mekael

What are you working on?

We can take the LEO's that would have patrolled highways/city streets and have them patrol on public transport, same job just slightly different environment.

Can I ask why you feel that public transit is unsafe in the US?

Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.

A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.

The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#

It’s precisely this, and, to be fair, it’s a rational approach given a Data Security Exhibit starts at 6 weeks and can hit 6 months to complete. That being said, I work with regulated data, so YMMV.

I’m most likely going to be downvoted, but Tofutti Cuties are absolutely delicious vegan ice cream bars. And i’d consume one in celebration of your accomplishment.

I think you’re missing the /s.

Serious question, and not meant to be snarky, but what is it doing , in terms of a personal assistant, that couldnt be done with some inbox cleanup, a couple of phone shortcuts, and siri/alexa/whatever google has?

I’ve never thought of it in terms of “how many new metropoli(sp) are being added”, but it seems like a deceny unit of measure. If we use the average of 6gw, we’re adding essentially 40 nyc’s.

Brevity is the soul of wit:

You’re pretty much spot on.

In that case I'm just moving the reading of the documentation from reading it as I'm writing the yaml to when I'm doing a code review. Not saying it isn't helpful to have a pair researcher, just seems like I'm moving things around .

Would you be able to give an example of a feature? For my example, I need to query an ancient undocumented database , pull back a pile of data, do some validations on it, and then show it to the user or pass it along with another processing step. The human part is researching the database and the data living in it, and implementing the validation(s) while talking to a business user, everything else can be templated.

I'm still confused about the things I'll be slower in though, and I'm being sincere with that confusion. If it's "boilerplate", then I haven't done enough research or pick a library which has little to none of that, or I'm not using the template(s) built into whatever framework I am using.

For example, in one of the projects I'm working on, I'm using the VSA pattern. I have the list of 50 to 75 features I need to implement and what "categories" they slot into, I have all of the frameworks and libraries picked out, and I have built out "feature templates" with all of the boilerplate setup (I'm reusing these over multiple projects going forward). for each of the features all I need to do is

'ftr new {FEATURE_TYPE} {FEATURE_NAME} {OUTPUT_FOLDER}'

and then plug int the domain specific business logic.

I'll most likely use Claude/Codex/Whatever to write out some of my tests, but the majority of the 'boilerplate' is already done and I'm just sorting out the pieces that matter / can't be automated.

Am I missing something huge with these tools?

Don't get me wrong, for doing reverse engineering they're great helpers and I've made a tonne of progress on projects that had been languishing.

If I don't have experience with the underlying framework/language/thing being modified, it makes it quite difficult to trust the actual review. In this example, I haven't worked heavily with Cloudformation, so I can't call b.s if it leaves a database instance exposed to the wider public internet rather than in my company's private VPC.

I had an heavy ai user on my team say that “those who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone”. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me.

Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.

I’ve heard estimates of starting at 2k a month per person, and thats for the “normal” user-base

Ah, management without managing. Its depressing and engaging at the same time. Depressing because palace intrigue is exhausting and fraught with peril. Engaging because I love explaining things to people and watching everything click into place for them (see the 1 of 10k xkcd comic).

> It want solved. There was some generic boilerplate that was added to IDEs but it wouldn't be project specific. It wasn't able to look at patterns within your own codebase and repeat them.

I left out some expository, apologies. For example, I rely pretty heavily on using VSA as a way to keep things self contained and thus created templates for each different functionality type (background worker, crud action, etc) where they already have the logging/database connection/code flow pattern, I just need to shove in whatever business logic is needed. Now, that logic is the hard part and would require me to explain it in excruciating detail to Claude, or write it out by hand, but it take the same amount of time either way.

Most people I know don't write any code with agents, 90ish percent is still written by hand. I'm personally still trying to figure out where to fit them into my workflow: there's not much boilerplate to write as well known frameworks and libraries had already taken care of the heavy lifting, templates for major project types cut down on the initial startup overhead, and all of the project planning is done upfront with business partners.

Despite my ethical issues with AI, I am using it for a handful of personal projects so I am at least keeping up with what the frontier models are doing and I'm quite impressed with them for doing reverse engineering (they need a lot of hand holding, but I've been able to knock out months of trial and error pretty quickly).

That being said, I'm still perplexed when people state they're getting huge gains from them in terms of knocking out boilerplate, or helping them plan out the project. I was under the impression that the former was a solved problem, and the latter was a requirement of being a decent engineer.

If, as a member of the c-suite, I find that a noticeable percentage of my company's workforce isn't "helping to explorer a current trend" then either they know something I don't or I haven't given them the time/methods by which to explore.

The latter is actually the more pertinent item, as I've seen several times that an initiative get rolled out by leadership, some teams have free time to play around and use it, and other teams have so much on their plate that they're barely able to keep their heads above water, let alone take on another experiment. If someone is worried about getting a project knocked out by end of month/quarter/year in order to keep their job, they're not going to mess about.

Now, that's a leadership failure, but it happens more often than not.

What is everyone shifting to, and at what scale? I can see moving to breaking down tasks in separate markdown docs for a small(ish) startup, but working at a company of more then say 1k or so requires a bit more infrastructure to deal with the cross cutting concerns (compliance/legal, pm's, leadership, etc). I'm at a reasonably sized F500 and Jira is the default, despite how much all of us despise it, mainly because it ticks all of the boxes for aforementioned areas.

A desire to engage with humans instead of matrix multiplication isn’t, and is incapable of being, racist.

The underlying data that said matrices compute upon, can be racist though.

I will admit that I may be missing some context though.

The reason, and the only reason, that leadership/owners want to get rid of devs is money.

If you’re wondering who the villain is, it’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism.

I’m unable to determine if you’re missing /s or not.

I took one look at it, realized it was a cesspool and noped out.

Don’t knock me for deciding “deathbed repentance” is a decent plan.

/s

Maybe it’s just my background, but I’m starting to feel that a lot of people in the tech industry have never learned empathy.

I was discussing this with one of my counterparts today, and we both agreed that writing the code is the easy part, and actually knowing what to do / getting requirements sorted out / working with our compliance team are the hard parts. That being said, I'm in a pretty highly regulated industry so it just might be that.

Surprisingly, this has been a project I’ve been tinkering with for years. There is an easy way to get the raw png/jpeg files out, but it does require a windows box. Im planning on working on it more over the long holiday.

I've predominantly worked in two industries, healthcare/public health and insurance where policies terms are measured in decades. The software for both ranges from 20 to 40 years old, and it hasn't been upgraded because to do so poses an existential risk to either the business or, in the case of healthcare, to human life. Upgrades are measured in terms of human generations because of said risk, but I wouldn't call these systems legacy due to not moving beyond java 1.6.

also, the Hyperion Cantos was a great series.

Tossed my main one in there.

-Slides up to the bar-

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