Link Round Up: Word Puzzles and Software
Dispatches from the world of daily puzzles
I already link to Bracket City, a daily word puzzle, from my links page. But I haven’t yet linked to the Bracket City Dispatch, the newsletter that for some reason hasn’t moved over to The Atlantic with its namesake game. It’s an interesting word-of-the-day newsletter. I’d really love to find something to replace the Paul McFedries’ old Word Spy newsletter, which focused on neologisms, but for now, this will do.
Speaking of daily puzzles, I recently discovered Doople, in which players find pairs of words that link together to build a chain. It’s a lot like Puzzmo’s Circuits, which came out just a month or two ago and uses the same core puzzle concept with a more variable structure.
They don’t make it (software) like they used to
I have seen a bunch of good essays and blog posts from technologists trying to grapple with the weaknesses of LLMs without sliding into facile dismissal or doomerism. One that really helped me with my own thinking on the matter is Why your boss isn’t worried about AI by Boyd Kane, which does a good job breaking down key ways LLMs don’t work the way software typically does. It’s hard to emphasize enough how important determinism is for programming, and the way LLMs rip away that assumption (possibly irrevocably so) is extraordinarily disorienting. But, as this piece lays out, that’s not the only assumption being broken.
The Great Software Quality Collapse: I look at this as a kind of companion piece to Boyd Kane’s essay. Even traditional, non-LLM software is going through a crisis of quality. It would be very difficult to argue that commercial software hasn’t become a profligate resource waster. The headline example in this essay, the MacOS calculator app leaking 32GB of memory, is a grievous example that should be a wake-up call for the industry. Not because of its cost—for better or worse, memory is cheap these days—but because of what it says about how the industry is failing to do quality work. Wasting 32GB of memory, especially for an app as simple as a desktop calculator, is hard, and actually shipping such an enormous flaw should make everyone think twice about how risky software is.
No seriously, they don’t make it like they used to
This charming little training film illustrates the way people thought about bringing computer technology into the enterprise almost 50 years ago. One of the bitterest ironies in the state of computing today is that there are still plenty of corners of the business world that could still benefit from adopting very basic information technology, but that’s not where the money is right now.