lll-o-lll

> Perhaps the biggest difference I see from millenials and gen z is that the degree in which they realize the difference between having earned the right to expressing your opinion and expressing your opinion.

This made me laugh so hard! I am gen x, and we used to say exactly the same thing about you spoiled, entitled, narcissistic, gritless millennials!

You should have seen what it was like when I first started! You should have seen what I was like!

You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not the generational differences that are the problem, it’s these darn young people are too darn young! (And some of them are a completely useless waste of space, as I was until life slapped a bit of sense into me). It’s a bit over the top, but I really love Musashi (novel) for this representation of the worthless youth who needs to be tied to a tree and suffering to the point of death before finally breaking and getting his crap together (become a human being; not just an animal). Feels like an (exaggerated) representation of the genuine journey all young men must make.

“Tinker in my garage” for low level things. If I’m playing around with a custom layer 2 protocol, python is not my language of choice.

Basically, if what you are tinkering needs precise control over the bits and bytes, Zig (or C) are designed for it.

Seeing as I can get about 200K TPS from a networked DB in my environment, I have to question your setup here.

In the real world we are looking at things like RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective). You need to consider HA and DR. It’s in these areas where SQLite does not scale.

That’s why I struggle to see the fit for SQLite in any sort of multi-user server environment. If you need the data to be durable, then the bigger DB’s have the tools. If you don’t need the data to be durable, just keep it in memory. I’m sure there are niches I am missing.

We’re all enterprise.

If you have 200 WF’s/sec each with 200 events, it sounds to me that you have a sizeable amount of work flowing through this system. 17 million workflows per day? Can I call these transactions?

Do these transactions add value to your business? Do you need durable execution for all these workloads?

Temporal is just a tool; and like any tool it can be misused. For the classic “book a hotel + airline, handle the partial failures” case, 17 million bookings a day would imply you should be thrilled with Temporal.

If you are using it to perform WAF in a firewall; you would be less thrilled. The scale you are describing, and that you aren’t super excited about the incredible amount of money pouring in, makes me question if the use-cases are fitting the tool.

With all due respect – if that’s the attitude, you have no business running anything on-prem. And that’s fine, there’s a reason the various cloud providers are the go-to for many businesses.

> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day, you're going to spend millions on infra, and it's still going to absolutely suck.

Where are the “millions” on infra going? It’s a handful of services and a Postgres?

> Their sales team is also absolutely appalling and desperate.

You said “on-prem”. It’s open source; why are you dealing with their sales team?

> If you're doing anything non-trivial (say, 200+ events/workflow) and you need to run only a couple hundred of them concurrently all day…

If “millions” were required to obtain such tiny scale, I’d agree there’d be a massive problem. No one would use Temporal; it would be a complete waste of resource. If this were true.

HCF

> as soon as you do something actually complicated, you realize that the different optimization modes of the engine give different results

The same is true of SQL query planners. You can perform basic queries without understanding how your SQL engine of choice works under the hood, but if you want performance, you must understand how your DB works. SQL is just the interface.

This is different in kind from imperative programming languages (which are much closer in abstraction to the underlying machine architecture), but we rub along with SQL ok; why not Prolog?

> existing anti-cheat measures can simply be avoided by letting the AI play through the same interface as a human.

Great. Now we are going to get “secure cables” for mouse and keyboard and bluetooth device attestation.

> The fish rots from the head.

The old adage that the people elect the governance they deserve; comes to mind. The concepts of Virtue, Honour, Duty, and Justice have been declining in the West over a very long period (this is not a US specific thing). The rotting head reflects the rotting society.

> It's a sucker's game to aspire to selflessly serve the greater good when the most powerful people in the land are brazenly corrupt

You don’t act honourably because that will “get you ahead”. You act honourably because it is right.

Right, but there’s really only two directions you can go.

1. Install a culture of honour/virtue/accountability. Rely on duty and moral justice to keep the majority in-line.

2. An arms race to prevent ever more sophisticated methods of cheating, and the reduction in human dignity this implies. (E.g. the proctor must follow you into the toilet).

We all want the systems to be fair and just; but we also all want to be treated with dignity. No easy answers.

Closed source centralized SaaS will have a major security advantage.

Edit: Because an RCE in a open-source dependency means you are just as vulnerable when the security patch lands? I don’t see the controversy.

Interesting idea

Yes, this! Weird notation solved with essentially written word autocomplete!

It naturally trains your memory as you use it. Definitely a language of choice for getting into array languages in my opinion.

> I'm working as a software engineer as we speak.

Well, there’s your problem. Get back to making the hotdogs!

> How would MCP help you if the API does not support keys?

Kerberos, OAuth, Basic Auth (username/password), PKI. MCP can be a wrapper (like any middleware).

> But that's not the point. The agent calls CLI tools, which reads secrets from somewhere where the agent cannot even access. How can agent leak the keys it does not have access to?

If the cli can access the secrets, the agent can just reverse it and get the secret itself.

> You ARE running your agents in containers, right?

Do you inject your keys into the container?

Cool cool. Except.

What about auth? Authn and authz. Agent should be you always? If not, every API supports keys? If so, no fears about context poisoned agents leaking those keys?

One thing an MCP (server) gives you is a middleware layer to control agent access. Whether you need that is use-case dependent.

Specific extension I use that became unusable (black text on black). However, if you look closely, you’ll see a lot of differences in look and feel that don’t seem “animation” related.

And VsCode will not display dark mode correctly.

It’s untrustworthy because its context can be poisoned and then the agent is capable of harm to the extent of whatever the “computer” you give it is capable of.

The mitigation is to keep what it can do to “just the things I want it to do” (e.g. branch protection and the like, whitelisted domains/paths). And to keep all the credentials off its box and inject them inline as needed via a proxy/gateway.

I mean, that’s already something you can do for humans also.

It’s politics. Boil most things down and the technical is inconsequential when compared to the politics.

Look at the political system of Switzerland and you will see a radically different setup.

And I think that’s the horse. The rest is cart. Yes they are rich but why? Yes they are relatively stable socially but why? Decentralised Canton government structure + direct democracy (referendums all the time for things that matter). That, I think, is why all the rest.

It’s not inevitable. Absolutely this is true without significant effort, but if you’ve been around the traps for long enough (in enough organisations), you get to see that the level of quality can vary widely. Avoiding the mud-pit does require a whole org commitment, starting from senior leadership.

This story is more interesting, in my opinion, in how quickly things devolved and also how unwilling the more senior layers of the org were to address it. At a whole company level, the rot really sets in when you start to lose the key people that built and know the system. That seems to be what’s happening here, and it does not bode well for MS in the medium term.

Sadly, the AI’s have been trained on human developed repos.

Eventual convergence? Assuming each defect fix has a 30% chance of introducing a new defect, we keep cycling until done?

Unless you are talking about running a local model, that’s not possible.

Question. In this new weird age of agentic everything. Does running your system from an agent TUI resolve much of the issues you’d otherwise have without a decent screen reader?

Where this falls down is that for the agents to interact with anything external, you have to give them keys. Without a proxy handling real keys between your agent and external services, those keys are at risk of compromise.

Also. Agents are very good at hacking “security penetration testing”, so “separate user” would not give me enough confidence against malicious context.

Yes. Rather it is the reverse that helps. Exercise is the biggest one, but essentially “pain that will stop” seems to help in general. Ice showers, fasting, new challenging activity, giving up caffeine/alcohol.

All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”

Edit: I’m referring more to the “self medication” approach. Please don’t take any of this as medical advice.

> I have a big goddamned problem with the tech world seeing things like creativity, expression, exploration, imagination, experience, companionship, empathy, sex, fun, beauty, inspiration, and all of that human-y sort of stuff as a goddamned math problem to be solved.

Resource to be exploited. That’s worse of course.

It would obviously be beneficial to go from super expensive to free (Postgres). But no one does - why? Because sql is just a veneer over otherwise two completely different things.