corytheboyd

The day can’t come fast enough where we just see things like this as trivial misuse of the tool— like using a hammer to drive in a screw. We use the hammer for nails and the screwdriver for screws. We use LLM for exploring data with language, and our brains for reasoning.

Well you’re sort of right, in that yeah, duh, you need your boss to like you to get promoted. If you are a very capable person, it won’t take long before you are looked up to for answers, which is where this attitude of “only doing what the boss wants to hear” falls apart, because, boss is depending on YOUR voice now. It’s not the end of the world if you plateau here, plenty of people do. Personally, while I too think corporate world is rife with idiocy, I’ve learned to largely detach from it. Constant negativity is mildly cathartic at best, and yet, it will burn you out very quickly.

You are not on to some “secret” here, all who participate in corporate work know it’s ridiculous. Seriously, open up a bit, and get to know some of these “terrible bosses” outside of work— they will shit talk with you like anyone else.

This falls apart around the VP layer, as from there up it’s actually insane people living in a different wealth reality than ours.

We are already very painfully aware of the hyper rich being out of touch. This reads like rich guy A saying it’s actually rich guys B and C who are the problem. Maybe this is frustrating for people like the author to hear, because clearly they have good intent with this message, but I’m sorry, the only way I will ever perceive someone who received a 9082% pay increase is as another criminal destroying the world that I live in. I am a complete hypocrite though, because of course I would say yes to a 9082% pay increase, like most/all people would. The price of being this wealthy is exile from plebeian society. Sorry you have to be rich?

> Rarely is this accepted by whoever chooses what we should work on.

I get that YMMV based on the org, but I find that more often than not, it’s expected that you are properly maintaining the software that you build, including the things like fixing warnings as you notice them. I can already feel the pushback coming, which is “no but really, we are NOT allowed to do ANYTHING but feature work!!!!” and… okay, I’m sorry, that really sucks… but maybe, MAYBE, some of that is you being defeatist, which is only adding to this culture problem. Oh well, now’s not the time to get fired for something silly like going against the status quo, so… I get it either way.

Heyo I’ve noticed Lodgy come up a few times on HN now, and was curious if you explored making it a proper desktop application instead of a two-part UI and CLI application. Did you rule that out for some reason?

Which is exactly the number of days a week you plebs will work, and that is final.

I lose a little more will to live each time someone smugly reminds us that the fiscal year actually started in February or whatever the fuck. God dammit can we just have one CALENDAR. It’s okay I know you need to close the finances or whatever, but why can’t that just end in January and start again in February, instead of creating this dumb second year for ourselves.

You know what it is? A leaky abstraction. Implementation details of finance leaking into something as fundamentally basic as the calendar for the entire rest of the company. NO!!!

Super love this as a project for departing from the grind of the day to day, but did you consider the name… Gem Boy?

Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.

Thank you! I have no patience for articles headlined with “Picture of rare <blank> taken!” that do not lead with the picture. If I want to read more about it, I will, but lead with the damn image. I know I know, the whole point is to show me ads, etc. Still gonna fart my fart into the wind I guess.

Java, or at least Lombok, seems to have a @NonNull annotation that does what I want— cause code not to build that fails the check, and forces propagation of the annotation.

Reality does indeed feel exactly like what you mentioned with C#, though. The annotation is going to be missing where it’s needed most unless something forces the whole project to use it.

> Without a more sophisticated type system that represented nullability, you can get NullPointerException anywhere.

I started working in Java a few months ago and holy shit does this stick out like a sore thumb. Null checks cascade down from gods domain all the way to hell. But oop we missed one here and caused an outage lol add one more! So much wasted human effort around NPE, and yet, we sit around in a weekly meeting getting yelled at about how stability needs to be taken more seriously. Hrm.

Went in expecting a basic how-to about the Singleton module, but this is so much more, you clearly know your shit, and I love deep dives like this!

Right, that’s what I’m getting when I say this:

> […] pick the one that’s already winning and make it the best we can.

I agree, it can be much better. Tons of incremental improvements have been made, and should continue being made.

I too would like to see browser close the gap completely, supporting everything needed to build real applications, not hacked together applications that accidentally work. We seem so close…

Sure, but learn from why the Electrons of the world are winning. It’s because browsers are already what you would get after reinventing the wheel all the way to its logical conclusion— a highly customizable, generic application runner. Let’s not throw that away and make an Nth new thing. HTML/CSS/JS are good enough abstractions with great implementations, and it’s easy to build applications against this. Portability is already solved too. Yes, we can do better than shipping each application with an embedded web browser executable, there are huge jumps being made all the time with native web view frameworks. Personally, I think the ship has sailed on making the “perfect” framework, let’s pick the one that’s already winning and make it the best we can.

> Always keep interviewing

Isn’t it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that something is off? Any seasoned manager will see right through it, but would never call it out directly to you.

Then, let’s say you get an offer, do you say you’ll only sign if you’re laid off? It’s expected you sign the offer and join reasonably soon. I’ve seen offers rescinded after ridiculous start date doubling down by candidates. You will be actively shooting yourself in the foot if you get an offer and don’t take it, because you just wasted many hours of their time, and they may remember that if you apply again…

Outside of all that… where do you even find the time to ALWAYS be interviewing?! I put (exactly) 100% into my current job, so always interviewing means I have much less free time. It guarantees I am always stressed, and being stressed ruins my life. I like the work I do, but find it incredibly exhausting and dehumanizing after long stretches. Five 8 hour days is enough of a long stretch to make me feel I am wasting my life, I can’t even imagine how always interviewing would ruin me…

The better advice in the same light is to always be networking— or at least making sure you HAVE a network. Referrals are your only weapon against the flood of trash applications.

So yes, yes, I get that I am a row in a database, came to terms with that a long time ago— this is the silly game we play for money. Until society collapses, and we miraculously reform it to something better, this silly game we will continue to play. I just want to scrape joy out of as much of that time as I can.

Accepting arbitrary input is a complexity that will be abused. Why not lock it down to a limited set of inputs… or just a heart? `POST /openheart/heart{?url}`

100% agree, you simply have to prove varied competencies repeatedly to level up. It’s very intuitive, and leading projects means guiding others to execute the varied competencies you’ve now demonstrated your understanding of.

Exactly what I’m getting at hah, its neat to see what other people come up with, to see if I want to change my own little set of perfect tools :p We all know it’s nonsense, but we’re going to do it anyway!

Just add other teams of people doing work in parallel, then make all the work depend on each other, and bugs will become even more inevitable. All the integration, end-to-end, contract, etc. testing in the world won’t save you, the savant incapable of writing bugs, from encountering and having to deal with bugs.

Yeah I was expecting real, concrete tricks, something involving the right/perfect(?) combination of language, tool, pattern, etc.

This is just “think correctly, and often, then, no more bugs”. Not helpful?

One one annoying thing about using LLMs to answer technical questions is when you provide context like “I have tried X, Y already, and Z won’t work because…” it does what LLMs do— uses all the words in the prompt to string together more words into an answer. It would make LLMs so much more intuitive to use for technical questions if this problem could be solved… sounds so obvious that maybe it does exist?

I imagine the software presented here does a lot more than proxy requests to a printer though. What sorts of payloads were you sending off to be printed? If it worked Good Enough for lightly formatted text, no-hosted is way better than self-hosted!

Sounds fine to me! I’d also be happy with a reasonable one-time payment for the self-hosted version.

I don’t think you can just send any document to a thermal printer and have it come out usable… there’s definitely value in software that can _convert_ arbitrary data to whatever format/dimensions/etc the thermal printer needs. Like the post mentions automatic dithering of images. Stuff like that. The HTTP glue is not the hard part.

It sounded to me like once it’s out of alpha the pricing model is “TBD, but likely pay-per-print”.

Yes, it does, and we have one for some recipes. It’s bulkier than these would be, and we don’t have a lot of counter space. Also doesn’t solve the disposable problem. We have plastic sheets to protect the pages which works good enough, and it’s easy to print new pages if some get soiled anyway.

I don’t want mementos, I want disposable references.

It’s also not that big of a deal if this isn’t feasible, because the binder works fine, the phone works fine. This is just sparked a “hey, what if…” idea is all.

> The home equivalent of a fast food kitchen ticket printer!

Exactly where my head went haha, next thought was having a clip to hold the recipe up :p

Is there something out there like this that is self-hosted? It’s ridiculous that this isn’t, and it’s going to become a pay-per-print model?! I don’t care about the AI nonsense, it’s a printer.

I could see myself using something like this to print recipes. I’d like to avoid getting my fancy cook book dirty, but have still have recipe in the kitchen to reference. Phone works okay until you have to scroll with dirty/wet hands.

Oh yeah that would be a great use of AR, totally agree, and feel like we’re not even that far off on this one.