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They gave a widely accepted way to estimate value, and your counter argument is that that is inaccurate. Fine but how can you be confident about that? I see only one way which is for you to come up with a better way and then show that by your better estimation, COCOMO is bad. Until you do that, all your argument goes down to is vibes.

Your example about OpenClaw works exactly against your own argument by the way: OpenAI acquired it for millions by all accounts.


COCOMO has been shown to be inaccurate numerous times. Google it. Here’s one result.

“A very high MMRE (1.00) indicates that, on average, the COCOMO model misses about 100% of the actual project effort. This means that the estimate generated by the model can be double or even greater than the actual effort. This shows that the COCOMO model is not able to provide estimates that are close to the actual value.”

No one in the industry has taken COCOMO seriously for nearly 2 decades.

>OpenClaw

1. OpenAI bought the vibes and the creator. Why would they buy the code? It’s open source.

2. You don’t seriously think OpenClaw needs half a million lines of code to provide the functionality it does do you?

Seriously just go look at the code. No one is defending that as being an efficient use of code.

https://journal.fkpt.org/index.php/BIT/article/download/2027...


> No one in the industry has taken COCOMO seriously for nearly 2 decades.

The funny thing is that we've just discussed how people do take it seriously. It's just that you don't like that. And what do you offer as an alternative?

Like I said, vibes. You think that the value of some software is something you can only "feel". That's not how an engineer thinks. If you're engineer you should know that if you can't measure it, you can't say anything at all about it. Which means you cannot discount any alternative method until you've got a better way. But clearly you can't think like an engineer.


I don’t know what to tell you. All the evidence says COCOMO is too inaccurate to use. Show me evidence that says it’s accurate.

Just because someone wrote a book and a few bankruptcy trustees used it doesn’t magically make it accurate. Just because something is systematic doesn’t mean it’s worth using.

If you do a bit of googling you’ll find that the majority of studies show that systemic models don’t outperform expert guesses. So yep vibes are general just as good.

Show me a large tech company that currently uses COCOMO to plan software projects.

Also if you are a dev outside of NASA or another safety critical industry and you think you’re an engineer, you’re kidding yourself.

Oh and try not to sound like an asshole next time.


Many people also take tarot card reading seriously as a way to predict the future.

As an engineer, you are not required to come up with a better way of predicting the future before you can dismiss tarot. You need only show that it doesn't work.


You seem to be spreading propaganda yourself by accusing Opera of something I have not seen evidence of. Are you saying this just because the company is Chinese?

See for example

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/opera-datensendeverhalten-desktop...

(In German, but Kagi translate or Google translate work fine here)


Thanks, that's pretty damning, in particular sending every visited domain to the browser vendor under the guise of "safe browsing". Really sad to see a former world-class browser stooping so low.

And I really couldn't care less if the browser vendor or their servers are in the US, China, or even any supposed "data privacy haven". It's simply none of their business which websites I visit.

For the same reason I'm not using Chrome, which intentionally kneecaps browser history sync when sync encryption is enabled, effectively forcing users to choose between non-synced history and privacy, when e.g. Firefox manages to do encrypted sync just fine.


> For the same reason I'm not using Chrome, which intentionally kneecaps browser history sync when sync encryption is enabled, effectively forcing users to choose between non-synced history and privacy, when e.g. Firefox manages to do encrypted sync just fine.

This is novel to me - what's the kneecap specifically? How do you only kinda sync browser history??


Chrome only syncs "typed URL" (i.e. everything you enter in the address bar/"omnibox") website visits when your profile is encrypted, as far as I remember. "True" history sync is somehow tied to Google's generic "activity sync", which only exists unencrypted.

For me, this completely defeats the point of having history sync in the first place, so this particular change was what made me switch browsers several years ago.


That's so cool. I already liked Coalton, and after this change I think it's definitely going to be even better. Can't wait to try it.

How convenient for Trump that now all Europe now has a pretext to send the help they were asked for.

The whole point of that noise is to put NATO + Japanese military in the Straits of Hormuz so that Israel and the US can continue to attack Iran with impunity. Any effort by Iran to shut the Straits in response to further attacks will hit some "innocent" party and drag them into the conflict.

It's basically bait for WW3, and luckily so far the EU particularly are not biting.


When was the last time the NATO navy do anything anyway? They’d just be sitting ducks and probably not even know which directions to point what pointless weapons they have.

Being sitting ducks is the point.

The underlying reason is too many people will readily believe that if someone died for something it means it's worth fighting for, and this has been abused by strategists for a very long time.


Your theory is easily disproven by looking at other countries with far more volatile economies than the USA. They almost always have much higher fertility rates no matter how bad their economies are. But don’t feel bad: every single theory people have come up to explain decreasing fertility rates in nearly every country on the planet can be shown to not match reality one way or another. Whoever comes up with an explanation that matches reality is going to get a Nobel Prize.

You must never rely on AI itself for authorization… don’t let it run on an environment where it can do that. I can’t believe this needs to be said but everyone seems to have lost their mind and decided to give all their permissions away to a non deterministic thing that when prompted correctly will send it all out to whoever asks it nicely.

There are plenty of competitors! I’ve been using Copilot, RovoCLI, Gemni, and there’s OpenAI thing.

This aren't competitors, they're clones, it's a different thing.

CC leads and they follow.


I used to be really excited about GraalVM but this, together with limitations in what Java code can run (reflection must be whitelisted - i.e. pain) made me run away from it. I do use Go, but my favourite substitute for Java is actually Dart. It can run as a script, compile to a binary or to a multiplatform "fast" format (a bit like a jar), and performance wise it's par on par with Java! It's faster on some things, a bit slower on other... but in general, compiling to exe makes it extremely fast to start, like Go. I think it even shares some Go binary creation tooling since both are made by Google and I remember when they were implementing the native compiler, they mentioned something about that.

Yeah, Java is pretty fast despite the fact that it still has these kinds of obviously suboptimal things going on.

I love how Zig, D and Rust do exactly what you say: parse the format string at compile time, making it super efficient at runtime (no parsing, no regex, just the optimal code to get the string you need).

I say this but I write most of my code in Java/Kotlin :D . I just wish I could write more low-level languages for super efficient code, but for what I do, Java is more than enough.


Kotlin string interpolation turns into the fancy invokedynamic based string concatenation behind the scenes so it's very optimized: https://openjdk.org/jeps/280

I admire Rich Hickey's approach of building on top of the Java ecosystem for this reason, adding a functional first approach with emphasis on data structures, where using the right algorithms comes naturally.

> Zig, D and Rust

Also C++, which works the same way.


Yeah a lot of us were at the point the other guy is now and thinking that writing code by hand is still an acceptable way to go. It just isn’t anymore unless you can justify spending 5 times more time in a task just because you have some principle that code needs to be written by hand. And the funny thing is that the more complex the code base, it actually becomes the more appropriate to only touch it with AI since AI can keep a lot more concepts in its mind than us human with our poultry 7 or so. I think only a few die hard programmers will keep thinking that in a year from now.

That you even describe it as holding concepts in its mind sounds like confusion to me.

As does the reductionist idea that human thinking is something crude in comparison.


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