What I didn’t like about this series of books was choosing “garbage collection” as umbrella term for both tracing GC and reference counting, without verifying if programming community would agree with that, which turned out they didn’t.
I’ve seen a lot of threads here and on reddit where people were arguing about terminology purely because of this book alone.
By that definition, C++ code has garbage collection if it uses std::shared_ptr, going against widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones.
“Automatic Memory Management” is a lot more suitable description to what programmers have to do to manage memory; it is now in the title but still hasn’t become the primary term.
Because the most important parts of the expertise are coming from their internal "world model" and are inseparable from it.
An average unaware person believes that anything can be put in words and once the words are said, they mean to reader what the sayer meant, and the only difficulty could come from not knowing the words or mistaking ambiguities. The request to take a dev and "communicate" their expertise to another is based on this belief. And because this belief is wrong, the attempt to communicate expertise never fully succeeds.
Factual knowledge can be transferred via words well, that's why there is always at least partial success at communicating expertise. But solidified interconnected world model of what all your knowledge adds up to, cannot. AI can blow you out of the water at knowing more facts, but it doesn't yet utilize it in a way that allows surprisingly often having surprisingly correct insights into what more knowledge probably is. That mysterious ability to be right more often is coming out of "world model", that is what "expertise" is. That part cannot be communicated, one can only help others acquire the same expertise.
Communicating expertise is a hint where to go and what to learn, the reader still needs to put effort to internalize it and they need to have the right project that provides the opportunity to learn what needs to be learnt. It is not an act of transfer.
macOS and Windows both used to allow running arbitrary binaries from a web page. Linux GUI users get away purely because it’s unpopular target for as scammers, once naive grandmas and 12-year olds start using it, I’m sure there will be comparable amount of hurdle to just give another person a binary.
What they think they see is actually a short snapshot of North Korean life with a red circle, a red arrow and a red caption text that says "North Korean propaganda here!!! -->", carefully drawn by their local propaganda.
Sanity check: I present you a country X, whose language you don't speak, and whose news you don't read day to day. I show you their politician saying something. Can you tell if that was propaganda? Substitute X from "North Korea" to a country you know nothing about and see how the answer changes.
This is indeed interesting because rotating 2D screen is not necessarily the same type of brain processing as experiencing things fly around you. Even VR is not necessarily the same, because knowing you're safe may be different from taking the situation seriously. Could be same, could be completely different.
But the first massively popular 3D games started end of 90s which means Alzheimer cases for them will pop up only around 2060 or later (average onset year 75 minus being 15 years kid during 90s).
Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful.
I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his kingship.
I can speak for myself: when I ask if the shiny side reflects the heat better, I don't mean to also ask if the difference is significant. It's really just curiosity, whether my school physics intuition holds up or lies to me, that's all.
So, "technically yes" is good enough answer for me.
I personally reported that around time when Mac OS X 10.9 (first non-cat) came out and immediately saw it marked as duplicate. So at least 13 years and counting.
Imagine being a person like me who has always been expressing himself like that. Using em dash, too.
LLMs didn’t randomly invent their own unique style, they learned it from books. This is just how people write when they get slightly more literate than nowadays texting-era kids.
And these suspicions are in vain even if happen to be right this one time. LLMs are champions of copying styles, there is no problem asking one to slap Gen Z slang all over and finish the post with the phrase “I literally can’t! <sad-smiley>”. “Detecting LLMs” doesn’t get you ahead of LLMs, it only gets you ahead of the person using them. Why not appreciate example of concise and on-point self-expression and focus on usefulness of content?
Agree, to me this "research" is like proving grocery stores are vulnerable to theft by sending students to shoplift. If review process guaranteed that vulnerabilities can't pass, wouldn't that mean that the current kernel should be pristinely devoid of them?
Having created 100 of nano-sized projects does not add up to having developed and maintained one large code base.
Coding agents are eating up programming from the lowest end, starting from pressing button on the keyboard to type the code in: completion was literally their first application. I don't think it will go all the way to the top, though, the essential part of the profession will remain until true AGI.
Metaphorically, think how integrated chips didn't replace electrical engineering, just changed which production tools and components engineers deal with and how.
Obviously we all are adapting to changes, but if he or someone are panicking about being behind, that can only be because they've never been in too deep.
I feel like many people in the comments aren't aware that Karpathy is an ML scientist for whom programming is a complementary skill, not a profession. The only reason he came up with "vibe coding" is because maximum complexity of his hobby projects made it seem believable. Maybe take his opinions about fate of programming with a grain of salt.
A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist. I wonder what whoever produced such "Systems Design" would have to say to customers now.
I am really surprised how well AI excuse works, most journalists just take CEO words as is, and make no effort to assess: is that even credible?
Obviously layoffs correlate with AI age, but it's most definitely not AI replacing jobs, not yet. Even in 2025 stories about a job fully taken by AI need to be scraped for, and it's almost always about non-SWE jobs. And in 2023, when the first layoffs already started, models sucked and none of the existing tools and agents even existed yet! But if you search for example for headcount growth in India/Mexico, the numbers can only be described as "booming".
I don't know what exactly is going on, but it's pretty obvious the companies are moving offshore or simply doing less work, and for some reason need to lie about why.
The best and cheapest is open-air, where voices fly into the sky and never return, it would take like a thousand of people before it stops being enough.
Second best are large open windows, missing walls (porch/balcony) or multiple rooms.
Beyond that I don't think there can be a solution without some sort of room soundproofing, which is usually no-go for rented spaces and private houses. The closest one can get is to maximize soft surfaces (rugs, curtains esp. along walls).
Speaking of which, I wish bars, restaurants and other venues were required to place echo reducers on the ceiling, such simple and cheap measure would dramatically improve ability to talk there when they're full.
Sometimes I think the way CRDT research formulates the problem, itself obstructs evolution of local-first.
That obsession with Google Docs-like collaborative real-time text editing, a pretty marginal use case, derails the progress from where local-first apps really need it:
- offline-enabled, rather than realtime/collaborated
- branching/undoing/rebasing, rather than combining edits/messages
- help me create conflict-aware user workflows, rather than pursue conflict-free/auto-converging magic
- embeddable database that syncs, not algorithms or data types
CRDT research gives us `/usr/bin/merge` when local-first apps actually need `/usr/bin/git`. I don't care much how good the merge algorithm is, I need what calls it.
Locals have always been allowed to quit the new job on day 1, and it has never been a crisis for employers.
A company that is confident it is offering worthy salary and career should have no extra reason to worry a foreign worker will quit during first week, than that a local worker would do the same thing.
The only difference a fee would make under such conditions is that locals become cheaper to hire, which is the point.
First of all, misleading title? It says that tech debt must be treated as regular business tasks when needed, not denies its existence.
> Throughout my career, I’ve been an engineer complaining about tech debt, a manager prioritizing (and deprioritizing) addressing tech debt, and a product manager, where I assume I primarily inspire the creation of new tech debt.
It takes staying on a codebase that has been mismanaged for 5-7 years to know from experience what tech debt really does. Author's CV doesn't show that: he's been 1st employee of a startup, 2nd employee, a PM, and intern i.e. most of the time it was something made from scratch and lasted 1-3 years. That's not enough to see an old project rot. In fact, my first thought while reading was "This post was written by a manager", and yup, by a PM.
> Sometimes people want to schedule tech debt in, saying things like “20% of each sprint should be dedicated to tech debt” or allocating a debt fix-it week
The reason is that the industry is full of managers who ignore tech debt entirely and will prioritize it never. All over the place there people who have never seen the tech but will micromanage engineers, preventing doing anything without immediate "customer impact" or "profit impact". It is unfortunately common for a manager to come in, mismanage for 1-2 years, reap rewards for "quick delivery", and leave without seeing damage ripples starting 3-5 years later. Businesses have virtually no measures to prevent this.
Allocating fixed 10-20% is a consensus that protects the team from manager changes. You may understand why something is a systemic problem that has long-term or unpredictable damage, but the next guy doesn't have to. If this was a standard practice which managers don't dare challenge, like code reviews, software engineering would be relieved from proudly incompetent "business focused" managers who run projects downhill. It is either this, or the other popular alternative of working without a manager (search it, there is a lot of advocacy for that).
Just like code reviews are safely net against potential crazy changes esp. from newcomers, fixed time could be a safety net against short-sighted management.
> Don’t treat tech debt as separate from feature work
We understand that, we're actually already at the next step: how do we as engineers operate in environment, where too many managers can't understand why tech debt should have same priority as feature work.
I’ve seen a lot of threads here and on reddit where people were arguing about terminology purely because of this book alone.
By that definition, C++ code has garbage collection if it uses std::shared_ptr, going against widespread common usage of the term “garbage collected programming language” which specifically contrasts manual languages like C++ or Rust against garbage collected ones.
“Automatic Memory Management” is a lot more suitable description to what programmers have to do to manage memory; it is now in the title but still hasn’t become the primary term.