Goats sure are neat

Responsibility lies with “The Democrats” (some sort of far away secret group that I can’t influence) and not with any American. If those Democrats can’t give me my perfect candidate, then I’ll just give up and let the fascists win. Also, I can’t figure out why they won’t do this–my ideal liberal candidate would appeal to the majority of Americans!

Wow! That is a big bean!

Not an answer to your question, but I thought this was a nice article for getting some basic grounding on the new AI stuff: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/

Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work…

The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.

An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”

Actual UML-according-to-some-books is old and unpopular now. I think C4 is taking its place, in that I’ve seen architect-types ask for it. More generally, I really like PlantUML and the prettier-looking Mermaid which both allow me to code diagrams using a text document.

Yeah, I agree: academia gets people expecting to go, “give me 2x Visitor Pattern, then 1 Builder Pattern, then as many Divide and Conquers as you need to reach the end”. It can be nice to have a name for things, but most of the time I’m asking for, “see how the setup, actual work, and cleanup are nicely divided up? Do like that.” Or, “let’s put all the related endpoints in the same file.”

• talks loudly in an open office when he take phone calls

That one’s my least favorite. Might as well just grab me by the shoulders and shout your conversation in my face for how little work I’m getting done.

As an undergraduate, I wondered how it was possible to write code professionally, because I could only barely fit the semester-long programming assignment in my head. When I asked my professor about it, I got an independent study credit to learn about UML.

UML (as a representative example of thoughtful documentation) is a partial answer. But actually a much larger part is that with practice I can hold a lot more code in my head. Today, that semester project seems trivial and if I see a stack trace I can tell you how to fix the bug that caused that exception to get thrown.

As a senior dev, I’d answer “how do you remember what your code does?” with

1. As you work, you get better at just remembering
2. As you find patterns and follow them, you’ll have less to remember (I bet I know what the downloadUnpackUpdate() method does!)
3. As you do the first two, you’ll learn to recognize when comments are helpful

It’d be way less offensive if it was just present as an option, instead of dancing around flashing at me