tharkun__

And none of those solve the issue.

You pass "foo" to Template. The Template will be instantiated before log ever sees it. You conveniently left out where the Foo string is computed from something that actually need computation.

Like both:

    new Template("doing X to " + thingBeingOperatedOn)

    new Template("doing " + expensiveDebugThing(thingBeingOperatedOn))

You just complicated everything to get the same class of error.

Heck even the existing good way of doing it, which is less complicated than your way, still isn't safe from it.

    logger("doing {}", expensiveDebugThing(thingBeingOperatedOn))

All your examples have the same issue, both with just string concatenation and more expensive calls. You can only get around an unknowing or lazy programmer if the compiler can be smart enough to entirely skip these (JIT or not - a JIT would need to see that these calls never amount to anything and decide to skip them after a while. Not deterministically useful of course).

Which is "fine" so to speak. We do this with using AIs for coding all the time, don't we? As in, we ask it to do things or tell us things about our code base (which we might be new to as well) but essentially use it as a "search engine+" so to speak. Hopefully it's faster and can provide some sort of understanding faster than we could with searching ourselves and building a mental model while doing it.

But we still need to ask it for and then follow file and line number references (aka "links") and verify it's true and it got the references right and build enough of a mental model ourselves. With code (at least for our code base) it usually does get that right (the references) and I can verify. I might be biased because I both know our code base very well already (but not everything in detail) and I'm a very suspicious person, questioning everything. With humans it sometimes "drives them crazy" but the LLM doesn't mind when I call its BS over and over. I'm always "right" :P

The problem is when you just trust anything it says. I think we need to treat it like a super junior that's trained to very convincingly BS you if it's out of its depth. But it's still great to have said junior do your bidding while you do other things and faster than an actual junior and this junior is available 24/7 (barring any outages ;)).

    My experience as a team lead working with a lot of juniors is that they are terrified of losing face

So much this! Both from my experience as Junior very many years ago and also with Juniors (and not so Juniors) today.

    tend to talk a big game

Very big game. Claude does too. The kind of BS it spews in very confident language is amazing.

    As a team lead, I try to use language which expresses any doubts or knowledge gaps I have so that others in my team feel comfortable doing it as well

Agree. I also often literally say "Dumb idea: X" to try and suss out areas that may have been left by the wayside and under-explored or where assumptions have been made without verifying them. It's amazing how often even "Seniors"+ will spew assumptions as fact without verification. It's very annoying actually.

    superpower

How do you actually do this tho? I would love to do this but it seems hard to find an actual "superpower". Like where does "super" power start vs. "yeah they're better at this than others but definitely not as good as me or "person X that definitely does have that superpower". Like when can you start encouraging so to speak,

Hehe fair enough in that case. Tho nothing said it had to work on a tar from like 1979 ;)

To me at least POSIX is dead. It's what Windows (before WSL) supported with its POSIX subsystem so it could say it was compatible but of course it was entirely unusable.

    Initial release July 27, 1993; 32 years ago

Like, POSIX: Take the cross section of all the most obscure UNICES out there and declare that you're a UNIX as long as you support that ;)

And yeah I use a Mac at work so a bunch of things I was used to "all my life" so to speak don't work. And they didn't work on AIX either. But that's why you install a sane toolchain (GNU ;) ).

Like sure I was actually building a memory compactification algorithm for MINIX with the vi that comes with MINIX. Which is like some super old version of it that can't do like anything you'd be used to from a VIM. It works. But it's not nice. That's like literally the one time I was using hjkl instead of arrow keys.

Which one?

Like, I see the comment about the Keychain integration and all that. But in the end I fail to see (without further explanation but I'm eager to learn if there's something I am unaware of) where this isn't different from what I am saying.

Like yes, my ssh key has a passphrase of course. Which is different from my system one actually. As soon as I log into the system I add the key, which means entering the passphrase once, so I don't have to enter it all the time. That would get old real fast. But now ssh can just use my key to do stuff and the agent doesn't know if it's me or I got compromised by npm installing something. And if you add a hardware token you "just have to tap" each time that's a step back into more security but does add tedium. Depending on how often my workflow uses ssh (or something that uses the key) in the background this will become something most people just blindly "tap" on. And then we are back towards less security but with more setup steps, complications and tedium.

I saw the "or allow for a session", which is a step towards security again, because I may be able to allow a script that does several things with ssh with a single tap, which is great of course. Hopefully that cuts the taps down so much that I don't just blindly tap on every request for it. Like the 1password thing you mentioned. If I do lots of things that make it "ask again" often enough I get pushed into "yeah yeah, I know the drill, just tap" security hole.

Personally it's the history for me. MySQL started with MyISAM, not innodb.

So if you wanted an actual transactional database back in the day, MySQL was definitely not it. You needed Postgres.

InnoDB was not MySQL. It was an add on. So if I had to use MySQL it was with innodb of course but why not just use Postgres. And after the Oracle acquisition... Yes I know MariaDB. But I'm already on Postgres so...

This seems to be the standard thing people miss. All the things that make security more convenient also make it weaker. They boast about how "doing thing X" makes them super secure, pat on the back and done. Completely ignoring other avenues they left open.

A case like this brings this out a lot. Compromised dev machine means that anything that doesn't require a separate piece of hardware that asks for your interaction is not going to help. And the more interactions you require for tightening security again the more tedious it becomes and you're likely going to just instinctively press the fob whenever it asks.

Sure, it raises the bar a bit because malware has to take it into account and if there are enough softer targets they may not have bothered. This time.

Classic: you only have to outrun the other guy. Not the lion.

Like I said, I was operating on a lot of zipped tars. Not sure what you are replying about.

The other commenter already mentioned that the xkcd just said "valid", not return 0 (which to be fair is what the original non xkcd required so I guess fair on the mixup)

    tar zxvf

Is burnt into my brain. One of my earliest Linux command line experience required untaring zipped tars.

So yeah that xkcd is "not funny" to me in that sense. Of course I couldn't tell you pretty much any other use without a man page.

Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho.

Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.

You're saying the people that work in ads are doing shoddy work because your ad blocker is able to easily block them, correct?

If they did quality work then your blocker wouldn't stand a chance and we'd all be flooded with BS ads all the time and barely able to read/view the actual site?

That is definitely true and why I compared idle watts. That Athlon uses the same idle watts as modern mobile CPUs. So no reason to replace during the mostly idle times. Spot on. I can't have this system off during idle time as it wouldn't come up to fulfill its purpose fast enough when needed and it would be a pain to trigger that anyway (I mean, really, port knocking to start up that system type thing). Else I would. That I do do with the HTPC which has a more modern Intel core i3.

The "nothing" here was exactly meant more for the times when it does have to do something. But even then at 45W TDP, as long as it's able to do what it needs to, then the newer CPUs have no real edge. What they gain in performance due to multi core they loose in being essentially equivalent single core performance for what that machine does: HTPC file serving, email server etc.

Where in Europe?

Asking coz I just did a quick comparison and it seems to depend but for comparison I have a really old AMD Athlon "e" processor (like literally September 2009 is when it came out according to some quick Google search, tho I probably bought it a few months later than that but still ...) that runs at ~45W TDP. In idle conditions, it typically consumes around 10 to 15 watts (internet wisdom, not kill-a-watt-wisdom).

Some napkin math says it would cost me about 40 years worth of amortization to replace this at my current power rates for this system. So why would I replace it? And even with some EU countries' power rates we seem to be at 5-10 years amortization upon replacement. I've been running this motherboard, CPU + RAM combo for ~15 years now it seems, replacing only the hard drives every ~3 years. And the tower it's in is about 25 years old.

Oh I forgot, I think I had to buy two new CR2032 batteries during those years (CMOS battery).

Now granted, this processor can basically do "nothing" in comparison to a current system I might buy. But I also don't need more for what it does.

Does that matter as long as you've made a few millions and just move on to do other fun stuff?

That is basically what I was saying. The "air quotes" were meant to actually be read.

What unites them is the German language when there is an outside "threat": English.

Otherwise there's squabble and language is part of it.

    The fact that a giant celestial body blocking out the source of the energy that powers all life on this planet inspired no awe in you

No. Why? We live on a larger giant celestial body than that ourselves and there are many others out there that are even larger. And there's giant tiny space rocks flying around and one could randomly come "out of nowhere" and end all life as we know it on the planet and no Bruce Willis would be able to save us.

    with no ability for us to do anything at all to influence affairs whatsoever [...] that inspired no awe

That's exactly it. We can't do anything about that in any way. We also know it's gonna be over soon. No need to start praying or sacrificing animals or something.

    reflection in you about our place in the universe

Why do I need a solar eclipse if I want to think about what we (think we) know about the universe and where we stand? I can still appreciate the eclipse, the fact that there's that giant celestial body you were talking about doing that.

    our limitations as people

Again, why do I need an eclipse for that? Why does it automatically mean I need to think about my limitations?

    I don't really think that's a testament to your superior apprehension of what you were looking at compared to the people who treated it as something worthy of reflection and introspection.

I never claimed any "superior apprehension" like that. Your opinion is your opinion and you're free to have it as well as share it and who would I be to tell you that you can't have it. But don't claim it's universally a "hauntingly humbling experience". You can have this event make you reflect and introspect but you have no right to claim that everyone has to and otherwise they're somehow inferior.

While I can understand how the GP's interpretation/wording isn't helpful at all and I understand it being down voted, there still is a kernel of truth in there.

I think their comment is coming from a place of having a very very HN typical but maybe taken to an extreme rational and fact driven "belief" system.

For example, you say that a solar eclipse is a "hauntingly humbling experience even to the modern viewer". Personally, I can understand that rationally. I can understand that many if not most people can or will feel like that.

But I've witnessed multiple solar eclipses in my lifetime and while they were "cool", I had no "hauntingly humbling experience" whatsoever. It's something that happens and that we have a good scientific understanding of as to why and how it happens. End of story.

I can absolutely appreciate how (think final moments of "Pillars of the Earth") great it must have been to know these things, calculate them or at least understand what's happening when it's happening and use them for "population control". Does it benefit societies? Yes, probably on a general/global level. Like how are you gonna rationally explain and get a large populace to deal with end of winter / start of growing season food scarceness? The best and easiest way is to have them believe in your religion and that fasting is something your god requires/encourages. I firmly believe that that's why many major religions include this.

But as "me" in the modern world, it appalls me that someone thinks they can just tell whatever the eff they want and I'm supposed to do it coz "they speak for <$DEITY>".

That sounds like a very German approach to the whole thing.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... and look at the total speakers vs. native speakers.

Now it should be clear why one is better than the other. The shared language of most is English, so you have the least amount of "extra learning" required.

Also, the number for German is generous in that it includes people that speak wildly "incompatible" dialects and accents. While people in Bavaria technically speak "German" and having them talk to other people that speak "German" (with various dialects) is easier than asking either to speak English as their primary language, that doesn't really solve the problem of even intra-German language rivalry.

Of course one thing will unite Bavarian and Saxon and Swiss and Austrian German and other highly accented/dialectic German speakers: They'd rather speak "German" (and deal with weird pronunciation/words) than English as an official language ;)

What about helicopters? Does Melbourne not have/use theirs in those cases or is the system just overwhelmed?

Asking because (different country) when we had a person present with stroke symptoms and called 911, they sent both an ambulance and the helicopter. The heli came first but it had to land a ways off on a field and they had to walk over and basically arrived around the same time as the ambulance. A couple minutes earlier basically. No fire engine dispatched but that made sense too as it's volunteer based and while they would've been much closer, getting them to the station would've taken longer than the helicopter.

Driving time for the ambulance if it came from the same place as the helipad would've been about 15 min for the ambulance. Fire engine driving time from volunteer department: 2 min but no dedicated paramedic services, just volunteer firefighters. Heli time in air probably about 2 minutes given the "as the crow flies" distance I just checked, add whatever time is needed to get them in the air and such.

Now I can't really trust these numbers fully of course but according to "a quick AI analysis" :P Melbourne with millions of population has 0.08 helicopters and 8-10 ambulances per 100k population while the aforementioned location is at about 0.3 helicopters per 100k and 6-12 ambulances. Can it be true? It also says New York City has no emergency helicopters at all? Los Angeles has 0.18 per 100k? I know my current location definitely also has none at all. For millions of people.

Just start drinking excessively!

This. Previous cow-orker of mine that was doing remote-only like 10+ years ago at some other company got an actual yellow rubber duck sent to him together with his company laptop when he joined.

I also like to do this when debugging. I'll just write out whatever my current hypotheses are about what the bug is and I adjust as I go, as I disprove or make them more precise. I would usually just do it right on the ticket. It both helps because it provides the "rubber duck" and in the end I just submit the comment and I have a root cause analysis right there.

Unfortunately it's quite rare to see this from anyone and asking them to provide a root cause analysis is usually fraught with peril. I don't quite get why. It's been working awesomely.

And like OP says, AI hasn't made it better in the sense that not everyone can use AI (or cow-orkers) in that way. They just believe what the AI tells them and they literally won't reverse engineer that protocol in 24h ;)

In similar "news" Re: tangents, I've noticed Claude now suddenly starting to give up on problem analyses. After like three rounds of it trying to figure something out that I told it is a requirement, it suggests that we don't need to do that as it's a nice-to-have only anyway. If in auto-accept mode it'll start doing the other thing even. I have to catch it and tell it to not effing give up so easily and to stop giving me BS excuses turning hard requirements (literally the reason we're doing what we're doing) into a nice-to-have it can skip.

I guess they recently re-trained on too many "perpetual junior senior dev" stuff.

So then "Montreal and some other locations" probably had the best views of any densely populated areas to watch the Aurora: When power is out, light pollution is no longer a problem!

No. And yes.

Yes it's meant sarcastically. Personally I agree with you that you want to look at pros and cons, both sides.

But there are many, oh very very many people out there who would literally do exactly what I wrote. They do it all the time. That's why we have these echo chambers everywhere. And AI as we can see here is not making it better.

And it's not just the "general population". I see it on a technical level too at work. Developers just trusting the AI output. It sounded confident when it said it found the root cause, fixed the bug and added tests. So it's good to commit, right?

When I search

    switching to LLM based search products in droves.

it says

    The shift towards LLM-based search products is significant as they offer more conversational and personalized responses compared to traditional search engines. This change is driven by users seeking quicker, more relevant answers and a better overall experience

So it must be true, right? Coz that's the only thing I searched for. I got my answer. Why would I search for the opposite? My bias was confirmed. I'm happy and will repeat the results to all my friends, who will search for the same thing to confirm and get confirmation!

When we loose power here internet usually works just fine. All you need is a generator and you're back up and running. Usually the POP still has power so this works for a long time. Sometimes they are or run out of (backup) power too if its widespread and prolonged. Cell service including LTE is usually still up / up for longer, so again as long as you have a generator, you're good.

Dunno what you have available, but since watching his video on powders I've always just broken off part of the powder pods we use.

We have the Finish tabs with the red ball in the middle (that's what our Costco carries, so that's what we use). I just break off on one side of the red ball and then crumble that up for the pre-wash. It usually breaks off super easily into three parts: The remaining tab with the red ball attached and two smaller pieces. If you rub the smaller pieces against each other, they break up super easily into powdered form. No cutting required.

Now think about this from a user's perspective:

We asked for Claude coz we really wanted it (as devs). Our security and legal guys evaluated it and the data usage agreements and such, which took ages and they stated that we can use it as long as we never never ever give any kind of bug report or feedback because that might retain data. This was all prior to this new feedback prompt being added to Claude Code.

We were happy. We could use Claude Code, finally!

Then suddenly, about once per day we are getting these prompts and there is NO option to disable them. The prompt just randomly appears. I might be typing part of my next prompt, which can very definitely include numbers from 1 upwards, e.g. because I'm making a todo list and boom I've given feedback. I've inadvertently done the thing we were never never ever supposed to do.

Do you really think our first thought is to double check if maybe the data usage agreement has been changed / hopefully says that this particular random new survey thing is somehow not included in "feedback"?

No, we panic and are mad at Claude Code/Anthropic. Heck if you noticed that you inadvertently gave feedback you might make a disclosure to the security team that will now go and evaluate how bad this was. Hopefully they'd then find your updated data usage agreement.

It would have been so easy to just include an option to opt out, which just set the equivalent of the env var you now provide into the settings itself. In fact, I see the first comment a few days after the bug was filed already asked for that and was thumbs'd up by many people. And you ignored it and all we got was a manual env var or settings entry that we also need to first find out even exists.

Not at MDW but there are plenty such places and yes, some people do "get used to it". But there are studies that show that you increase health risks from such levels of noise even if you get used enough to it so that you can sleep through them. Search for increases in problems of cardiovascular health from car and plane noise.

And some people just won't really get used to it. I've lived near airplane noise and I never got used to it. I also don't sleep better with white noise. I sleep worse.

I just looked that up (Atlanta) on https://noise-map.com/ and man, that's way not enough zoning tricking in my book. Not that it's much different in other cities (or countries).