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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2025

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  • I started using it as an alternative to Octave/Matlab and Perl. Python is better at general programming than Octave/Matlab, and better syntax than Perl (IMO) while being almost as easy to do the same stuff I was using Perl for. It’s very good for quickly writing small scripts. Issues can arise on large projects/teams because of stuff like type safety, and it also has issues with performance.


  • I think compose files are usually pinned to a version, or use a .env file that needs to be changed to update to a new version.

    I personally don’t update very often; usually not until I’m forced to for some reason. I find that just checking the documentation for any upgrade/migration guides, and doing it manually is sufficient. I don’t expose this kind of stuff publicly; if I did, I’d probably update regularly.


  • I’ve had “success” with using them for small one-off projects where I don’t care too much about correctness, efficiency, or maintainability. I’ve tried using various AI tools (Copilot, Cursor agents, etc) for more serious projects where I do care about those things, and it was counter-productive (as studies have shown).

    Hmm, I was curious if ChatGPT still gives inefficient code when asking it to write quicksort in Python, and it still does:

    def quicksort(arr):
        if len(arr) <= 1:  # Base case
            return arr
        pivot = arr[len(arr) // 2]  # Choose middle element as pivot
        left = [x for x in arr if x < pivot]   # Elements less than pivot
        middle = [x for x in arr if x == pivot] # Elements equal to pivot
        right = [x for x in arr if x > pivot]  # Elements greater than pivot
        return quicksort(left) + middle + quicksort(right)
    

    That’s not really quicksort. I believe that has a memory complexity of O(n log n) on the average case, and O(n^2) for the worst case. If AI does stuff like this on basic, well-known algorithms, it’s likely going to do inefficient or wrong stuff in other places. If it’s writing something someone is not familiar with, they may not catch the problems/errors. If it’s writing something someone is familiar with, it’s likely faster for them to write it themselves rather than carefully review the code it generates.




  • People have different levels of “nerves” as others, and it kind of sounds like you may filtering out applicants on an arbitrary metric (how nervous a person may be in an interview). Don’t have enough information about your process to say for sure (obviously), but it may be something to think about. Interviews can be very high-stakes for some people (such as “I may become homeless”), and not for others (“my parents are rich”). After hired, it’s not necessarily as high-staked, and toy problems aren’t what SEs work on day-to-day.