TeriyakiBomb

I found chezmoi kind of annoying and then just moved to symlinks and a fossil repo. Low tech and low drama

Reports of Ruby slowness are often exaggerated. Around the time GH was built that was certainly true, but in the ways that matter Ruby is more than fast enough nowadays, even at scale. (Shopify is a rails monolith, as is intercom and a bunch of other massive services) Compute is/was pretty cheap and the economics of ROR mean that it's ultimately not that expensive to run. I think GH's slowness is a mixture of mismanagement and issues on the frontend.

But for sure a systems language is going to be far faster on paper and Rails is far from perfect and does have some performance foot guns you need to avoid. And yeah, architecture is everything.

Yes, standard rails. Rails does not ship with components out of the box and the most prominent component system for rails was built and is maintained by GitHub. They have been moving to React for the last few years though, it seems to be more about hiring and ergonomics rather than capability.

In the first beta they've actually made aspects of it worse with more instances of the glass effect than before. It's still very distracting even with the slider all the way over to opaque

I think it's just gemini in a dress

I don’t think it’s solvable. And I think Anthropic etc know it. LLMs can only reconstitute things in its training data and they are so hungry they can’t do a good job in long lived codebase full of complexity and novelty. There’s never going to be enough similar code on the open internet.

It's inevitable that more projects follow this path.

The elephant in the room is so many projects already operate like this without formally announcing it.

If you look at Blender, one of the biggest and most successful OSS projects out there, it's effectively run as source available. Some PRs make it through, but for the most part there have been heavy barriers to entry to get your work into the product. In this example, it's been key to such a large and complex project with millions of users staying afloat. It's an inconvenient truth.

It's one of those unspoken things in open source - the bigger the project the less you can accept or vet contributions. The less able you are to respond to users because there are too many. The amount of code you need to own balloons. The signal to noise to too much. LLMs have massively exacerbated this issue.

I just hope there's not some bullshit publicity stunt coming in a few weeks.

"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"

I think it’s a question of investment. Google had incentive to pour tons of cash into V8. In recent years Shopify have been more involved with Ruby directly with yjit and zjit. The former bringing a pretty substantial performance improvements to the language.

We've gotten to a point now where ultimately there needs to be a very short elevator pitch for any language to gain any traction at all. Anything longer than a sentence, it generally won't go far relatively speaking. It's like a calcification/maturity thing in big sectors of software engineering. You need a VERY good reason to upset an incumbent. "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.

There's a huge amount of wonderful people in the community too.

It really doesn't. You think Anthropic will still be in business in 10 years? If they are, it's not likely they'll be in the same shape.

Exactly this - the late 00s and 10s we were riding the wave of the internet and smartphone adoption. Those markets have matured now and this is ultimately just the response. Covid was like some weird last hurrah for irrational spending. LLMs are just where all of that silly energy is going.

That's the less common third kind. late 10s tech spending was absurd, it's the same excuse as the first but again, an easier way to reduce Capex for staff they don't need.

In reality there are two kinds of layoff going on.

Idiots who truly believe that AI will actually replace a significant amount of the workforce (Long term, it will not but some jobs displaced) and those who have internalised that ZIRP is over, they need to be more lean as VCs have closed their wallets and saying "We've revolutionised our workflow with AI" than "We haven't turned huge investment debt into profit in 5 years and we need to reduce headcount for even the slightest chance of that happening, or at least raise again by saying 'AI' over and over" has far better optics.

It reminds me of the Crypto mining bubble - I look forward to buying my heavily discounted Mac Studio soon.

Only on this blog so far and India Today, so pinch of salt for now. Hilarious if true.

While this is true, it doesn’t stop businesses being overzealous with AI. It’s a compound issue of a decade of ZIRP, grow at all costs and then covid overhiring and AI is suddenly poised as some kind of magical panacea.

The broader issue is the sheer number of businesses that build massively overcomplicated stacks, bought heavily into bandage solutions like AWS lambda, got on dumb tech bandwagons like big data, nosql etc. This is just another one.

I think you can engineer yourself into being leaner, in some businesses AI will help but we’ve had over a decade of “we can just add more complexity” and it just does not work.

I’m a rails guy. People forget for every unicorn there’s 10 9 figure businesses just ticking away on some niche with a VPS, rails and like 4-10 devs.

I hope the Deno lot take the opportunity to capitalise on this

I think the concurrent write thing is not as much of an issue nowadays with the speed of NVMEs and WAL.

Plenty of cars can get off the line faster than an F1 car. But around a track, an F1 is by far the fastest in the world.

Going fast isn’t the difficult bit.

I can respond directly to this, I’m a former VFX industry person and still fairly well connected.

The the former you suggested. Background plates and the like. The lack of actual creative direction tools, trite visual style, lack of consistency/repeatability and complete inability to be edited or adjusted easily make it a non-starter for most tasks. Compositors are fast, LLMs are slow at that scale. There are tools like ComfyUI that sit in the “we’re running experiments/useful sometimes” category.

Loads of ML tools are in use and incredibly handy, but fit into that tool category, but actual wholesale video/image generation is not that prevalent, no.

Ah ok, I don't have much bearing, I'm not super au fait with the rust ecosystem.

Why in rust times?

My experience was actually close to the one from the article. I used SVN for a year or two, moved to git and never looked back

Reading this as someone in the process of migrating several projects to Fossil, interesting to see no mention of it all

A great article though!

I'm rooting for Zed but it does feel quite underbaked still right now.

Honestly not sure how viable that is long term with the way the pricing kinda needs to go. I think the recent copilot price increase is just the tip of the iceberg.

...yet.

..kidding. Obviously.

Ok. Well have fun. Bye.