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dzonga

4,127 karma · joined January 27, 2017

All in on Agentic Applications

engineer at everywhere with a knack for product.

email: ptdzonga \\ at \\ gmail dot com

I build things.

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dzonga··on The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
a lot of educators in the frontend space are very good and had excellent material e.g Dr Alex.

before 'A.I' - frontend was a tarpit - very few people did it well specially with SPA frameworks. There was always something broken whether due to state mismatch or something else. the state management libraries didn't help either with most of them being so complex. HTMX etc were a reaction to that complexity. Then add performance stuff - very few people had the skills to solve for that too.

now with 'A.I' - most of the educational material has either been taken offline due to 'A.I' scrappers, the llm's tend to hallucinate - so how are we gonna nurture talent to become experts. One thing I give to llms though - is that they're very good at plain javascript, decent at the frontend frameworks. But complexity around frontend work still remains - with 'A.I' generated code & devs who don't understand how to fix stuff - just a disaster waiting to happen.

dzonga··on US diesel prices hit a record high of $5.85 on average
most goods in the US today are transported via trucks. most of the whole main-street runs on diesel as well think home services businesses etc.

cost of diesel has a reverb effect across the whole economy.

the shrinkage is felt but won't be truly reflected in the economy. so the government can keep lying about the numbers.

dzonga··on Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
people tend to have short memories though.

late 90s and early 00s - even while growing up in the 3rd world - you bought or pirated a software license.

so we've never really purchased or bought software.

dzonga··on Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS
that's a beautiful ui
dzonga··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
based on your experience - if you were Tim Cook what would you have done ?
dzonga··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
you can blame Tim Cook for other things - but giving trump that useless statue - you can admire Tim Cook for his shrewdness & political capacity.

he knew he was facing an incompetent petty adversary. so instead of preserving his ego - he damaged his instead of damaging Apple itself. that's a martyr like sacrifice.

has Tim Cook put company profits over the customer - yes. but has Tim Cook preserved apple's value & position yes when it could have been severely damaged by trump, YES.

dzonga··on Fastpotify
whether vibe coded (which it is) or not - this is free work for a corporation.

that could hardly care less for it's users / customers.

dzonga··on The safest job from AI may be writing
I have a feeling the author framed this the wrong way.

my take is - the author wanted to express that there's always a demand for human prose / writing that captures the subtleties of expression, thought & ideas. which is very true. & we can already see this e.g by people opting out of LinkedIn for it's A.I driven long posts. whereas engagement is high on X where posts are likely to be human generated.

I wouldn't say writing as a job is protected - as corporations will always take shortcuts.

dzonga··on Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO
Firefox sucks on memory though on MacOS.

I use Firefox when I want disposable tabs / containers.

then majority of stuff - Safari. private window work stuff set to chrome - since I can resume the session unlike safari.

dzonga··on What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
it's a Sunday - I don't have time to put things into buckets.

there's coding - writing code to do something could be a game, utility to move files around. what have you. inherently the nature is a closed domain. AI is perfect here - the impact if something goes wrong is close to 0 or null.

then there's software engineering - which is both an art & science. u r dealing with rules of thumb. nothing is ever coded / written down. but a feel to whether something feels right or not. the domain is unbounded. the impact of something going wrong is catastrophic in all dimensions. coding is a delivery mechanism for software engineering. but not the actual work. using A.I here is useless.

but we keep having these pieces - I guess that's just shallow the industry is.

dzonga··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
the unfortunate thing - is the money pumped into omarchy + the hype around it .... a lot of sheepish followers will just follow the hype.

the tech might gets fixed later.

dzonga··on 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight
wish more lawyers broke down things simply like you did.

unfortunately - as you pointed out the outcome of the cases being a coin flip at the supreme court is the tragedy in all of this.

dzonga··on Monzo Stand-In
monzo r the same guys who went in on micro services. at a time they were bragging 3 micro services per engineer. so yeah a lot of things don't make sense.
dzonga··on Small Models Have Arrived
there's this [0] - Zep.

e.g for a lot of small business - they generate invoices - feed that into a RAG system. Then have an agent etc do follow ups. for agents then the smaller models are enough.

[0]: https://help.getzep.com/graphiti/getting-started/overview

dzonga··on I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
for Auth - why don't people go with trusted solutions that work without hiccups.

if you want hosted setups - FusionAuth, Stytch etc.

if you work in a mainstream language/framework - some excellent libraries eg in ruby authentication-zero, in js - BetterAuth, Django-all-auth.

for AWS as well - use their solutions where you don't need to read a lot of docs.

dzonga··on Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal
[flagged]
dzonga··on Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away from Top U.S. Universities
it has been close to 100 years now - that the U.S has been the leading destination for researchers, scientists & other ambitious individuals.

before it was Germany - but then nazism took hold. & researchers left starting from 1925/30. Slowly now Germany is recovering their place in science.

such a tragedy - with the dismantling of NIH etc - smart people might say, the U.S made progress without the NIH. The issue is the US was able to invite a lot of immigrants, then even raid those ones with blemished records e.g during Operation Paperclip.

100 years of work, going to waste. It will likely take another 100 years to recover.

dzonga··on Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash
I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.

e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.

dzonga··on Software engineering is about managing complexity
pretty good article.

I wish everyone in our industry read 'No Silver Bullet, & Grug-brained Developer'.

a lot of complexity - is about what can we do now, with what we have.

dzonga··on Small Models Have Arrived
small models + a good application layer - are more than enough, good for routine business tasks.

the application Layer i.e having a good graph RAG & connecting it up together is the missing piece for most.

dzonga··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
bingo. capital, talent has no borders.
dzonga··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
the current admin are working hard to destroy the U.S as if they're foreign agents.

not only are they making it hard & unbearable for families of US citizens & PR holders to be together.

while at the same time - discouraging talent to come to the US at a crucial time when talent is at a premium due to A.I development.

last the backwards energy policy of banning renewable energy.

dzonga··on WebMCP: Teaching Your Website to Talk to AI Agents
I don't know anything about you or where you're based.

but in Main Street US - guess what the dentists are using ? guess what the auto-shop is using, the auto-dealer ?

mostly desktop software running on on-premise hardware, with some using cloud version but just being a small population overall. most of the software has no APIs, & no web version.

it's not sexy, nor fun. actual FDEs are needed for those industries, if anything A.I will unlock so much lost productivity.

dzonga··on GLM-5.3-Flash
> Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.

Just like that we are witnessing an open burial. It's now in everyone's interest to keep the valuations in the 'A.I' economy as they're though it's apparent they're not justified.

whether it's the cost to develop models, cost of hardware, cost of serving ie inference.

dzonga··on WebMCP: Teaching Your Website to Talk to AI Agents
we already have something better than WebMCP - i.e general APIs.

more impactful work has to be done on the native legacy desktop app scene. that's where most of major companies big or small do their work.

agents automating websites is kinda easy. automating legacy desktop apps that's another issue though there's RPA.

dzonga··on AWS Acquires DuckDB
AWS acquiring DuckLabs is massive. nice move.

one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.

dzonga··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
these things have to be operated from Russia or some country that has total independence from US legal system.
dzonga··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
effects of vibe coding + the zealotry like passion of DHH & this is the result.
dzonga··on Starbase, LA
Elon - great product guy - he has to let go of his scammy tendencies of overpromising stuff.

just one launch base will transform the Louisiana economy.

dzonga··on Show HN: PicoMQ – Durable Streams over HTTP, on object storage
only if it could be run serverless.

but nice product overall - just like s2 lite.

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