wulfstan

I’ve just started a new job and my first month has been coming to terms with a vibe coded codebase. Nobody really understands it. I think that people who have the skills to really know what is there and how it all fits together will be the most valuable workers in future.

My ex business partner said “AI won’t take your job, but the person who uses it will”. I don’t agree. The person who isn’t reliant on AI is the one you should really be afraid of.

I am currently wrestling a vibe-coded codebase into a shippable state and we should call these tools out for what they actually are - technical debt generators.

100% with you. I start a new job on Monday and I intend to keep building great young engineers who love their craft and their community. Enough of this vampiric unethical horse manure.

Extremely useful information - unfortunately I just assumed this didn't apply to me because I am in the UK and not the EU. Another mistake, though given it's not huge amounts of money I will chalk it up to experience.

Hopefully someone else will benefit from this helpful advice.

I've just shifted my SWE infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner (literally in the last month). My current analysis looks like it will be about 15-20% of the cost - £240 vs 40-50 euros.

Expect a significant exit expense, though, especially if you are shifting large volumes of S3 data. That's been our biggest expense. I've moved this to Wasabi at about 8 euros a month (vs about $70-80 a month on S3), but I've paid transit fees of about $180 - and it was more expensive because I used DataSync.

Retrospectively, I should have just DIYed the transfer, but maybe others can benefit from my error...

That is false. Burglary is a crime in the UK.

See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/9 and https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/theft-act-offenc...

I think this is partly true. Raising the necessary funds, hiring enough of the right people and become sufficiently visible to get "mindshare" are all important factors in building a successful business. It is a lot harder to do these things if your ideology is out of step with what is considered mainstream.

It's not uncommon. My cousin sent out a Christmas card announcing her divorce - I think it stops a lot of 1-1 conversations with people which can be quite draining when you're already pretty raw.

These are all good arguments. Then do the opposite and block S3 access from VPCs by default. That would violate none of those.

“We have no idea what your intent is, so we’ll default to routing AWS-AWS traffic expensively” is way, way worse than forcing users to be explicit about their intent.

Minimal is a laudable goal - but if a footgun is the result then you violate the principle of least surprise.

I rather suspect the problem with issues like this is that they mainly catch the less experienced, who aren’t an AWS priority because they aren’t where the Big Money is.

Yes, this. You lock it into Terraform or some equivalent.

And ok, this is a mistake you will probably only make once - I know, because I too have made it on a much smaller scale, and thankfully in a cost-insensitive customer's account - but surely if you're an infrastructure provider you want to try to ensure that you are vigilantly removing footguns.

Right, I can appreciate that argument - but then the right thing to do is to block S3 access from AWS VPCs until you have explicitly confirmed that you want to pay the big $$$$ to do so, or turn on the VPC endpoint.

A parallel to this is how SES handles permission to send emails. There are checks and hoops to jump through to ensure you can't send out spam. But somehow, letting DevOps folk shoot themselves in the foot (credit card) is ok.

What has been done is the monetary equivalent of "fail unsafe" => "succeed expensively"

This happens so often that the S3 VPC endpoint should be setup by default when your VPC is created. AWS engineers on here - make this happen.

Also, consider using fck-nat (https://fck-nat.dev/v1.3.0/) instead of NAT gateways unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, because you will save on per-Gb traffic charges.

(Or, just run your own Debian nano instance that does the masquerading for you, which every old-school Linuxer should be able to do in their sleep.)

OPs experience working their way up the keyboard stack is very similar to my own. I settled on the Dygma Raise. I now own one of the Raise and Raise 2.

Yes, they are a lot of money. I don’t have time to game any more, and they clearly focus mainly on gamers. But if you’re a software / IT person your wrists are your livelihood, so for goodness sakes invest in them. There is no silver bullet and you will probably have to try a number of possible solutions if you suffer from wrist and forearm pain when working, but do not ignore it and take your workplace ergonomics seriously.

For younger engineers, learn to minimise your “travel” and learning editor shortcuts, terminal shortcuts and similar so that you can be smoothly productive with constantly shifting from mouse to keyboard and back again. And take regular breaks! Get up and walk around. If you are WFH get out for walk at lunch.

In general, care for your body so that you may write code into your 80s.

Such a relief! But it drives my wife completely crazy.

By narrow program of study I don’t mean “breadth within the discipline” I mean “credit for work outside the discipline”. My son is studying maths but has taken two semesters of biblical Greek, previously did a music subject and this term is doing Hebrew. Can’t do that at Oxbridge.

The truth is that if you have an intelligent child, independent school is a complete waste of money. In the UK you will be spending in the vicinity of £200k over a child’s education to finish a levels, and although they will get better a levels on average, their results at university do not reflect their a level achievements. This is why independent schools find themselves downgraded in university offers.

This isn’t a surprise, because independent schools hothouse children to ensure they peak at a levels, whereas what universities want is students who will continue to improve at university.

I have two children (3xA*, 1A for one and 3As for the other) who were not interested in Oxford or Cambridge. My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out. You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early. It’s also a 3 year undergrad program with 24 contact weeks a year, which is insanely short.

My children have gone to Scotland (Edinburgh and St Andrews) which allows significantly more flexibility than English universities offer in choosing subjects outside your chosen degree pattern. St Andrews even lets you change degree completely if you find something else you like.

If you really really want to be a mathematician at 18 then I can see why Cambridge or Oxford might appeal; for kids with more breadth, I think it’s a poor choice.

Yes I'm really not sure obsessive patterns of behaviour will be helped by an unqualified stochastic parrot giving you advice. Unfortunately, when treatment for conditions in some countries costs you an arm and a leg people will resort to quackery. But even in countries where it doesn't, the waiting list for therapy can be so long that you could be waiting years if your case isn't somehow life threatening or profoundly limiting you won't be a high priority.

Nope, don’t think it’s the demographics, unless by demographics you mean “easy to buy a gun”.

That isn’t the only reason why there are large numbers of gun deaths in the US.

I really don’t understand why people are downvoting these remarks. We can feel desperately sad and sorry for his wife and child and family while also recognising that he has literally espoused wide availability of guns AND the inevitability of gun deaths as a result.

He talked the talk, and now he has walked the walk.

In Australia this would be considered normal office conversation.

Good, it's not just me.

I guess it's not a massive surprise given it's an HN forum and a reasonable percentage of HN candidates are doing LLM/AI stuff in recent cohorts, but it still means I have to apply a very big filter every time I open an article and people wax lyrical about how amazing Claude-GPT-super-codez is and how it has made them twice the engineer they were yesterday at the bargain price of $200 a month...

May it all die in a fire very soon. Butlerian jihad now.

Answering my own question:

If you've got a QNAP, you can install Debian 10 on some of them <https://www.cyrius.com/debian/>

If you've got a Synology, it has been done on some older devices as well <https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology>

So all is not necessarily lost, and I have one of each so will need to do some experiments!

Stupid question, but has anyone hacked/replaced the vanilla firmware on Synology boxes and got it running something more flexible? This is kind of a lazyweb request, but I have an old Synology box that I wouldn't mind resurrecting.

That is impressive. Beyond bonkers, but impressive.

When I worked in China (not for long periods but frequently enough that the Great Firewall became an irritant) I hosted an OpenVPN server on port 443 and/or port 22 of a server I owned. That worked sufficiently well most of the time.

I bought your app in 2010 and use it regularly. Thanks for making it!

I would like to say an enormous thank you to Dave, who after a huge amount of pestering (and probably to try to save himself from further pestering) shared his .emacs filetree with me and told me to learn Lisp.

Be generous with your dotfiles, and especially with the young and curious engineers who ask lots of questions about your setup. Pay it forward.

The reason it works for music is because the people behind the databases have a team of lawyers that will come after you for violating copyright/performance legislation if you don’t pay your dues.

The argument that LLM outfits are using is that they are just exercising “fair use” / education rights to do an end run around copyright law. Without strengthening the rules on that I’m not sure I see how the database + team of lawyers approach would work.

But with that, sure, that’s an approach that seems to have legs in other contexts.

Yes, this is the crux of the matter.

The "social contract" that has been established over the last 25+ years is that site owners don't mind their site being crawled reasonably provided that the indexing that results from it links back to their content. So when AltaVista/Yahoo/Google do it and then score and list your website, interspersing that with a few ads, then it's a sensible quid pro quo for everyone.

LLM AI outfits are abusing this social contract by stuffing the crawled data into their models, summarising/remixing/learning from this content, claiming "fair use" and then not providing the quid pro quo back to the originating data. This is quite likely terminal for many content-oriented businesses, which ironically means it will also be terminal for those who will ultimately depend on additions, changes and corrections to that content - LLM AI outfits.

IMO: copyright law needs an update to mandate no training on content without explicit permission from the holder of the copyright of that content. And perhaps, as others have pointed out, an llms.txt to augment robots.txt that covers this for llm digestion purposes.

EDIT: Apparently llms.txt has been suggested, but from what I can tell this isn't about restricting access: https://llmstxt.org/