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2023
3185

NP-complete isn't always hard

A common assumption I see on the ‘net is that NP-complete problems are impossible to solve. I recently read that dependency management in Python is hard because package resolution is NP-complete. This is true in principle, but the reality is more complicated. When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about…

3186

CheatGPT

This week I stepped out of one world and landed in another. It started while I was marking assignments in a few of my programming courses.The quality of the code I was reading was amazing! My students were doing the sorts of things that my open source peers do:

3193

Creation happens in silence

It’s Saturday, and I’m enjoying the last sunlight for the day in my studio. The house is silent now; my family is taking a nap downstairs. And I’m here, writing, in silence. There’s a thought that kept coming in the last few weeks. As painful as it is, any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external…

3200

Writing an engineering strategy

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just…