Are you sure is not just your bubble ? That's not all the impression that I get

It's what keeps me away from the fediverse... Outside it's a bit better so I lean bubble. But the training material that shapes the part of the network that activates when claude works on something technical might have negativity over-represented.

Why is your identity tied to writing code ? That reads a bit weird to me at least.

You're being paid to solve business problems, not to write code. Now you can do it without writing code.

Maybe try to form a different identity ? I wouldn't ever define my identity (not before AI) as someone who writes code.

> Now you can do it without writing code.

That’s just a gigantic bs you wouldn’t be able to stir an ai without code writing knowledge this approach in the long term we will make all of you shilling people go back to hand code crucial parts of the business logic

Sure ! I have been doing this for 2 decades now and started my career in VHDL / Hardware before going to embedded systems and then cloud. I am pretty sure I can understand hand code pretty well. I just don't need to write it. Why would it.

Configuring postgres to automatically failover instead of doing it manually. The automated system caused more downtime in a few months than manually doing it did for years before. All in the name of more automations and less downtime

For resolution of a problem you can’t prevent categorically, you have to spend a good bit of time pretending to be the computer before you can trust the computer to do it. A run book is a draft of a requirements doc for a program to do the same thing. And you can’t afford to test that program in production without loads of simulations first. And that’s running the process manually and checking aggressively for any signs of problems.

Some coworkers snaked the autoscaling work out from under me, and then ignored the advice I offered on low water marks and weeks of testing and rehearsals. All I can figure about their irrational exhuberence is something to do with claiming something for annual reviews? All I do know is we didn’t make it 40 hours from when they flipped it on until we had our worst outage in two years. Classic FAFO.

They were hoping to eventually get to a low water mark of just over 30% of our static cluster size, and they decided to use that for their initial go instead of my estimate of 40% being the low, and a recommendation that they start with 50-60% for the initial weeks and then ramp it down. When I refused to let it go in the status meeting, the team decided we should vote on it. Two guesses how that went.

A bug in the deployment logic the Ops team had for doing things like upgrading VMs caused the next update during daylight hours to spin up the new instances at the minimum cluster size, instead of the current cluster size. It was done outside peek hours but that still had us cut over with just under half of the hardware we needed at that moment. Because we were in such a fucking hurry to be something like third in line to use the new autoscaling support, nobody else had run into this problem yet (or system did a pretty good job of buffering everyone else).

A couple weeks later they’d looked at the stats and decided that we were spending less than a half hour a day running at the low water mark, and the additional shutdowns were causing churn that made it harder for us to detect problems like memory leaks. Surprise, surprise, they increased the min cluster size to exactly what I’d told them two weeks before.

Since “listen to me” isn’t a lesson that transfers to other teams, I will instead say, don’t transfer initiatives to a new team when there is less than 10% of the project left. The lack of friction you encounter may result in a lack of respect for the danger, and attention to potential problems. And if you must transfer, if your ideas about rollout timeline end up being less conservative than theirs, be patient and do it the slow way. They probably have encountered problems you haven’t seen yet.

Could you elaborate on why that would cause more downtime?

Why do you feel that ?

Because AI cannot be trusted as a reliable source of information. Information is more trustworthy when it comes from from primary sources on the open web.

Well then ask the LLM to go find and pull its information from primary sources. Don’t ever rely on its own training data.

Google (as it originally) existed wasn't a source of information, it was an *index* of it. You were trusting google as a source for {search_query}, you were trusting the links it gave as a source (based on your own evaluation). LLMs are fundamentally different, because you are trusting the software to actually generate the information in a truthful way.

If you use google (sans AI), you're putting some trust in their page ranking algorithm. If you use it with AI, you're trusting the same algorithm (since that's how the model gets it's sources), but then you're trusting the model to evaluate the sources for credibility and extract the information you actually want.

Pagerank is just a popularity contest, doesn't say anything about trust. AI probably does a better job determining trustworthyness than pagerank.

Do you think the LLM reads every page on the internet before generating your answer? Of course not. What happens is that it use some sort of ranking algorithm to pick the pages that are most likely to answer your query and reads *them* (at best. At worst it just makes something up). You aren't avoiding the problems with ranking algorithms by asking an LLM, you're taking all of those problems, adding more problems on top, and pretending that this is somehow better.

> Do you think the LLM reads every page on the internet before generating your answer? Of course not.

The way LLMs are trained the answer is of course yes, but they don't remember them all exactly, of course.

> Can google be trusted ? Or facebook ?

No. Neither can be trusted as far as you can throw them. They're both incredibly invasive data brokers. Their customer facing products are just vehicles to show ads and Hoover up more PII and behavioral data on everyone.

I routinely run into Claude Opus and Fable making basic mistakes like misunderstanding a simple negation, which would be on top of whatever reliability issues there are with a source. I think that means it is functionally very different.

How would you count them or even know if they were made with AI or not ? Such nonsense

Of course yes, and it's even easier in some cases. Since there's a language that defines the functionality (e.g: formal methods) that the agent can use/veriy against

You can have another agent write the tests and verify the former agent ? This is pretty basic stuff. Makes me question if people are actually trying to use AI

Now you have two problems lol, in that you don't know if the tests are any good or actually test the thing in question.

Sooner or later you run out of turtles to put on the stack.

That’s a solved problem, you just add another agent to check if the tests are any good, and one more to oversee the test-checker, and one more…

Lol. That's not true at all. And not how projects are done on startups or big companies.

Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.

Nah. You can succeed in every single individual thing but fail at the overall project because the parts don't align into anything that makes sense.

If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.

Videogames are a weird comparison because they are basically the ultimate culmination of the combination of both engineering and art. The two can crossover in weird ways but still have distinct aspects that do not really compromise the other.

Just because a videogame isn’t fun doesn’t mean there wasnt a cohesive engineering vision. God of War: Ragnarok is a good example of this. Excellent technical execution and (arguably) great direction but a terribly boring game.

And many games that are terribly engineered are also incredibly fun. Dark Souls is a good example - runs like ass, looks very rough even by the standards of the time when the game released, with terrible enemy AI in a combat focused game - one might even call it a confusing mess (and I laugh at the notion that it doesn’t have good direction)… despite all this it’s a classic and arguably the most influential game since its release.

Elden Ring carries a lot of legacy baggage from years of iteration on the same engine as ~~Dark~~ Demons Souls - and it’s widely considered From Software’s magnum opus and a masterpiece. Yet considering the scope of the game it is a great example of how small wins added up can solve large problems when executed with the skill and judgment gained from experience. So one might still consider it a success in terms of “engineering”.

Would From Software have been able to make the same game using Unreal Engine 5 built from scratch with dime a dozen “Unreal experts” brought in off the street? Not a chance. Want to know why western game development studios are suffering right now? Compare American layoff culture and race to the bottom economics to the retention rates of Japanese game studios like Capcom, Nintendo and other heavy hitters.

For many of the most marvellous things humans have ever built, if you take a peak behind the curtain you’ll still probably find some amount of duct tape and popsicles sticks somewhere keeping it all together.

Fun, however, is a matter of taste and you can’t engineer that.

Long term projects that survived on short term wins are still around. But you're going to want to check how big the graveyard is of "project collapsed under tech debt from short term decisions" to see whether it's a good strategy.

If you're using Windows you're likely not the audience. Which is fine.

Not really; not without understanding what am I missing. Why does Linux need a "multiplexer for all work," while Windows either already has one, doesn't need one, or couldn't use one?

A Multiplexer let's you run multiple terminals in one window, this is a new one. WindowsOS does not get as nice of tools as Linux generally.

After using a tiling WM, it feels like this is a window manager job. It even works for non-terminal applications.

Multiplexer works without any WM installed, which is nice.

Except you don't need a multiplexer for that. Essentially all modern terminals have tabs. Many have split-screen. Even windows ships with a half-decent terminal with tabs and multiple panes by default now!

A multiplexer's job is to do the whole multiple tabs/panes/windows thing independently of the terminal itself, but (a) the UX for eg. tmux is so much worse than that of a good terminal UI, and (b) you only need that if you plan on connecting remotely (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108483).

Staples. I have a broken Canon now and before had a broken HP. Both were dirty cheap. I imagine how much the environment suffers from broken printers alone.

I am not buying a new one. Only going to stores to print.