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awill88

89 karma · joined April 16, 2020

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awill88··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
Oh my god, I feel so old lol
awill88··on OpenDLSS: A Vulkan Reimplementation of Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering Network
I guess in this example since the model wasn’t trained on that, just like they said.

If that data is some kind of missing key, go make your own and stop nitpicking someone who made a great point as to why they didn’t want that oh so precious data

awill88··on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices
No doubt the feature that would imply analytics doesn’t function until terms are accepted doesn’t work as intended. It’s not like it’s going to be a priority to test before going to production.
awill88··on AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too
It almost feels like ages ago when the promise of AI was to be a sponge of knowledge, to help us dig in quicker and speed up the search process of looking up implementations on Google / Stackoverflow because the expectation was that we authored code and demonstrate it to our peers it was correct as the role of an earnest code contributor.

You cannot overstate how disruptive agentic powered development has had on the startup scene. There is clearly an embrace or loosening of that expectation which is upending the profession and also paradoxically giving superpowers to us who have been in the business a long time.

It’s hard to know where this is all going as we are being challenged by this transformative, powerful, yet problematic technology every day at work.

awill88··on OTel isn’t going well
otel is amazing and when thoughtfully instrumented, turns out, you can opt out of auto instrumentation btw, it provides a standard that is useful, well maintained, portable to enterprise or self hosted.

It’s modular, but the author is appraising the Ruby shortcomings as a problem while also saying they unfortunately don’t have time to contribute because, you know, they can’t “join the calls” lol

We just got a CTO who loves Ruby and guess what I’m about to do: use AI to fill in the Ruby gaps and open a PR and work a weekend or two and see if they like it and then you won’t write any more articles disparaging a project that I personally love.

It saves our company AT LEAST 10k a month vs having datadog / splunk / enterprise-y bullcrap. You seem so educated, why not roll up your sleeves instead of patronizing the hard working people that make the project work with your “if it were me” just go ahead and say it in their forums.

And, if you work for your paycheck, you’re using an agent. A mature project like Otel? Shit. That’s easy-peasy to feed into an agent, so what’s what is actually the problem? Take the time to learn and help them out if it bothers you so much you want to share it with the world!

Isn’t every single “problem” found in every large and successful open sourced framework?

Throwing out a baity framing like it’s some kind of project going wrong and then kind of just ending the article without making any sort of judgement on where this all leads, proceeding to post on hackernews.. bait!

It’s a cloud native project that is not owned by any company. That’s so rare and worth an article to celebrate open source! What a privilege to stand on the shoulders of giants!

> So OpenTelemetry currently is attempting to support a dizzying number of languages and frameworks.

“dizzying” — so I’m lost, did the author remmeber the scope of the project before they started making judgements about it?

And calling the attention of hackernews here: what’s the alternative? Oh that’s right, there isn’t one. Because this is a wag my finger article for attention and aggregating the author on a developer channel to boost their presence. Lame.

(Thumbs down)

awill88··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I think we are all vulnerable and need to reassess what it is we bring.

Agents merely accelerate and equalize the playing field. And they cost money. We might be a dying breed, but we are the best operators of this technology. And if we want it, this is our moment.

Yes, get into wood working.

awill88··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
LLMs don’t “solve” execution at all. They aid and accelerate it.
awill88··on Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things
You know what lacks focus? This whole article. Oh, and also individual styles of commit messages. You know what’s a waste of everyone’s time when you’re building technology in 2026? How to write and summarize what you’re work is doing.

Conventional commits doesn’t make a promise, it’s a specification. Words have power and meaning, this viewpoint is about more than a spec, it’s about the popularity and relevance that they clearly despise.

Conventional commits are like BEM syntax for CSS, it works if you pay attention. It’s structure around what developers do, which thoughtful limits. What is the problem with that? Is it the only way? No. But to say it’s encouraging the “wrong things” pshhhh

This author’s take is dog water for coders who yearn to be controversial and (clearly) focus on the wrong things.

awill88··on You can no longer Google the word 'disregard'
Seems like a bug
awill88··on Prepare for an AI Jobs Apocalypse
That’s a bet and remains to be seen.
awill88··on How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Based lol
awill88··on Dotfiles feel too personal to share
I feel similarly. There is virtually zero chance I’m going to clone and run someone else’s dotfiles. So the act of sharing them is a generous look into a developer’s toolchain and I’ve been inspired by others’ choices. So, if you know how, please share them!
awill88··on WASM will replace containers
I think this author is so far off the mark that it makes me wonder if they were high when they wrote this
awill88··on Bay Area cops are getting a new Siri-type tool for fighting sideshows
Yeah this whole effort is just more money wasted on security theater and this whole discussion thread is filled with disgruntled tech workers who drive into the city rather than take Bart and are so clearly salty about the inconvenience of people being people. To be honest I would have thought sideshows would’ve gone out of style by now I’m sort of impressed it’s this much of a problem lol
awill88··on Bay Area cops are getting a new Siri-type tool for fighting sideshows
Which makes sense because they might actually be people who otherwise feel powerless and deserve empathy like anyone else
awill88··on Bay Area cops are getting a new Siri-type tool for fighting sideshows
Surveillance tech is the worst and I hope this fails miserably.

There should be an outreach program that goes to the community and works with the people who perform sideshows to make them less disruptive.

Narc tech won’t fix the problem it just wastes money

awill88··on Scrum's “Product Owner” Problem
The article and commenter are talking about a single management role, Product. You say “retain managers” — plural. You’re putting words in their mouth.

They had something like Extreme Programming, and it was not a good time from what I heard. If you want to live in la la land of coding for a profitable business, well, sorry to break it to you, but a cohort of smart people need to be led. Notice I said led, not managed.

Also, the role is called Product Owner not Product Manager, I would imagine that was a conscious choice. If a PO feels like a manager, that’s what’s wrong. And maybe why that could be is the engineering team’s fault for having an insatiable need to.. control all aspects of their day-to-day. However, it’s a business at the end of the day, not a coding playground.

The article is basically suggesting POs shouldn’t control the backlog because engineers know better (essentially). Sounds like they’ve had a bad experience and want to vent about it. Fine, but it’s an immature take imho.

I am an engineer myself and I think it’s insulting to the people who have to take the work that engineers do (or fail to do because they want to experiment) and cross the divide and tell the business that the work you’ve done is worth everyone’s salary.

I don’t want to control the backlog with a bunch of other knuckleheads, thanks.

awill88··on Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
Leetcode?

I find it interesting that there’s an assumption that if you exist in this world as a professional software engineer and are successful by all reasonable measures that it somehow predisposes an exposure with leetcode.

I’ve never used it for interviews not because I put energy to avoid it, but because I don’t think it’s all that popular, or maybe I just don’t interview often enough. If I want a new job I wait until I’m emotionally done with the one I’m at and none of the places I have ever interviewed have used it. What, is it that if you’re not using it today then you’re somehow “behind”?

I don’t understand this post at all. What a loaded assumption. Does it do something only Leetcode can do? Is it some holy grail? I’m just burnt out on this tenor of the community here, as if any of these platforms are seated as some kind of hegemony of “the engineering scene” Yawn.

An interview is and will always be a balance of your technical skill and your ability to present your work and deal with timely feedback. That’s it.

So for people who wonder wtf this post is about, you’re not alone.

awill88··on I Spent 24 Hours with GitHub Copilot Workspaces
The tenor of the conversation I imagine since it’s a chatbot
awill88··on DuckDuckGo AI Chat
At this point, anybody here likely has had the privilege of being educated to prefer primary sources of information over secondary, tertiary, etc.

The indexing feature that search engines for years provided was a side-effect and benefit of the internet’s success.

There have always been challenges with this as it is not immediately clear what should be treated as “primary source” information — it takes time and skill — the user in this model is accountable for their own exploration and consumption of other peoples’ knowledge.

AI seems to be purposefully at odds with that. So, for me, the distrust and avoidance is well-placed.

That said, it’s a powerful tool that has a place in the world, but I hope it doesn’t come at a detriment to the colloquial understanding of what it means to “search the web”

awill88··on AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft
It’s been a good run everyone, good luck out there
awill88··on Tools and Apps for Technical Theater
Good to see QLab. I’m curious why MaxMSP didn’t make it on there. In college we used it for ‘These Shining Lives’ to create a harmonic, barely perceivable drone over the actors voice fed from the mic. It was sick!
awill88··on Hyperloop One to shut down
It’s not even just about choices, it’s about consensus and we’ve forgotten how to see a win from a partial loss. We no longer know compromise at a federal level
awill88··on Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms
You’re a natural but don’t forget to slow down, get done with school, find meaning outside of tech, and then change the world. You’re already on your way.
awill88··on GitHub Snakes SVG
Great job!
awill88··on Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine
Excellent work
awill88··on Is Austin losing its luster?
Yes? Isn’t that implied by “losing its luster,” considering the publisher and audience of the article? I think it goes on to talk about the relationship to venture capital and local govt. so it’s more than a general thing?
awill88··on Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
There’s some good points on here that I might share with some tutoring students, esp about greenfield and how that’s really a coveted thing in a social setting of engineers. I do think the tone should be worked on so it is less.. bleak. Like, I don’t really remember being nervous about how long something would take me, unless I was concerned it was impossible to do to begin with. I also didn’t have to deal with thinking about the job all the time, because I was doing it, which is a tongue and cheek way of saying if you want to succeed, work life balance might look different to you than to the peer next to you.
awill88··on Refactoring has a price, not refactoring has a cost
Ah yes, this short, click baiting article highlights the very predictable and widely known side effect of what we all know as the software development cycle.
awill88··on Go Package for Building Progressive Web Apps
Hold up, they lost me at “declarative syntax” no, it’s Golang. It’s not infrastructure as code. Hard pass, use templates..
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