dottedmag

However if you asked your Danish roommate to write down what he said it would make perfect sense.

I've had one-line PR fixing real bugs sitting unreviewed for years. It didn't need any bumps or reviews.

So they won't have idle hands sitting around and itching to redesign something that works just fine.

Alternatively, if they could reassign that 50% of their headcount to bring Mountain Lion or Mavericks to the working state (updating cryptographic stacks, patching vulnerabilities) and just don't... touch... the... UI?

(Author here) I found that over time I spend more time striping someone's badly designed abstractions to get to the real functionality. LLMs are surprisingly good at figuring it out, plowing through the code and documentation and finding out that a 100MB library is in reality a HTTP client for 7 REST endpoints, or something like this.

(Author here) I meant "design" as in designing physical objects — and all our "programming" is "design" in this definition, because "manufacturing" is done by compilers and bundlers.

And I wouldn't write this article 3 months ago. Since then the quality of the output jumped significantly, it is now possible to put the agent into a proper harness (plan/edit/review/test) and the output is good — and if it's not, you discard it and try again, or point out a detail for the next cycle of improvements.

Yes, this requires a lot of forethought to set up, but it works.

I'm not talking only about "web things", I'm working on a project that involves engineering calculations and a lot of optimization of hot paths, both CPU and GPU.

(Author here) That's why I spent a sinificant chunk of the article talking about what should and what should not be reinvented.

(Author here) I'm actually talking in the article why it hasn't happened.

24% real vs 17% expected. Yes, some patterns, but not much.

Better never stray from code.

My faviourite configuration pattern for SaaS code: all the configuration for all targets, from local development setup, to unit tests, to CI throwaway deployments, to production is in a single Go package. The current environment is selected by a single environment variable.

Need something else configured beyond your code? Write Go code to emit configs for the current environment, in "gen-config some-tool && some-tool" stanza.

I don't see it challenged before the MR.

Linux caught Kent when he tried to sneak in non-bugfixes into a RC, and berated him.

After that (not before, this is a critical distinction) Kent said "I don't want to abide by the rules, because I have my concerns".

This is very similar to the situation I have described, except that in Linux it was Linus who was skipping reviews on Kent's code trusting him not to subvert the rules, and in situation I described the team collectively was trusting each other not to subvert the rules.

I didn't make myself quite clear — the others were raising points on _other_ rules, and as a result we tuned the rules quite often, as we discovered what works better and what works worse.

Except one person.

It is, but directly, not as a subversion.

I have had a similar experience with a team member who was quietly unhappy about a rule. Instead of raising a discussion about the rule (like the rest of the team members did) he tried to quietly ignore it in his work, usually via requesting reviews from less stringent reviewers.

As a result, after a while I started documenting every single instance of his sneaky rule-breakage, sending every instance straight to his manager, and the person was out pretty soon.

Except that every month bits of that value get chipped off.

PostgreSQL server is a single process that starts in under 100ms on a developer's laptop.

In the company I work for we use real PostgreSQL in unit tests — it's cheap to start one at the beginning of a suite, load the schema and go, and then shut it down and discard its file store.

I keep thinking of moving that file store to tmpfs when run on Linux, but it's nowhere near the top of the performance improvements for the test suite.

So: no more mocks or subsitute databases with their tiny inconsistencies.

Serial port

Cray 1 was released 1975, teletypes were old tech at that time.

Thank you, that's what I feel too.

For me switching the career, after spending more than 20 years in this as well... is very hard. I spent all my career outside of high-pay places like SV telling myself "I have all the time in the world, I don't need to grab most amount of money as soon as possible", so retiring is not an option.

So, switch to what? Any well-paid profession is going to be under pressure to be LLMized as much as possible.

Will it? The author goes to my «do not hire / hype-eater» list for sure.

Indeed, that's the only reasonable scenario that comes to mind.

Have you really seen language chosen based on formatting?

Should all companies expand to the whole globe?

There are plenty of well-off places with mild climate where using a scooter all year around is feasible.

Syscalls are easy. Drivers will be tough.

Make managers personally responsible.

Exactly: this "license" thing has to be changed to buying digital content.

Open source is a technical detail. One can see a less drastical change that will have the same effect.

1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are:

- Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner.

- Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner.

- Spying on a user is an unlawful search.

2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job.

3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years.

4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.

One can argue there are ~8bln of these robots already roaming the Earth.

There are rocky deserts.

70% of Sahara is rocky, not sandy, for example.

Bangladesh is also large.

A seemingly endless list of descriptions of open positions, just to be disappointed by "remote within US" buried somewhere within each and every one.

There are many open bare places on Earth where solar panels are useless because there are no electricity users nearby: any desert.

If all it takes is to truck the ceramic panels around and dump them to the ground, then it's probably not that expensive.

Isn't it nice that the article has a summary with all the facts upfront for a change?