echohack5

Am I supposed to feel bad for the cancer juice people?

As someone who has been using alot of spacetime for side projects (like https://heat.echohack.app), I am continually impressed with the speed at which it operates.

I think there's alot of interesting things happening in the database space. Vitess/Neki, vector stores, spacetime are all really good things to be happening. I think it's a shame that database developers seem to have a drama filled timeline out there. It's... all very exciting, together.

Anyway, Some things that need improvement (some of which are addressed by this blog post):

1. Backups (fast recovery) and Disaster Recovery (slow, durable recovery)

This is a big one, but sometimes speed is not the only objective you have to meet. You need to have certainty that, if everything goes down that you (eventually) can bring things back online. I don't really have a way of doing that today.

2. Read replicas sure would be nice for analytic workloads

3. Durable writes to s3 would be nice for intermittent bursting workloads (like ci systems)

I think the Spacetime folks have their work cut out for them, not necessarily because of the technology (that's hard too) but because the AI models have seemingly decided that Neon and Postgres are all that exists.

I think spacetime has a bright future ahead of it, and I am wishing the team all the best as they work hard to imprint something new on the universe.

The weirdest payment method has got to be the Coke ON vending machines that do not support SUICA but instead require you to QR code-IR blaster you to a website where you bluetooth pair with the vending machine then buy it on your mobile browser.

Like....somehow they turned a sub 1ms operation into a 4 minute 32 second one. It boggles the mind

Which is precisely why powers will try to make all these illegal

The oxford comma debate is so annoying because it clearly has nothing but advantages. Removing commas from a delimited list does nothing to resolve ambiguity, whether lexicographically or syntactically.

It's so useful as a delimiter and anti-ambiguity machine, that you don't even need spaces for it to work! See CSV or Japanese.

I have found AI great in alot of scenarios but If I have a specific workflow, then the answer is specific and the ai will get it wrong 100% of the time. You have a great point here.

A trivial example is your happy path git workflow. I want:

- pull main

- make new branch in user/feature format

- Commit, always sign with my ssh key

- push

- open pr

but it always will

- not sign commits

- not pull main

- not know to rebase if changes are in flight

- make a million unnecessary commits

- not squash when making a million unnecessary commits

- have no guardrails when pushing to main (oops!)

- add too many comments

- commit message too long

- spam the pr comment with hallucinated test plans

- incorrectly attribute itself as coauthor in some gorilla marketing effort (fixable with config, but whyyyyyy -- also this isn't just annoying, it breaks compliance in alot of places and fundamentally misunderstands the whole point of authorship, which is copyright --- and AIs can't own copyright )

- not make DCO compliant commits ...

Commit spam is particularly bad for bisect bug hunting and ref performance issues at scale. Sure I can enforce Squash and Merge on my repo but why am I relying on that if the AI is so smart?

All of these things are fixed with aliases / magit / cli usage, using the thing the way we have always done it.

Office because lawyers send docs in .docx format like it was written in the blood of the Benjamin Franklin

DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck form

I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh

This was a fun thing to realize in my early days of programming in Delphi. I guess the author will soon realize why old systems name things ticket "00001" and so on.

In 2012 managing the JVM was a nightmare. Java is fine now.

If the thing standing in your way to engineering a great product was syntax, and a bunch of gate-kept and inconsistent linux cli tooling, then its fine to call it engineering.

I dunno, do you read bytecode?

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Make the price of houses $250K instead of $500K and I will gladly buy an $80 game.

Man I miss Chef. It was wildly good for its time with a vibrant community. Habitat was cool but tried to carve into some niches that were too ambitious. And InSpec was an incredible tool but failed to build the critical community to drive it forward. I haven't experienced anything like the Chef Community since. (AI has some of these vibes in small pockets but it's very disjointed)

Now we're stuck with what I call the "DevOps ball of mud". I gotta learn 15 different yaml formats alongside the nuances of every hyperscaler and micro cloud. Like seriously it's 2025 and we still gotta deal with stateful bullshit and a bunch of unoptimized docker containers flung all over the place. It feels like nobody has solved the application runtime stateful egg and we're all just dancing to the dark gods of Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm in hopes that our blood sacrifices make the engines go for another month.

Full Disclosure: I worked at Chef for 5 years

Honestly yeah, Raycast is the replacement I'd recommend these days for spotlight.

Is this what it feels like to become one of the gray bearded engineers? This sounds like a bunch of intentionally confusing marketing drivel.

When capitalism has pilfered everything from the pockets of working people so people are constantly stressed over healthcare and groceries, and there's little left to further the pockets of plutocrats, the only marketing that makes sense is to appeal to other companies in order to raid their coffers by tricking their Directors to buy a nonsensical product.

Is that what they mean by "agentic era"? Cause that's what it sounds like to me. Also smells alot like press release driven development where the point is to put a feather in the cap of whatever poor Google engineer is chasing their next promotion.

And? Git is "idiot" in British parlance. I don't think software should be made to appease some false idea of corporate politeness.

And the journalists know if they reveal their sources that the people behind them will subsequently have their lives destroyed by the powerful.

Death by a thousand cuts. Microsoft Recall in a vacuum isn't the issue, but rather a decade of

- Forced Cortana (oops no let's shut that down) - Forced OS Updates (oops your computer doesn't have the requirements) - Ads in your start menu - "Yes" and "maybe later" interactions everywhere - Edge force defaulting itself on occasion - Literally needing configuration management to run powershell on a daily cadence because settings might not get respected - 5 Layers of failed UI frameworks duct taped together

Basically Windows is becoming such a bear to wrangle that you might as well use Linux and save yourself the pain and $100 per computer.

Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.

What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.

Maybe the closest thing to this is a Blackmagic box of some sort. I use a the Ultrastudio 4K to capture 4K60 output, pipe through OBS and pass through as well.

Will run you $1K though. Corsair/Elgato has some solutions in your price range but the devil is in the details of precisely what you're trying to accomplish.

QA was literally invented for the airline industry.

Software QA when actually practiced is more advanced now than airline QA.

> request was denied

> mac mini proxy server

I love that the programmer's solution is more expensive than doing it the right way had OP's request been approved.

Absolutely nobody is arguing that optional items are what is making it tough on people. It's housing and basic groceries.

In 2005 I managed to wiggle my way out of poverty by splitting a $615/mo apartment 4 ways on minimum wage (and I considered that quite lucky at the time). I ate mostly rice, soy, beans, and frozen veggies because that was the cheapest thing I could eat. Eggs were a luxury.

That same apartment is $1799/mo now and minimum wage is virtually the same. I would probably be dead or worse trying to escape poverty in those same conditions. Add in that the humiliation people must feel driving for Uber or running Doordash. You're helping others live a lifestyle that's unreachable for you, ever.

Even though I can afford it these days I still refuse to Doordash / Uber because I feel like these services are fundamentally dehumanizing. I will fetch my own food, and drive/transport myself. It's not hard.

These unemployment numbers just bury the struggle of regular people with a numerical handwave.

There is a keyboard and mouse attached to the server already, but few if any services run, and if they do they're fairly locked down, or in some degraded state.

It's not a server I need to access often in this way. But I think these necessary-but-limited-use scenarios will be interesting should passkeys really catch on like passwords did.

Here's a workflow:

1. Normally I run everything on my own devices, use 1Password, 2FA, etc, but rarely I need to use a locked down device and manually and painstakingly enter 100+ character passwords and 2FA keys. Installing anything on the device is out of the question, but I need to use a web browser and auth using these credentials. Copy and paste and externally using any devices to connect with the system is prohibited.

How does doing a FIDO2 dance work in this scenario?

Strong evidence isn't common.

There we go folks! Since I have now declared strong evidence to not be common you can believe on a 2,000,000:1 probability that in fact this is true!

I'm privy to Software <D&D/Video Game Class Name> for titles.

I want to agree with this post, but I don't. This person is in a position of power over their product.

Instead, I have found that decisions work by "path dependency". If something works, even if it is a poor implementation, the path to get there is holy ground and the amount of effort to change a 10 minute decision that was made flippintly by two business people chatting in the urinals on a Wednesday is like trying to siege the walls of Jehrico.

There's no solving this problem because it is fundamentally human in nature. The egos are invested in the existing thing -- so improving the proof-of-concept-that-is-now-hastily-shoved-into-production problem requires that you unravel every person's thoughts and pride on the current thing, regardless of the seriousness of the problem. And so the problem cannot get solved and change cannot happen unless something catastrophic occurs.

Thus, the line-worker software engineer, who has no real organizational power, has to hope that the proverbial printer falls down a flight of stairs "accidentally" so that they can swap out the black ink cartridge to a new one that doesn't make weird bleed lines on the edge of every page. That way, when the new printer comes in, and someone complains that the ink bleed is gone and how they liked that, that you can feign ignorance.

I'm still having trouble seeing LLMs more than a glorified python script that processes enormous data sets. I find their usefulness still less useful than 2005 google when knowing how to use quotation marks.

Not to mention that those data sets are typically Reddit, Twitter, Github, etc. Why and how is that superior than just... searching the original data set?

Could it just be that the "enshittification" of the way we find information on the net gives LLMs a use case?

Journey before destination. Schedule and build in bulk.

Learning Japanese? Take the train/bus/bike and listen to lessons via audiobook, listen to Japanese music, etc

Working on hygiene? Add your habits together in bulk. Do your face care, teeth, etc all together. Position all the products in a line in your bathroom drawer or countertop in the order you expect to use them.

Need to exercise more? Schedule your exercise with something you already have to do (going to the grocery store, walk or bike) or are highly motivated to do (go play DDR, hit the climbing gym, or listen to a video game podcast or 4 while running)

Remember that you are human and have a limited amount of willpower. So don't leave your goals to willpower, make them happen because they have to along the everyday journey.