solatic

> wrangler

Is actually a really good example of why TS was a bad choice for Cloudflare. It made sense for their initial version, because the only programs that you could run on Cloudflare Workers were themselves JavaScript scripts, so it was a reasonable expectation that developers were already using npm/yarn/pnpm to install tools and manage dependencies.

But now, Cloudflare Workers supports containerized workloads and Python workloads. So even if your project doesn't use TS, you are still expected to set up some kind of JS toolchain for your project, just for wrangler.

> Pretty much any choice of tech stack will work well.

Choice of tech stack is not merely a question of performance, but also portability and packaging. Self-contained, compiled static binaries are much, much more portable than shipping full script runtimes (JS/Python), dealing with the inevitable spread of runtime versions installed on everyone's machines, and dealing with the version spread of the dependencies installed separately.

> All the CLI does is take command line arguments, put together requests based on them, send them to an API, get the responses, do mild transformation on the responses,and output it to stdout/stderr.

This is an argument in favor of a language like Go, arguing that the garbage collector in the runtime is inconsequential, over a language like Rust. It is not an argument for shipping a script runtime.

> The thing with watching CI in an agent loop is that it burns tons of tokens.

Not my experience with Claude Code.

> writing a deterministic, traditional CLI tool to poll GitLab CI pipeline+job state changes on a branch and exit with an appropriate status code

This is what Claude Code does, more or less, on the fly. With a short prompt like "I pushed, monitor CI and debug if needed", it writes a monitor script which is responsible for polling CI status (the script is short, so it's not token-heavy), and if CI fails, only then does the agent proceed to pulling out CI logs, grepping them for signs of errors, etc. as continuation to debugging.

I mean, I'm sure it's more token-efficient to have a CLI tool ready-to-go instead of Claude Code dynamically writing its own script each time, but as I'm on a Max sub where it doesn't seem to affect how close I am to the limits, and I only ever hit the limits if I'm running Fable for everything... /shrug

100% this.

I live in a place with year-round fair weather, so I use a petrol motorcycle as my primary vehicle, and live in a rented apartment with no dedicated parking space or possibility of using an at-home charger.

Even with incredibly high petrol taxes causing petrol to cost more than 2.2 EUR/L (like 9.5 USD/gallon), the public fast EV charger rates available at refueling stations are so expensive, that when you take great motorcycle mileage into account, it still doesn't pay to buy an EV, even when only considering charging/refueling costs. Of course, if I could recharge from slow household electric power, it would be a different story. But the politicians are already worried enough about the loss of petrol taxes that the odds, IMO, are quite low of EV charging staying cheaper than petrol refueling (particularly when the vast majority of the petrol price is taxes to begin with).

> 1950s texts

The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.

If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.

But LikeC4 has the interactive layer as well as guided walkthroughs.... adding a code view is a single feature

> with stock this is trivial

On the contrary - it's trivial for controlling shareholders to direct the company to issue more stock to them and thus dilute the shares that were taxed. What do you propose, that companies can no longer issue stock after some of the stock has been taxed?

And what about non-divisible assets like real estate? There's nothing that prevents the government from forcing real estate to be held by LLCs instead of individuals, then shares in the LLC could slowly be taxed by the government. So what happens in 20 years when the government owns 50.1% of all the LLC shares that comprise the ownership of the $100 million Hollywood mansion? You're going to let a bureaucrat kick out the A-lister who lives there and put it up for auction? Attempt to sell it to someone who knows full well the same would happen to him?

It's very, very hard to design a wealth tax that doesn't end up being an assault on private ownership in all forms.

How do you compare to https://likec4.dev/ and https://erode.dev/ , which are currently fully open-source and community driven?

C4 gives the text-based representation needed for LLMs to generate and maintain large architecture diagrams - why not build off that heritage?

> If I use cash to buy 1B dollars in Microsoft shares today, am I not worth a Billion dollars...?

Who says that the price you paid per share was the actual market value of the shares? For example, let's say that you inherited 10 million options to purchase Microsoft stock at $1/share, and in so exercising the options (by writing a check for, say, $10 million to Microsoft), you then end up with 10 million shares, which on paper, with the current stock price close to $500/share, would be worth close to $5 billion. But could you actually get that much money from selling 10 million shares? Definitely not overnight - so many shares getting dumped on the market at once would materially affect the stock price. The $5 billion number is a hypothetical that depends on other people backing up the hypothetical numbers with their own money (i.e. buying at the hypothetical price) - it is not the same as "I have $5 billion in a bank account and could use that to go buy a yacht and buy political ads etc. with it"

For what it's worth, the way Israel deals with this is that property tax is levied on the property resident, not the property owner. In other words, when you rent a house, the person who is legally responsible for paying the tax is the renter.

This makes it exceedingly easy to ensure that old people are not affected by property taxes: if you are elderly resident, you simply get a discount. If you are an elderly landlord who owns multiple properties, your younger tenants don't get a property tax discount, and you pay income taxes (not discounted for age) on the rental income. If you are elderly and want to downsize, your property tax discount follows you into the smaller apartment.

The system has its challenges, but it is far superior to Prop 13 and achieves the same goal.

This is one of the arguments for polyrepo: different sources have different sensitivities. Code ending up in production needs to be reviewed, so enforce reviews.

Docs do not.

So what results is either allowing developers to push (but not force push) directly to main (you can always push revert commits if needed), or a PR process that exists to enforce linters and build-ability, but if those pass, allow the developer to merge independently, without human review.

Right, this is why a real war on drugs would use social workers, not police, as its soldiers. But they are underpaid, so there are hardly enough of them to be effective.

> eminently reasonable

Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:

1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).

2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.

6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.

> People shouldn't be considered criminals because they're addicted to a drug. We should help them, not stigmatize them or throw them in jail.

I agree with you, but it's worth spelling out exactly why. Philosophically, prison has one of three purposes: protecting society, rehabilitation, or punishment.

If the sentence for use is anything less than spending the rest of your life in jail, then society isn't really protected from addicts; the recidivist rate is too high. Get out, steal again for the next high, rinse and repeat through the revolving door.

Prison is not an environment capable of rehabilitating addicts. Leaving aside drug smuggling into prisons, getting people past the withdrawal period is the "easy" part of rehab, the real work is in therapy, developing better relationship models, better boundaries, better strategies for the triggers that drove people to look for a high. It's very, very difficult to facilitate that in prison.

Finally, it's debatable whether prison is actually punishment for addicts. If they keep access to drugs through the people who smuggle them into prisons, and the prison pays for meals and a roof that were often lacking for the addict on the street, then, is it really a punishment?

Title is click-bait with poor framing (i.e. if you are often wrong, then sometimes, you will be right).

Finishing your goals does not "make you right". Life is not a binary where you are either wrong, or right. Thinking that you ever become "right" or that you ever achieve 100% confidence that you have arrived at a "solution" is arrogance of the highest order.

Life is about getting better. Every person, every product, starts at a beginning. A beginning is not "wrong", it is early. We try, individually and collectively, to improve ourselves and that which we are responsible for. The decision to ship is not whether we have made something "right" but about whether we have made it better. We ship, knowing we will ship another improvement after this one.

> 2. Gather missing information... 6. Achieve the goal

Sometimes in life, you need to ship first in order to gather missing information later. You cannot do that if everything has to be "right" before you ship it.

> I love being wrong

This is not the essay of someone who loves being wrong. This is the essay of someone who loves becoming right. But the deeper truth is that you will always be "wrong" - unfinished, lacking knowledge, under-developed, incomplete. Do not love being wrong - love improvement.

Important buried context: 60/hour unauthenticated, but 5,000/hour on the free plan.

60/hour sucks. 5000/hour (a little more than one per second) is totally fine.

I'm chalking this up alongside Docker's decision to restrict unauthenticated pulls. Unauthenticated anything went the way of the dodo some time ago. If you want unauthenticated access, go run your own mirror.

> 5-year treasuries were paying 7-9% with inflation in the 2-4% range

One crucial difference: the US wasn't $40T in debt, and it wasn't pulling trillion dollar deficits. In 1998 the US federal government actually had a surplus! Even 9% interest wasn't going to wreck the Federal budget when the overall amount of debt to be serviced was so much lower.

Everything is relative to size. If your older brother lends you a dollar at 100% daily interest, you can still throw a balled-up Jackson at him a couple days later and walk away clean. But ask anyone who agreed to a crazy 20% interest rate on their car loan what it did to their personal finances, and all you'll hear is horror stories. 9% on $40T would be suicide.

> what happens to scaling of the businesses?

This is a fundamentally political question. When different customers demand different new features, and other customers demand particular bug fixes, who do you satisfy first? The one with a small but growing account, or the old account who has been with you from the beginning? I would challenge anybody who thinks agents mean you can just do everything, immediately - by all means, prove me wrong and build Google again overnight.

And how is growth financed? Reinvestment, equity, debt? I would challenge anybody who thinks this can be reduced to a calculation, because money ultimately flows between humans; even if somebody grants an agent access to a current account (and some are, experimenting with vibe day-trading), a human always retains final control and can liquidate that account whenever they like.

Not OP, but -

You didn't explain why, in your opinion, opt-out is disrespectful; why respect requires opt-in. For most Western users, the bandwidth is hardly a drop in the bucket, and while there are certainly kinds of telemetry that are disrespectful of a user's privacy, telemetry in and of itself is not (in my opinion) abusive of user privacy, and therefore neither is opt-out abusive.

Indeed, if you were to argue that telemetry violates user privacy, then opt-in (i.e. to help send bug reports) doesn't fix that. If you add a "send bug report" button, but the data collected in the bug report abuses the user's privacy, why is it ethically any better? The data collected is far more important than the frequency or control over how and when it's sent. Users who desire taking that control should anyway run their own restrictive, allowlist-based firewall, which no opt-in/opt-out setting can overcome anyway.

But ClickHouse has its own concept of sessions that is completely independent of HTTP:

https://clickhouse.com/docs/concepts/features/interfaces/htt...

If you throw something like nginx in front to try to better guarantee the "balance" part of load balancing, as an improvement over TCP connections that are sticky to the initial server they reach, then you're asking different CH servers to handle the same original session. So what did the load balancer give you?

Now, CH added session-aware routing for the HTTP client... but it's a beta feature, and it requires an Enterprise license anyway: https://clickhouse.com/docs/products/cloud/features/infrastr...

Why go against the tide?

I cocked an eyebrow more than once reading this.

> A quick note about HTTP: ClickHouse® offers a TCP connector with a native protocol, but we don't use it. It does not offer many advantages for the type of application we build

This needs more elaboration. One of the major goals of running a ClickHouse cluster is to provide low-latency queries; a persistent TCP connection removes the need to re-establish a new connection for each query and thus reduces overall latency in line with CH goals. So I really didn't understand this.

> ClickHouse® open source faces a significant challenge: limited support for cloud storage. Modern OLAP databases and data systems should leverage cloud storage for cost efficiency and independent scaling of compute and storage resources. Snowflake established this standard over a decade ago, and ClickHouse® (open source) lags behind

ClickHouse writing to NVMEs is exactly how they provide their latency and performance advtanges. Writing and reading to object buckets is fundamentally slower with multiple network hops to reach what is, in this architectural context, a storage server for your storage server. If you really need far more storage, and are willing to sacrifice query latency to get it... why not architect for one of the OLAP databases, like Snowflake, where that was part of their architecture from day one?

> Because you are testing your analytics queries, right?

No? Half the point of an OLAP database is to let users write their own queries. If we knew the queries ahead of time, we probably wouldn't need an OLAP database, and instead use a less-flexible streaming architecture storing intermediate calculations so as not to need to pay for petabyte-scale storage. The expected value from paying for all of that storage is to support not knowing which queries will be written by users.

> Every single company handling ClickHouse® struggles with ingestion... Backpressure mechanism: Some people put Kafka before ClickHouse®. This does the job

The whole trade-off that you make with column-store databases like ClickHouse (instead of row-store databases like Postgres) is that inserts are slow for column stores (whereas they are fast for row stores). Inserts happen slowly, asynchronously, in the background. It is the price you pay for fast analytics queries. This is why OLAP databases have a latency lag and do not show real-time results. This is why stores like Kafka are usually a good fit, you let Kafka hold onto new data until batch insertions can catch up. If you do need real-time queries, you don't write to an OLAP directly; you write to a stateful frontend that answers the query itself, then streams out historical data from the OLAP that was successfully written there. And the first thing you do in a "I want to have my cake, and eat it too, and yes I'm willing to pay for the privilege" architecture like that is... to keep the persistent TCP connections, because that's really low-hanging fruit.

You're not comparing against real-world fixed-route bus routes.

In the real world, most bus routes run nearly empty if not completely empty most of the time, belching diesel smoke and paying a driver, in order to ensure that service is provided to remote locations and that service is made available on a regular schedule. In cities, utilization is usually higher, although you see the same pattern off-peak.

In suburban and rural environments, the footprint is nearly irrelevant, but the lack of riders means that early attempts would start with designs that prioritize battery capacity and range over the sheer number of seats. In urban environments, the final mix of buses will look closer to a combination of mid-size buses for door-to-door and full-size buses for trips that are door-to-door but in practice are no different from fixed-routes due to the sheer number of people who take the current routes at rush hour.

They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.

But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.

If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.

It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.

[1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit

Even if you don't have sympathy on an individual level for hundreds of thousands of ordinary, working-class people with decades-long careers suddenly losing their livelihood (and you really should have sympathy for them), you should at least care on a selfish level for the increased risk of civil unrest that such a socioeconomic upheaval can cause.

> that sounds very minor

Are you arguing that a lesser evil (compared to the evil of offshoring) is not evil? Is offshoring supposed to be relevant here? Why bring this up?

Your argument is non-sequitur and nihilist. America was created by colonizing Native land, so should we somehow evict hundreds of millions of people in the name of justice? (/rhetorical)

Original sin is a sunk cost. If you want to make the world better, you focus on what's right for tomorrow, not what was right for a century ago.

You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.

Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.

And how do you know if you have been breached if you (negligently, in my opinion) have no audit logging, multiple principals sharing the same account, and no anomaly tracking? Does a breach only happen if the attacker brags openly about it?

The difference with accounting is that, relatively speaking and certainly within this context, few businesses are cash businesses. Your bank is keeping at least a basic audit log of money coming in and out of the corporate bank account. Your payment processor is keeping at least a basic audit log of who paid you and how much. You won't make your auditors happy if they're the only documents you have, but they're at least something to be handed over in an audit that pretty much every software business will have. Cybersecurity? By default, nothing is collected.

> Backups are _tested regularly_ now because LLMs make it cheap to do so.

sighs heavily in 90's sysadmin

Testing backups is not just a question of whether or not the restore command works. Go back and read the Tao of Backup: http://www.taobackup.com/history.html . The application itself (in its current version, with its current features) needs to work with the backed-up data, and the only way to verify this is to attempt to actually work with the data.

If you don't trust your agent to ship to production without manually reviewing the output (in some way), you have no business trusting your agent managing your backups. The agent writing some tests doesn't mean that the tests adequately handle all of your actual scenarios, let alone that your system will adequately handle data that is missing since the last backup.