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jbotdev

387 karma · joined January 31, 2021

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jbotdev··on What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
I think speed is actually going to be a bigger factor than cost. Even projects where “money is no object” often hit a wall with LLM response times.

Sure you can speed things up with parallel work under subagents, but as with parallelizing traditional computational tasks, there are diminishing gains.

I keep hearing people saying just change the way you work to trust long-running agents and multi-task more, because they’re too slow to work with interactively for many use cases. I think that’s painful in a world where we expect humans to still heavily guide and interact with agents for their day-to-day work.

jbotdev··on Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras
Additional info on the “pilot program” they took issue with: https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
jbotdev··on Evanston orders Flock to remove reinstalled cameras
They don’t have a public list, but this blog post conveniently has a map of their locations: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/introducing-law-enforcement...

Judging by the places they advertise, it’s mostly smaller cities/towns. I think the larger cities in the US tend to run their own cameras.

jbotdev··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
I’m not sure an “objectively great” feature exists, because “great” is such a vague and subjective term.

I think it’s more productive to discuss it in terms of the use cases and who they benefit.

jbotdev··on Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix
I get it, he’s trying to do everything in software (with the existing cameras), since software is “cheap” and can do anything in theory.

Unfortunately they keep showing how they’re in over their head with some of these features (like FSD). But it’s fine because their customers agree to keep beta testing while they figure things out on production cars.

jbotdev··on Slow Electricity: The Return of DC Power? (2016)
They’ve actually had 48V systems in production cars for several years now. Tesla is late to the game on that one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/48-volt_electrical_system

jbotdev··on Americans' confidence in technology firms has dropped
Just like “this is the year of the Linux Desktop”?

I’d love to have an open non-profit alternative to Google’s productivity suite, but realistically it’s very hard to host those things outside a traditional for profit business. Building the open source software is the easy part, and has been done already. The hard parts are things like email deliverability, and getting people to pay for what’s typically a free ad-supported service.

jbotdev··on Why Are So Many Dogs on Prozac?
https://archive.ph/31bBL
jbotdev··on Uber migrates microservices to multi-cloud platform running Kubernetes and Mesos
Part of my point is the goal with such a system is usually to require less infra work/knowledge from your devs, but it backfires if you don’t invest enough in your abstraction.

The implicit goal of these abstractions is really to central knowledge and best practices around the underlying tech. Kubernetes itself is trying to free developers from understanding server management, but you could argue it’s not worth using directly vs. just teaching your devs how to manage VMs for the vast majority of organizations.

I don’t think you’re ever going to stop more and more layers of abstraction, so the best we can hope for is they’re done well. Otherwise you may as well go back to writing raw ethernet frames in assembly on bare metal.

jbotdev··on Uber migrates microservices to multi-cloud platform running Kubernetes and Mesos
It seems like they’ve gotten to the “holy grail” of deployment where developers don’t have to worry about infrastructure at all in theory.

I’ve seen many teams go for simple/leaky abstractions on top Kubernetes to provide a similar solution, which is tempting because it’s easy and flexible. The problem is then all your devs need to be trained in all the complexities of Kubernetes deployments anyway. Hopefully Uber abstracted away Kubernetes and Mesos enough to be worthwhile, and they have a great infra team to support the devs.

jbotdev··on Go Package for Building Progressive Web Apps
I think you’re confusing Progressive Web App (PWA) with Progressive Enhancement. PWA is basically a web app (typically an SPA) that behaves like a native app, as described in the MDN page they reference. Loading progressively such that the page is still useful without JS is Progressive Enhancement.
jbotdev··on Hackers stole access tokens from Okta's support unit
The post glossed over how exactly they detected session hijacking. They mentioned “This detection looks for suspicious sessions appearing without an authentication event that are consistent with session hijacking.”, but authentication obviously happened at some point, otherwise the session wouldn’t exist. I’m guessing this is a complicated way of saying the IP changed since login.

Of course the easiest solution is you shouldn’t voluntarily share HAR files for an active session.

jbotdev··on Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?
It’s weird to complain about supporting AEG claiming they’re somehow the 2nd “monopoly” after LiveNation. You can only have one “monopoly” in a given industry, otherwise they’re both just close competitors.

Having a close second competitor is still a step in the right direction, even if you disagree with their business practices.

jbotdev··on Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware transport, to the ecosystem
It sounds like this builds on top of Ethernet to provide a higher performance alternative to UDP/TCP, with some sort of hardware acceleration.

I may be in over my head since I’m not an HPC/datacenter expert, but not sure I understand how you’d use this on the software side. Maybe someone is aware of specific examples? (beyond the vague “HPC/AI”)

edit: as another comment mentioned, the diagram shows it’s on top of UDP/IP, so it’s mostly an alternative to TCP/IP

jbotdev··on Netflix plans to open brick and mortar locations
It sounds like they’re trying to emulate Disney/Universal to some extent. I can imagine them having themed restaurants, gift shops, etc. similar to what you see in theme parks.
jbotdev··on ChatGPT’s system prompts
Technically that’s always been the case. It’s just that now you can tell the computer what to do in a “natural language” like English instead of a “programming language”.
jbotdev··on The Twelve-Factor App (2011)
It is true that this is somewhat influenced by how Heroku works, but ConfigMaps and GitOps do not meet the same security and usability requirements as Heroku config/env vars.

If you want secure config storage on Kubernetes, you end up using Secrets, which ends up being key-value like env vars anyway. If you want similar security with Git you need a layer of encryption, which breaks diffs and requires additional tooling. This all leads back to why high-level deployment tools like Heroku were created.

jbotdev··on Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again
I wonder why there hasn’t been more effort behind replacing single use plastics for food/beverages. People get all up in arms about plastic straws, but then stick their paper straw in a big plastic single-use cup.

I also find it sad that some companies like Snapple are regressing, changing from glass to plastic bottles.

jbotdev··on Show HN: Shuttle – Build and ship backends without writing infrastructure files
Seems ironic that you’d use rust to “build fast”. My impression is that Rust is more about building things safe/correct and efficient, with developer productivity being lower relative to other modern languages.

That said, the “infrastructure-from-code” idea is interesting. I’m not a big fan of coupling your code to your infra, but I’m intrigued by the idea of inferring infra dependencies from existing application code.

jbotdev··on D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect
I’ve actually run into this more with debit/cash accounts than with credit cards. I’ve had checking accounts frozen, but I’ve never had a credit card entirely suspended for “unusual activity”. At worst they’ve declined individual charges until I called, or I just switched to a different card, since it’s easy to have many redundant credit cards.
jbotdev··on Show HN: A map that tells you if a NYC cafe has WiFi, a restroom, and an outlet
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed most cafes in NYC with more than a handful of seats have a bathroom (even if they hide it) and WiFi. Outlets are pretty much everywhere, it’s more a matter of whether you can get a seat next to one.
jbotdev··on Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars
To be fair, public transport often has similar issues. If a subway/train car is stuck, nothing else can get by on the same track and thousands of people could be delayed. It happens in NYC all the time. At least with the road system there are typically ways to get around stopped cars.
jbotdev··on Show HN: Bubblic – end loneliness together using the power of your voice
As a user this seems like a nice way of connecting with people online.

As an engineer I wonder if/how you would open this up to a wider audience (behind “lonely” users). Moderation is the first issue that comes to mind, but I’m guessing that’s already a concern with the current audience.

jbotdev··on If You Want a Car This Heavy, You Should Pay Through the Nose
Having recently shopped for an EV, I did find that there are a lot more options in the US if you’re looking for larger vehicles. It’s a shame because many smaller models exist abroad, they just don’t want to bring them here (e.g. the VW ID.3).

What’s also funny is in many parts of Europe, their idea of a “small” car seems to be very different from ours. I’ve heard people there classify cars like the Honda CRV or the VW ID.4 as “big”.

jbotdev··on A Year in Review of 0-days Exploited In-the-Wild in 2022
The delay in updates is what originally pushed me to move from Android to iOS a while back, and years later it’s still an issue. You would think at least Nexus/Pixel would get updates quickly, but that still isn’t always the case. It seems like even within Google there are some issues that need to be addressed before they can lead other manufacturers by example.
jbotdev··on MrBeast has become a viral sensation for his acts of altruism
> However if it's something that enough people agree is worth doing, why not just use your tax dollars to pay for it? Who's going to seriously oppose a bill for giving people the ability to see?

Unfortunately, I think the same people who oppose universal healthcare would also oppose this.

It’s also hard to draw the line on which things should be covered by the government, short of just covering all essential medical care. Curing blindness is definitely important, but people in the US literally die from not being able to afford other types of healthcare.

jbotdev··on Cloudflare Is Having Issues
Fortunately there are so many cheap options nowadays for fully managed small-business websites which include all the CDN/WAF stuff for you (Squarespace, managed WordPress, etc.). The setup/maintenance time for running your own web server doesn’t make sense unless you already have an “IT” person on the payroll.
jbotdev··on CppCon 2022 Best Practices Every C++ Programmer Needs to Follow – Oz Syed
Maybe I’m arguing semantics, but my point is “need” seems a little subjective here. You can write insecure/unsafe/unreliable code and it’ll still run and compile just fine. You probably don’t want to, but you don’t “need” every program to be safe.
jbotdev··on CppCon 2022 Best Practices Every C++ Programmer Needs to Follow – Oz Syed
> In this session, learn some of the best practices that every C++ programmer needs to ensure successful completion of a project.

I find it annoying when people say you “need” some best practice. The things you actually need are generally enforced by the tools (compiler errors in this case?). Everything else is subjective and/or depends on your use case.

jbotdev··on “Tinder for Canceling Meetings”
Are people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them? I typically am upfront about when I think a meeting is not needed or when I’m not needed, and have no problem discussing it with my coworkers directly.

Larger meetings like all-hands are different.. no way you’re getting every attendee to agree on canceling those, that’s more management politics.

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