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sharpy

374 karma · joined December 5, 2013

garath@tutanota.com
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sharpy··on Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
Yep. That is what I do too. But a lot of times the changes it makes are bandaids rather than addressing root cause. I have to periodically evaluate the skills for consistency and opportunities for simplification.
sharpy··on India's top court angry after junior judge cites fake AI-generated orders
What will that accomplish? Does it give license to developers to check in code that they don't understand/trust fully?

Ultimately, people should be responsible for the code they commit, no matter how it was written. If AI generates code that is so bad that it warrants putting up warning sign, it shouldn't be checked in.

sharpy··on California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years
We are having an unusually dry and sunny winter in PNW.. I wonder if it is related.
sharpy··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
That sounds nice, but I think that increased tax will just be passed down as higher rent.
sharpy··on A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave
I wonder if US still manages to keep the most promising?
sharpy··on Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price
Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.
sharpy··on Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.
sharpy··on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
I think AI can be really powerful tool. I am more productive with it than not, but a lot of my time interacting with AI is reviewing its code, finding problems with it (I always find some issues with it), and telling it what to do differently multiple times, and eventually giving up, and fixing up the code by hand. But it definitely has reduced average time it takes me to implement features. But I also worry that not everyone would be responsible and check/fix AI generated code.
sharpy··on High-income job losses are cooling housing demand
Probably a lot of private equity buying up homes to generate rental income? Usually, I am more pro market, but I think there needs to be some regulations on this. Although if you are an existing homeowner with low interest rate locked in, you probably want more private equity investments to drive up your property value...
sharpy··on Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
Intellectually, I think people agree with that. But I think the weight of history works against it. When you have a history filled with war, and intense competition...
sharpy··on TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term
If they get things like PyTorch to work well without carinng what hardware it is running on, it erodes Nvidia's CUDA moat. Nvidia's chips are excellent, without doubt, but their real moat is the ecosystem around CUDA.
sharpy··on Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia
If it becomes a liability, wouldn't the onus be on the network operators for failing to support devices sold within X years?
sharpy··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
When they added the CM bar raiser, I felt like it hit day 2. When was that? 2014ish?
sharpy··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
Nah, I used to work for defense contractors, and worked with ex-military people, so...

Anyway, I actually loved my first time at AWS. Which is why I went back. My second stint wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't go back, unless they offered me a lot more than what I get paid, but that is unlikely.

sharpy··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
The culture changed. When I first worked there, I was encouraged to take calculated risks. When I did my second tour of duty, people were deathly afraid of bringing down services. It has been a while since my second tour of duty, but I don't think it's back to "Amazon is a place where builders can build".
sharpy··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
I have seen one promo docket get rejected for doing work that is not complex enough... I thought the problem was challenging, and the simple solution brilliant, but the tech assessor disagreed. I mean once you see there is a simple solution to a problem, it looks like the problem is simple...
sharpy··on TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)
As someone whose employer uses a broker that doesn't do cost basis correctly for RSUs, I was very surprised TurboTax was able to import the supplement and adjust it correctly for me.

Even without RSUs, I usually have hundreds of transactions across multiple brokers.

sharpy··on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves
Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...
sharpy··on Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas
Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. I worked on exactly one Ada project. The rest were C/C++. I presume the shift away from Ada has accelerated if anythinng.
sharpy··on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.
sharpy··on Margin debt surges to record high
I do trade using margin account, but I don't borrow. The primary reason I use margin account is to be able to trade with unsettled funds. Probably don't need it now that the settlement times are T+1, but when it was T+2, it was kinda annoying.
sharpy··on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon
I am pretty sure he will get a nice stock compenstation for the mental anguish he suffered for this decision.

Snark aside, did Intel management take any cuts, even symbolic ones to show they are in it together?

sharpy··on First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV
I thought an American pope would be the last thing Vatican wanted (to avoid being seen too close to US)
sharpy··on Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history
Worked for a french company once. The code was in English, but the comments were in French. I guess this happens, because all the language keywords are English, so it might be strange to mix and match langauges there. But comments were fair game.
sharpy··on Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL
Once upon a time, as an intern, I had the 'fun' task of optimizing the performance of a stored procedure written by someone with a math phd. It was more than 6 pages when printed, and took more than 30 minutes to run (it was used in billing), and had no tests.

Ended up rewriting it in native code, and it run in less than a second. Most of the work was proving it produced same results... and writing and documenting test cases, so next person wouldn't have to go through that.

After that experience, I have generally avoided putting a lot of business logic in SQL...

sharpy··on Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
I am totally going to advocate for this at my workplace. I myself am guilty of it - not saying "just", but questioning people's estimates based on my limited understanding of the research they had to do to come up with the estimates in the first place.
sharpy··on Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole
I have been out of the defense industry for quite a while now, but even back then, more and more projects were using C/C++, because it was so hard to hire Ada developers.
sharpy··on Meta built large-scale cryptographic monitoring
Never worked at facebook, but typically at a large companies, things like this are sent with instructions on how to go about doing that, and most often just making sure your dependencies are updated so next run of automated build/deploy will pick up the change.
sharpy··on Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
Often yes. There were times when I was writing unit tests that was me just naming the test case, with 99% of the test code auto generated based on the existing code, and the name.
sharpy··on Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore
Very true. My previous employeer offered use it or lose it 6 weeks. I used it all. My current employeer offers unlimited PTO. I take 3 weeks at max...
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