chronid

> But it still remains that AI can very much be effectively used either to write first drafts OR refine your own first drafts.

There is a world of difference between this and copy-pasting LLM output into slack and email.

You can write the first draft with the LLM, or have the LLM help you do an analysis, look at how code works, and so on. But you need to check for the LLM to be correct and you need to be able to articulate what the LLM found in your own words. If you don't you have just offloaded all the work to someone else: someone else will have to check, verify, investigate what could very well be an hallucination (bad context, random bit flips, whatever the cause doesn't matter). Your effective contribution to the discussion will be negative.

This is my personal experience: I've seen multiple emails from management about handling AI properly - it hasn't improved the situation. Those people don't hear and my org still sort-of says to people to use as much AI as possible (though they've limited which models we can use, and slashed token spending).

And with hiring effectively frozen there is not even an incentive to let go of those people because they will not be replaced - they may have contributed little overall (routine tasks, oncall weeks) and now contribute 10x more spam while before they would not even try to investigate an issue, but we don't have the cycles to allocate that to someone else. And every time you tell them something they try to gaslight you by telling you they're trying to learn and you're being too aggressive.

I've become so frustrated by seeing claude-isms in slack or in emails it has become impossible for me to use it to work on my personal projects and I'm moving over to codex. Maybe it's time to try pi and some chinese models, definitely I need a break from this madness.

> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.

Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.

I work for a very big US company. My team (10 people) has something like 4 PMs and every task is essentially priority 0. They're coming up with a new way to split tasks that seems inspired to a gatcha to prioritize between priority 0 tasks, this is their contribution and solution to the issue, any attempt to make them see how crazy that is has failed.

There are daily syncs for things that take weeks to do due to compliance, endless war rooms to solve things that would be done offline in half the time, and random bullshit process and committees introduced by management which generate even more meetings...

It's common all over the world, motion instead of progress. It's incredible to me how all those companies don't realize where their money is spent. But alas you cannot make people see a problem if their salary depends on it, and I may be no different.

I don't think the dependency from Whatsapp (it's arguable other apps are "better" or not and on which axis) is critical. WA has alternatives (up to "no app at all" thanks to RCS).

The real issue with US tech dominance is B2B (i.e. Microsoft)

Not bizarre at all. Many EU countries mobile users have "prepaid" SIMs. Whatsapp came at the perfect moment - mobile operators were starting to offer decently priced data plans but were also still very stingy with SMS (which was a bit of a cash cow for them, infra costs were very low) and essentially never added at the time advanced features (like MMS) to any prepaid plan ever. Many of these operators never really recovered from becoming dumb pipes.

Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)

And i want to use hibernation, as I don't mind putting my disk encryption passphrase once a day as the price of not risking having my laptop with a completely drained battery on Monday morning due to 1% battery drain/h of s2idle in my 64GB RAM configuration.

You can use suspend+hibernate to accomplish that and it works well. Unless the gods of kernel lockdown decide you cannot for your own good (and it doesn't matter if your disk is fully encrypted, you're not worthy anyway) of course. It's their kernel running on your laptop after all.

I worked in finance on the other side of the pond - developers wanted to constantly bring in and use new services but also didn't want any of the responsibility or the work needed to make compliance happy (or even in that particular company shoulder the costs). When me and other folks where brought in it to fix the "cloud strategy" it was a complete shitshow and heads actually rolled when we wrote a tool to assign costs to applications. But we had to start almost from scratch and limit usable services as we developed strategies and blueprints for each...

The complete, unapologetic desire of devs and security teams (but also many infra teams) to not have any kind of ownership was horrifying to me.

In the end there's not a single solution or strategy, it really goes back to the organization and where your weaknesses and strength are as an org. If you have a gazillion consultants following the "best practice" of the day and exceptions on top of exceptions you are dead, devops or otherwise. You will still make billions if you are the right company though regardless of your software practices, so...

They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.

The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.

Exactly how openssl was (is?) when heartbleed happened. It's nothing new sadly, there are memes about the "unknown oss passion project" holding up the entire stack all over the internet.

Isn't this intuitively true?

Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC.

Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately.

But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.

Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT.

Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!

I have plenty of hard disagreements on the "user experience improvements" in Linux. "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard (GNOME is sort of successful at an extreme cost and plenty of limitations, KDE is still an incoherent mess with plenty of bad defaults starting from the base CDDM skin). It's full of things like the missing icon view in the GNOME/GTK file chooser [1] and while it's true that Windows11 is atrocious, all those little things add up.

I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...

I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)

I've been reading about the "year of linux" for years now, it's a meme for a reason. People that are not "prosumer" will keep using the preinstalled OS even if it's garbage - assuming they buy a laptop or desktop at all - and the prosumer will probably keep an OSX or a Windows machine close by anyway. Linux is usable as a browser kiosk sure but there is still plenty of friction on everything else. Enshittification will continue, and possibly infect also linux.

[1] https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-thumbnails-file-picker/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43945373

The last rewrite I've seen completed (which was justified to a point as the previous system had some massive issues) took 3 years and burned down practically an entire org (multiple people left, some were managed out including two leads, the director was ejected after 18ish months) which was healthy-ish and productive before the rewrite. It's still causing operational pain and does not fully cover all edge cases.

I'm seeing another now in $current_job and I'm seeing similar symptoms (though the system being rewritten is far less important) and customers of the old system essentially abandoned to themselves and marketing and sales are scrambling to try to retain them.

Anecdotal experience is not so good. Rewriting a tiny component? Ok. Full on rewrite of a big system? I feel it's a bad idea and the wisdom holds true.

This is what home automation was supposed to be. You shouldn't be looking at it, it should just help you silently and reduce the amount of things you have to care about.

Turning lights off, closing shutters when it goes dark, handling temperature and CO2 concentrations, etc.

I feel people have a need to look at dashboards, have screens, etc (maybe it's some sort of sympathetic reaction about looking at dashboards all day at work?) instead of letting go. Dashboards should be looked at if something is wrong and automation is failing.

As a non-blind user, the title expresses my feelings too. And I feel like it's getting worse over time, not better.

From little things to kernel lockdown breaking hibernate on a fully encrypted system just because you should be happy to get your laptop battery killed by s2idle or disable secure boot. Yay, security.

I can only imagine the pain of all the accessibility issues on top of what I experience.

In my country you pay for school lunches as a local tax (and assistance is available for low income families). Children are always fed. Parents are the ones with the debts and the garnished salaries.

In one of the movies it's actually explained the machines originally created an utopia for humanity, but it was bad for "engagement" and "retention" and they had to pivot on the nineties simulator - which was better accepted.

IIRC eBPF and DTrace are (no longer) solving a similar problem, eBPF has become far bigger than just tracing, it's now a way to have user space code "driving" kernel decisions. I'm not sure they can be compared this way - and even if we do, the user base of DTrace is infinitesimally smaller of the one of eBPF.

> Every minute you spend doing on-call work is time that you can't spend on the things you've actually been assigned to do.

In my experience at least if you're oncall during a sprint you would have less work assigned to you than otherwise (2 week sprint and 1 week you are oncall? 50% allocation) as the expectation is that week you will spend responding to alerts, or investigating issues, or even improving alerting and dashboard and fixing bugs. If this does not happen, devs don't push for it and management is completely blind to it you have an organization issue. If leadership does not care about the problem it's time to jump ship ASAP.

But I've seen people stubbornly defending an alert on >60% CPU usage of their 1 CPU allocated kubernetes pods where there was no impact in p99.9 latency (which was measured and was the actual metric that mattered as agreed with the rest of the business and internal customers of the service). Or alerting on each single pod restart. That is self inflicted pain.

I guess what you are saying is the problem is the company culture - from a technical operations point of view at least - sucks. An no one wants or can put the effort into fixing it.

I see normally in oncall threads people complaining about "I got paged by an alerts because of another system X" - but in at least in a big enough organization this should not happen and it's an organizational failure. There should be an operations center on 24h/24h able to triage, escalate and evaluate, possibly not staffed only with L1 techs and given enough freedom to actually improve and automate. I know there are places where that is not true, and I ran away screaming from some in my career once I understood tech leadership had no understanding why it was needed.

But you would be surprised how much of the oncall pain is actually self inflicted by application teams themselves (some examples I encountered in the last year: TCP connect timeouts in the minutes and with no retries, no retry policies in general and things that should be idempotent that are not, no circuit breaker strategies, connection pools churning as they're shared between 10+ remote endpoints, wrong expectations about transaction isolation levels and how to handle conflicts at least in simple scenarios).

The fact boot codes displays are getting pushed to always more expensive motherboards - and there is no standard way to get them otherwise - drives me crazy.

You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you.

You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.

> But it's not the case that EU nations and Canada sent their soldiers to die in Iraq

They did, not all of them but many did. On Canada I may be wrong, sure. I believe even Ukraine has KIAs in Iraq.

> France in particular sided with Russia to block the Security Council from authorizing military action, leading to substantial tensions with the US and widespread disapproval from the public on both sides. European demonstrations against the war remain one of the largest mass movements in history.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars broke the model the US and EU had been trying to push until that moment, alienating the south of the world from it and providing certain countries with a justification for their future actions. France had the right of it in the UN assembly.

People were angry back then for similar reasons they're angry and shocked now, and once again it has to do with expectations.

I also don't believe the Iraq war alone is not really enough to deny the alignment between EU and US foreign policy in the last 30 years or so anyway. You won't have complete agreement with 30 nations involved ever.

> But the North Atlantic Treaty simply does not contain a promise to align foreign policy in this way.

I think this in your original comment highlights your surprise at what those people believe, or at least your not understanding it?

There was effectively uniform foreign policy between the US and its allies for the last thirty years, even under the first Trump presidency, and this included at least a certain degree of interventionism (first Iraq war, Yugoslavia...) which solidified international institutions (differently from the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, which weakened them).

Even if they didn't agree, EU nations and Canada at least sent their soldiers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway.

Why are you surprised people expect such policy alignment after thirty years of it?

Why are you surprised people consider this a betrayal of what NATO stood for in the past, as a proxy of the democracies of the west? Just because there is no violation of the letter of the treaty?

The NATO treaty doesn't imply in his wording any obligation for a military reaction to an invasion of a member of NATO. There's no penalty to just respond with a strongly worded letter, but there's an expectation an ally will react militarly.

Will your allies trust you any longer if you just follow the letter of the treaty? I don't think they will. More critically, nor will anyone else.

The US have historically positioned themselves as "defenders of democracy" and have multiple times used that positioning actively. It's inevitable for an expectation to be there for them to do just that. The US is free to violate expectations and just follow the letter of the treaties it has, it is a sovereign nation after all, but the surprised and frankly childish "we have no obligation!" reaction to the blowback is more unreasonable than the expectations for its support of Ukraine, particularly in how it has been handled politically.

> All wallets could become worthless in a weekend if a government makes the wrong stride in quantum research..

No need for the wrong stride in quantum research. A government can make it illegal and seize the exchanges and watch actual value go to a round 0 in seconds.

A nation's government has a vested interest in preserving the value and viability of its own currency, not Bitcoin's.

When coding, you trust the CPU to do correct math. The kernel to properly allocate memory. The network stack to send packets and pass you only the ones with valid checksum.

Much of our world operates on trust (and eventually verify), same as any application does. It's exceedingly costly to do otherwise.

We will never know, but I wonder if it could be a power/signaling or VRM issue - the CPU non getting hot doesn't mean something else on the board has gone out of spec and into catastrophic failure.

Motherboard issues around power/signaling are a pain to diagnose, they will emerge as all sort of problems apparently related to other components (ram failing to initialize and random restarts are very common in my experience) and you end up swapping everything before actually replacing the MB...

In my last job we ran centralized clusters for all teams. They got X namespaces for their applications, and we made sure they could connect to the databases (handled by another team, though there were discussion of moving them onto dedicated clusters). We had basic configuration setup for them and offered "internal consultants" to help them onboard. We handled maintenance, upgrades and if needed migrations between clusters.

We did not have a cluster just for a single application (with some exceptions because those applications were incredibly massive in pod numbers) and/or had patterns that required custom handling and pre-emptive autoscaling (which we wrote code for!).

Why are so many companies running a cluster for each application? That's madness.