austin-cheney

The Bronze Age collapsed for many reasons but the event that really kicked things off was the explosion of Santorini. The empires that died were not quickly replaced because after extensive famines and invasions they were replaced by different people with different social objectives.

The same thing happened later in Europe when Germanic and Asian tribes displaced the Roman and Celtic tribes of Western Europe.

This is only challenging to understand if you falsely believe civilization and technological advancement to be socially preferable. Historically that is not the case. Civilization tends to emerge not of preference but out of unwanted necessity to regulate resource production/distribution.

The last time I wrote code was 2 days ago. 4 days ago I made changes to 3600 lines of code across 45 files.

I have not gotten into the whole LLM code authoring thing. I have tried, but I just haven't found a way to make it both more productive than writing by hand and also less error prone.

When my kids were that age I read several of the Edge Chronicles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_Chronicles

My childhood favorite is the Dragonlance Twins trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance_Legends

I am not sure why people believe that data centers are the future. I did not down vote you, btw.

I wonder if the industry can shift towards production foods. Grapes are high in sugar which has value to the food industry. We have a concord grapevine at my house that produces 10-15 gallons of fruit a year and we use the grapes to supplement other meals and create fruit roll up preserves.

They are not generalizations. They are frequently repeated observations. The ability to operate from evidence is what determines if you are working with real professionals or children pretenders.

You improve performance for a variety of reasons. You stop when you have competing evidence. The other 99% of the time it’s just developers making bullshit excuses.

The shitty team excuse.

Performance is not complicated. You measure something and compare the numbers. Through my career I have encountered the following failures repeatedly:

* The complete inability to measure things. This is common among people with low social intelligence. Many people in this line of work cannot measure things and form all kinds of bullshit excuses. Cannot do it all as if they are disabled. Sometimes it is laziness, sometimes it’s autism masking, and sometimes it’s stupidity/ignorance where they believe they shouldn’t have to or are superior from convention alone.

* The shitty team argument. It’s common for people to intentionally avoid or discard measures because there is fear superior performance may indicate an operating deficit. The last thing anybody in software wants is to change approach if they are on a shitty team, because corporate developers are allergic to training people. This is often justified by asking what happens if you work on a team or about new hires.

* Throwing performance data away and lying about it. This is very common when performance data provides evidence that current conventions or favorite tools harm performance. If, for example querySelectors measure 100,000 times slower than some other approaches developers will pretend the performance evidence just doesn’t exist.

* Guessing. When people suck at what they do they invent their own performance realities. When people guess at software performance they are supremely wrong more than 80% of the time and tend to be wrong by multiple orders of magnitude.

According to GitHub it was about +2114 / -1519 lines of code from 45 files yesterday. I felt productive yesterday.

https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio/commit/0c730389c9e4e69...

Yeah, I have never understood the over reliance on AI. Writing the code is not the challenge. The time it takes to push a new feature and test it out is often trivial, maybe a few hours.

The real challenge is forming the new ideas in the first place and most of those new ideas coming either from using the code as a product or time spent maintaining and refactoring large code.

Anyways, if you want to continue on the path towards regaining control and take it to the next level I wrote something similar here: https://blog.sharefile.systems/be-brave-go-low/

I completely disagree. Are you going to operate from principles or from conventions?

Higher order thinking is actually substantially more common, like overwhelming so. Higher order thinking is the application of known patterns, such as frameworks and common tools. Many people often dismiss doing the right thing for matters of convenience, which is the basis of tech debt.

First principles are not elusive. State your goals and limitations first. Then proceed accordingly.

It depends on your goal. Here is my current experience:

* If you want the most fresh job posts in your inbox, fully AI generated, use indeed.com. You should set reasonable expectations that a billion other people are getting those same job alerts and almost every application that goes through that site is also AI filtered.

* If you want the most recruiters to actually call you then go with dice.com. If I were a junior developer in a struggling market with a killer resume dice.com is gold. As a super old JavaScript guy that no longer wants to play well with insecure children or struggle with indecisive sociopathic pretenders most of these jobs feel stale.

* I have not tried Monster.com in a while but they have worked for me in the past.

My recent experience with recruiters contacting me:

* I had 6 different recruiters contact me over nearly 10 weeks about the same super urgent opening. These recruiters were each doing everything correct to find excellent people, the other candidates as well, but the client did not really seem to want this job filled.

* Most recruiters find the city I live in and pull out 1 zip code assigned to that city and then determine I am about 12 miles away from all their job openings. My city has 55 zip codes and most of these jobs are 55 miles from my house with mandatory onsite through the worst traffic in the country.

* Everybody wants to rewrite my resume, sometimes multiple times. I keep learning the hard way its just as strategic to not include certain information and to become less desirable for many jobs you would rather not do. Recruiters want to place you in any job to collect their commission, which is completely at conflict with making the most desirable career choice.

> I choose to believe your word regardless, but I would urge you to take heed of the "love" part of "tough love" more, next time.

Why? If that is not the correct answer why would I supply more of the wrong answer?

In my experience encountering people who inject themselves into conversations where they were never invited to impart their unwanted tangential wisdom they are almost always unmedicated ADHD or on the spectrum. This is actually one of the top diagnostic criteria for ADHD evaluations.

I have a 9900X (Zen 5) and I am able to clock 5,000,000 WebSocket localhost message sends and response receipts per second (single socket) on it from my WebSocket library written in TypeScript.

My best advise on this comes in two parts:

1. Go low level, as low as your language or runtime allows.

2. Keep things simple, where simple means few not easy.

As a Node.js developer low level to me are net sockets, streams, and the file system. Yes there is more, but those 3 things will get you 95% of what you need. You really need to understand that when it comes to systems programming most of what you need is in the OS kernel and you do not have direct access to any of it, but it is available to you in some form via run time API. For example TCP, UDP, TLS, and more are all in the kernel. What you eventually see are payloads riding upon those protocols with their header information stripped.

In the case of Node.js if you learn streams and pipes you can eventually figure out everything else out. A server is just an event listener on a port, IPC, or named pipe and all communications are data fragments on sockets and sockets are duplex streams. File system access is also comprised of streams and streams can share data access via pipes.

After that its just a matter of solving for practical problems one step at a time as they come up. This is how I wrote my own HTTP and WebSocket libraries. Node ships with an excellent HTTP library, but mine is lower level so I can do other things with it. My WebSocket library can now push messages at 5,000,000 per second on a single socket including roundtrip responses. You just take it one step at a time. You find lots of challenges and break a lot of things along the way, but only because you will find new edge scenarios later that you were not currently aware of.

You are mostly correct, but no rule exists in absolution, and my words while harsh are neither snarky nor clever.

I really am hoping my comment reaches that curious soul, because I really believe kindness alone is insufficient given the context and behavior. Their failure is a failure of expectation. The way to correct for poorly aligned expectations is harshness, otherwise known as tough love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tough_love

Software has been in the toilet for years before AI and for years before Covid.

Software is fully unregulated which means it’s full of liars and pretenders who should never be anywhere close to any kind of machine. The result is a saturated job market full of cry babies, both in management and individual contributors, that need just a little helping hand to do absolutely anything. This why at any large employer 20% of the developers deliver 80% of the value.

When it comes to looking for a job you are a needle in a giant haystack. Maybe you are an excellent developer, but you are still a needle in a haystack and most employers really don’t care how good you are. The goal is asses in seats, which really means you need to be over achieving at the minimum qualifications more than all the other minimal qualified applicants.

I used to think I was forced to do this nonsense because it’s my professional experience. The reality is that the industry relies on this. Just go do something else. You might take a financial hit at first, but you will likely be happier.

I don’t think the medical community has believed as the article claims for nearly a century.

Most animal brains have three very different organs in the brain: the cerebrum, cerebellum, and the limbic system (which itself is further divided into numerous differentiated types of tissues)

* PiHole - dns

* Jellyfin - videos and such

* mealie - recipes

* aphorio - my own app for container management, web servers, sockets, and more. It can do 5,000,000 messages person on a single socket roundtrip

* gamevault - like Jellyfin for games

* there is an audio app I wrote that I use daily

* ghost - blogging on my public web server

There are some others I run additionally but those listed above are the main ones

> That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI.

That is already here. One example of somebody who probably cannot program desperately trying to push some AI slop without considering why they are repeatedly rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693790

I am starting to see this everywhere. Its like an entire generation of developers just gave up and believe they could become expert developers in a week by pushing prompts into LLMs. For me this is the greatest danger of AI, people building garbage they will never be able to understand, extend, or repair and that garbage will enter production critical systems like traffic signals or medical equipment.

Everything that touches JavaScript in the corporate world feels broken.

Look at any full stack job post. It’s a mess of tech stack nonsense on the backend for people who are terrified of JavaScript and a layering of framework madness on the frontend for people who are still terrified of JavaScript. So it should be no surprise to see packages like those in common use when people aren’t really writing, or even reading, the real code anyways.

That is just the coding aspect of it. There are many additional challenges to working with a bunch of cowards whose primary job is to pretend to be something they clearly aren’t.

That is why contracts are more than one page in length. The details matter. I can remember receiving a contract class in Afghanistan about something as simple as moving gravel. Yeah, use your imagination with that and whatever absurd cartoon like fantasy you could dream up regarding "moving gravel" is still probably less strange than the real events that occurred.

I don't write contracts for a living, at least yet, but my learning so far is:

* clear goals: where is the end point and what does the product look like once it gets there in all required details

* defined test criteria: this is where you get to sue when they fuck shit up

* measures: there must be predefined measures. These can be wildly unrealistic at the start and require changes as the work occurs, which is ok, but there must be defined performance criteria that all parties are held to before work completion. In other worlds this is rewarded with bonus targets and penalties

No. I am going to launch a startup next week by pivoting my current personal application into a different industry.

Some highlights:

* a proxy (and reverse proxy) is 3 words on a web server configuration object that supports many such proxies on many such web servers

* it can send 6,000,000 web socket messages per second per socket (or 5,000,000 per second roundtrip with responses)

* it can log everything

* none of it was written with AI. The one time I used AI to validate some absurd performance results the AI took a lot of education to follow the code only to reaffirm my incorrect conclusion

A/B testing.

I learned how to write high performance JavaScript code directly to the DOM without a bunch of abstraction bullshit. Turns out this proved to be a bias because our experiment code frequently executed faster and failed far less than the actual production code that went out later.

So there a couple of problems to solve in this space.

1. The price of hardware has to return to normal. Otherwise it might take 2 years to see a savings compared to just paying streaming subscriptions.

2. Private access from anywhere. This requires something like a vpn tunnel to a globally available address that otherwise drops all network traffic. There are private commercial solutions for this like TailScale. Otherwise you would need IPv6 access to a WireGuard virtual network interface, which is way more challenging to get correct than it sounds.

3. Finally the easy part is the software. I wrote my own solution for this but there other great options like Open Media Vault.

I have something like this very recently.

About a month ago I wrote a perf tool for my application to measure its network message speed. It showed I could send 3,250,000 WebSocket messages per second in my TypeScript application. If I moved each test of an experiment into its own call stack I could send 3,250,000 messages as fast as 0.002 seconds. Claude confirmed the number.

It was about two weeks later I learned the number is wrong. The number would be correct if this were just a linear instruction processing problem. Actually the processing time, CPU and network handling, is about 0.08%. The other 99.92% of processing time is in memory. What was happening is the perf tool would push messages into a queue on the socket from a JavaScript loop, but the speed to process these messages and drain the network buffer was less than the loops execution speed.

Correcting for that dropped my transmission speed to a more realistic 100,000 messages per second. Modified queue management then allowed a rate of 800,000 messages per second. Pushing each message send into a separate call stack then allowed for a rate of 6,000,000 messages per second on a single socket but it sacrifices stability to reach that rate of transmission speed.

My wrong number was confirmed by Claude for the same reason I believed it, a confirmation bias that was well reasoned from the logic. Claude came to confirm the number for the same reason I did but came to that conclusion a completely different way.

> When people put quality requirements too high on software, we get situations where

This is a common trope of the unregulated: We can’t raise quality because we can barely deliver as it is. The real message there is that the user should suffer so that you won’t.

I think you misunderstand quality versus competition. The purpose of regulation is to impose a minimum baseline of quality.

Software does not have regulation. In many areas of software we force shit quality on the users and just expect them to take it without complaint as a common practice. Then we as developers, like entitled children, completely rage the moment anyone casts light on this insanity.

One of the greatest challenges for software as an industry is for the developers to consider the role of the user. In my 20 years of doing this rarely have I seen a developer advocate for the users over themselves. Instead the developer imposes themselves as the primary user and the actual users as a secondary class. This is where most tech stacks and design decisions come in at every step.

I can also remember when I worked at Travelocity a million years ago and they actively tried to fight this insanity with exhaustive A/B testing.

Actually they do. Local coffee shops fall under the regulation of local food inspectors just like restaurants.