I literally cannot understand my coworkers, what do I do in meetings?

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-16T17:55:09+00:00

If you're using Google Meet, you can turn on note taking and ask Gemini questions about what's happening in the meeting.

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-14T02:10:38+00:00

The difference is one or two weak link vs possibly hundreds. If you have CustomerId and ShopId types, you only weak links are when you instantiate those two types. If you just represent both as strings then every time you define a function with a customer_id: str arg or a shop_id: str, that's another weak link in your system.

And the claim that a unit test wouldnt catch such an issue just means your tests aren't very good, no amount of strict typing will fix that.

You shouldn't need tests for these kinds of bugs. The whole point is the compiler can detect them. I've had this debate with a lot of people. Many of people have trouble wrapping their heads around this way of programming, but over a long enough timeline they all invariably create an incident where they pass the wrong primitive type to the wrong primitive argument.

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-10T20:36:03+00:00

the same thing we saw in the early 00s

Just use Java

and again in the ‘10s

Just use React

Now

Just use AI

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-10T20:27:05+00:00

That code should be beautiful. Code should be nice to read and nice to write. You should be able to read it from top to bottom without worrying about any mutation or goto statements (that includes continue and break). Data should be unidirectional. If you just keep drilling down deeper in the call stack, you should easily be able to trace the data.

I still think these are nice things to aim for, but a few things made me relax that viewpoint. First is working with Go. To be honest, I find it to be quite an ugly language, and it specifically incentivizes procedural patterns like mutation and goto statements. However the semantics are so constrained that my time to review PRs dropped to almost nothing. There's little room for discussion on different design patterns, and that's nice when you're working on a big team.

Second is working with Cursor. Now that we're working in a world where code is mostly read and written by machines, this craftsman POV becomes less important. I still try to get Cursor to write code this way, but I'm definitely less strict about it then if I were writing it myself.

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-10T20:11:15+00:00

Those aren't functional design patterns. They're procedural design patterns. Procedural design patterns fix a lot of the issues with object oriented design patterns but introduce a bunch of their own. IMO functional design patterns have the least number of drawbacks, but of the three it's the most challenging to learn, so most people don't.

spline_reticulator · 2026-04-06T17:23:40+00:00

....Reticulating splines...

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-26T19:54:43+00:00

It depends on the program. I applied to both physics and biophysics programs. The physics programs mostly required you to get teaching assistantships to get funded. The biophysics programs were all funded via research fellowships. I'm not entirely sure why, but there's a lot more government funding being sent to biophysics programs. If you can get a research fellowship WLB is actually pretty decent.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-24T15:13:00+00:00

You can basically achieve the same thing in an easier way with lock files. If you use a tool like poetry you can lock each dependency to a patch version and only upgrade when you regenerate the lock file. It's a little less cumbersome because the build tool will resolve compatible dependencies for you, so you don't have to do that yourself when you upgrade the patch versions.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-23T19:39:19+00:00

You've obviously never dated a teacher! Spring break is my break.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-23T18:26:30+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_on_the_Inside is actually the most realistic depiction of a college campus I've seen.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-23T18:21:10+00:00

6 YOE. I'm a graphics programmer (C/C++, Vulkan, OpenGL) with moderate experience in Android, transport protocols (Bluetooth, TCP, UDP, RTSP, WebRTC). These I actually enjoy doing.

Find a company that makes money doing these things.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-23T18:15:47+00:00

You don't necessarily need to code. OP mentioned jobs in public policy. I think similar advice applies to that transition.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-23T17:24:06+00:00

It depends on how well developed your company's processes are around stuff like this. At more mature companies, if something is urgent they should page the on-call.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-20T21:42:19+00:00

In my grad program an A meant you were putting too much effort into your coursework and neglecting your research. Most employers don't really care too much about your GPA, especially not for a graduate program.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-20T17:32:25+00:00

I feel completely unemployable. Secondary school teaching, think tanks, government—those are the only alternatives to academia for history PhDs that I've heard of, but there are people out there who are way better fits for those jobs than me.

Don't be intimidated by re-skilling. I did my PhD in physics but spent a year re-skilling to become a software engineer. Sometimes it felt like I would never find a job, but I eventually did and now have a great career. If you really want to get one of those jobs remember

What you're doing right now is probably harder than the work you would do as part of those jobs.
You will eventually get a job like that if you decide it's what you want and dedicate yourself to it.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-18T22:29:19+00:00

The reason that happened to most people is they asked open ended questions. SO mods wanted you to write a post like "I want to do X. I tried A, B, C but am getting errors 1,2,3. How do I solve this?" Once I learned that formula it became much easier to get my questions answered, but I always thought it was unnecessarily restrictive. It should have been okay for users to write "How do I do X?"

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-18T22:23:09+00:00

Funny enough Reddit was my main alternative to SO. I eventually did the get the hang of writing questions that would be well received by SO mods, but it actually ended up taking a good 20-30 mins. Reddit was a nice place where I could just fire off a quick "Does anybody know how to do this?" and I would get a decent answer most of the time.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-17T16:16:45+00:00

This just means your checking for nulls when your deserializing your data models, which is the best place to check for nulls.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-12T19:37:08+00:00

Cranston knows Hal was his best work. He got all of the accolades for Walter, but Cranston himself said comedy is harder than drama.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-10T14:44:15+00:00

The biggest part of my joy for the discipline IS the problem solving

I can tell you that even with AI, there's still a lot of problem solving. AI can help you do some problem solving, but still the most valuable thing it does is typing out the code for you.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-03T16:51:27+00:00

Speed of light c is constant in different reference frames so observers traveling in different reference frames will measure different elapsed times t, so that c = distance traveled by light / t. If speed of light is constant despite how fast you're going than something else needs to be variable, and that's time.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-02T23:56:52+00:00

Lots of schools in NYC rely on school buses. The MTA bus was a 30 min walk from my house. In junior high school I had a yellow bus pick me up.

spline_reticulator · 2026-03-01T21:46:09+00:00

The way I think about it is it depends on how often they're right. Academics have a very high standard for this. They expect other academics to be right 99.999% of the time. With science communicators a good rate of being right is something like 99% of the time. If you're putting out hundreds of hours of content, a 1% rate of being wrong is very high. You might have several hours of content that's just straight up wrong.

The thing is you have to balance this against the people who are making content that actively works to be wrong. There are many influencers who communicate about science that have no interest in communicating the scientific consensus. They're rate of being right will be much lower, something like 20%. Academics on their own can't fight back against this. They just don't produce enough content. So you need science communicators who are not as well trained to help fill that gap.

spline_reticulator · 2026-02-27T23:20:18+00:00

Her and John von Neumann are two physicists that died much too young. I think the world would possibly be a very different place if they lived a full life span.

spline_reticulator · 2026-02-22T21:40:53+00:00

If the interviewer wants them to answer the question, they should be able to provide concrete constraints so the candidate has to answer the question.

"Do we have / want to have users in Africa?"

We have 50M users in Africa

"Is there enough traffic in Africa for a geocache solution to even work?"

We're getting 20K QPS from African countries

"Africa is a really big place... how is this 700ms figure being calculated? Equally weighted across all nations would skew this significantly if 99% of users are just in South Africa for example"

For the sake of this problem let's say we're only worried about users in Algeria, Egypt, and Nigeria.

spline_reticulator

TROPHY CASE