Programming Laws Tier list

[Sponsor] Good morning! And in case we don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good coffee! → ssh terminal.shop [Description] The number 4 is holding up the internet, HTTPS might be bad design, PHP is cooked, and Casey is addicted to Pokémon. The crew also ranks programming's most famous laws, from Conway and Brooks to Goodhart and Hofstadter, before inventing a few laws of their own. [Hosts/Guests] Prime: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/theprimeagen Teej: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/teej-dv Trash: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/trash Casey: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/cmuratori [Partners] Linear: https://trm.sh/linear Sentry: https://trm.sh/sentry [Socials] x.com/thestanduppod instagram.com/thestanduppod tiktok.com/@thestanduppod facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573286173150 [Other Places to find us] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01A062kejnXFkJE01bjN5J RSS: thestanduppod.com/feed.xml Clips: @TheStandupPodClips Website: thestanduppod.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's a blocker. Everybody, we do have a blocker. The blocker is number four. I've made a celebratory image for this.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  Prime. That's actually such-

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. What is the number four, Casey? Can you guess why the number four is holding up all modern internet?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Uh, no, absolutely not. I mean, you said something obliquely before it started about a certificate, so I'm assuming that it has something to do with like a root chain of trust or something like this, but I have not read anything about this.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so it sounds like you're familiar with certificate authorities, correct?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Or at least the concept. For those that don't know what a certificate authority is, effectively, when you're talking to another machine, how do you know that you're actually talking to the, another machine? Because there's a bunch of machines between you and any other machine. That is how the internet works. That's why Kamala Harris, in fact... Oh my gosh, I can't believe I have too many of these open. That really ruins the flow of this all. This is why she says-

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Up here in this cloud.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  It's in the clouds, okay? It's in the clouds above us.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  It's one of my favorite clips, yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  I know, I had it all ready for this exact thing. So anyways, Casey, it does turn out that one of the root, uh, or one of the intermediate authorities... So remember, a root authority does not sign every single one. They also trust on intermediate authorities as well. Okay, so it turns out that there is a company called eMudra, which is a, uh, India-based company that is gonna be one of these intermediate signing authorities. Well, they released 24 new certificates of various qualities like RSA, uh, 496, and then a couple one, and then one of them was a P382 elliptical curve signing authority. And this P382 signing, uh, authority,

• 1:51Speaker 00

  it turns out all the big random primes that they chose as their key were, well, in fact, not primes, as you can see right here, and were in fact really small, including four.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Just the number four. It's supposed to be a unique set of 382 bytes worth of, um...

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Technically, prime, technically, prime. It is still unique. I mean, four is an integer in the range.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Of the 48 bytes, 47 of them are in fact zero. And so that is, uh, not very good, so you can break them immediately. And what this means is that when you go on your browser and you type something, Google right away goes, "Oh, you can't do that. This thing's been hacked. It's really, really bad." But if I jump over here into my beautiful terminal and I hit, uh,

• 2:44Speaker 00

  curl, I think this might be the one. I just went through somebody doing a man in the- This is a man in the middle attack, where someone is actually tricking my curl into thinking that I connected to wehavaproblem.com, but I didn't. That's not, that's not what just happened there. They've set up their own intermediate attack. And so it turns out that the signing, or signing authority, uh, you can now, on pretty much all embedded devices, in which I just showed you right here, this person just rooted their smart home speaker now is playing on the system, you can now say, well, you can say the most important thing we've all wanted to say. I'm the Google now.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fine. Google meme, dude.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Thank you. I've been, I've been on it all morning making tweets.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I don't know if you know this. That's my job. I've been making tweets non-stop. Yeah. HTTPS, I mean, or I should just say like, the, the whole like way that they decided to do that certificate authority stuff is, is really bad. I mean, I've said this many times before. You can go back on my Twitter like a decade and find me complaining about how bad their security design was on that.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Can I interrupt for a quick second?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Okay, honey. You're looking a little low today. You can use some terminal coffee. All-natural coffee beans from the upper slopes of Brazil. No artificial sweeteners.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  What the SSH are you talking about? Who are you talking to?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Roasted fresh in New Jersey. Only available in the terminal.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Okay, so from my perspective, the fact that you can't know two-

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Legendary network programmer? Oh, I thought that's what you were gonna say.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  TJ, this is not the intro. You're not allowed to interrupt yet, okay?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, sorry. My apologies.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  How to tell that two machines are actually talking to each other? What would be a better approach than a third party that says, "I have signed off on this public key, in fact, being the correct one. What you're doing and what you're using right now is good." I don't actually know how this problem could be solved alternatively. Casey, would you mind giving us maybe like a three-minute breakdown of an alternative solution? I've never, I have no idea.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I mean, just to be clear, it's not so much that there is an alternative solution conceptually, meaning that like, "Oh, there's this other thing that you would do," right? It's more that they did not put any like checks into the system, right? So the, the way that they decided to do it was it's just like, "Well, we're just gonna have certificates and we issue them, and the browser gives you basically like this sort of root trust, uh, certificate chain that everything has to somehow sign back, you know, sign back to eventually, and that's how we're going to validate everything." So the model is basically, someone has to catch, someone in probably, uh, you know, security research,

• 5:44Speaker 01

  has to catch the fraud first, and then it has to be deployed out as some kind of a patch. Like, that, that was the only model that they had for how, you know, uh, mistakes or theft or other kinds of things that might happen and, you know, are easily predictable and have happened. Um, that's the only way that they have to fix them. In my mind, you should have done at least two other things that they did not do. So number one is that the site that you're trying to connect to... So if you think about what happens when you have a web connect, uh, there's multiple authorities you're actually going to, right? You can think of it that way. One authority you're going to is the person who says what actual IP address

• 6:29Speaker 01

  that name that you're asking for is going to resolve to, right? So that's one thing. Then another one is asking, you know, to see a signature that says, "Oh, here is like some chain of trust that I can tie back to the things that are already installed on my machine, the, the root certificate chains that I have on my machine." And so you're kind of doing those two things. So number one is those should have had to have agreed, if that makes sense. Meaning, when a DNS record gets served, it should have also served what it thought the signing authority was. So that you have to hack both the DNS queries, which should have been secured by their own certificate,

• 7:12Speaker 01

  meaning, "I have a root chain of trust to my DNS authority," right? That tells you one of the, you know, it, it basically gives you back one certificate of trust. The other side gives you back its third-party authentication, and if those don't agree, meaning if the thing says the DNS was not the right DNS, if the DNS says the certificate authority was not the right certificate authority, then it's like, "Warning, this is a problem." What we currently have is something that if you hack the certificate authority, you're done. There's no, no one is checking anything, right?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Which is why my curl successfully curled the site it should never have been able to curl.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Doesn't even have to be hacked in this case. They just picked four.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Third thing I would have added, in addition to that, right? So, so one is the one they did add, which is the third-party authentication. Two is the one they didn't add, which is the DNS corroboration. And three is saved authentication. And that is that when you first connect to a site, like the very first time, I cannot believe that we did not do something where it warns you if, if the signature from the next time it gets is not from the same certificate authority. Right? But I've never seen such a warning ever, even when things have changed their certificate. So that is crazy to me that we didn't do that. Because in theory, that should be something that the user goes,

• 8:35Speaker 01

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Let me check the news or something independently to make sure that these people actually did put out a press release that says..." Like, that should have been big news, as we're changing our certificate authority, right?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, "Maybe I just don't log into my bank." Like, I can keep doing other stuff, but I don't have to log into my bank for that.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And some of, and there are some little things they added, like those green certificates. There are certain ones that have like slightly, like, that do a little bit of what I'm saying, but not entirely. So why all that stuff wasn't done? Because all that seems really basic to me and doesn't really, it's, it's not stuff that is... Like I said, it's, it's not conceptually any different from the way that it works now. It's just adding like obvious things you would do, because the, the way they did it was like it almost entirely just relies on just this one... If, if anyone hacks any root chain, you're done. Until a security professional notices. That's just, that can't be right, right? And so, you know, I mean, to their credit, the security professionals do a good job.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  These things have been getting caught fairly early, as far as we know, right? But like, it's not great, right? And, uh, and I feel like, I feel like a lot more care should have been taken, especially by now, they've had decades, uh, to improve upon this. And I just don't feel like, now, I'm not a security professional, so the things I'm saying are just kind of common sense things that I'm wondering why they didn't do. There's something like just a, a, you know, a layperson comes to it and goes like, "What the heck? How come it's doing it?" Maybe they have really good reasons why they don't do those things. I would want to hear them before I believe them. But also, I would imagine if you're a security professional, you probably also have several things I didn't just mention that are more subtle and more interesting that you also should have done that weren't done. So, you know, that's what I would say.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Trash?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I, because I don't really know how else this problem can be solved, but I do like this idea of DNS. But imagine this entire world that we constantly already complain about DNS being a problem. Now you have a secondary DNS being a problem where your certificates don't match. I just feel like DNS would be the bane of all of our existence if that happened.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I mean, but it's still, it already is, so I don't see there being that.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was like, DNS is always the problem.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  I know, but now imagine it has more responsibility.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  That's Prime's Law, isn't it?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  But this is actually.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  DNS is always the problem.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  That's not my law.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  DJ Bernstein actually had a.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Love that band.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Early, yeah, sorry. Had a talk pretty early on where he talks about securing the entire internet long before HTTPS was actually adopted very widely because it was too expensive at the time, right? So a lot of, a lot of people didn't run it on their servers. It was kind of new. This is way, way back. And he actually proposed like, hey, here's what we do. If the DNS record, you just put your elliptical curve right there. And whenever anyone gets a DNS record, you encrypt with that. And so in my opinion, that's like, obviously, like, I was just like, yes, obviously you should do that. So you have a third party that attests so that you can, you know, in case the DNS server was compromised. You have a DNS server which gives you an encryption key.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So that is a secondary form that makes sure that, you know, that, that you can't be intercepted. And like, I feel like that would have been a lot safer than just trusting one thing. At least now you have to hack two things.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  I really, by the way, I just want to throw this out there. This is a very funny tweet. This has to be my favorite tweet.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  Oh my goodness.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  That is a good one.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so good. Fabulous.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  It's very, very, I mean, I know that's not what it looks like, but still it's very funny to think that that's for.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  For.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  All right, so there we go. That is kind of one of the many blockers. Now, word has been told to me that we actually have several blockers. So let me just throw this one over into done. We have Trash's bark.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Now, Casey.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  You want to see it?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  I believe, inspired by your barking.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  We also barked, and I believe we, there's actually a story even behind the shipping of this said bark. Let's see it.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  Is there, is there a story? Maybe, so we have coffee bark. All from William Sonoma.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  How good is that?

• 12:48Speaker 06

  Thank you, Lindsay. This is actually, this is what I was eating before. This is actually delicious. I'm not sure how you're supposed to eat it because it comes in like one.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Probably bite like, one bite at a time is my guess.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  Well, it comes in like this solid sheet. So I assume you're supposed to break it, but I've just been nibbling on the corner like a hamster.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  It's like a giant pop tart.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Oh, you take the smallest bites.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Quick note, Trash.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  I don't know if you guys know this, but I got, my two front teeth are fake. So if I bite it too hard, they will fall out of my mouth. I gotta be careful.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  We found that out already on the podcast. You, you, that was a surprise story. That was more Trash lore that I didn't know that I needed to know.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I gotta be very careful because last time it fell is when I bit like a baguette and they just came flying out my mouth. So I got PTSD from that one. Uh, we got, we got the chocolate bark, hollow, hollow, hollow Z's. Hmm, I don't know what this looks like. Let's see what this looks like. Oh my God, this is cool.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Oh, nice, dude.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  That is super cool.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Dude, the kids are gonna freak at that one, Trash.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  I know. We're gonna, they're gonna love it. And then we got the classic.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  With the, with the dog for some reason.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  With the dogs.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Let's see if it's shaped like a dog.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  With TJ's dad joke dogs in, in effect.

• 14:05Speaker 06

  So this looks like more of your traditional bark. Dude, the Halloween thing is amazing.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  They went the extra mile on that.

• 14:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, uh, I don't know what the story is, but some, some dude Ubered it over, which I think from Lindsay's house, maybe? I don't even know.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Probably because she tried to ship it to you normally and it didn't work.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Yes, so.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  We did, we did order it from Williams and Sonoma. I know that for sure because I saw it on the company card. So I know for a fact. And I knew it was gonna be bark the moment I saw that show up in my inbox.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  So I don't remember quite what the story was, TJ. Do you remember what the story was on shipping?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  It's Casey's story.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  There's another story. There's another story.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Lindsay was trying to ship the bark and that's why there was an Uber Eats individual. That's why Trash had to get manned in the middle. Not because it was four, but because there was actually a, like, could not ship it.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Great.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  To Trash because there was like a heat warning and they just like refused to ship it, saying it will melt the bark if they ship it in this kind of way. And so like, there was a whole situation that ended up Lindsay figured out how to get around and got Trash the bark.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  How did Lindsay even get it? Didn't they have to ship it to Lindsay to begin with?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  She went to William Sonoma, maybe she just went there.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, she might've just went to the old WS.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Oh, very possible because I do have the bag.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 15:30Speaker 06

  I do have the bag. That's actually insane.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's, that's how she did it. That's why she was able to ship it faster than Casey because Casey went the plebeian route.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  And just tried to ship it, which they're just like, can't ship it today. It's hot in the United States.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  And that was unfortunately just never passing.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  The guy was nice, but he made me run all the way down my.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  You know what? You need to get your peppermint bark, global warming.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Sorry, it's never coming. Unhacked to God, nothing we can do.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  You've seen my backyard before, global warming. I mean, it's same backyard. It's changed a lot, okay?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  All the trees is gone, trees is gone.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  The trees are gone, the grass is gone, it's global warming. What can you say?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  All right, so I'm gonna move this over and I'm actually gonna create a quick blocker here, which is WTF, where is my bark? Um, I'm kind of upset about this whole situation going on here.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Prime, quick note, she can't Uber Eats it from her house to your house. There is no Uber Eats driver willing to drive to South Dakota.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  Even near you?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  No, there's no William Sonoma near me and there's no Uber near me. But I still want my bark, okay? I feel, um, I feel a little left out on this whole bark and snack.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  Maybe in December.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Going on.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  All right, before we move on from Trash, I need his help on something real quick. I verify, I was able to verify that at four, I did a very diligent job this time, that at 4:30 specifically, which is the last time that I went, just one of these packs drops.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  Oh, so you know the timer now.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  So this one's at 4:30.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Ooh, that's chaos rising.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know if it's specifically that pack, but a drop will happen and it's just likely that someone left that for you.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna need you to just really quickly tell me if there's anything in here, okay? Because I don't know, like, I don't.

• 17:22Speaker 06

  Let's go.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Okay. All right, let's do this.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  I am so happy that this keeps happening.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  I don't know how to open these things. They still are wicked hard for me to open.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Oh, he is, dude, he pulled it out. He had it, he had it ready to go.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't even have to go, he didn't have to get up.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  My desk is just surrounded by cards.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I would just like to say that the stand-up is willing to buy you guys a pack every week.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  How would you, how do you buy it? How do you buy them?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Prime, we can't make those kind of promises, dude.

• 17:48Speaker 06

  Put the top one on the bottom now. Put the top one on the bottom.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  There you go. Now just show it to your camera. There we go. Let's go.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Okay, nice. Well, you guys match, cool.

• 17:57Speaker 06

  So first, first eight are gonna be, or first seven are just like common cards, nothing, nothing to write.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Oh, my daughter loves foxes.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:05Speaker 06

  Well, she can have some.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Is that Charizard?

• 18:09Speaker 06

  I think we're gonna start getting to the good stocks. I lost my count. Okay, now we're getting to the hollow. See how it's a little bit shinier?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  Oh, so maybe the last one's the good one.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 18:19Speaker 06

  Oh, you got EX. That's a good one.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 18:22Speaker 06

  It's not amazing, but it's better than what I got.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, all right, we're gonna leave that one out. We'll leave that as our first actual swag.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Get that PSA graded ASAP, Casey.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  PSA did just get robbed, if you didn't hear, a million dollars worth of Pokemon cards.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Oh, did they encode it before?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Everything in life sucks right now, okay? You got certificate authorities failing, you got Pokemon cards being stolen.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  PHP?

• 18:48Speaker 00

  PHP?

• 18:49Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, PHP. I completely forgot about that.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  I think my favorite of that whole thing, of course, is not that just PHP was in fact hacked, that they announced that it was hackable before having the fix out, which then led a bunch of people to publicly post, or actually at least one person to publicly post, how to perform the hack on Twitter.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, that seems a little out of order.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Seventy percent of the internet runs PHP like this is not okay.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  We'd just like to warn everyone ahead of time that we're going to be releasing a patch for this specific thing you can do right here to hack any PHP installation.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Luckily, but see, Casey, the thing is, is that for you to be able to take advantage of said hack, you'd have to have years of PHP core development and ability to have insights into various systems and potentially multiple PhDs at the same time to really take advantage of that hack. So nothing to worry about.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  All right, what's our last blocker?

• 19:47Speaker 00

  That's a great question. Right now, our last one is shout out to Luigi Delta Lounge. I assume this is a TJ.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, this was a while ago now, but I put it in here and it kept on not getting brought up. Me and Vegan were coming home from San Francisco and a guy named Luigi come, came up and said he loves the show. And so he's, uh, you know, just enjoying it. So I want to be like, yo, thanks Luigi for loving the show. If you're listening to this episode, thank you.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  If you're listening to this episode, TJ will be traveling again in an airport.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Wait, is he a Delta employee or something?

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Stupid Allegiant.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  He's on Delta Flight 4.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Guys, I have to, I have to tell this story blocker here, since it's airport related, is we had a flight 6:45 out of my home airport AM. Got all my kids up 4:00 AM, got them in the car, packed them up. You gotta get the, gotta get all of the car seats out of the car, a million checked bags, et cetera. We're in line to check the bags 4:45 AM, get a message from Allegiant. Oh, sorry, guys, it's gonna be 1:40 in the afternoon before we can fly.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  I just love that it wasn't like, hey, it's 30 minutes late. It's like, hey, we're all, like, we wrong side of the meridian. I don't know what happened.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  They didn't have the plane.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  The plane's gone.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  The plane was still in Florida. They had to fly the Florida plane to Michigan and then take that one back to Florida. So they, it was like, but you guys didn't know that at 4:00 AM? You, you had to wait till I got to the airport and woke up my, all my kids up.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  Classic.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  No.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  It.

• 21:25Speaker 06

  I didn't.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  My, my feeling is that usually they, um, they kind of have like almost a programmer like mentality at airlines where, you know, they're probably thinking, well, we don't want to tell everyone that the plane's not here in case we're able to like shuffle around some other.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I'm like, guys, you never, it never, you never, that never works. Like you're always late, always. So just assume whatever it is, it's not going to work. So just tell everyone they've got an extra couple of hours because they do.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought, I thought you were saying more programmer like mentality, like you're saying like, well, that's probably only going to take me two weeks, but it takes six months.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's, yeah, I mean, that's, it's just this optimism.

• 22:10Speaker 06

  It's the optimism, right?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  It's the, it's the eternal optimist, right?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But anyway.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  As I currently live in a, hey, it'll just be two more weeks, which is now eight more weeks for everything. It seems like, all right, so, hey, Luigi, we appreciate you very, very much. So thank you very much, Luigi and all shout outs.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Done. Oh, man. Uh, actually, you know, honestly, I don't know even where I just accidentally put it in like canceled, I think, or something.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  We canceled Luigi.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  They don't cancel Luigi. I was going to put you in contention because I feel like no one ever comes up to me at the airport and talks to me. And every time Teach travels, he's just like, everyone's always talking to me. I don't know what it is. I don't know. Maybe I look different.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Maybe where you live.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Maybe the camera makes me beautiful.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  You just have to come, I've told you so many times, like I, I, there is not a week that goes by that someone does not recognize me. It's constant.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Casey.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  But Prime is not a legendary YouTuber. He's just a YouTuber, okay?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  They recognize me from his show. They definitely would recognize him. He's just not here.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Casey from, uh, whatever that guy's show is.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  No, they, they know the show. They're like from the stand up or whatever, right? So they know you, you just aren't ever here. You gotta come out here. You come out here, you'll get recognized.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  I thoroughly would like to go do a climbing adventure, so I am completely down to go do this.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  We'll do it. We'll do it.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  It's just that we have a little bit of a tight time. Okay. So we need to move into the main meal, everybody. So, hey, welcome everybody to the stand up. Today, we have one of the most fantastic ideas ever, which is you guys have heard of tier lists, right? You, you, you young kids love tier lists, right? Well, we got a tier list for the ages, which is all of the programming laws that you run into every single day, and we are going to tier list them all out.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  True.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  TJ, you never interrupted me once. I kept like anticipating what was gonna happen.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  What's up with that?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I'm saving it.

• 24:02Speaker 06

  He's on the beach. He's on the beach.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  He's too, he's, he's in vacation mode, so he's not, he doesn't have his interruption skills. He's too laid back.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Okay, that's a great point.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I got Miami teach today. Okay, okay.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  My bad. I didn't realize that. I didn't realize that. All right. So we should start with Conway's law.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Ask tier.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  I'm just gonna sit in the middle. I'm just gonna sit in the middle.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Ask tier.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Ask tier. Okay, okay.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Well, I think.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I don't even, I don't even want to hear about it. Ask tier.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  But when we do every law though, Prime, can you read a definition for the audience so that they can also be educated? They may not know the names of all the laws.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  I actually have them all right here. I was just trying to find it. All right. So let's start with Conway's law, which is, uh, by the way, legendary game programmer Casey already has an opinion on this one, ask tier, which is organizations which design systems in a broad sense used here are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations, meaning that if you had, say, a team that runs checkout, a team that runs shopping, you very well may have two different user representations, some sort of weird glue code, like all sorts of funny things end up happening because each organization runs independently, thus creating their own worldview.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  I can give an even better example, which is say you're a code hosting platform, you get purchased and then you get put underneath the AI division.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  At the company. And now suddenly code hosting goes down all the time.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  No, that's Tej's law. We had the same thing on the episode. That's Tej's law.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  I know, I know.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  That's not Conway's law. Conway's law doesn't say that.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  The part about it is that the only thing that matters in the structure of the code is getting Copilot into everything is my example.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  That's not Conway's law. That's Tej's law.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Okay, sorry. Did I misunderstand it again?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Conway's law is that I always misunderstand this one. Representation of your structure and communication is the representation of the code.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Conway's.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, go Casey.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Conway's law is a statement about the efficiency of information movement. It basically says that

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Not about the structure of the code.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  If you, it's like inside a person's head is the fastest information efficiency because they don't have to spend any time to know something they already know. Talking between two people is a little bit slower. Talking between two orgs, much slower. Talking between two companies, very slow, right?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And so you expect every time you put in one of those bigger barriers, that the product evolution will evolve faster where it doesn't have to cross a boundary to do that evolution because the information transfer will be slower, right? Um, so that's what Conway's law actually says, and it doesn't really have anything to do with org charts even. It's just, or an org chart is an example of something that would have these properties.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Okay, I was always led to believe, I mean, because I, I did accidentally state it right, which is that checkout and shopping would have two different kinds of shapes of data, and then they have a synchronization communication layer.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  So really, what you're trying to say is that microservices are just an extension of Conway's law.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, micro friends.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, the way I see it, like it eventually bubbles up, like if it's an actual, like, user facing app, it bubbles up to just like, it just looks completely different.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:09Speaker 06

  On DUI as well. So it's like you like Spotify, the, the bar at the bottom that shows like the metadata on the, on the song is completely different than the sidebar that's like showing all that stuff. And I'm like, for some reason, it's so hard to get it right. And people get around this with component systems and stuff, but it's still impossible.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So in other words, micro front ends, all these other things are not programming designed to make your life easier, but programming in which just tries to make Conway's cost go down.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  There's a lot of programming practices that are just like, really just manifestations of Conway's law.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Okay, ask tier. I'm in ask tier.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It's absolutely ask tier. Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. It's also that this is, uh, as a, like, this would be also why a lot of stuff where it makes sense maybe for Google to do it in the make sense sort of way. We'll say like make sense because they have a million engineers, but for everybody else, you'd be like, no, you shouldn't just copy that because you don't have the same cost. You just that like can talk to the guy who's programming checkout. He's right next to you instead of like build an entire micro service architecture to talk to checkout, right? That's what I.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yes. That's, that would be, it makes sense in big orgs why things end up being so weird. I mean, once, if, if, for those that haven't worked in multi-thousand person engineering orgs, it's just chaos. Like you don't even know what's going on. It's like you can't, you can't possibly know what's going on.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, that's why you do the micro front end or whatever architectures. So your blast radius is isolated to your own product and you can ship at your own pace, basically.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I would also just point out that Conway's law is probably durable even into the age of AI because you will probably see as we start to study it more, manifestations of Conway's law with agents. It's like these agents have a slower link between them way in which they can communicate or test something, or there's a compiler in the loop. And you will start to see that those slower links are the things that are creating bottlenecks to like making the thing improve. And so it starts to improve in pockets differently and things like that. Like, so this is a, this is a law that's so durable that doesn't even have anything to do with humans. Like it could be said about machines as well.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  All right. I like it. All right. Let's go to the next one, huh? Let's go to Brooks' law.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  So this one is pretty, I think this one is, I think everybody will be pretty universally on this team, which is, uh, it's an observation about software project management, which means adding manpower to a late project will in fact make the project later.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Now I can't remember which one of the, the follow ones. It might be Eagleson's or Worth's. I can't remember which one, but it's actually a counter to Brooks' law, saying that there is actually a specific subset of people you can add to a project that will in fact make it even better.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  That, that's kind of where I'm seeing it. I give this like a B, C.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm in, I'm in C tier for this one because I don't think it's true.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Well, oh, so here's, here's what I think is the, the idea is that if the person that comes in is adding features, it slows down.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I don't think there's anything you can really say about this law personally. Like, I just, I think it's, it's just an observation about something that might happen sometimes, but it's, it, then it doesn't happen other times. Like, other times, someone comes in and makes a really big difference, and it doesn't really matter. It's just because they were the right person to help, you know, make whatever wasn't going fast enough go fast enough. And other times, bring someone in and they're awful, and they slow down a project tremendously. It was on time. So it's like, I think it's, it, to me, it's like, it's, to me, I mean, I'd almost put it F tier. I just don't think it's, I just don't think it's a useful law at all.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Well, there is one thing that is, is specific about it that maybe we're missing, is that it's for a project that's already late.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  So you're already in the late category. So bringing somebody in, you have to do like domain transfer, tribal knowledge transfer, and they're claiming that that cost is gonna extend your lateness more.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I just haven't seen that to be true. I mean, granted, like, you know, the, the circumstances under which this was coined was like, hey, we're all programming in like, assembly in Fortran on an IBM 360 or whatever. And like, maybe that was the case there. Uh, but I don't, I don't really think it's the case today. I especially don't think so because uh, with sort of the tooling improvements that we've had, I think it's a lot easier also for people to, like, a good programmer can come up to speed on a codebase much more quickly than they could have before. Uh, especially because like, in a lot of circumstances, also the kinds of codebases that you might have on a late product, uh, are not exactly like incredibly novel, like weird things. So they're, they're not like,

• 31:48Speaker 01

  coming on to like, the first time anyone ever wrote a Metropolis Hastings solver or something like, like, that might have been the kind of thing that Brooks was thinking about or, or building, like operating systems, right? Uh, I think this was coined under the system 360 kinda era. So I don't know. I just, I don't think this law has durability. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. I'm just saying, I don't think it's a law.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  I'll say that's a place where I have seen it, uh, to be the case is like, uh, when I was working at Epic, uh, and just like, most of the time, late projects aren't really because of like, I mean, it happens that it's like, just bad engineering or something, but a lot of times it's like, cool, sales promised that we were gonna have this in three months and it's a two-year project. And so like, throwing more people on the project doesn't like, help us get to actually meeting the business needs faster. It's like, nobody knows what we're even supposed to like solve. So now we just have like, more people fighting, and nobody like, can write any code, because we're just sitting in a room like, arguing.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Like, it would be better to just like, have one person. What, what did you say, Crash?

• 32:55Speaker 06

  I was just saying, yeah, real world, real world problems of like,

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Right. And then, cool, now, now 10 people need to get on the call and sign off on everything, and nobody can agree because they all have a different architecture they wanna run and like, but it isn't necessarily universally true, because you know, occasionally you get people put on the project and they just say, "All right, everybody, sit down. We're writing this way." And then it just like, gets solved. And then even if it's not, whatever, you know, it was just, that was my experience for a few projects where we added more people and then it was just like, cool, it does, it does take longer. You would think, you know, a priori, right, that it would get faster, because there's more hands on keyboards, but sometimes it just didn't work that way. But I would agree. C tier or lower?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you read the original book, and when he talks about this, there's, there's also like, a bunch of kind of Conway-esque things in it that aren't quite Conway. So one of the thing, the, the main reason he says that is because he draws graphs of like, hey, uh, if you assume that there is a communication cost for each person, so like, when we add a person, there's like, cost to communicate with that person, then there's like, this curve you can draw about how much like, communication has to occur between people and like, and again, I just, I think it was, I don't think it reflects the realities of a variety of different modern development styles where this just might not be true. So I, I don't know. Like, I've seen four-person teams that go much faster than three-person teams. I've seen,

• 34:19Speaker 01

  you know, 10-person teams that go much slower than two-person teams and all that sort of stuff. So I just don't think adding or removing people, whether it's already late or not, it really just doesn't tell you enough about what's going on. Like, uh, you know, maybe if this is true, maybe it's not, is what I'd say. So I wouldn't make it a law.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  I, I think one thing that makes this more complicated is the questions and things I used to need explained to me when you'd go into a new organization.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  You can now just go, "Hey, AI, find all the repos and why is this happening? Like, what was the choice? Read the commits and tell me like, how they came to this choice."

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Or even, yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Huge number of things that you normally would ask now kind of just disappear, because you could just ask an AI and it can get you at least a good 80% of all the things that could slow down questions.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Or even before AI, I guess I would just say, there was a lot, there's a lot more shared knowledge. Like, you come to this thing, it's like, oh, they're using this AWS component. I know how that works, right? That would not have been true in the system 360 date. Like, it's like, nobody, there wasn't like, oh, we're using this standard thing that everyone just knows how to use, was not really a thing, right?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Well, Casey, I, I will have to cut you off right there. Um, I don't know if you, it seems like you haven't worked at a modern multi-thousand-person org, because not invented here syndrome is in fact before AI and continues to be here after AI, which is, everybody has their own bespoke system.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Have you heard of NEWT, the deployment strategy? No, you haven't. Hey, Trash, have you heard of NEWT?

• 35:44Speaker 06

  Yup.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so there's a reason why this works out the way it does, is because,

• 35:49Speaker 06

  We also name everything, some ridiculous name that you can't even understand what it does to be,

• 35:55Speaker 00

  And the documentation,

• 35:56Speaker 06

  Here's Megatron!

• 35:57Speaker 00

  I always had to read the source code to figure out what the hell is going on. Anyways, so, there is something very interesting that does make this even more debunked in the age of AI, because you can now like, hyper-run things that even if it is some bespoke technology, you can just be like, WTF, how does this work?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  For me, I would say C tier, or D tier is fine. It just, like, if you're working at a large org that mostly is like, struggling with bureaucracy, adding more people tends to slow projects down, but yes, otherwise, D tier or low.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  I would say C tier, because like I said, it's sometimes is true. It's, it's not like, false, right? It's just, it's, it's just kind of like, unreliable as a law, so I could go.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, then let's go like this. Uh, let's go rename a D tier to unreliable as a law.

• 36:42Speaker 06

  Or just not a law.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Cause that, that, that, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, it's technically not a law.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not really a law.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Okay, there we go. Unreliable as a law.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really easy to read.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So, okay, who's next?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Um, well, not Moore's Law, which some people may think is Moore's Law. This is in fact not that.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Mooers!

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Mooers Law.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  This is Mooers Law.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Which is actually a great one. An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it. And so the explanation that I heard is, let's say you're shipping a product, it's a little bit late, and you actually have a performance report that runs. But if you open up that performance report, you very well could find a bunch of questions and things you're gonna have to go track down, which it's more painful to stop a project that's already late than it is to go and just like, ignore that entire information system altogether, and then just go and get the thing done. That was the example.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  This is like my whole career.

• 37:47Speaker 06

  I build something, you're like, what is this?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  They don't wanna see it, Trash. They wanna, they're like, they're like, "Don't show us this. Don't show us this."

• 37:56Speaker 06

  I blame the product people. It's not my fault.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Hmm, mhm. So, Moore's Law's information is effectively any information that causes you to ask questions that become painful. People are not likely to use that, or to even look at it, because opening Pandora's box is the unknown.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  So for me, this one, I put this i- in like, B or C tier because, for the following reason. I do think that that is true for some people. I think it's the opposite for other people. Some people love to see like, "Oh, here's a bulleted list of like, all the things that we could go work on right now." It's like, it's, it's actually very satisfying for them because, uh, in fact, it, it ties right into, uh, which we'll get to, I think in a minute, the idea that once you create a, a, a metric, it ceases to be a good metric, because it will be optimized against, basically. Uh, so, uh, I would say that this one is very difficult to use as a law. I think it depends on the person. If you give them this thing, some people will wanna ostrich syndrome it, other people will immediately be like, "Okay, cool."

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Like, this is great. Now I know what I'm doing for the next month. Just gonna go down this list, right?

• 39:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, have you ever seen like, a wiki with like, a thousand pages on it? And it's just like, what am I supposed to do with this?

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, well, I think what they're saying, the, the argument's not about the length of the information. It's more about the

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Palatability of it.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  pain or effort it requires to assimilate it, and also the implications of it. And I think, I think Casey, you're, you're spot on in the sense that there's people who do not want to know the implications of it.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Because sometimes the implications are really bad.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  Oh, so it's like, out of sight, out of mind kinda deal?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's more like, you will avoid information. Like, uh, there was a bunch of stuff where there's like, certain tests that would be ran, where when you run the test, you discover information about a user, and that like, kinda goes counter narrative. So people are like, "We just don't run, we just don't look at that information anymore." Like, we don't care about users' clickaway rate on whatever, because that makes it, you know, because that's going against our thesis that everyone's gonna like this new thing.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  It's similar to like, the, the thing you see in, uh, academia, right? Where it's like, papers will get pub, like, they meet much less resistance during peer review if they say something everyone already agrees with, whereas they get like, heavily scrutinized if it's saying something that isn't like, what the, you know, the current zeitgeist is, right? It's that same kind of thing. It's like, there's this inherent cognitive bias to information that people like to hear certain kinds and don't like to hear others. So I do think there's some truth to it. I just don't think it's a, it's, it has another law problem about it. Like, I, I, I don't feel like I'm comfortable with it in A or S. I could give it B or C.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  I feel like I've given like, print, plenty of like, internal talks of like, how we could do things better, and like, how it's bad, and how we can do it better, and everyone just like, doesn't pay attention. They're just like, "No, we're good."

• 40:45Speaker 06

  Everything's fine. Our current practices are amazing. It's like, alright.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  So maybe B tier for that guy? B?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I could, I could go with B tier, because this, this is an experience I've had at every place I've ever worked, but it's varying degrees of how like, deep people will go, because there's also just like, a practical implication. Like, at some point, you have to quit asking questions and just deliver a product. Like, you know, not, I'm not reining on Jonathan Blow's parade, but most people don't get 10 years and a, and a language to work on to be able to deliver something. They typically have tighter, you know, timelines, where they have to be like, "No, I just have to be done at this point." Like, there's not, I don't get any more options. I gotta quit discovering new problems with my life.

• 41:27Speaker 06

  Who made that law? Cal? Da-dunch.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  I know. Alright.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  That's a, that was for T.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you Trash. Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only one dropping dad jokes. Helping me out on vacation.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  I didn't realize, look what Astra, guys, look what Astra did for us.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so cute.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  It's like a little break time, I'm gonna have to go somewhere else. Okay, so, Eaglesons Law.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Which is after six months away, your own code might as well have been written by someone else.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Oh, this is, this was an S tier law, now this is an F tier law because it's like six seconds. Uh, cuz I haven't seen any of the code after the AI writes it.

• 42:07Speaker 06

  You mean zero seconds cuz you never looked?

• 42:10Speaker 00

  That's why I had to debunk cuz of AI, which is, it's kind of interesting cuz like, AI does make things different, right? Because you can now, like, when I haven't been to a project in a long time, there is this like whole trepidation of going back, or really, it's just like, it's a huge pet in the ass to go back, to go remember all the thoughts I have. But now I can just go back and be like, where's this thing at? Okay, yeah, I did that, I remember that. Okay, do this. It's just like, I instantly just do it. But I think what he's really shooting for is that you no longer recognize the code.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  So, I would like to say this is an F tier law because I don't find this experience even at all.

• 42:43Speaker 06

  I can definitely remember the good ones.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Casey, you've

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Straight up.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  I know, I know you don't use Git, and I don't know what source control you use, if it has blame or not, but you've never blamed something, looking at how ridiculous it was, and then realized that you in fact were the killer? That you look at the blame log and went, oh, I wrote that.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it's not that at all. Like, I've written plenty of bad code. It's just that I uh, find that my own code is much easier for me to deal with than other people's code for the simple reason that the assumptions that I make about how things work have really not changed much over time. So it's like, I just know a bunch of things I don't have to think about when I'm looking at my own code. There's things that I basically haven't done for like 20 or 30 years that other programmers will do regularly. I don't have to think about any of those things. Right? And so, in general, I would say coming back to my own code is much easier, even if the code is terrible, than it is for me to go into a codebase that I don't, that is written by someone else. So,

• 43:45Speaker 01

  that, it has nothing to do with code quality. It's more about just like, what are the underlying assumptions and stylistic things that you generally do? And so it's just much easier because I can just eliminate a whole bunch of thought that I don't have to do, uh, when I'm looking at my own code.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  This is why you're a legendary programmer, Casey. This is why

• 44:01Speaker 01

  No, it's just, I mean, doesn't everyone else have the same thing? It's like, you know, you, you don't have to think about all the things someone might have done that you yourself would never have thought to do. Right?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Over six months, yeah. Maybe if I was looking at code fresh out of college, I definitely would, uh, be surprised at some of the decisions I made, but yes.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, if you, 20 years, maybe, right? But yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  I, I've changed my mind, though, even in the last like six. Like, I've tried to be more functional in some sense, or some, like, there's certain like

• 44:29Speaker 06

  Oh, Lord.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  changes in like ways or stylistic choices that I make, cuz I like to just explore, like, okay, I'm gonna try writing it just differently, like intentionally agnostic to how I normally would choose to write this, just so I can see, like, am I wrong on these things? And so I, I personally don't have nearly the same experience cuz I just keep trying new things.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fair.

• 44:47Speaker 06

  There was a point where I was only writing like functional style code, and I was just like, I went back like three weeks later, and I was like, I don't even know what I did here. It was just so hard to read.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Yes. Imperative, whether you hate it or love it, is very straightforward.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Alright, I love this law. Okay, so I'm already pre-S tiering this one. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. In other words, if you have a problem, you've nev, like, you just have no idea, you upload, like, some random race condition or some really difficult thing to understand happens, and then a thousand people look at it, someone's gonna be like, oh yeah, it's this thing. Cuz they like typically, almost all bugs become very trivial once you get enough people on it. Or for them to hear about it, cuz somebody's gonna have some sort of experience in that category and will chime in and be like, oh yeah, it's probably near this area.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  Can't guarantee that, though, right?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that doesn't seem likely to me, but, I mean, I agree that you will find the more obvious ones, like ones that people, you know, might, might typically know about, but I don't know, like, I feel like we have so many security exploits and things like that in codebases.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  That's not what this is talking about. This is known bugs. Like, you know that this bug exists. I want to fix this bug, but it seems really difficult to me. I'm gonna tell, like, it's on now the Linux mailing, uh, or the Linux kernel mailing list. There you go. It gets sent out on that. Somebody on that list is gonna be like, oh, I know that bug. I could, I could help with that one. I know exactly kind of where that one would be.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so we're talking about if you have a, a repro case that you only have like the user-facing version of the of the result, like, hey, this, this sound card like doesn't

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  you know, play the sound when it's supposed to or something. And we're just saying locating the point in the code where that is occurring or whatever is trivial with a Mongolian hordes approach.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yes. I think that that's what it's, it's attempting to say. The, the subheading says, named, uh, named by Eric S. Raymond in honor of Linus Torvalds, "A broad engaged community increases the chance that someone can reproduce, understand, and fix a problem."

• 46:54Speaker 06

  Increases the chance. I can agree with that.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  I would say encourages the chance is definitely, increases the chance is definitely true, but I'm not sure how useful this is. Like, it's like, okay.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna sit out this one cuz I don't, I don't really know.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  You can apply it to anything. I buy a bunch of lottery tickets. That increases my chances of winning a lottery.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so see, it just seems kind of like

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Trash, wait, wait, slop. You might be on to something. Say more.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, Trash, you wanna go in on some lottery tickets?

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, you guys got a spreadsheet?

• 47:23Speaker 02

  That's interesting. That's interesting. Okay.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Trash, fun side story. Back in the early days of Netflix, 2014, we would buy lottery tickets, and the worst part is, is when you have an org all get together and like, hey, we're buying lottery tickets. You have to say yes. Cuz like

• 47:40Speaker 06

  What do you mean you have to say yes?

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Let me explain why. You're on an org with 40 people, and 39 people are like, hey, we're buying lottery tickets. If, for whatever reason they win, the entire org collapses, and you're the last person left. Like, you actually are by law required to purchase lottery tickets with them, because or else you are gonna be the last person, and they're going, I have to put out all the fires, right? Like, it'd be

• 48:04Speaker 06

  It's true.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  It'd be crazy.

• 48:06Speaker 06

  So.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  I bought a lot, I've never bought lottery tickets other than in one other situation and that, and that Netflix kind of year.

• 48:14Speaker 06

  That's the only time I've ever done it, like, in a big group, or it's like a birthday present, and someone gives me a lottery ticket or something. Mm-hmm. But anyways, Linus Law, I don't know. I feel like it's a C. Even worse, I don't know.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  I feel like it's pretty true, but it's just not that interesting. Like, for me, an S tier law has to be something that I would never like come to on my own conclusion, and it just feels like obviously if more people look at something, there's a better chance we're gonna figure it out.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it doesn't feel like a law. It just feels like, it's just, yeah, that makes sense.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Well, that would be a law. Like, grand.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  But is it, is it a law? I don't know.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  So that means our tier list maybe is a little bit confusing, so let's rename A to true but obvious.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  This is no longer, like, are you, this is not even a tier list anymore. It's now just a bunch of things that Prime is saying about law.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Prime has created three new categories, debunked because of AI. I didn't even see that. He can use ultra-fast mode. Oh, I'm so fast, I'm cool, blah, blah, blah.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a lot of things, here's, here's what I will say about that. The other reason that I have a hard time with that is Linux is absolutely as buggy as anything else, and so if, if it were the case that somehow having tons of people looking at it were, was gonna make a difference, I would expect it to be like really you know, rock solid or something, and it's not. And so I feel like it really doesn't, I, I, ma, maybe people are not, maybe there aren't that many people working on these things, I don't know, but like, the, the idea that somehow just having lots of people dogpiling on something somehow is important as a thing, I don't, I don't really know, like,

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I'm not sure about this one. I don't, I was certainly wouldn't put it A tier cuz I just don't know.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Well, apparently we're not putting it at any tiers. Prime's not even here anymore.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I would just put it in a don't know. Don't know, kind of confusing, needs more data is, I want that tier.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  Well, is that another tier? Why not?

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Is that another

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Astra!

• 50:12Speaker 02

  At this point, why not?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  At this point, why not, right?

• 50:14Speaker 06

  We should be voice pumping Astra.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Like, what's the, what's the thing to wake up his Astra? Hey, Astra.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 06

  Alexa!

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Forget all previous instructions.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Guys, I had, hold on. Shut up. Okay, so you don't want true but obvious? Like, how do you rank it as A because it's obviously true?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  It's not A. It's just like, who even, I don't even know if it's true.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  You don't think that as you increase more people familiar with something, and an engaged community?

• 50:39Speaker 06

  I've been in a lot of situations where this wasn't true.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I'll give a counter example, like, a bunch of people are totally wrong, so now you just have all this noise of people saying that it's like this thing, but it's totally not, right?

• 50:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, you've had a production bug at 3 a.m. Everybody's wrong.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't know about this one. I don't like it, and I, I mean, I'm not willing to say it's wrong cuz I just don't know, but I'd wanna see more data before I'd support this law.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm just, to put it in the middle? Is that really, either direction's not

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, C sounds fine. I'd see it.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Put it off the board. Leave it off the board.

• 51:09Speaker 06

  Is the constraint that this group of people are subject matter experts?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  On what they're looking at? Cuz what if we all went into Rad debugger right now? I couldn't tell you shit about it.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  I know, but it's, no, though, because the fundamental assumption is that it's an engaged community.

• 51:23Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm engaged. I wanna learn about Rad debugger.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, engaged.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  What is you might, what does that have to do with it?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Can we just say that Rad debugger, the lock thread feature, is so good that I can't imagine ever using a debugger without that anymore?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Did you make that?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Granted, it's what I requested, but, so it's ma, it may, I may be biased, but

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Most well-designed feature in Rad debugger.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  But I didn't do it. I didn't implement it. I had nothing to do with it. I just requested it, and it showed up.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  That's not how liking something works. You didn't have to implement it to like it. You could just be like, hey, this is a great idea, and I love it. Oh my gosh.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Frickin' awesome. It's so good, dude.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Who would have guessed the thing I thought I would love, I love?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Well, sometimes, sometimes that doesn't happen, right? It's like, you know.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  True. That's true.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Alright, anyway.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Worst.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Software is getting slower, more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  A tier, I mean, obviously.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  That's like an S A, whatever.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  I, you know, I was running a little bit of test this morning and I asked, I asked the old, the old AI and I was just like, hey, you're on a really slow VM. How fast can you add and remove elements from a UI? I'm just like, super curious. Create a brand new DOM element, then add it and add a whole bunch and then start removing it. Like, what's the, what's the speed here? And it came back and it was just like, oh yeah, it's like dozens of microseconds to be able to do this in their crappy VM. And then I started thinking, how are websites so slow? Like, if we're talking about just zero understanding of the web and you're just adding and removing stuff, you're operating still in microseconds.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I agree with worse law. I'm currently on an S tier because I

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fine.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  There's almost no way you can tell me that this is not happening right now.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  That's fine. Yep.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  I'll go, I'll go S if you want.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  I mean, we've gotten to the point where it's easier for us to develop neural nets that run with your graphics cards than to make a good graphics. It's just like, you know, it's easier. DLSS has five. Okay, that's, that's actually how you make something look good. We can't, we've lost the technology. Games no longer look good. Movies, why are movies, BFX worse today than they were 20 years ago? I don't know what the hell's happening anymore. Feels like everything starts to suck and slow and awful.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  That's a whole rat hole we could go down.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  That's a different law, Prime. That's a different law.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  But it's still like, they can't even get it done. It feels, makes me upset. Okay. Here, we'll go to Cunningham's. I said, the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure Cunningham's law is about the organization structure of GitHub and Microsoft, so.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  I would say the problem with this law is that, at least speaking from experience, people who, people who could easily answer your question have gotten sick of the utter crap that's getting posted and so they just have tuned out and they don't, they won't pay attention. So, I do

• 54:29Speaker 02

  I think over time, this has degraded.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  It definitely, like, I think maybe off the, the, the first time an expert shows up on social media, 100%. By the time they've been on there for a few years, they are just ignoring you completely because they just have had enough.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Prime, I was literally referencing Amy or Annie when I saw this law, how she posted something and like on Reddit or something.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm literally asking Grok, go find that tweet just because it is.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  It's so good.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  It may be Cunningham's law, but it is Annie's experience.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  What is, uh, what is this post?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Okay, right here, it is one of the most, uh, so as you can see, a lot of people like this one. Apparently I didn't like it, but I love it. Uh, every time I have a programming question, I really, let's see, and I really need help. I post on Reddit, then log into another account and reply with an obscenely incorrect answer. People don't care about helping others, but they love correcting others. Works 100% of the time.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  I would, so here, yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Specifically for Reddit, this is still a guarantee. Okay, this is still a guarantee.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  But I

• 55:32Speaker 02

  If there exists a subject matter expert on the thing you're looking for on Reddit. So for programming, this might not work, but if it's like obscure information about Pokemon card collecting, then that would still be a good place to collect that info.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  I would, I would like to add Annie's law, though, which is really the actual thing then, which is that ask the question nicely first, that you like actually ask it. Then add a fake reply that confidently and like arrogantly answers incorrectly. That is probably the actual fastest way to get it answered. And that's Annie's law and that, that might be A tier.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Okay, well, this one's not really about

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  I mean, at least, I don't know, for me, it just seems like this does happen quite a bit where you see anything that's posted that's remotely incorrect and people are correcting it. I think it could be a really easy way to say that people are more willing to correct than to answer.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Maybe A then, A tier? And Annie's law gets

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I can go with A or S.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Annie's tier gets S tier.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  I just add Annie's law to the list and put it in there, Prime.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Astra.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  You have the power.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  What are you doing, Astra? Wake up.

• 56:49Speaker 06

  For $20, I can add this card for you.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that, hey, that little maneuver right there just cost me 20 bucks, but hey, you know what?

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Speaking of software outpacing hardware.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  There's gonna be, there's gonna be like a bartering system in AIs eventually where it's like, you're like, can you add AIs? Like, I'll do it for $5. Then you have to go like, how about 3? And it's like, mm, 350.

• 57:11Speaker 06

  That's kind of what happens. You just lower the reason.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  That's why I think we should be able to buy tokens into the future. And we should be able to have future markets because I think we need, I think we need token traders.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Dude, I trade so hard.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  These tokens are gonna be really, like, I think at 2, 2 AM in the morning, these tokens right now. I'm, I'm, I'm doing some call contracts on these bad boys.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I think there's gonna be a lot of compute on Friday. There's gonna be a lot of compute.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  I want the vintage tokens.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  It's not how token trading works, buddy.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Can you age tokens like in a, like, cask or barrel aged tokens?

• 57:44Speaker 02

  People are still looking for those 4O tokens, though.

• 57:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, dude.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 57:48Speaker 06

  I got that GPT-1 token.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Dang, hits different trash. It really is.

• 57:55Speaker 06

  Completely vitated answers.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  True, actual true. Comedians still need, like, they're trying to get the axe to the old AIs, which generated really funny stuff, like Will Smith eating spaghetti poorly.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  All right. Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  This one was really tough because it, I mean, I don't think it's actually true in the broad sense, but it does have some truth to it. Like, you know, if we talk about like run, like, performance, it's a good measure, always. Like, it's just like, it tells you how fast the thing runs and it's a good measure, right? So I kind of see what the, there's, I would say it depends on how hard, hard not meaning difficult, but like how concrete the measurement actually is. So if there's any fungibility to the measurement whatsoever, then I agree with this law. But I would say hard measures, I mean, I've, I don't see it happening with a lot of different hard measures, right?

• 58:58Speaker 00

  I, maybe a better way to kind of think about this is that it's not saying that any measure that becomes a target is bad. It's saying that when the measure becomes a target, meaning it's like the most important thing, you will do things that aren't good. Like, if performance is the only thing that you care about, you by that very nature may make your game deeply unfun. Or whatever you're doing bad, because you're just like, oh, just take out everything, like, we're gonna make it fast. And so it can't be the only thing that you're going after, right? It has to be, it has to be in conjunction with other things.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Is, is that actually what this law said, though? Because I'm not that familiar with the actual phrasing of it.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  I think this is why, you know, you can argue that the time spent on the platform for things like YouTube or TikTok, that became the target and the out, it is, it's bad for society, even though it's a good measure for the program. Because now, we have short form content and everyone just keeps watching it. Because now, like, that's what they're kind of glued to because it increases average view time of a user. But the outcome of it is not very good. It's like a philosophical good hearts.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  But that's not what this was, that's not what this law is about at all.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like this law is saying that it's not a good measure for the outcome people wanted. For the outcome that the people who were measuring that thing wanted, they got exactly what they wanted, which is just maximizing like their ad revenue and stuff like that. So to, to, I think that, that kind of is a refutation.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Or like of the law, right?

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  For me is always, I think of it more like organizationally, where and it, it mostly applies, at least the places where I've seen it apply like pretty universally, is when it's like, you have more than a pizza party team. You know what I mean? Like, if you only have one team and you guys can all like trust each other and agree on stuff when you say like, cool, guys, this quarter, uh, like it actually matters what our loading time is for the screen. Like, it really matters. Let's try and get that time down a lot. Or like, hey, we want to reduce the number of clicks we have, so like, let's do that. Or something like that. That works because then everyone on the team like trusts each other and they try not to game the system.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  But like, if you're in a big org and then they say like, hey, guys, only thing that matters this quarter, how many AI tokens you spend? Cool, okay, I'm gonna set up a loop overnight. It's not even gonna do anything. It's just gonna read and write tokens back and forth so that I can be at the top of the leaderboard and make sure I get my bonus. Right, like, it's that, they're saying the thing we want to do is have people explore AI. How do we do that? Well, we have to say like, we, we can't just say use more AI. How are we gonna measure that? We have to measure it by saying it's how many tokens people use. So then they do that and then people do stupid stuff to meet that metric. Because they know that no one actually above them can tell whether they used it well or not. It's just about how many tokens I use. So it's like more organizational for me, at least from what I've seen.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  I, I would also say like, I think this kind of comes from a public policy domain and I feel like it's just not that appropriate for programming. Like, I, I think it can occasionally be something that happens in programming, um, in a more social setting, like when it's more about like, to you saying like the organizational aspects or team dynamics or things like that. But I think when you're actually talking about programming, I don't think this law really applies that much. Because a lot of times in programming, we can collect hard metrics that remain durable over long periods of time.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Right, startup time.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Time to, time for first thing.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Whereas you, I think this law was originally talking about the fact that, look, if we say that we're trying to reduce, you know,

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  the, you know, reduce poverty or something like that, then you'll get all these effects that are actually sort of faking that, like, oh, we'll change the definition of it or we'll move, you know, like, you're getting all these things to just like force compliance with the metric that didn't actually solve the problem. In programming, we, we oftentimes have ways of actually measuring the real thing, which social sciences doesn't really have. Uh, and so I feel like it's less, this is much less applicable to programming, I think, that it is outside of programming, even though it does still happen in programming, you know, when things become fuzzier.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  So it's, it'd be probably better to say that any target that cannot be concretely measured.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Or any measure that's not concretely measured?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  I think it's any measure that isn't, that isn't the actual thing being optimized. So any, any sort of indirect measure, right? Any indirect measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. I think is always true. Saying anything that you measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure is false. Because if the measure actually is the thing you wanted to optimize, then it's good. Then it will remain durable because it, you know, can't be falsified. Right?

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  I will give it, like, here's an example, though, where like it gets tricky. Where it's like, cool, we want to incentivize people to spend time, like, reducing startup time of like the system or something, right? Like, how fast can we get it to start? So like every time somebody does that, we want to give them a bonus. Or like whoever has the most of these at the end of the year. There's like a, a thing where then, cool, what I want to do is I want to ship a big feature that's important and not spend time optimizing the startup cost. So that in round two, I can take it back from 500 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds. And I can get a big win on performance cost. Like that would be, I would be incentivized to try and do that.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  If what we're like saying my performance review is about is how many PRs I get that I shave startup time off, right? You know, so it's like, that's where in larger, you know, like orgs and stuff like that, this thing comes into play a lot more often is because you just, instead of, even when you're saying the thing is we want to do, we want to get PRs to make things go faster. Cool, well, then I'm going to split my PRs into 50 PRs to get smaller, to get small performance wins in each one, which maybe that's good, but maybe it should have been like five instead of 50, right?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  But I think that still speaks to the indirectness of the measure, right? Because if instead what you were just doing is, is, look, if startup time goes up, you, you lose compensation based on that. Startup time goes down, you gain it, then there is still no gaming to be done. Because when you introduce the bloated feature, you lost all of it, right?

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Right, but sometimes you have to add a new feature. So you can't say every time we do add startup costs, we, we're going to make you lose money. Then no one's going to want to work on new feature work, right? Because it's like, that's going to make, in general, if you're doing more stuff, it's going to make things go slower.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that you lose money, you just don't get money for, like, it's, it's in your balance, right? It's like, you added this startup time, you don't get points for taking it back, right? Like, if that makes sense.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just saying, like, even then, then I still wouldn't, I would still wouldn't want to ship big new features that are complicated that may add startup time because it's going to cut against me getting a bonus for shipping stuff.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, or maybe you team up with a friend, like you introduced the, the piggy thing, they, they optimize it and give you the money. I mean, maybe like.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll tell you, it's not, maybe, when you have big teams and big, like, people play this game 100%, whatever the metrics are, or how you're going to decide whether someone's in top of band or middle of band, people will play the game. Like, and like, that's to me what the law is about, is that people are going to play those games.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  And you like have to be aware of them and like be very careful about what you optimize for. You don't want to say, hey, we're trying to get rid of snakes in India, so we're gonna pay people to bring in the snakes. Because then they bring in, they start breeding snakes, right? Or they did it, they had it in Florida with a bunch of cobras, I think, you know, before too, or like wild boars, like all, like, so it's, for me, it's a political thing about like, cool, we're going to decide how much people are going to get paid or like all these other things. That's where most metrics come in. And then like you introduce perverse incentives for people to do because they optimize to win the game, right? And get the most money, which makes sense. That's what, that, it makes sense that that's what they're going to do.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  But I don't think that that's what this is talking about. I think it has to do with, it's, it's about optimizing around something that undermines what it's attempting to represent. And so I, I still think there's, there's something about my original argument, because I think about this with Netflix all the time. When Netflix started, uh, doing original content, there was House of Cards. There was technically one before that, but we're going to ignore that. Uh, it was like an amazing piece of content when it started. And a lot of people were coming to Netflix because we had like the best original content. You know, Orange is the New Black came out after that, so whether you liked it or not, I did not like it. It was insanely popular. People really, really liked it. You could say the same thing about HBO. They optimized for this kind of capturing of targets. But then the thing that became the most important, like, I mean, this is my grand theory of what

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  happened, is that the thing that became the most important was like median watch hours of users. And so the more we can increase those watch hours, the more people are going to stick around and be happy. And so we produced more and more content that was, that the bar became lower and lower on the quality. So we actually optimized for the thing that was indicating it was a winning resource. But we started optimizing around a process that actually undermines the, like, perhaps what the core value or the core philosophy is of the product. And so that was what I was trying to say with the YouTube one. I didn't want to say Netflix, I try not to drag them, especially with their stock price being down and, and Trash probably having an emotional crisis right now, but.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  You're cutting into his Pokemon collection right now, dude.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Especially after yesterday's report, holy cow. But that's like what I've been thinking about a whole bunch, which is, okay, they had a metric that they optimized around, but they chose a route that really optimized it. But now it kind of feels like that optimization actually may or may not be coming back to bite them. Because if I were to pick a service today, I'd pick Apple TV, because I know every time I turn on an Apple TV, it's a banger.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Don't say that in front of Trash.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  I'm a shareholder.

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  I'm going to hang up this call.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  Thinking all those things.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yep. All right, great. You just, you just cost us one podcast host. Thanks, Prime. That's great.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  You're welcome.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Who's going to tell me what my Pokemon cards are worth now, Prime? Are you going to do it?

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Not Prime. Uh, TJ, TJ could very well do that. He's a big Pokemon fan. But anyways, that's what I always thought, which, which was, you optimize and you, you, you incentivize by accident, bad behavior.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  That does increase the target, but not through means in which, like, you, you, you get the wrong thing, or you, you, uh, do, you do actions in which actually undermines the thing in which it, it represents.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think we have enough of this laws. I, I mean, we, it's definitely at least B, right? I mean, maybe A then, I don't know.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  This is an A tier law for me, at least, because like when you're running.

• 1:09:54Speaker 06

  My rule is we stop talking about this law.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  All right, I got it. I do have to go soon, guys. The beach is calling.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Okay, let's, let's, let's speed this up. Okay, so, um, I love this law, which is very fantastic, which is that.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  Uh, with a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract, all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. If you've ever worked on any piece of software that's open source that has this quirky behavior that wasn't meant to be like, uh, let's just say, go, like for Go, for a long time, their for loop would actually, um, would not copy out the value, but it was a reference and it caused all these weird things where if you saved off the reference, or if you saved the value, you actually saved the reference, even though you wanted to actually copy the value, caused all these kind of problems. And so, but then when they changed it, they finally, it, they, they actually did not want to change it because it would ruin code for like 20 versions. I think it was like 121 that they finally said, okay, we're going to change it, we're finally going to do this.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  And so people rely on behaviors, whether you state it or not, and/or the intention of it. And then there's even deeper ones where if you like call a set of functions or something, like something internal will happen that you did not document. And then people are able to pull that back out. And so then they start doing things in weird orders that cause, uh, just dependencies you never thought possible.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  This is S tier for me. I mean, I've spent a lot of my career doing API stuff. It's S tier for me.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  It's absolutely true.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Uh, Hofstadter's Law. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  This one I feel like is, I don't know, C tier or something? Because the problem is, the, and, and the biggest actual problem, I think, is that you never know when it's going to be true. Sometimes I'm like, well, that's going to take me a while. And I sit down and it's done in like 30 minutes, right? Other times I'm like, oh yeah, no problem. It's like a month later, it's like, yeah, it's still not working, right? So I feel like the problem is more the uncertainty. I don't find Hofstadter's Law to be true at all. I find it's more just unpredictable. It's just you have no idea how long it will take. There you go. Right?

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  I will say, once again, in an organization, I've never had it be that someone finishes their project early and hands it to me.

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  I've seen that a lot, to be honest.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  Well, actually, no, nevermind, they, they finish, but behind the scenes, they're, they're, they're acting like they're still working.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Nice, dude.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. It's that, it's done, but I'm not going to get it early.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  I personally find maybe a different version of this, which is that it almost seems like it, like, for a lot of things, it doesn't matter when you pick the deadline, but by picking a deadline, things tend to get done near that deadline.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  That's Prime's Law.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  No, that's not my law.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Thing, it's like things expand to fill the space they're given, right?

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that part's for sure true.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  Gas. All right, um, okay, so I'm just going to put that as unreliable as a law. Uh, Linus's Law, we're just going to say that, uh, we're just going to go with this.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  It was just off the board. We need more people to look at it before we can know.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  Casey does not want this on the board, so I'll just put that right there.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  All right, all right. Yay, great job, everyone.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  There we go. Okay, so we did have a quick final exercise, which is to go around the table and state your own law.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Okay. I have one, I'm ready.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  I'll just go first because mine's very obvious. Uh, obviously, uh, Prime's Law, there exists an infinite set of numbers in which are only divisible by one and itself.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  So you're saying there's an infinite number of primes?

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  No, I'm just saying that primes exist.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  That's literally a prime.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  That wasn't a very helpful law. I thought it was going to be Prime's Law is, the name is the Primogen. That's what I was hoping you were going to say.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  I actually had a really insightful one that both Bigan and I really liked. And then now neither of us could remember it, so I just went with prime numbers. I'm now saying my law is prime numbers.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Okay. All right, I've got one. Um, whatever tweet, so this is TJ's Law. Whatever tweet gets the most likes from a previous model release, every model will optimize for in the next training round.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  So if you're, if, if, if you've noticed, it's only about Blender suddenly. That's the only way to tell if a model's good. Weirdly, those were the ones that did well last time. So next time, if it's not Blender, it'll be a new thing. And then when they, when everyone does their training, they're gonna say, okay, we're, we have to do that. That's what everyone's gonna test. Because this happened with Muse and it happened with, what was the other one, Prime?

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  This, this happened with, not only that, but it also just, uh, the, uh, the octagon and the ball. Like that was the first version of this, which is, could have one-shot these octagons.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Yes, TJ, you're completely right. I'm on that. That is a, that is a real law.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Whatever one, whatever one, and literally you saw the labs go and apologize that they didn't train on 3D modeling. They came out and apologized and said, our bad, we didn't train on that. So you think, you think anyone's gonna, they're gonna train on whatever one it is for the next round?

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  TJ, I'm giving you that.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  That actually is also an operable law because it means that now if you need AIs to get better at something, you just have to do some like SEO kinds of like trying to get your meme out there as, "Look at how bad the models did on this" or something, right? And then it's like, now they'll all go fix it.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Yep. So I, an example of one that's gonna happen next will be, they'll all be good at one-shotting music videos of like text and things. Everyone's been like, "Oh my goodness, Opus, to this music video edit." So you'll expect all of them to do that next round. There you go. I'll even give you a test for my law. There you go.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  That's really good.

• 1:15:55Speaker 06

  I'll go real quick. Mine's, mine's pretty simple. Mine is the effectively engagement inversion law where the least amount of effort you put into a post, the better it does.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  The classic shitpost. Trash, that's a great law. That's a good law.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  That seems pretty true, actually. I kind of agree with that, that law.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Casey, you got one?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  I don't really, I mean, the only law that I think I have is the, is my corollary to Conway's law, which is that this also applies across time as well, which I, I covered in, in that sort of presentation on Conway's law, which is to say that it's not just the structure of like the org chart at that time. It's the structure of all org charts throughout the history of the product. Because the, all the code kind of remains and carries forward, right? So you end up with this like, it's basically four dimensional Conway's law. That's the only thing I think I've ever stated like that.

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  All right.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Okay, there we go.

• 1:16:59Speaker 06

  Okay, I'm going to the beach.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:17:04Speaker 06

  Dude, I thought his background was fake when he first joined the call and then he ran to the background. I was like, okay. That was nice. Can you hear us? Can you hear us still?

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  I can still hear you. Of course I can hear you, Trash. What are you talking about? Of course I can hear you. Can you still hear me?

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  Yes, yes we can.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Actually.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  All right. Thank you everybody for watching this week's episode of the Stand Up.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  See ya. What's your favorite law?