scorpioxy

Extra impressive considering he has a newborn at home.

As an emacs user and fan, I sometimes feel that emacs is pushed into directions it is not meant to handle but the fact that it can be pushed to do so is its power. It's image handling has taught me that, but it also taught me that I prefer to use "the right tool for the job".

This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).

Can someone tell me if this is LLM generated content or not? I tried to look for obvious signs but didn't notice anything.

I can empathize with the commenter you're replying to. I still read for pleasure and have to read constantly for work of course. On some days, I feel like I can't. It is like exercising the same muscle every day which will lead to injury in a short amount of time. Switching to audiobooks or just taking a break does resolve that.

From what I am seeing around me though, reading for pleasure or even to gain knowledge has decreased a lot. I noticed it in adults first and this is being reflected in their children.

For the unresolved photos issue; I am not an iOS user so not sure if there's any application to help you easily achieve that goal on that platform. But in general, you can encrypt the sensitive files themselves(either files or directory).

You'll lose the ability to easily and quickly look at the photos, as in a single click and you're in, but the process would achieve what you want. To view the photos, you can mount a decrypted version whenever you actually want to look at them and can automate some of this process if it is time consuming or you do it frequently. This is all much easier to do on a computer rather than a mobile a device.

On Linux, there's ecryptfs. There were a few other similar tools in various states of maturity and maintenance when I checked. Perhaps look into something similar for your platform.

Shorter work weeks don't mean less work though. Not from the point of view of management, at least. It just means that 5 days are now compressed to 4, probably making the problem much worse and burn out much more likely.

In my experience, this is what ended up happening.

You mean there's no excuse for cooldowns? Yeah, there is. Security consultants have for years been saying that you need to always keep your dependencies updated. This is often parroted without any context of whether a package needs to be updated or not.

And what's a proper cooldown? 1 day? 3 days? 1 week? 1 month? If you have a vulnerability, now you're exposed during that cooldown period. There's no straight forward or easy answer here.

I am speaking from my own experience here with having to sit in during these discussions where security "advice" is provided to the development team without understanding what it entails or any tradeoffs. I found that keeping things relatively secure is hard work and needs to be a part of culture.

I wonder that too. I've been on the receiving end of "it's 90% done, we just need someone to get it over the line for us" way too many times to know that there's going to be a lot of pain trying to maintain or re-write parts of anything that is vibe-coded.

On the other hand, I notice the AI-fundamentalists(I am not sure how to refer to people within that group) just say that you won't be doing any hand coding anymore and you'd "just" ask something like claude to maintain it or re-write.

I've only seen pip give up twice and both times were due to bugs that were actively being worked on and the project dependencies were quite old. Perhaps that's why I am less impressed. Don't get me wrong, working faster without any downside is great. But I don't change dependencies all that often for it to matter if it does it in 5 seconds or 30.

"holy sacred programmers" and writing "the same functions again and again" are two extremes. There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc.

I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces.

That phrase and "Who designed this command line interface" are probably written for attention and clicks. The feedback content is useful and I agree with most of it but using such phrases diminishes the value of that feedback and invites defensiveness. I find uv's command line interface cumbersome for me too but I understand why it was written this way.

Interesting point of view and I think feedback is good. Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, I disagree with the intensity of the criticism.

Having a command runner within your project will mask a lot of the issues the author mentioned. And although, in my experience, having a command runner for mid-sized projects and up is useful for many things, masking the UX issues means there's a problem.

I got on the uv bandwagon relatively recently as most of my work is maintaining older python projects so I've been using it for new builds. Although the speed part is welcome, I couldn't see what the big deal is and mostly keep on using it because it is a popular tool(there are benefits to that in my line of work) and not necessarily because it can do something that couldn't be done before though with a couple of other tools. Whether it is beneficial or detrimental to having all of that functionality within one tool, to me, is a matter of opinion.

The problem to me is that I've seen this cycle many times before. New tool shows up claiming it is far superior to everything else with speed being a major factor and everyone else is doing it wrong. Even though the new tool does a fraction of what the old "bad" tool is doing. With adoption comes increased functionality and demands and the new tool starts morphing into the old tool with the same claimed downsides. The UX issues to me are a symptom of that process.

I still think uv is a fine tool. I've used poetry before and sometimes plain old pip. They're all fine with each tool catering to different use cases, in my opinion. Sometimes you have to add pyenv, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you add direnv, sometimes you don't and so on. And I've cursed at everyone of them at times. However, the fanboyism is very strong with uv which makes me wonder why.

I believe the problem was always the process that Google has where they tend to want to automate everything from the start and make it very difficult to reach a human and explain the situation. The service itself seems solid but if you make it difficult to address any problems when(not if) they occur then I won't be comfortable doing business with you. I stay away from their services for anything serious for this reason and always recommend to others to do the same.

It's going to be interesting to watch this unfold. Google's automation vs LLM agents, no humans from either side.

From a youtube video I saw about it, yes they are. It was interesting how cheaply they can make it. Their margin selling them is going to be huge according to their CEO.

Anyone feels like all this money spent on weapons and war would better benefit humanity if invested in other industries? These days it is either wasted on AI, technology marketed at making people obsolete, or weapons, technology to kill people. Sad.

I'm a fan of thinkpads but I didn't much like the "AI" branding as of late. I tried to look at what it means exactly and all I could find is that nobody actually knows. I still ended up purchasing one because it was a reasonable price and it could run Linux flawlessly. My experience with their pre-purchase sales team was not good and almost made me go somewhere else.

The build quality has improved over the past 5 generations or so. It was getting too plastic-y and felt brittle. Nothing like the original thinkpads though, those were built like bricks.

Yeah, I can relate. It's a problem if you don't bother since you won't be doing your job to the best of your abilities and it's a problem if you do since you might get in trouble with the management for not being a "team player" or some other silliness. Without meaningful consequences, I don't see this situation changing.

I've got a better one. I once had the same argument mentioned to me by my manager at the time when I pointed out that passwords were being stored in clear text. That it needs to be this way so that it is read/sent when the users forget their passwords(which happened a lot). I tried to explain that typically a "reset password" flow is used for that but that fell on deaf ears. That system contained healthcare data.

Something bad did end up happening due to that lax security and there were oh so many meetings about it.

What about answering something like "I don't know but if the work can be done for hundreds on AI instead of thousands on me then I refuse to let you waste your money like that"?

Vibe coded self driving cars sounds very interesting.

I was going to say that sounds like short term gain for long term pain. But I'm guessing if there are any issues in the future, the government would just bail them out.

Interesting. I saw contractor rates dropping here too. The ones I saw recently were at pre-pandemic levels so from 6 years ago. The large increase in cost of living from that time makes it even worse. The funny part is that the skills and experience that are being asked for are at a senior level. So I guess that would be senior level vibe coder at junior rates?

I found that sort of thinking is no longer a part of corporate culture(in AU at least). As in, investing in your staff and planning for the future. Resources are meant to be used and abused for benefit and that's it, consequences be damned.

> agent development, model engineering, AI-native workflows -- point directly at where large-enterprise demand is heading.

I don't understand these words. Does "AI-native workflow" mean vibe coding?

I am now seeing a lot of roles asking for "AI-enabled engineers". And I am not sure what that means either. I am sort of afraid to ask because the answer will probably confuse me even more. Maybe it's my understanding of what LLMs are and how they work that makes these words mean very little to me.

What always happens. A market correction followed by going back to a reasonable state, until the next bubble of course.

In my opinion, LLMs are useful for many things but not anything and everything and definitely not in the way the boosters are claiming. This is not a popular opinion when you are inside the bubble or have something to gain by it. So when there there's a downturn, things will hopefully stabilize with LLMs being another tool that can be used to automate certain things. It feels crazy saying this these days and have been told I'm out of touch if I think this way and who knows, maybe that's true.

Isn't it strange? You'd think there were some lessons learned from the 2008 crisis but apparently not. It is not that long ago to be forgotten already.

I don't have the same requirements and when I really thought about it, it turns out I need very few things and can get by without the other requirements.

So for many years it's been orgmode in emacs. Not exactly a wiki, but you can treat it as such. As they are "just text files", you can treat them as that and many things become simpler. Difficult to share with non-emacs users is probably the only downside.

I had a business owner tell me that they don't need to hire juniors anymore because claude can do all of that work for them. This was not a software shop so it's not even about writing code but I also thought that was something that will bite in the near future. A business that is not investing in juniors is a business that is not investing in the future.

Maybe consent is not an appropriate term. Perhaps an acknowledgement and a way to say "I don't want this" would be a more suitable approach. I feel like a flag to turn off LLMs is useful. Firefox added something like this in a recent release. I don't know how much they're downloading or how much they run it, nor would I be a good judge if it's necessary or not, but I don't want that functionality in my browser so turned it off.

I am not sure how you jumped from what I said to this. I don't believe I claimed that every project and business methodology is bad. I can only speak from my experience and am not confident enough to say how every project and business methodology should or shouldn't work.

I do believe you are helping to make my point though. I am saying that the process may very well be perfection but if entities within "meatspace" cannot use it well and may never be able to use it well then how useful really is it.

And if a tool is that difficult to use, how can you tell if the problem is in the tool or the user? There's a large industry built around doing training and certifications in agile methodologies now. If a tool is that difficult to get right, maybe it's just not a good tool to begin with.

To be fair, the manifesto and methodology is quite good in theory. But I just have never heard of(or experienced) it working properly and the response is always that it wasn't implemented correctly.