Monday Links 35

Vicki Boykiss on the hard problem of Naming Things

When we program by ourselves, we are building patterns. By the time we’ve been programming five, ten, fifteen years, our minds are full of patterns we can apply to different problems. Picking good names it turns out, is mostly the process of constantly observing the world and providing good abstractions. and the people who are best at this have seen thousands of cases that they can generalize. This is not unlike what the neural network underlying ChatGPT does, but when I think about what I’d like to train more and get better at naming things, it’s me rather than the machine.

RIP Kevin Mitnick who, if anything else, demonstrated that humans are the hardest problem to solve in cybersecurity.