9,638 karma · joined January 20, 2017
I am passionate about the internet. I write computer software.
I've neglected my blog. https://knightoftheinter.net/blog/
Systemd is annoying. https://systemd.software/
Yeah so I'm a C++ software engineer. I tinker with hardware -- raspberry pis, arduinos, drones, robots. I'm interested in simplification and/or automation of the day-to-day life of normal people.
Have you encountered a "marketing email" that you didn't sign up for? That's called phishing.
Have you clicked on links in phishing emails? That's called getting pwned.
What glorious universe do you live in where email is respected enough to have transactions separate from marketing, and that this is not only required by law but also enforced?
greedy* enough, sure
There's only one company: the one with the backlog. The other company either went bankrupt or was bought out and consolidated into the first company.
Meanwhile, Samsung refrigerators can have an app store.
Google's doing that for them though.
That's because people report them as spam, so they hop domains to avoid that.
Use Kagi instead.
If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.
Does said company operate against the best interests of the constituents?
> On Feb. 1, 2025, Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter. That password was subsequently used to access that individual’s email account without authorization.
Sorry, nobody's winning that AI race.
What support team? The ones that were all not hired in the first place, and if they were hired then they were replaced by AI? The same support team that customers simply cannot reach at all?
Sounds very useful.
No. Absolutely not. Cloud-first is privacy-second, and rental model with ever-changing fees and terms of use.
Even if you don't live in a one-party consent state, assume you're being (perhaps illegally) recorded by any of the parties in a face-to-face conversation too.
Got a team with Indian, Chinese, Texan, British, and Australian? Your A.I.-powered translation tool is going to get 80% of your conversation wrong.
Should they? Yes. Will they?
Well, do LLM model builders pay for any copyrighted work so far?
There's a reason the internet runs on Linux...
No. In a paper contract, you can scratch off things you don't agree with. You can negotiate.
You can't do that in Ts & Cs. For example, Ts & Cs often unilaterally change with no ability for you to review or cancel or undo. It's trivially easy to write software which uses services without ever agreeing to Ts & Cs. So it's not really a legal contract.
> And that makes sense - otherwise how else do you agree to things or not agree to them?
Through a real negotiation. With a paper contract, that both parties sign, and both parties receive a copy of, and that can't be unilaterally changed.
/s
I've been in companies where a standup with 6 people takes 45 minutes.
The company I'm in finishes standup with 8 people usually within 10 minutes and often enough within just 5 minutes.
The companies have very different approaches to information sharing. The first wants in-depth information and for everyone to have opportunities to speak up to offer help. A true team effort is what they want. The second wants everything to be as brief as possible, so you can get back to doing what you're paid to do.
I saw a lot more "progress" at the second company. I also saw a lot less collaboration and more "oops we need to fix this now" happening too -- even into production.
The first company definitely did things a bit slower. But that slower generally translated to better quality software: software that generally worked correctly on the first try, or problems were at least caught before reaching production. When an issue did arise in production, it could be safely and quickly handled and rarely with downtime, because rolling back was part of the extensive test suite.
Coming to truly understand the differences between approaches has been eye-opening, and has seriously changed my biases about "how" to go about writing software on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Collaboration is good, but you have to have buy-in from the developers for it to work well. That was key and it took a lot of convincing each developer of the benefits.