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cwilkes

979 karma · joined July 9, 2015

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cwilkes··on Show HN: I mapped every US golf course
Missing this one on Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle:

https://nwhickoryplayers.org/2015/08/ccs/

Believe it is only open for residents in that area

cwilkes··on Python f-string cheat sheets (2022)
Maybe should be called “iq-string” for Interview Question string.
cwilkes··on MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems
This implies that the input process did a check when it imported the data from somewhere else.

GIEMGO garbage in even more garbage out

cwilkes··on Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom
Scammers attract scammers?
cwilkes··on Laziness Death Spirals
I recommend the book “Unwinding Anxiety” by Judson Brewer for further reading. Another book of his “Hunger Habits” is really good.
cwilkes··on Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
Most of these entries are Naticks where the two crosses are proper nouns. That’s really unpleasant as it usually means there’s no way to figure out the cross unless you know the two terms.

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

In 2008, he invented on his blog the crossword term "natick" (after Natick, Massachusetts) for an "unguessable" square crossed in both directions by proper nouns considered obscure.

cwilkes··on CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4B
I’ve heard of that for civil engineering firms but the amount of damages is capped at the yearly contract amount.

Which in this case is probably a lot less than what these companies are paying in clean up costs.

cwilkes··on Boeing may reacquire Spirit at higher price despite hating optics
I cannot upvote this enough. They continuously squeeze suppliers either on a bill or to make more faster. Accidents are bound to happen.
cwilkes··on [dead]
“Back in July 2025, six years before Apple introduced Siri, Susan Bennett made some recordings.”

The author is from the future?

cwilkes··on How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years
You inherit some code. Is that string a username or a phone number? Who knows. Someone accidentally swapped two parameter values. Now the phone number is a username and you’ve got a headache of trying to figure out what’s wrong.

By having stronger types this won’t come up as a problem. You don’t have to rely on having the best programmers in the world that never make mistakes (tm) to be on your team and instead rely on the computer making guard rails for you so you can’t screw up minor things like that.

cwilkes··on Google shares sink following reports that some of their AI demo was faked
MSFT today: $373. Yeah I would say 10x growth vs 4x isn’t comparable.
cwilkes··on JC converts the output of popular command-line tools to JSON
Use “aws s3api list-objects-v2”

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3api/

cwilkes··on Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO
“ChatGPT summarize last weeks events”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave. Not cuz I’m deciding not to do it but because I can’t for the life of me figure this shit out. Like what was the endgame? This is breaking my neural net”

cwilkes··on Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer
Slight twist on that here: most employees are in Seattle and WA state law doesn’t mandate paying out unused vacation time.

Most (good) employers do that when employees quit but they don’t have to.

cwilkes··on Convoy cancels all shipments, load board is empty, announcement upcoming
Curious I wanted to see who are the top players in this market and the hype around Convoy and found https://www.ttnews.com/logistics/freightbrokerage/2022

CH is the highest with $14.5B in revenue. Convoy is … 20th with $1.1B.

cwilkes··on Meta's Mandatory Return to Office Is 'A Mess'
I’m envisioning carnival barkers trying to get other teams to use up their -15 seats as if they don’t sell out they have to pay the company a rental fee.
cwilkes··on Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
Just have those machines randomly ask one another for the time. Because of the Wisdom of Crowds the time will eventually be right.

/ sarcasm

cwilkes··on Lidar-equipped, 30-pound robot dog can be yours for $1,600
So kind of like breaking one of two compasses before going out to sea. Makes perfect sense.
cwilkes··on Air France denied my delay compensation, so I challenged them and won
Similar rebooking: less than 24 hours before a flight from Seattle to Naples via Paris Air France says “lol flight canceled good luck as we aren’t rebooking you”

Had to scramble as flights were filling up. On hold for 45 minutes. Eventually cancel our refundable tickets and buy another pair of tickets on AF and have to make up the difference.

AF is now saying that we should have gone through the non working app to reschedule.

And to top it off the luggage didn’t make it to Naples, arriving 3 days (!) later even though there are multiple flights a day.

Plane and the staff were nice.

cwilkes··on Terrible real estate agent photographs
What does a software engineer do? They type on a keyboard.
cwilkes··on LLM Powered Autonomous Agents
Mentally impaired humans sounds like the US Congress, so we are living it in a way.

So imagine that world but with garbage coming out 100x faster as it can tailor political talking points down to a fractional percentage point of voters. Oh your car was stolen by a minority? Here’s an ad that mentions car thefts, going beyond the prior ad of just generic minority-hate.

cwilkes··on LLM Powered Autonomous Agents
> Who knows how many of us reading this would never have existed if nukes hadn't been invented. You can't make the argument 'the Manhattan project, we blow the planet up, the end".

I don’t think that argument against anti-LLM uses works as the response would be “nukes weren’t launched as we had humans in the loop. Without a stopgap like that maybe a nuke would launch if there was a 50.001% chance of our side winning”

The counter counter argument to that would be that there isn’t enough weighing to how terrible a nuclear war would be and then maybe the LLM would change its mind. But who knows.

cwilkes··on Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers
That puts a new spin on a “brittle unit test”
cwilkes··on Hacking the Philips Sonicare NFC Password
Expect that to change as Phillips bought SonicCare in 2020.

Maybe soniccare will be the high end model and Phillips will be the one with “special offers” aka making you listen to a jingle about mouthwash while brushing your teeth.

cwilkes··on Paper Airplane Designs
Hah! Me too. Fond memories.
cwilkes··on Elon Musk says ‘get off your work-from-home bullshit’
Person that sells cars for commuting wants people to commute. News at 11.
cwilkes··on Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff
Those are great applications of AI. Still doesn’t explain about how DropBox canning 1/6th of the company will help them do that.

I can see DropBox making some interesting features for their products around AI. That’s going to require manpower to do it. Manpower that’s probably a little nervous about staying at a company that just did layoffs.

cwilkes··on Lyft to Cut at Least 1,200 Jobs in New Round of Layoffs to Reduce Costs
How would the downturn get rid of leetcode? If anything it will dramatically increase its use as now there’s 100k more programmers on the market all applying for the same reduced pool of jobs.

Somehow companies are going to have to now filter through a lot more candidates to fill positions, and for right now leetcode-like tests are the quickest way to get a gauge of an engineer’s performance (on leetcode).

Don’t get me wrong: I think leetcode hiring depending on how it is done doesn’t result in getting the best talent.

cwilkes··on Support for Nest Secure Ending
General Motors’ teaming up with Google is going to backfire in a couple of years when Google gets bored of that market.

You won’t be able to sell a used car that comes with a non-working entertainment system. Maybe there’s a play in there to make an aftermarket system that will still function.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/01/business/gm-apple-play-evs

cwilkes··on Salesforce is shuttering Slack’s remote work research group Future Forum
Counterpoint to that: if you can work remotely you won’t leave for a company that requires your butt to be in a seat in the office.
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