‘There is a confirmation bias at work here: every developer who has experienced such a remarkable outcome is delighted to share it. It helps to contribute to a mass (human) hallucination that computers really are capable of anything, and really are taking over the world.”

This is survivorship bias, a form of sample bias.

Confirmation bias is a form of motivated reasoning where you search for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs.

Tools don’t have rights. Neither do silicon, sandwiches, or centimeters.

In the software business, if a product doesn’t do what you want it to do we call that a “defect.” Defects get fixed. Defective products that can’t be fixed are discarded in favor of better ones.

“If it’s truly intelligent…” is an empty condition. And anyway, no one wants intelligence from their tools— or employees. They want gratification.

This article crosses a line for me.

The line is “It’s not necessarily helpful to be clear about lines.” combined with “who the hell are you to tell us how to live, kiddo?” with a little bit of “let’s all silently agree that each human should be defensive and prickly at all times instead of ever being soft and accommodating to their friends and family and colleagues.”

Some will downvote this comment just because I am being trying to be clear about my lines right now, which proves my point. If popularity matters to me, I need to do more smiling and shrugging.

The article is slop. No human ever talks about domestic abuse or heart attacks like that

Are you not entertained??

Apparently not enough to justify the subscription :\

Was anyone using a spreadsheet to drive automation for testing earlier than 1988?

I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple SQA to lean heavily into that, but I’d love to hear of earlier examples.

I know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2_Spreadsheet?wprov=sfla1 existed since '84 and was in use in disparate parts of the company (I hit the printer division in the summer of '88). IBM was still using mainframe tools, including FORTRAN and APL for engineering work, and we were using BASIC for some testing automation as well as stuff written in assembly (bit banging of parallel ports as GPIO).

Automation was used in testing since the beginning, of course. (Earliest vivid example I have is from a 1956 television commercial.)

Spreadsheets certainly existed. We know that.

What I don't have is any example or testimonial from anyone, earlier than 1988, of using a spreadsheet to DRIVE automation used in testing. I would be surprised if I was the first to have thought of it. I can only say that my team asked around Apple and found no one doing this but our team, at that time.

The world seems to be divided between people who assume that things work well until they are proven not to, and the other kind of people, who are known as “responsible adults.”

Responsible adults say that vibe-coding a serious product is a bad idea, because you aren’t capable of recognizing or fixing certain serious problems that commonly arise.

At last, a story about an invasion of delicious aliens!

Yes, I want to see the prompts. Yes.

But I won’t promise to read it, because it’s bad writing.

So maybe it would be better to not use the LLM to draft writing that pretends to be you. That would be easier on everyone who reads.

Instead we live in a world where all of us are reading through a cynical lens.

This comment was written without using any form of AI.

Was this written by an LLM?

> This comment was written without using any form of AI.

That's exactly what ChatGPT would write if it didn't want us to think it wrote that comment!

In this ever-changing world, it pays to delve beneath the surface of a casual claim— if you know what I mean.

For every single post of this type: please stop writing as if you know that any of this works well.

You don’t know! You are experimenting, speculating, and excited to share. That’s fine.

What’s not okay is presenting a false impression that you have deep experience and did sufficient experimentation and that you know the risks and have experienced the problems associated with your wonderful idea. This takes time.

I want to know:

- Caveats - Variations - Descriptions of things that went wrong - Self-critical reflection - Awareness of objections that others will probably have - Comparison with viable alternatives

If you want to credibly say “Don’t do this! Do that!” there is a high bar to meet.

I agree. This is what has worked for the past few weeks and I want to share. Maybe I will regret my life choices. If I'm still doing it next year, that will be something different to say. But I want to try to help and share before I really know. <3