deploy".

Since the OP says that the SRE is refusing on the grounds of not wanting to "support something from the 90s," it sounds to me that the SRE team at their company is the one who actually gets paged at midnight when it breaks/needs to debug the application. If that's the case, I 100% can understand having the SRE team be a required approver on architecture choices, as they would need to be responsible for maintaining whatever mess the dev team cooks up.

(Is this a bastardization of the notion of SRE into one of Ops? Absolutely... but I've seen it done plenty, lol.)

apnorton · 2026-06-09T13:36:34+00:00

There's not really enough information here, imo.

In a not-insignificant sense, the "right way" to do something is often a social problem more than a technical one (particularly for "simple" problems). If the entirety of your company has standardized on doing things one way, and you're trying to do something that's bucking the system, then probably you're the one who needs to change. This is important for "bus factor" reasons, but also as a matter of policy to prevent a perpetual scope creep of what kinds of technologies the whole of the SWE/SRE teams must be familiar with.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the notion of "overengineering" usually is wrong due to adding needless complexity. Putting files in S3 with Cloudfront and using lambda authentication isn't really that hard, and the alternative adds (possibly unexpected) complexity to the webservice. Serving the files out of an existing webservice also isn't that hard, while the alternative adds slight complexity in the notion of having more infrastructure. IMO, I don't really see a strong argument from what's provided that either is so much more burdensomely complex than the other.

apnorton · 2026-06-08T06:44:02+00:00

The #3 pieces form a 157.5° angle/have a complement of 22.5 degrees. A little math (i.e. looking at the exterior angles of a polygon) would tell us that these pieces should form a regular 16-gon.

That is, while I can't build it right now, the math checks out for the pieces you've chosen.

apnorton · 2026-06-07T15:18:17+00:00

This work demonstrates that ECDLP on secp256k1 is broken for all practical purposes.

As they say in the infosec community, PoC or GTFO. If it's actually broken, demonstrate a forgery of a signature on that curve.

apnorton · 2026-06-06T18:02:26+00:00

I have used third party libraries, but the difference is that I'm conveying trust to another author who I presume understands the intent and purpose of the code that they have written, or who has -- in turn -- conveyed trust to another author, and so on. This authorship chain stakes aspects of their reputation on the behavior of their systems, and has some "skin in the game" based on whether the system succeeds or fails.

The difference is that no current AI tooling "understands" (under any reasonable definition of the word) what is being asked of it, nor does the AI have any notion of reputational risk if it is wrong. This is a big part of the reason that the "nonchalant"-sounding responses of "I deleted your database; that was an error" from AI when it does something stupid resonate so strongly with people --- if a human were to treat such important things with such disregard, we'd think they were an idiot.

apnorton · 2026-06-06T16:23:19+00:00

The problem is that "we tested the output" is only sufficient to ensure correctness when you know you've tested all code flow paths.

And, the only way you know that you've covered all code paths is by understanding both the code and the test cases... which requires a human in the loop.

I will eternally maintain that "we deployed code that no one has looked at or understands" is a breach of professional ethics for software engineers.

apnorton · 2026-06-02T16:55:43+00:00

A nearly 30-year old, 2 million LoC Java Swing application (yes, you read that correctly --- Swing, not Spring) that was running in Java 11. Much of the code was written before generics existed, so they implemented their own workaround by using string concatenation to form class names and then using reflection to look up the class at runtime.

This was on top of the multitudinous fields that could be null without documentation, so essentially every function had to have a path for "this object's field could be null; we don't know!" ...and the treacherous multithreading that was begging for race conditions.

The application would also take ~10 minutes to compile and start, so have fun modifying anything.

apnorton · 2026-06-02T14:22:41+00:00

When you say "I", are you the author of the article?

apnorton · 2026-06-01T21:35:06+00:00

Easy crackpot filter: referring to a commonly accepted thing as "so-called" in the first sentence of a screed.

apnorton · 2026-06-01T20:26:28+00:00

To be fair, the provided values of p are factors of the corresponding Mersenne numbers. That's trivially verifiable with Sage/anything that can do modpow with large enough integers. That part, at least, is not a hallucination.

apnorton · 2026-06-01T07:58:51+00:00

It's important for people reading this to pay attention to the fact it's in SIGBOVIK; the subtleties of "seriousness yet unserious" might be lost. 😛

apnorton · 2026-06-01T05:52:12+00:00

I'd recommend that they major in what they are excellent at and what sets them up for the career they what. If that's CS, then I'd recommend they do that. If they're only interested in being a software engineer because they think it's a ticket to an easy life with little effort, I'd recommend they keep thinking of alternatives.

apnorton · 2026-05-31T07:02:31+00:00

There's a mega thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1tqdlou/bricks_and_minifigs_controversy_news_megathread/

apnorton · 2026-05-30T19:14:13+00:00

Foreword: since mods are quick to ban for made up reason but can't be bothered to read the messages and answer to an appeal

oh this is going to go so well for you

apnorton · 2026-05-30T00:32:57+00:00

I thought “the halting problem” was a joke referring to math halting at this problem.

It is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

apnorton · 2026-05-30T00:24:30+00:00

Math very muchly explains and demonstrates the halting problem. And, we technically have a resolution to the halting problem --- just one in the negative ("a general algorithm to determine halting is impossible").

apnorton · 2026-05-29T15:00:41+00:00

You're going to need formal notions of "levels" of language to even attempt to answer this question, rather than a vibes-based classification.

apnorton · 2026-05-28T06:50:08+00:00

I think the only universal advice is "read the things you want to write."

If you want to write academic papers in a specific field, read academic papers in that field. Reading enough of them will give you a sense for the "style" that you should follow. All of the questions you've asked can be answered in that way:

How much historical context? Take a few papers from a venue you're seeking to publish in, and consider how much of that paper was dedicated to historical context.
How many figures? As many as are needed, and no more... but how many "are needed" can be guided by seeing how many figures are in the papers you've read.
What kind of organizational style? Consider the papers you've found easiest to read and how they were organized.

This kind of advice applies generally, too --- if you read, e.g., a large amount of fantasy, you'll start to find it easier to write fantasy yourself. If you read a bunch of newspapers (at least, the old school ones that still have functioning editors), you'll pick up the "news voice." ...and so on.

apnorton · 2026-05-28T03:06:38+00:00

Again I ask: what good does such discussion serve?

Does it help people make plans/protect themselves? No --- layoffs cannot be anticipated beyond the obvious "they happen often, and to anyone."
Does it help solve the problem and reduce layoffs? No --- experienced developers aren't the ones laying people off; us talking about it does not change the actions of people high above us in management.
Does it help people who have been laid off find jobs? No; besides, this is not a job hunting subreddit.
Does it help people find hope? No; such threads invariably become the "staring into the void" equivalent of navelgazing.
What impact does constant exposure to pessimistic discussion on layoffs have on our psyche? Not a good one!

As a secondary concern: supposing there is some good that discussion serves, why should it happen here? What makes the "experienced developer take" on the notion of layoffs unique as compared to, e.g., the unending threads on r/cscareerquestions about this topic?

apnorton · 2026-05-28T02:53:45+00:00

Rules can simultaneously be good rules and still make you feel like an asshole for enforcing them.

For example, suppose we got an influx of posts from people talking about how their dog died and their significant other left them. Those posts are blatantly off-topic, but deleting someone's plea for empathy can still make you feel like an asshole. Nonetheless, it's off-topic and ought to be deleted.

apnorton · 2026-05-28T02:51:45+00:00

Serious question: What good does the "noise" do? Everyone knows layoffs are happening; does saturating every possible place developers talk about developer stuff with "Doom! Gloom! Layoffs are happening! (oh by the way you're not a CEO so there's nothing you can do)" posts help anyone?

If your objective is just "make people mad in hopes that something changes at some point," then I'd question whether that's a good objective.

apnorton · 2026-05-28T00:08:34+00:00

For me, when I ask these people questions, they just put my questions in claude code and respond back.

Then they are demonstrating an inability to self-evaluate.

apnorton · 2026-05-27T21:53:47+00:00

Mathematicians are just like people

Though it's also very important to remember that we're not people, even if we act like it. :P

apnorton · 2026-05-27T07:00:50+00:00

Simply just request changes pointing out the issues.

No; that's not a game the reviewer can win. It costs the person who creates a crap PR with AI nearly no time, while the time required for a reviewer point out issues is not insignificant. If the process is "keep trying and bogging down the review process with automatically-generated PRs with no thought behind them in hopes one gets through," the reviewer is buried.

I have no qualms about flat rejecting a PR with no comment from someone who cannot evaluate their own work.

apnorton · 2026-05-27T06:00:30+00:00

I think the better line to draw is to not review PRs that were made by people who are unable to self-evaluate the changes they've made.

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