Post #4502676
2026-08-11 00:08 UTC
What's bugging me right now is that I have a rhetorical strategy of minimal conflict. I'm not pathologically conflict-averse, I will have the fight that needs to be had, but I will try to avoid big, heavy issues in a technical context, because it's not really possible to win on those issues; consensus is won by inches, and trying to win in a big ideological debate is a detour of several miles. And this makes those massive, unwinnable debates a hard requirement.
Replies (1)
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@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-08-11 00:11
But today, in an LLM debate, we say "it makes the defect rate unpredictable". But then the pushback comes back: "it's OK, we'll just add a little process fix. We'll do some code review. We are all Very Careful Engineers around here, it'll be fine." With other tools, we could do a little work, point at a metric or two and maybe find a useful middle ground. But now we just have to look them in the eye and say: no you aren't. You were never careful enough, before. *We* were never careful enough.