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rednafi

1,910 karma · joined June 2, 2019

https://rednafi.com/about | redowan.nafi[at]gmail.com
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rednafi··on Go 1.27 Interactive Tour
I am all for using LLMs to generate value but a little more editorial review can't hurt.

> The quieter but bigger change: the classic encoding/json (v1) package is now backed by the v2 implementation under the hood.

This is fantastic content nevertheless.

rednafi··on Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds
Now that no one cares about JS frontend framework, we moved the drama over to JS tooling written in other languages.

One reason I find deno nicer is that the node creator is solid isn't a slopperoo yapping about LLM induced quasi-productivity.

rednafi··on It's getting harder to focus every day
Not relatable. "Internet is not real, and strangers' opinions don't mean anything" is an ethos that I have been religiously following for as long as I can remember.

Also, I do a lot of things offline. Read physical books, run after work, and tend to stay out of the internet mob altogether. Oh, having no Instagram or Twitter helps a lot.

The faster you realize that we have a limited time on this planet the more ruthless you become with your time. My time is expensive and my employer buys it at a premium. So I am extremely judicious about what I am reading, watching and who I am interacting with.

Building the muscle takes time but it's not that hard afterwards.

rednafi··on GC shape stenciling in Go generics
It's all tradeoffs. Fully monomorphized generics tend to blow up compile time.
rednafi··on GC shape stenciling in Go generics
It's a bunch of things. LLVM is one of them. Zig moved away from it for reasons.
rednafi··on GC shape stenciling in Go generics
I'd be curious about the runtime cost of the extra lookup in case of Swift compared to Go.
rednafi··on Lisette a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go
Nah made the same comment on r/golang
rednafi··on Lisette a little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go
Go syntax and the Go runtime would be the perfect combo for me. Oh well...

I love Rust for what it is, but for most of my projects, I can’t justify the added complexity. Sure, there are a bunch of things I miss from the Rust world when I’m working on large-scale distsys services in Go, but introducing Rust in that space would be a recipe for disaster.

I guess the Go team knows that if they start adding everyone’s favorite Rust features, the language would become unrecognizable. So we’re not getting terser error-handling syntax or enums. Having union types would be nice too.

But I work in platform engineering, so my needs are quite different from someone writing business logic in Go. I understand that having a more expressive syntax is nice when you’re writing complex business code, but in reality, that almost always comes with a complexity/fragility tradeoff. That’s part of the reason no one wants to use Rust to write their business logic, despite it being so much more expressive.

For distsys, programming ergonomics matter far less compared to robustness and introspectability. So the Go runtime with Go syntax is perfect for this. But of course, that’s not true for all use cases.

Sorry for the rant - completely uncalled for. This is a cool project nonetheless :)

rednafi··on The Indie Internet Index – submit your favorite sites
It's super satisfying to search for my own blog on an indie aggregator and finding it there already.
rednafi··on Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs
This is great. But I’ve bookmarked at least 10 of these aggregators over the years, and I never revisit any of them. Partly because I don’t have the time to browse and discover new content.

I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/

rednafi··on European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
Europe doesn’t do software better - not because it can’t, but because it can’t afford to drop the GDP of a country to build a single app like some of its US counterparts can.

It might feel performative to some people, but Europe just doesn’t trust the US, and arguably shouldn’t. So it’s not about demonstrating superiority in software, but rather showing that there are alternatives you can choose if you want to.

rednafi··on Working on Products People Hate
"Their experience is different from mine; therefore, they haven't worked in big tech" is a bit reductionist.

While it's true that in large companies you typically have much less agency than you think and sometimes have to work on things that don’t resonate with you, large companies also have many different teams you can switch to.

So saying this should be the norm is what people have a problem with. Plus, moving to a different workplace is always an option.

If you decide to collect the paycheck and do the work, that’s okay too. But touting it as the norm and saying everyone should do it is gaslighting.

rednafi··on Working on Products People Hate
IDK why these vacuous corpo tropes appear on the front page of HN every now and then. Sounds like exactly what a quasi-technical, management-leaning staff engineer would say.

Sure, in the end we work for these faceless, meat-grinding machines. But more or less, we all have some semblance of autonomy, and I absolutely can choose not to work on a product that people hate. I can switch teams before switching companies.

To some extent, I also just do what leadership asks, keep my mouth shut, and collect paychecks. But whenever that happens, I don’t gaslight myself by writing a post on why it's supposed to be this way.

To me, this seems like someone who is married to their paycheck and would do whatever necessary to protect that.

rednafi··on EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
It's great that they are recreating much of the fundamental software stack using LLMs. But if you're going to 'vibeslop,' at least do it in a language other than JavaScript.

I struggle to understand why anyone would want to generate code in TypeScript - unless what you're building truly can't be done in Go, Rust, or Kotlin; anything but JS.

I’m not sure how much of an improvement it really is to rewrite something from PHP to TypeScript while claiming security benefits.

rednafi··on Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
I'm not bored of the technology per se but the people around it. The yappers, doomers, and the shills are insufferable.
rednafi··on Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects (2014)
I dream of a SQL like engine for distributed systems where you can declaratively say "svc A uses the results of B & C where C depends on D."

Then the engine would find the best way to resolve the graph and fetch the results. You could still add your imperative logic on top of the fetched results, but you don't concern yourself with the minutiae of resilience patterns and how to traverse the dependency graph.

rednafi··on POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
Damn. I got a bunch of idea around atproto from this comment. Also found out your blog. I wish digging out human written blogs wasn't such a chore. I like the idea of blogs but their discoverability sucks big time.
rednafi··on POSSE – Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
I follow this religiously. The process of posting is manual but it works fairly well if your intention is good and you're not blog spamming in different forums.

But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.

Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.

If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

rednafi··on OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent
Go binary says hello. No VM overhead. Everything is statically linked.
rednafi··on Ant Mill
We have vibe leadership mills where AGI-pilled leaders are driving their companies into a death spiral.
rednafi··on OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent
There is literally no reason to write it in a JVM language in 2026 when better options exists. Either Go for simplicity and maintaininability or Rust to get the most out of the machine works.

Also, it'll be hard for them to lure good people to work on that thing. Absolutely no one is getting excited to write, vibe, or maintain Java.

rednafi··on Some things just take time
Mandatory read by Peter Norvig - even more relevant now

https://norvig.com/21-days.html

rednafi··on Time to Dump Windows?
I come from a developing country where the only OS people know is Windows. Macs used to be too expensive, and Linux didn’t have any of the applications people would use (read: pirate) for work.

Typically, college students and teachers would get $500 dingy laptops from Asus, Acer, and Dell. A decade ago, those machines were fine. My mom used one for 7 years, right until they retired Windows 7.

Then the machines started becoming absolutely useless with Windows 8, 10, and now 11. 8GB machines are barely usable now, with constant Windows updates and all the background telemetry services maxing out the disk all the time.

Sure, people can turn off some of these rogue processes. But my point is - an OS should just disappear from the user’s view and let them work.

I don’t live in my home country and haven’t visited in a long time, but I’ve heard that people are really opting for second-hand MacBook Airs. Now with the MacBook Neo, more people will go that route.

Students are opting for cheap Windows machines and flashing them with Ubuntu to make them usable.

rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
Ha ha I wish. Then both corporate and your coworkers hate you.

Also, there is no point in asking questions when you know that they just yoloed it and won't be able to answer anything.

We have collectively lost our common sense and reasonable people are doing unreasonable things because there's an immense amount of pressure from the top.

rednafi··on How I write software with LLMs
The world could use one less "how I slop" article at this point.

This reminds me of the early Medium days when everyone would write articles on how to make HTTP endpoints or how to use Pandas.

There’s not much skill involved in hauling agents, and you can still do it without losing your expertise in the stuff you actually like to work with.

For me, I work with these tools all the time, and reading these articles hasn’t added anything to my repertoire so far. It gives me the feeling of "bikeshedding about tools instead of actually building something useful with them."

We are collectively addicted to making software that no one wants to use. Even I don’t consistently use half the junk I built with these tools.

Another thing is that everyone yapping about how great AI is isn’t actually showing the tools’ capabilities in building greenfield stuff. In reality, we have to do a lot more brownfield work that’s super boring, and AI isn’t as effective there.

rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
Yep and now we are encouraged to use AI to review the code as well. But if shit hits the fan then you are held responsible.
rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
If you run a loop alongside the agent and make PRs that are tractable, then there isn’t much difference. But to me, it seems like we have collectively lost our minds and think it’s okay to make a 10k LOC PR and ask someone else to review it.
rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
I also work at a huge company, and this observation is true. The way AI is being rammed down our throats is burning out the best engineers. OTOH, the mediocre simian army “empowered” by AI is pushing slop like there’s no tomorrow. The expectation from leadership, who tried Claude for a single evening, is that you should be able to deliver everything yesterday.

The resilience of the system has taken a massive hit, and we were told that it doesn’t matter. Managers, designers, and product folks are being asked to make PRs. When things cause Sev0 or Sev1 incidents, engineers are being held responsible. It’s a huge clown show.

rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
True at Doordash, Amazon, and salesforce - speaking from experience.
rednafi··on LLMs can be exhausting
I have always enjoyed the feeling of aporia during coding. Learning to embrace the confusion and the eventual frustration is part of the job. So I don’t mind running in a loop alongside an agent.

But I absolutely loathe reviewing these generated PRs - more so when I know the submitter themselves has barely looked at the code. Now corporate has mandated AI usage and is asking people to do 10k LOC PRs every day. Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

I don’t want to read your code if you haven’t bothered to read it yourselves. My stance is: reviewing this junk is far more exhausting. Coding is actually the fun part.

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