alexjplant

As the Dead Kennedys opined: "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"! [1]

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=FV1YVZV-Wb8

No, calling him "disturbed" was entirely out of line. As with everything it's not GitHub per se that is causing him consternation but the loss of what it represents:

> “Some people doom scroll social media. I've been doom scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word,” he admitted. “On vacations I'd have bookmarks of different projects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source code, but OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations. Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.”

> “I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal,” he wrote.

He is a passionate person whose identity is heavily invested in community and technical achievement. He's upset about his world being disrupted, not that GitHub as a product is failing him. This is how high-performing people are - they care deeply about their work. Could you imagine leveling these charges at a visual artist when they complain about a company messing with their favorite pencil? Or a saxophonist when their reed of choice is discontinued? It's petty and reductionist.

> For that reason I think the happiest I've been is with a dirt cheap bike in Japan. Didn't even lock it properly (just a key built into the frame) and could park it outside any old shop or restaurant for hours.

I didn't see a single bike locked up when I visited Japan. I was told that this is because of the high conviction rate and mandatory bike registration process that they have. Was I just in especially low-crime areas? Do most Japanese cyclists lock theirs up?

Did people act like this in the 70s too when we had stagflation, mass unemployment, gas rationing, Vietnam, Nixon, etc. to contend with? I ask that sincerely because I wasn't around then. The US got a ton of cool music and cinema during that decade (disco and soft rock excepted) but the rest of it sounds even worse than things are now.

> the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.

I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it.

> Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.

> But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.

Mike Judge is a masterful satirist.

> they are a source of toxoplasmosis

You are far more likely to get it from undercooked beef or shellfish than from a cat. Less than 1% of cats broadly are shedding it at any given time and that number is even lower for indoor cats. If, like me, you have a penchant for rare steak and beef tartare then there's a decent chance that you have it.

Lightning is a superior physical design to USB-C (can't speak to the electrical part). Much like every major tech battle in history, however [1], the worse solution won because of ubiquity. I'm not particularly thrilled because I've had a USB-C connector irretrievably break off in a port once on a laptop but I'll make that trade for being able to use a single cable for all of my devices.

- Not an "Apple Faithful"

[1] VHS vs Beta, Doom vs Marathon, Zergling vs human, etc

My personal LLM coding stack is now OpenCode, Claude Sonnet for ideation on spec with OpenWhispr for voice-to-text, GLM-5.1 for the orchestrating loop, GLM-4.7 for coding, and DeepSeek R1 for review and validation. It works much, much better than the Claude Code setup I have at work for substantially less money to boot.

At this rate I fully anticipate being able to run a comparable stack on a 128GB Mac Studio using quants of newer-generation distilled OSS models in a year or two. Being able to ramble to a computer for an hour about features and technical philosophy then have it build a nearly-working app for $50 is an exciting feeling. There's still a long tail of productionization and fixing what the model didn't adhere to but it's still incredible.

Updated my comment to refine my rhetorical intent. Thank you for the call-out.

> "code should be self documenting

It should be to the greatest extent possible. Strive to write literate code before writing a comment. Comments should be how and why, not what.

> - ergo: We don't write any comments, ever"

Indeed this does not logically follow. Writing fluent, idiomatic code with real names for symbols and obvious control flow beats writing brain teasers riddled with comments that are necessary because of the difficulty in parsing a 15-line statement with triply-nested closures and single-letter variable names. There's a wide middle ground where comments are leveraged, not made out of necessity.

From TFA:

> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness — the AI doomerism, the cults, the hippies, the drug use, the polycules — is downstream of people saying things and other people taking them extremely seriously.

This is a perfectly reasonable usage - perhaps not the Hallmark greeting card one but it's certainly valid.

> the difference between the east coast and the west coast.

Having lived in and visited places on both sides of the US I can safely say that there is no single "difference" between them and that treating both as culturally monolithic (or their constituent places as broadly similar) is a massive category error. Boston is not Miami is not Atlanta just as San Francisco is not San Diego no matter how many people confuse them because they both start with "San".

Using a speaker as a kick drum mic ("subkick") has been a thing in recording for years [1]. I've never used one but it makes complete sense.

[1] https://bobbyowsinskiblog.com/build-subkick/

People do all manner of wacky stuff with Pis that could be more easily done with traditional machines. Kubernetes clusters and emulation boxes are the more common use cases; the former can be done with VMs on a desktop and the latter is easily accomplished via a used SFF machine off of eBay. I've also heard multiple anecdotes of people building Pi clusters to run agentic development workflows in parallel.

I think in all cases it's the sheer novelty of doing something with a different ISA and form factor. Having built and racked my share of servers I see no reason to build a miniature datacenter in my home but, hey, to each their own.

I recently had to write a coding interview question for candidates at my current job. I wrote the outline and had Claude generate synthetic data for it. I then wrote the solution without assistance to make sure it was viable (and because I wouldn't ask somebody to do something I wouldn't myself). I had no trouble getting it done in 20 minutes in a language that I haven't used actively in around a year and a half.

I do still write stuff manually frequently - I often spend 5 minutes writing structs or function signatures to make sure that the LLM won't misunderstand or make something up. Maybe that's why I haven't lost it.

For personal use I've noticed Claude (via the web-based chat UI) making really bizarre mistakes lately like ignoring input or making completely random assumptions. At work Claude Code has turned into an absolute dog. It fails to follow instructions and builds stuff like a lazy junior developer without any architecture, tests, or verification. This is even with max effort, Opus 4.6, multiple agents, early compaction, etc. I don't know what they did but Anthropic's quality lead has basically evaporated for me. I hope they fix it because I've since adapted my project's Claude artifacts for use with Codex and started using it instead - it feels like Claude Code did earlier this year.

I'd like to give the new GLM models a try for personal stuff.

Class warfare is a chart-topping hit in the US too. I've been on the receiving end of this rhetoric a few times in social situations but it's always been by college-educated people who get their politics from specific corners of the internet. They view those below them as ignorant, culturally-regressive boors and those above them as malicious hyper-capitalistic villains. That they've never dropped a fry basket or mopped a floor in their lives is of no consequence - they still find it appropriate to call people "tech bros" or, astoundingly enough, tell them that they "don't deserve to make as much as [they] do" because they view others' finances as an affront. It's personal dissatisfaction and consumerist impotence manifested as jealousy, nothing more, nothing less.

Interestingly enough I can't recall a single instance of a working-class person acting like this in a similar situation. A friendly ribbing and wise crack here and there, sure, but never as seething as somebody who feels like they should be making more than they do because they went to school for this, damnit!

I literally had the same thought about the counter and went to see if there was an HN thread to post about it on :-). PHP4 on shared hosting was such an innocent time.

> I think that if you go to an AI for advice and emotional support, it will do what most people will do - tell you what it thinks you want to hear.

Open two windows, ask it the same thing from starkly opposite perspectives, then see what it comes back with. If nothing else this exercise forces you to think deeply about what you're considering before you even see what the giant blob of matrix multiplication says about your situation.

> Ah, is this what you do for a job? I actually have to [...]

> if my job was CRUD apps and thats it,

I'm not sure whether you intended this but your post reads as presumptuous and disdainful. The whole point of these tools is to free people from having to do these parts of their job so that they can focus on the ones of greater substance. At no point did I say that was my entire job or that I was afraid of it disappearing - if that was your takeaway then I don't know what to say.

ACME [1] has been a thing for more than 10 years and has been a stable specification for 7 years. There were similar vendor-specific implementations that preceded it. The DoD has employed none of these solutions for their flagship infosec public web presence. If they were going to automate this then they surely would have done so by now. The reasons why are opaque but people who have experience working in this space might be able to make an educated guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Certificate_Manageme...

> Sure, not related to DSPy though, and completely tablestakes.

I agree but you'd be surprised at how many people will argue against static typing with a straight face. It's happened to me on at least three occasions that I can count and each time the usual suspects were trotted out: "it's quicker", "you should have tests to validate anyhow", "YOLO polymorphism is amazing", "Google writes Python so it's OK", etc.

It must be cultural as it always seems to be a specific subset of Python and ECMAScript devs making these arguments. I'm glad that type hints and Typescript are gaining traction as I fall firmly on the other side of this debate. The proliferation of LLM coding workflows has likely accelerated adoption since types provide such valuable local context to the models.

If you've only had exposure to one corner of the software industry then it's very easy to develop blinders. Not saying that this is what parent is guilty of but as somebody who has regrettably had this particular problem in the (thankfully distant) past I feel compelled to point out that this type of ignorance is sometimes just a side effect of one's circumstances.

As an example PHP still powers something like 75% of web sites and I've never once used it professionally. If I didn't know better I might think it dead.

> Why do people keep ralking about AI as it actually worked?

Because it does.

> I still don't see ANY proof that it doesn't generate a total unmaintainable unsecure mess, that since you didn't develop, you don't know how to fix.

I wouldn't know since it's been years since I've tried but I'd imagine that Claude Code would indeed generate a half-baked Next.js monstrosity if one-shot and left to its own devices. Being the learned software engineer I am, however, I provide it plenty of context about architecture and conventions in a bootstrapped codebase and it (mostly) obeys them. It still makes mistakes frequently but it's not an exaggeration to say that I can give it a list of fields with validation rules and query patterns and it'll build me CRUD pages in a fraction of the time it'd take me to do so.

I can also give it a list of sundry small improvements to make and it'll do the same, e.g. I can iterate on domain stuff while it fixes a bunch of tiny UX bugs. It's great.

My $.02 is that in the domain of software engineering LLMs have largely automated the process of copy-pasting from StackOverflow and existing parts of the codebase. Architecture and product management is still very necessary. In the same fashion they can also automate writing a novel. The issue is that prose is sometimes much more important in literature than it is software (because, after all, users use software, they don't read the code). I say "sometimes" because this clearly doesn't apply to stuff like schlocky bestsellers that one buys in airport stores and reads like movies.

When ChatGPT first came onto the scene I actually started using it to write something in this vein - a techno-thriller starring a former fashion model trained in Krav Maga working as a nuclear physicist who discovers a sinister government conspiracy to alter the foundations of quantum mechanics and enslave humanity with assistance from extraterrestrials. And, of course, only she can stop them with the help of a gruff-but-sensitive retired Marine who has since opened a ranch where he teaches orphaned puppies calculus. I only got 20 pages (so one gunfight and a car chase) in but it was as riveting as anything. Context limit cut my efforts short. Perhaps I'll revisit it soon.

I say all this to say that if words themselves are distantly secondary to narrative then I don't see anything particularly wrong with leveraging an LLM to help crank something out.

Faygo is unironically delicious. They used to sell them for $1 a pop (Midwestern pun intended) on the East Coast in gas stations. Diet varieties of Orange, Moon Mist, and Root Beer were personal favorites.

No idea whether this is still the case as I haven't been in a Sheetz in years.

Although "cyber" is a prefix used to denote a relationship to high technology there exist people who use it as a stand-alone term to mean "cybersecurity", e.g. "I work in cyber." It's very confusing given that it came from the word "cybernetic", the hundreds of other words that begin with it as well, and the existence of the term "cybersec" which is unambiguous and only a bit longer.

My first two gaming PCs in high school had a side window and blue cold cathode light. My next build in my early 20s I decided that even this was too garish and went to a simple brushed black case. I understand that cheap tri-color LEDs mean fewer SKUs and infinite custom colors but in practice many people never turn off the "demo mode" color cycling and it just looks ridiculous.

Then again I'm typing this from a Thinkpad - maybe that says something about my aesthetic preferences for computers.

The problem is that too many people couch pettiness and personal attacks in the philosophy of "being direct" or "telling it like it is". OP specifically mentions that criticism must be made on technical merits. The people that hand-wave this distinction away are absolutely insufferable.

> I know its unpopular to say, but when I have my 2 programmers in office, we get sooo much more done than at home. Someone gets stuck and we don't message/call, we just talk.

The technology exists to "just talk" in high-definition audio and video. If somebody isn't asking for help when they're stuck that's a people problem, not a remote work problem. There are several possible reasons for their avoidance; if multiple people are exhibiting the same behavior it could be cultural (specific to your workplace, not the person's upbringing). Using physical presence to force their hand is curing the symptom, not the underlying cause.