Martijn Faassen

The art of refactoring early and often is still as valuable as before, and as underutilized as before. Even though LLM agents make aggressive refactoring easier than ever, not everyone can wield this tool.

Refactoring requires conceptual understanding of the code, the problem, and experience with structuring and abstractions. LLMs *can* let you run ahead of human understanding, but only a little bit.

Too much, and you fly into the wall of jello faster than ever before, and within the wall of jello everyyythingggg issss slooowwww and diffffficult

#programming #llm

A lot of my talks have in general been about projects I've done. Sometimes to illustrate ideas or concepts. I still do projects, but I've talked about them less. Maybe I should just submit a talk about something I think instead.

I used to speak at many conferences.

I think I only gave a single conference talk two years ago, and that was because I was encouraged to so by my client. And I think the last time before that was almost 10 years ago.

While COVID-19 didn't help, I don't think that's the main explanation I stopped doing so.

I did attend various conferences; JS ones, in particular React, Rust conferences, an XML conference. I think it's because I went adrift from Python, perhaps. And because conferences take a lot out of me, perhaps.

(I still do talk a lot)

A while ago I pushed poems I wrote, as a human, about AI. Because we feel things about this, and I feel things about it, and poetry is one way to express and communicate. https://hyperstate.org/ephemeral_minds.html

#poetry

I was on a team some years back where we did retros. They were high trust, we showed some of who we were and our vulnerabilities. Overall they helped quite a bit. I made friends on the team.

I sometimes wonder whether high trust retros could have helped on other teams where things didn't work out so well. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg. Showing vulnerability only works if you can trust each other. If there are cliques or if someone is going to be dishonest, for instance, could a retro have helped?

I wouldn't say it definitely wouldn't help - dishonesty has a cause, after all. But it's also a real risk for those participating who mean well.

I do sometimes recite poetry on discord to a small group of people. That's a form of public speaking I guess. Initially I was very nervous. People often like how I recite and my voice, which is a curious experience for me.

I recently learned there's this technique in modeling called "neural surrogates". You can basically take an incredibly slow mathematical model, feed its output into a type of neural network, and the neural network learns how to mimic the behavior (and possibly even generalize it). You can then run this neural network efficiently on a GPU and get orders of magnitude speedups. With FNO, a particular technique, you can even switch to a higher resolution than the original training data.

That's pretty neat stuff. I suspect there are all kinds of unexpected application domains lurking in there too.