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marklubi

841 karma · joined June 27, 2007

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marklubi··on Anthropic CEO says AI swarm could 'take over the Internet' in 6-12 months
I'm convinced that a large reason for their apocalyptic warnings is because they're working to build moats for their businesses.

Get enough bills restricting AI passed through legislation, and they can cut off or slow down any newcomers that simply don't have the resources to compete with those that are already entrenched in the industry.

marklubi··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport.

Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better.

Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over.

I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make.

While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system.

Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.

marklubi··on Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls
https://github.com/jelly-org/ui

It's buried at the bottom. Had to click on the "sponsoring" link, and then select the package.

Feels like they should make the repository more prominent.

marklubi··on AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
Thanks for sharing the video of moving the server.

I wouldn't say that I miss those days, but there's some good nostalgia there having done some things that feel pretty similar (early 2000s). Not quite to that extreme though.

marklubi··on Redis 8.8: New array data structure, rate limiter, performance improvements
For the project I've been working on for more than 15 years, we make extensive use of the pub/sub functionality for distributing live data. Pub/sub scales well across the cluster. Publish to one, and it goes out to subscribers on any of the nodes that they've connected to.

Will millions of users, high availability is critical for this functionality.

marklubi··on Ferrari Luce
It reminds me of a rant that my friend sometimes goes on with regards to really low quality items, particularly about music...

someone wrote it, someone performed it, someone mixed it, someone approved it, someone developed marketing for it, someone helped get it on shelves, and then someone played it.

There were plenty of points along the way where the disaster could have been averted.

marklubi··on A desire for a loud car correlates with higher scores on psychopathy and sadism
The popping sounds from a turbo car is from the wastegate (whistling sound for a blow off value) when the system is releasing pressure from the turbo that was built up. It prevents over compression that would damage the engine.
marklubi··on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
I was thinking a similar thing. Many of our customers have purpose use computers that rarely see physical infrastructure internet, but need a modern browser (many chose Chrome on their own, we never recommended it).

They're going to get blasted with cellular data charges when they fire up their computer in the field.

marklubi··on Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
Documenting why is incredibly important, but also why something has not been done.

The last business I started, I was coding at full steam building features that I could make work now although not optimal, so I would add comments reflecting that.

Over the > 15 years the product’s been on the market, there have been several times I’ve come back across those comments when we outgrew the quick solution several years later.

marklubi··on How getting richer made teenagers less free
> They enjoyed each other's company and bonded over these shared experiences

My son competes on the national and international level in two different sports, so we do a lot of traveling. The bonding is very important, just as it is knowing when to get out of the way and let them shine.

In one sport, I drop him off and pick him up for practice (he gets distracted/flustered when someone is there watching him practice). In the other, I practice with him and am trying to stay better than him as long as I can.

There are a few other things I think are important...

If they don't want to do something, don't push them to. My son decided not to compete in a national ranking event in a couple of months because his competitions are on Thursday and Saturday and he would miss three days of school when factoring in travel.

Try to anticipate their eventual needs and make sure the right tools/equipment/etc. are available for them before they realize they needed it. Also, have backup equipment just in case something breaks or fails.

Make sure that they understand the 'why' behind all the things that both they have done, and what you have done, to enable them to get to that level.

Finally, from a young age, teach them to "always do your best, and always do better next time." The first national competition he went to, he literally finished dead last out of over 250. When we were in the airport heading home, I let him know that it's alright if he doesn't want to do more of them. He didn't back down in the slightest, and asked me when the next one was because he knew he could do better. Next month will be the second time he competes in the Junior Olympics for that sport.

marklubi··on Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Haven't noticed that one. Oxidation perhaps, or maybe salt in the air based on the locations?

West coast food (particularly oysters) seems to be a little bit more salty/briny.

marklubi··on Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Similar thing with orange juice. The producers add 'flavor packs' to adjust the taste for different regions of the US.

My son and I travel all over the US for various competitions, and there are certain regions where he refuses to get OJ because of the flavor differences.

marklubi··on The Enshittification of BMW
This is a terrible video. Doesn't even have dates right. ECUs have been locked far before 2017.

I don't like the lack of buttons/knobs for things like heat (they can be configured based on the weather though), but most of his complaints are just trash.

The S58 engine is spectacular, the handling on the 2024 M4 is amazing.

My only real complaint is when the CarPlay integration comes up as "Unknown Song, Unknown Artist" and I have to change the media source to get control of it from the steering wheel buttons.

marklubi··on A new pay-per-mile tax system is reportedly being considered by the Government
They already have a monitoring system... TPMS. Four distinct IDs for every vehicle passing a location makes for a good fingerprint (they've been using this for years to estimate traffic levels)

Add in something like Flock license plate reading and you now know which vehicle it was.

marklubi··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
Bought my teenage son a couple lock picking kits, he's picked almost every single lock we have in our house.

I then picked up a sizable rock, and told him I could get into the house faster than he could. He didn't understand for a few moments, but the lesson was learned.

marklubi··on Why George R.R. Martin Broke the Cardinal Rule of Hollywood (2024)
> He wrote Thrones explicitly to challenge Hollywood clichés

Hard disagreement on that one.

He wrote an epic story known as A Song of Ice and Fire (started in '96) that ended up getting out of hand and tied up with too many Goordian knots to complete. Sadly, we'll probably never get a conclusion to it.

Along the line, a producer came along who thought they could make money with it. First few seasons weren't terrible, but were too short to capture it all. The rest were completely rushed and unable to take on all that was going on. They went off the rails after a few seasons.

I will agree that he doesn't owe anyone anything though. My philosophy is that I create for me, if others also enjoy that, excellent.

Edit: I'm still a little bitter after going to a trivia night and losing a question because I gave the canon answer that was different from the show

marklubi··on America's top companies keep talking about AI – but can't explain the upsides
> This reminds me of the internet in 2000

The thing that changed it was smartphones (~7 years later). Suddenly, the internet was available everywhere and not just a thing for nerds.

Not sure that AI is quite there yet, currently trying to identify what will be the catalyst that makes it seamless.

marklubi··on Just let me select text
Similar story for me. With my work, I get pulled in a lot of different directions at seemingly random times. This helps me quickly resume what I was doing.
marklubi··on Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used
I can confirm this. Have a relative that works for Apple. Made the mistake of complaining in front of her about their take on sales (they make six-figures annually from my app). She went off on how much they give us (including Xcode) for the privilege of having an app on their phones.

Still don't have a contact there. Would have thought I would at least get someone there to talk with if issues come up.

marklubi··on Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used
Every time there is an Xcode update, I dread installing it because it will be a whole bunch of new bugs, and I just finally figured out the previous ones.
marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
I wish. It's on Github, but my hands are tied and I can't share them since it's someone else's property now (hooray for exits, I think).

It's mostly a thought process...

I have or need something (entity), lets get data about it (repository/extensions), we need to do something with this now (only extensions).

Lots of "static" and "this" involved, but the separation and eventual simplicity makes it worth the effort.

Edit: I tried going through some of them to anonymize some for examples, but it felt like treading in dangerous territory.

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Ultimately though, most of those aren't required from the beginning, but the syntactic sugar, abstractions, and performance gains from them are amazing.

You probably already know, but I'll opine a little bit about extension methods. I use them a lot.

Entities > Repositories > Functionality. All split out.

- Entities (pretty much just gets and sets, nothing more than necessary).

- Repositories via extensions to determine where the data comes and goes from (some data comes from SQL, some from Redis, some from Postgres, doesn't matter since it's split out) and any particular queries you need for optimizing things.

- Functionality via more extensions without adding additional code to the entities.

Separation of purpose/use.

I may or may not have completely replaced our data layer in the middle of the height of our season with no interruption. Little bit passionate about this one.

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
> 27 years ago!

Sometimes, I feel like I'm the only old guy on here. BASIC, VB6, .NET, and some Java along the way.

Too many new ones to list, although that might be a whole other problem in itself.

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
.NET is amazing and keeps getting better. JetBrains is killing it with their IDEs and add-ons.

Currently running nearly a dozen different services written in .NET running on Alpine in K8S.

Started transitioning most of my code to .NET Core/Standard when they first came out. Sadly, I still have to deal with some ASP.NET MVC code that was written before and requires .NET Framework

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
C# is amazing. Decisions at the education level were made well before it went cross-platform though (FWIW, I've been using it since before v1.1).

Would be interesting in what confusing syntax you're referring to. I think one of the beauties of it is that it's additive. You can program plenty of simple stuff in it with conventional style code, but there's a lot of syntactic sugar available that makes things so easy when you need to start scaling things.

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
> Outside of the mystical incantation of `public static void main(String[] args) {`

I don't think it's mystical. If you don't have an instance of the class yet, you need a starting point and static fills that void (lol. I'll show myself out)

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
I concur with most of your thoughts, except that Java is never going away. I might wish that it would, but here we are.
marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
Not going to disagree. It's the sandbox that we're playing in though (dealing with, HOORAY JAVA!) since it's a class at school.

Have to start somewhere, teach them better alternatives as they evolve. Not even going to broach the prototype-based programing stuff until he comfortably has the basics understood.

Edit: I don't GAF about downvotes, but I would at least expect a response about why. If you don't like the philosophy, give me some reasons. Don't like something else, tell me why. I'll happily debate anyone all day long

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
I fully disagree with Java as a starting point and it was an interesting conversation with the teacher.

Apparently, "College Prep" courses more or less determine that Java is the language that they should use.

His teacher thought it was stupid as well, but sometimes your hands are tied. That's what the schools are using as a starting metric though.

He was apparently the only person in the class that said he wanted to do software engineering. Don't worry, he'll be a polyglot before he reaches college.

marklubi··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
> One of the things I've tried to teach people I've mentored over the past few decades is the principle of "Sharing is better than assuming." If you know something, share it with other people.

Definitely agree with this in principle. My son and I play pool (billiards) competitively. As you get better, almost nobody shares any tips because it's very competitive. I've taught him to be better than that and we have a great league team where everyone is helping the others grow.

In the mentoring (not just teaching) realm, I like to guide them into asking the questions that gets them to the answer they're looking for. When the connections in their mind light up, it's amazing.

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