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swiftcoder 3 days ago

Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.

Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).

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neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

What is managing legal and PR risk if not professional?

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swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent [-]

corporate != professional. Plenty of professionals who do not work in those highly risk-averse corporate roles

What's the actual risk here? I guess he could sue Andrew for slander, and then prove in court that his management style doesn't suck, and his code is not slop...

	▲	neutronicus 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The risk here is that a deep-pocketed entity elects to forgo funding Zig development because they don’t want to sign up for this level of dirty laundry airing if things go poorly.
	▲	reinitctxoffset 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Professionals worry, stay late at the office, and work hard. They care a great deal about the outcome, they care a great deal about the craft, they are fanatical about their responsibilities. They tend to be willing to increase their accountability faster than their compensation. They sometimes argue, use profanity, or otherwise communicate emphatically, that is the register of communication when something critical is on the line. The best computer hackers and other technologists through the years were very often outspoken, plain spoken, and did not suffer fools gladly. In their own way everyone from Djiksta to Jobs to Gabriel to Carmack to Linus to Nagggum to jwz to Hotz, too many to count. It's the same in law offices, hospitals, and forward operating bases in any military that ever won a war. It's the same on a construction site or in Mission Control in Houston. This venomous pretense of decorum performed by people who ruthlessly optimize to minimize their accountability while maximizing their compensation subject to no scruples. That's not being professional that's being a leisure suit con man. It is en vogue at the moment precisely because we are in an extreme low integrity regime.

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dom96 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Calling someone’s code “slop” surely isn’t professional nor courteous.

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neutronicus 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nor is polemic against financiers.

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grayhatter 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it is.

If I call your code slop, I'm being professional and courteous.

The truth doesn't have a ethical value. Me calling your code slop might feel disrespectful, but it's less disrespectful than trying to pass slop off for your coworkers (or users) to use and deal with.

Lying to someone, and allowing someone who's supposedly your friend to ship slop is more disrespectful. If I wrote shitty code, and my friend didn't stop me, and I find out later he knew it was shitty code... that would be very hard on our friendship.

Unless you meant it's a lie to call it slop code. A lie would be disrespectful, but then again, we both know you didn't say that because it's not a lie.

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dom96 a day ago | parent [-]

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional.

If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

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grayhatter a day ago | parent [-]

> If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

You and I must have had very different interactions with the types of people who happily emit slop. For the people I've met who've suggested slop; they don't care about quality, and it has exclusively been a waste of time trying to explain why quality is important.

Calling someone's work slop, if they're willing to engage, might be disrespectful, I agree! But calling someone code/commit slop when they don't give a shit about the quality of their code (as evidenced by the commits they're willing to put their name on) is simply a description of reality. Willingness to engage is shockingly important. I can't think of a more vague response than answering "I don't know why the code is like that, the LLM did it".

I'd also like to assert: giving out slop to other people is more disrespectful, and less professional (professionals don't suggest low quality options). I'm much rather you try to insult my code, than waste my time trying to trick me into accepting low quality work.

And then, speaking personally. I would feel the most disrespected, if you were willing to call my code slop when speaking privately. But wouldn't call it slop to me, or publicly. It's not disrespectful to have a candid conversation; even if it's uncomfortable because someone has different and strong opinions than I do. I'm a big boy, I'm able to handle the honest evaluation of my work from another person without it being instantly being disrespectful to me, just because they used a word I didn't like.

If they were lying, that would be disrespectful.

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dom96 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, the creator of Bun is certainly someone that deserves professionalism.

But even random people you get on GitHub sending you PRs. You shouldn't reject them with "this code is slop". At least say "Cannot accept this. The code quality isn't great" or something to that effect.

But the point is: dismissing real people who are doing real work and spending a lot of effort on something with "that's slop" is very unprofessional.

You are just coming up with scenarios that don't really apply to what happened in this blog post.

	▲	grayhatter 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Well, the creator of Bun is certainly someone that deserves professionalism. I disagree. (Funny that, different people with different values have different perspectives on acceptable behavior?) > You are just coming up with scenarios that don't really apply to what happened in this blog post. Counterpoint; I'm actually sharing a perspective because I thought it would be interesting or useful to consider different opinions. We're all just pattern matching; you see one form of indifference as offensive, I see a completely different set of actions as the root cause for the offense. We all have our own rules for what follows and breaks the implicit social contract we've each invented independently. These rules are allowed to differ. You feel like someone insulting your code is more disrespectful, I feel like someone wasting my time is more disrespectful. If you'd like to assert I'm wrong, I'm equally happy to assert you're an idiot (in case it's not abundantly obvious, I don't think you're an idiot, this is an example of how I don't care about "insults") > But the point is: dismissing real people who are doing real work and spending a lot of effort on something with "that's slop" is very unprofessional. I might agree with parts of this, but fundamentally, LLM produced code does not count as real work. No, reviewing it doesn't count, because 1) it's harder to do right 2) no one does it correctly 3) if reviewing actually took more effort than no one would use LLMs.

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melodyogonna 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, I can't think of other people more qualified to know when a Zig code is slop.