DanielHB

Yeah, you get what I was trying to get at. It also helps to think about open source (and even paid) alternatives as competition.

Although my main problem was that they were designing these very generic solutions (that were both super complex and very brittle) that can fit every scenario when my _actual_ scenario was very simple. I couldn't get my point across that I didn't want to buy-into their full platform because of risks and complexity on my side, but that I would be open to buy-into small solutions if I saw the need for them in our product.

In any case this company platform team had this mentality that the company should operate like google, trying to build these massive all-in-one solutions that everyone under the company should use. When in practice it would never work because of the sheer amount of people required on their side to pull that kind of initiative off (on top of other considerations like ROI, downtime-risk, etc).

oh-my-pi is a fork of Pi that adds a lot of this stuff

https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

I haven't tried it much though, can't vouch how well it works.

> In a good “ideal” org the only source of requirements should be users, aka customers, aka real people, user facing products, teams etc.

There are many other source of requirements that matter a lot. One heavily underestimated one is employee frustration. A frustrated employee is less productive and is at risk of leaving the org which incurs huge costs.

A few other ones: environmental impact, social impact, security, ethics, data safety/privacy, regulamentory compliance.

You might say that all these eventually end up as a requirement from users, for example "an employee leaving because he is frustrated means it takes longer to deliver features to a customer". But that is a very roundabout way of looking at it.

Previously I worked at a very large company, my team was mostly isolated form the rest of the tech stack of that company.

Suddenly came a mandate to try to integrate our systems together, the first goal was to use their authorization system (which involved, I kid you not, setting up 3 separate EKS clusters that talked to each other and if the main one goes down, all go down) that the core Platform team of the company was setting up.

Worse even, the plan was to use us as "guinea" pigs for their new systems before rolling out to the rest of the company because our team was smaller and therefor wouldn't be as impacted by problems on their side.

I was vehemently opposed to this, all our other experiences with their stuff was just a huge amount of pain. I remember clearly a meeting we had where I said: "Why would I use your stuff that is not well documented and that I don't understand when I can use open source stuff that is documented and that I can understand". Their only argument was that said they would have internal support for us.

I came up with this concept that I tried to push on to them, that their stuff shouldn't be this monolithic tower of babel monster, but instead should be a buffet where I can pick and choose what to use. Our requirements were very different from their stuff and I didn't want to run into problems because of stuff that had 0 benefit to us.

I ended up leaving that job mostly because of this.

I remember as a teenager going for a road trip, there was a stretch of the road that had no street lights about 100km away from the closest city. Looking at the side of the car I was surprised just how bright it gets when the moon is out and the sky is clear. You can totally walk around in the open without any extra lights.

If anyone is interested I made a build that can make most items at the highest quality possible using a single assembler by switching the active recipe on the assembler. You just throw in the basic resources for the base items in the recipe and it just builds the whole thing at legendary quality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FactorioBlueprints/comments/1gl5v50...

It takes a bit of setup for each item you want to make though and doesn't work if the process takes more than one fluid. The default in the blueprint is to make blue circuits.

Unfortunately factorio has this mechanic where if you switch the item an assembler is making it loses progress for productivity bonuses, so this setup is not really practical for many items. Plus it takes a lot of space. But it is fascinating to see it work.

Yes, this was my point, formal proof static analysis makes LLM output better. Therefor a language with far higher requirements on formal proofing (to the point it becomes very difficult for humans to understand) might end up being better to use by an LLM.

Of course it is not that simple as a large part of how effective LLMs are is due to training data which is hard to get for a new language.

Since the output of human software work is code and AI software work is _also_ code they are both liable to shoot themselves in the foot in the same manner.

You see this already, LLMs are a lot more reliable in statically typed languages with strong memory guarantees (like typescript or rust) than in weaker languages.

IMO the only way LLM code can avoid most of the pitfalls of human code is if we make new programming languages targeted at being used by LLMs exclusively. Think of languages with very strong methods for formal proofing and stuff like that.

The problem is that even if said language was invented, it would still fail catastrophically when integrated with systems not made in said language. We are very lucky that relational databases already provide a somewhat high level of formal proofing in this regard.

Said language would be impossible to parse by humans, kinda like assembly where you can parse what an isolated piece of assembly code is doing, but if you can't comprehend a somewhat large pure-assembly codebase as a whole.

I am from the biggest port town in south america, I remember when I was a kid some of the local shops would sell blank CDs incredibly cheap. This was around 1999 so blank CDs were not quite so cheap yet.

Eventually I found out what was really happening, thieves somehow got notice of container ships with blank CDs and were breaking into those to steal the CDs. A single container could keep a city fed (and all its modded playstation 1) for years.

Haha, try drag-and-dropping a file over an SMB volume that can't be mounted (just hovering the files without dropping does it). Not only does it crash Windows Explorer, it crashes the whole god damn window management system (but at least it restarts it on its own).

It has been doing that for at least 2 years.

I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

I wonder if a technique to pack crazy high amounts of heat in a small mass and just eject it in an orbit to the sun would be viable. Probably not, but the idea of a datacenter pooping its heat into little pellets is quite entertaining. Like Lila's pet from Futurama.

You assume billionaires and politicians are all-powerful and that they congregate in a secret cabal voting on where to take civilization next. No they live in fear of what other powerful people might do and their reactions to what is perceived risk can really f up everything. Even the most powerful autocrats in the world have to deal with other countries.

I dunno, won't a satellite be _more_ vulnerable in space? There is not anti-missile tech in space.

I suppose it is about being out of reach of cheap drones?

Haha, so true, even when I was a kid I thought Samsung LCD monitors were a bit shiet compared to the alternatives.

Goes to show how long brand name goes, especially on appliances.

In practice, if I don't use the terminal from inside the editor, what are the advantages of this extension compared to the other one?

Yeah, but to be honest on my current project the only extension that I needed, but wasn't available was the Typescript 8 support (the typescript with golang-based language-server) which should land eventually in the built-in typescript support.

I get it, but my incentives are deeply misaligned with the company's in this regard, I prioritize things that annoy _me_ directly or indirectly (through not having to troubleshoot bugs made by other people).

On a ROI and prioritization metrics I put myself first, co-workers second, product third, company bottom-line fourth. Part of putting myself first is delivering things mandated by management (so, you know, I don't get fired) which skews to product and company bottom-line, but things I do of my own volition is definitely not going to the bottom-line/product.

I am lucky I am not time tracked aggressively and that my immediate superior lets us work on things out of our own volition. The fact that some of the stuff I do benefits the company indirectly is secondary to my motivation to do it.

One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again).

Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed.

Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.

I have been using VSCodium (chromium-like version of VSCode) with this extension:

https://github.com/jeanp413/open-remote-ssh

I run the editor (and its extensions), my projects and any agent harnesses from inside a container and use that extension to get an editor.

This is mostly to protect my credentials and data from malicious extensions/dependencies/rogue-agents, bu it also lets me quickly port my dev environment to any machine (I use linux at home and macos at work). Just install podman, install VSCodium, add the SSH extension, build image, add my utility shellscripts (to quickly get in and out of the container in a shell) and done.

Apparently Microsoft keep some VSCode APIs proprietary so only its own extensions can use it (allegedly for security reasons), which is why this specific extension only works in VSCodium. I wonder if it is vulnerable to the same things the article points out.

My company did this a couple of years ago to some machines we host ourselves. It is a bit of trouble to set up but it is not that bad and can easily save a 1000+ dollars per month since GHA runners are very expensive.

It is that grey zone where it is kinda worth it to pay someone to do it, but also might not be worth it the headaches of managing that person and the infra (like what happens if they go on vacation). The improved speed is the thing that tilts the balance.

To be fair they are also really good at fixing the tests and the whole point of a test is that when it breaks you need to take a look.

It is more like looking at test diffs is more valuable than looking at new tests.

But yeah, I wish people would clean up LLM-slop a bit and remove some useless tests, but I think this status quo is actually better than no tests at all.

The one thing I remember the most was making the jump across the broken bridge, that was the most badass thing in my childhood mind ever seen. I didn't know english very well so it took _ages_ to get to that point in the game.

The game is amazing, but it is really annoying when you get stuck on a weird timing-based wall-kick game, or robot-bunny minefield, or destruction-derby minigame with unclear instructions.

Somehow I remember those parts more than the fun parts, maybe because I didn't have access to a guide back then.

It is funny to think that even back then people just didn't put up with bad controls. Like Elder Scrolls Redguard, amazing game for the time but the lousiest controls ever. Megaman Legends also comes to mind.

They would put up with crazy puzzles, huge grinds, weird RPG numbers systems (AD&D in BG1/2 for example), but if you want to do action A on thing B that can not, under any circumstance feel bad to do.

I dunno, I found that kind of environment a lot easier to work with. The really hard environments are when the tech teams are large, to get something done you need to talk to 3 different teams and get them all to agree to do something and _when_ they are going to do it.

And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.

Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.

It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.

Similar for me except that my tenures are usually 4-6 years, except this one job that I lasted 1 month because I fundamentally didn't want to do the work I was assigned to do (and would keep doing for at least a few months, probably longer).

The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.

It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.

Yeah the keyboard controls were awful, apparently it was because they wanted the game to have a console port using a gamepad.

Thing is I bet the people who played it are right too, I just never managed to bring myself to play more than a few hours of the game before getting frustrated. Bad controls + 90s point-and-click-puzzle-design + early 3d graphics is not a good recipe.

Full Throttle was criticized for its dumbed-down point-and-click (basic only 3 actions + using items, instead of the usual verbs), but that was the sweetspot for my early-teens mind. Can never get enough funny responses of using the lick action.

I remember playing it back in the day and I was severely unimpressed. Compared to Full Throttle it just felt clunky and the 3d art wasn't nearly as good as the amazing pixel art. I ended up never finishing it.

> People share skills and superpowers and plugins and mcps and very, very few of them have and kind of proof they do much at all.

At least 3 times last month I was asked to review a change in a .md file used by agents. And I am like: "yeah I guess it makes sense?"

It feels we need to write unit tests for this stuff, but even how to do so in reasonable time and complexity seems difficult.