Welcome to the ABEND dump #28!
Don't know what is an "ABEND dump"?! I'm glad you asked.
You can check the previous ABEND dump here:
This issue is brought to you by the letter "A": AI, agency, Apollo, and a bit of absurd metal. Let's go!
Quality Software
Critics of AI call anything made with it slop. I think this is too easy. You can write shitty code, broken interfaces and buggy functions without help from a machine. Humans did all that first. The problem is AI does it faster.
I don't like Twitter X for posts like that, however, the post is strong! This is so true!
The tool didn't invent slop, it just gave slop a wider distribution. The bar for quality was never guaranteed, and now it's on us to hold it, more deliberately than ever.
On acting with agency
One more take I couldn't agree more:
I built an LLM from scratch
This video is very instructive if you wanna know how an LLM is working under the hood. All condensed in 51 minutes. Highly recommended!
If you're like me, and you learn better by seeing the thing being built rather than by reading abstract diagrams, this is the one to watch.
Margaret Hamilton left us
If you ever doubted that software engineering is engineering, remember her name. Hamilton led the team that wrote the Apollo guidance software, and it was her work that helped land humans on the Moon -- and, famously, her error-handling decisions that saved the Apollo 11 landing in the final seconds. She also coined the term "software engineering" when it wasn't even taken seriously as a discipline.
We lost a giant. May her legacy remind us that software is not a detail; it's the thing that makes the hardware do something meaningful. RIP
Manowar of Steel - Kotlin
I stumbled upon this parody metal band, thanks to Spotify's recommendation. It seems like they have a programmer in the band XD
They sing in English, mostly, but also have songs in other languages, such as German and Italian. If you like the genre, and parody, it's so worthy listening!
I won't spoil the rest of the catalog -- dig in, there's plenty of nerd humor to go around.
Thanks for reading the ABEND dump! Same tools, same slop risk, same human responsibility -- the difference is what we do with them. Subscribe and let's keep shipping quality software while headbanging to Kotlin.
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