dzonga

> I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.

unfortunately a lot of people in tech tend to think in terms of technology - looking at this from one solution - not looking at the problem holistically. turning their brains into slop brains.

my take from this article - there's a point you miss. is the organization product driven ? because usually that changes how engineers solve or approach problems. a few organizations are product driven.

if it's product led - and every engineer no matter the level are supposed to understand the business and the requirements that drive value i.e create their own tickets etc - then yeah the value of the junior engineer stays the same or goes up.

with other orgs - where product managers act like high priests and everything has to go through Jira. then the value of not just junior engineers but engineers in general has been always at an all time low.

> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.

to risk sounding like a madman - if you're a solo individual- serving b2b small businesses.

then Sqlite works as well too. can run the whole thing on Cloudflare.

running Postgres isn't difficult. but dealing with a VPS for low traffic is a headache that's not necessary.

starling bank uk uses a similar kind of stack. both java based as revolut.

what the author doesn't say - is being ambitious at what ? ambitious at making useless software ? useless hardware ?

in tech we like to overwork on nonsense problems ie working on problems that change or are non permanent. literally if 98% of the software went away today it won't be missed, just like shit that came before.

if people listened to Jeff Bezos - who said - focus on things that don't change - you will realize - you can live your life - without overworking. because guess what - if you don't do something today, the problem Will exist tomorrow & the day after.

certain problems never get fully solved, just tiny bits of progress.

but I guess zero sum thinking has taken over.

once Huawei was forbidden from using Android - that's when people ie western markets & the world at large should've shifted. look at HarmonyOS.

in China - there's no google apps available on their 'android' versions.

their platforms are already performant and fluid - so people should build on that.

people blame apple but this a result of the duopoly - we have in the mobile operating system market.

I was once a iOS mobile dev before - most apps don't need to be native unless banking, maps, video games & maybe ride-hailing (before I even used uber web).

the rest the web is sufficient - hell even games.

so most of what apple is proposing won't affect you if you're using the web platform.

scary shit is this is out there for people to read & learn.

but the same thing keeps happening.

top heavy organizations.

kinda crazy how Microsoft just destroyed the Github goodwill.

also crazy how the noisemakers about rails scaling for GitHub have gone quite all of a sudden i.e Github being on the main rails branch.

anyways the future is decentralized - a developer from say Russia/ Ukraine (Crimea), Iran etc - wouldn't be able to access GitHub but surely they can access decentralized repos without the permission of not being from a forbidden country as if they're at fault for their country's ills.

the last image - it's barely visible to human eyes

they're tryna convince the populace who don't like to read with useless studies.

get rid of medicare etc, then let it be handled on a city / state level. if some states wanna provide for public hospitals clinics - let them do so. even more if cities too wanna provide for public healthcare. then we can gladly reduce taxes too. the amount spent on medicare vs outcomes is already scam level.

trying to solve this at a national level won't work - too many middleman, too much politics and perverse incentives.

sveltekit - the problem is they can't settle and not change the api frequently.

every release is a breaking change.

well done to the duckDB team - one of the features I'm waiting for is real time materialized views.

a lot of people before llms were already subcontracting their thinking to fb, instagram. with boomers mostly exposed to an echo chamber that reinforced their beliefs on fb, then younger people on insta.

to some people - if they didn't see It on insta / fb then it didn't happen.

with meta now pushing 'a.i' content on both platforms the damage from misinformation, fake products etc is incalculable.

that's without taking the effect on children & young adults - mental health.

this is true I have noticed that in rural africa too vs any surburb like city in america.

the credibility of using vercel data - means the journos were lazy.

vercel is mostly used by the 'next.js' kids - so that ain't gonna paint the full picture.

again vercel is just reselling aws services at high marked up prices - so people paying for vercel again are most likely to pay for anthropic models. though we know models are a commodity at this point - without major differentiation.

what a lazy analysis.

the software engineering profession seems to be one of the few professions that doesn't reward 20+ year professionals. with doctors, lawyers etc - your value goes up past 40.

but in software engineering with ageism - your value "goes down". when it should be the reverse if you're an IC.

so yeah going your own way as quick as possible - is not insurance for your sanity but income too.

is it easy no, but worth it.

nope - a.i companies to promote their platforms offer 'a.i' credits to startups usually worth 10ks, 100ks worth of credits in $ terms.

so to a startup - you can trade your credits - then get actual cash.

just like you would if trading debt etc.

yep - if these were only scanning books & end there then most people wouldn't have complaints.

but nah they're destroying very rare, out of print books in the process.

then after - when you ask their stochastic parrot some fringe question it won't answer cz of 'safety'. when literally one could buy a book and find the answer.

I also noticed the same thing & asked about it here [0].

seems lately HN hiring has been mostly filled with seekers instead of those hiring.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279790

are there Chinese companies doing the same as Cerebras is doing ? having large scale wafers designed for inference ?

Wordpress having a high number of vulnerabilities not surprising lol

I will say one of my career regrets was kinda being dogmatic about boring tech instead of being pragmatic e.g with new tech

there was a period around 2016-17s when people were building stuff with Node.js | Mongo. but it was risky tech though I had experience in it & turned some of those opportunities down cz I wanted to work with boring ruby/swift(iOS stuff) lol. rookie mistake.

fortunately the market made me wise up - you go where you're wanted.

I feel like the corrupt Trump regime has accelerated this.

what other people tend to forget - money is just an exchange mechanism - the real currency is energy.

europe is already paying for Russian gas in rubble, china will soon exclusively be taking payments in yuan.

with so much green energy coming online - do you really need a massive foreign currency buffer - if you're not buying finite hydrocarbon energy ?

glad life has no formula or one right answer.

there's many paths to success.

yeah the 'grok' way sounds less safe but it means less policing and having abstract arbiters of the truth

garmin watches are unbeatable for battery life - my Pixel 5 - would last close to a month. now it's close to 2 weeks since it's pretty old now :(.

but Garmin software sucks. my next watch will be an Apple Watch.

yep 100%. the SSE version is less headache and can easily scale.

ruthless pragmatism.