squirrellous

Something that amazed me around the time Cider V was first introduced is that some folks have been at Google for so long, they have never used VSCode, and didn’t recognize the UI at all.

What do you find appealing about GCP? I occasionally hear positive sentiment like this but don’t entirely understand the reason, mostly because I haven’t used non-GCP clouds professionally. Is it just the least bad of all the big clouds?

In this specific case. In the case of trace IDs (an example of which is [1]) where the equivalent of UUIDs are explicitly used to avoid coordination, it’s hard to imagine how you’d reliably detect and retry.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48033853

To me it’s more like being a super micro-managing TL that would annoy the hell out of their human reports. It comes with all the pros and cons of micro-management.

I wonder from time to time whether you can decide the best “schema shape” beforehand, ie before you can run real workloads that stress the memory implications of such things. This can be very useful if you are trying to decide the boundary of some public facing API, but for whatever reason can’t run benchmarks (lack of impl, data, time, etc).

Without that, if you try to suggest a transformation like this when the schema is first conceived, it will likely be considered premature optimization.

This tells me a real developer wrote the docs, instead of someone with good English writing skills but is less technical.

> they could have even used their own LLM to edit their documentation to fix grammar issues

In my experience companies who do this rarely stop at using LLMs to fix grammar issues. It becomes full on LLM speak quite fast, especially if there isn’t a native English speaker in the room who can discern what’s good and bad writing.

Ha, probably nobody at Google even knows the exact cost of each of those business lines.

I’d even argue that most things operated by tech doesn’t need 24x7x365 availability. If it’s about life-and-death, then yes make it super reliable and available. Otherwise, bring back scheduled downtime please.

I’ve always thought about this as more of a meme than a serious point. Trivially, aren’t most of the network protocol RFCs “sufficiently comprehensive spec that isn’t code”?

This is probably the least important bad thing you could say about Altman.

Also why is a low effort commentary piece of the NYT article on the HN front page?

It’s what the cool kids are doing these days. It’ll pass. Also it’s quite fun to build things around agents and watch them go off to work.

ARK was all the rage around early pandemic time when wallstreetbets was in the news a lot. Most people probably know it from then.

Weird that this needs to be said. I’m not familiar with the Go ecosystem, but there is usually a natural incentive for library developers to reach more people, which means you’d want to support the oldest feasible version. If you don’t do that then someone will develop a better library which does support an older version. Is that not happening here?

The problem is scale. Beyond a certain scale it’s all a net negative: social networks, bitcoin, ads, machine learning, automated trading, big this big that, etc.

Unfortunately for fellow developers, software enables massive scale.

A lot of process and management is about dealing with low performers - by which I don’t mean incompetent people but people lacking motivation, or with the wrong intuitions, etc. Our hiring process can’t reliably filter out low performers, and when they get in it’s difficult to fire them, so we invent ways to raise the bottom line through processes.

And FWIW I don’t think you can solve this by always hiring the “best” either, at least not beyond a certain team size.

I agree in principle. However JSON tooling has also got so good that other formats, when not optimized and held correctly, can be worse than JSON. For example IME stock protocol buffers can be worse than a well optimized JSON library (as much as it pains me to say this).

Great post!

The minimized repro seems like something many other eBPF programs will do. This makes me wonder why such kernel issues weren’t found earlier. Is this code utilizing some new eBPF capabilities in recent kernels?

Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.

One pattern I've seen is that a team with a decently complex codebase will have 2-3 senior people who have all of the necessary context and expertise to review PRs in that codebase. They also assign projects to other team members. All other team members submit PRs to them for review. Their review queue builds up easily and average review time tanks.

Not saying this is a good situation, but it's quite easy to run into it.

Can’t argue with the quote. However my current boss has been pushing this to the extreme without much respect for real-world complexities (or perhaps I’m too obtuse to think of a simple solution for all our problems), which regrettably gives me a bit of pause when hearing this quote.

I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.

C++ dev here. It’s helping me just fine. Not as much as frontend folks but not far behind either.

It’s not quite at the place where LLMs can take over 100% coding, but give it a few more months.

This is why I get turned off hearing about Rust (and I use it from time to time). You can say Rust is good without saying other languages are bad.

I’ve seen so many people fall into this trap. Have to wonder if it’s the API design of rwlock that’s wrong because it leads to misuse.

Would be great if it supported API keys. I’m getting by with slack threads of all things for work.

Yes I’m stretching this a bit, and certainly don’t mean this as a slight on Tao’s peers. That said I’m sure there’s someone out there who fits this description better. I was picturing a modern-day Ramanujan in my mind.

It’s kind of interesting that AI opens up a new avenue for intellectual progress where even if you are the prevailing expert in your field and nobody else quite understands what you do, there is still an LLM that can mostly keep up with you and explain, critique, develop, and generally engage with your work. IOW people who are way ahead of their time now has a peer they can talk to.

This assumes a lot:

- the same entity has access to the source of both the library and the main app

- library and main app share the same build tooling

And even if that’s the case, you have the problem of end users accidentally using different versions of the main app and the library and getting unexpected UB.

They probably have some inflexible internal policy where preview needs to be in use for X months before GA. Couple that with the rate of AI progress and voila.

I thought OSS-fuzz still uses the aforementioned sanitizers and fuzz engines. It is not by itself a fuzzing engine.