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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Those aren’t white papers. They are scientific papers.

    White papers are written by companies as a marketing tool. The first two papers you linked above are written by universities and the last one by a research-focussed non-profit.

    As per Wikipedia:

    Since the 1990s, this type of document has proliferated in business. Today, a business-to-business (B2B) white paper falls under grey literature, more akin to a marketing presentation meant to persuade customers and partners, and promote a certain product or viewpoint.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper

    It’s a marketing presentation masquerading as a fake scientific paper.


  • White papers are shit written by marketing people who try to make their little ad sound like something academic. In truth these white papers are in equal parts misunderstandings, wrong and full of useless fluff. They are AI slop, often completely without any AI involvement.

    If someone is serious about the content, they call it a documentation, reference or datasheet.





  • It’s a really weird team mechanic.

    We have two teams working on the same codebase. The teams are very far apart in terms of organization. We are in different departments.

    That dude is in the other team. Each team does their own code review and is supposed to ask for cross-team review for stuff that affects the other team.

    The guy built himself a reputation as an infallible master programmer in his team by bullying everyone else during PRs. You know, nitpicking tiny non-mistakes like variable names, blocking PRs for weeks by always finding some unnecessary detail, then waiting for a few days after that detail was adjusted to find another one and so on. So his team thinks he’s the greatest. Or maybe they are afraid to be his next victim or something. Whatever the reason, they just greenlight everything he does. And he never asks for a cross-team review.

    His boss also completely covers for him, so so far our escalations just went nowhere.


  • We have that situation at work.

    Stupid dev creates mega-PRs that do a ton of things that are not part of the ticket and thus aren’t tested by QA.

    When it then inevitably fails during release testing or in production, better devs need to spend quite a bit of time to figure out what the hell the stupid dev messed up and the fix is then often just a few lines.