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smetj

263 karma · joined April 5, 2016

https://smetj.net https://twitter.com/smetj
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smetj··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
To be fair, American wine, probably undeservedly, doesn’t seem to have much appeal in Europe. There’s still a strong perception that wine should be either French or Italian, and anything else tends to be (again undeservedly) frowned upon.
smetj··on Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Indeed ... "hey everyone slow down" ... there, box checked, I have done my contribution.
smetj··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
What is it with people and not seeing things for what they actually are? These are just if then else loops on steroids, not human behaviour, so don't expect more. Every reasonably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ... what do you see? Magic or technology?
smetj··on Creepy Crawlies
Offer the content, which is otherwise scraped, as a tarbal + diffs via a torrent or p2p network making it more efficient and cheaper for the crawlers to obtain the data.
smetj··on Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
Works for me!
smetj··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
> I'm just another off-the-shelf engineer now

You're wrong there. You are capable of judging the outcome of the llm.

> But I don't know what to think about the long-term.

Don't you think it all has taken long enough. When I look back at the beginning of my career and compare what we do now ... I cannot shake the feeling we're essentially still solving he same problems and we have accepted that as being normal. Complexity skyrocketed, (abstraction) layers got added but the needle didn't move exponentially together with that. I think the IT industry as a whole gets what it deserves, thinking that we would remain the maze masters of the mazes we create.

> Maybe I should consider transforming my woodworking hobby into a profession...

I'm looking for 8 (affordable) oak panel doors with the exact same measurements as my current doors so I can replace them. That shouldn't be too hard to find you'd think right?

smetj··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
smetj··on Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software
I guess the people not complaining here are the ones who do not immediately upgrade production to latest non-security releases?
smetj··on Slumber a TUI HTTP Client
That looks great! Will give it a spin during my daily work. Thanks for making and sharing it.
smetj··on Alert-driven monitoring
Depends on what you are monitoring but let's assume an API endpoint. Collect and monitor the RED metrics with detailed dimensions in combination with blackbox monitoring simulating client transactions as realistic possible and alert only on those 2 types.

When that happens, fire off a battery of diagnostic checks which you have collected over time to pinpoint the cause.

What if the diagnostics checks don't reveal the issue? There is still value since you know these are not the reason so no time is wasted re-evaluating them. Where to get these diagnostic checks from? Well, what's the first thing responding engineers do? Open the CLI and troubleshoot. Those are your diagnostic checks. Collect, automate, capture the domain specific knowlegde and democratize it.

smetj··on Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons
Some years ago I owned a Mercedes CLA which had Android auto controlled using the rotating joystick with push down to select. The experience was perfect. It was fast, could be handled without any distraction, never misbehaved and never detoriated over time. Now I drive a car with touchscreen ... it's bullshit but I guess it looks fancier.
smetj··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.
smetj··on Why isn't LA repaving streets?
red tape, regulations, corruption, low pay, inflated prices, a gamed system. Although the topic is unrelated, I came across this the other day ... makes one think https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910
smetj··on Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop
Generally speaking, the value of these contributions was determined by "proof of work". Time and effort are precious to a human hence its a somewhat self-regulating system preventing huge amounts of low quality contributions being generated. This is now gone. Isn't that an interesting problem to fix?
smetj··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
Here's mine: https://smetj.net/
smetj··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
Beautiful! Nice work.
smetj··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Be it as it may, its aesthetics are so distinct it isn't for everybody. Also a big part of the target audience expecting to buy an utility vehicle have cheaper, proven and more practical alternatives. I guess the fact its not road legal in the EU doesn't help either whilst other Tesla models are quite popular there.
smetj··on I hate GitHub Actions with passion
Its not Github Actions' fault but the horrors people create in it, all under the pretense that automation is simply about wrapping a GitHub Action around something. Learn to create a script in Python or similar and put all logic there so you can execute it locally and can port it to the next CI system when a new CTO arrives.
smetj··on I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
Its simple. If you require specific software which only runs on Windows, then you cannot use Linux. If that's not the case, the Linux desktop these days is entirely capable of helping you achieve your goals.
smetj··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Well ... IMO this is literally replacing (entry-level) engineers, but lets agree to disagree on that. Be it as it may ... task automation is also "a product" then not? 5 years ago, this wasn't possible. Now it is, so extrapolate that to the future ...

ps: If you can guarantee the Powerball lottery continues forever, I can give you a guaranteed winning combination.

smetj··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch.

If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is.

- What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing.

- What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above.

- What will that look like 5 years down the road?

I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

smetj··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once
smetj··on KDE onboarding is good now
This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.
smetj··on Avoid Mini-Frameworks
Somehow, somewhere there is a pleasant balance between DRY and non-DRY which is different for everybody. God forbid having a colleague who sees a thing repeating and slaps an abstraction over it at whatever cost because DRY!
smetj··on Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
Exactly! Linkportals and webrings ...
smetj··on What Killed Perl?
Perl became popular because there was not really an alternative on par with its capabilities and because it was bundled with every Linux distro. But then Python came along and picked up momentum and because of that, people realized Perl's syntax is actually not very intuitive to read and understand compared to Python.
smetj··on Helm 4.0
> What is the essence of the complaint here?

As said, that I often cannot relate the managed application's documentation to the Helm chart's interface?

Reason for it can vary ... poor Helm chart documentation, poor Helm chart design, Helm chart not in sync with application releases, ... The consequence is that I often need to grep through its templates and logic to figure out how to poke the chart's interface to achieve what I want. I don't think that's reasonable to say that's part of the end-user experience.

PS: I have no gripes with YAML

smetj··on Helm 4.0
Came here to feel the temperature of the comments, and unsurprisingly, most folks seem to have plenty of gripes with Helm.

A Helm chart is often a poorly documented abstraction layer which often makes it impossible to relate back the managed application's original documentation to the Helm chart's "interface". The number of times I had to grep through the templates to figure out how to access a specific setting ...

smetj··on David Lynch LA House
Beyond stunning, worth its asking price imo.
smetj··on Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience
Yes, I deliberately left that out for personal reasons. With a little sleuthing you should be able to figure out the brand.
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