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Working on Nodewood (https://nodewood.com/) - a SaaS starter kit designed to save weeks or months of development time. Skip out on the boring user and subscription boilerplate, and start writing business logic out of the box!
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Senior Software Engineer at https://www.evisort.com/
- If you're logging and reporting on ERRORs for 400s, then your error triage log is going to be full of things like a user entering a password with insufficient complexity or trying to sign up with an email address that already exists in your system.
Some of these things can be ameliorated with well-behaved UI code, but a lot cannot, and if your primary product is the API, then you're just going to have scads of ERRORs to triage where there's literally nothing you can do.
I'd argue that anything that starts with a 4 is an INFO, and if you really wanted to be through, you could set up an alert on the frequency of these errors to help you identify if there's a broad problem.
- From both the developer and manager side of things, I've found that the most important attribute of estimates is frequently the least paid attention to: that they be kept up to date.
When you discover more work hidden under that "simple" pile of code, you absolutely HAVE to update your estimate. Add more points, add more tickets, whatever. But then your various managers have the ammunition to decide what to do next - allocate more resources to the project, descope the project, push back the release date, etc.
Far too frequently, the estimate is set in stone at the start of the project and used as a deadline that is blown past, with everyone going into crisis mode at that point. The earlier the estimate is updated, the calmer and more comprehensive action everyone responsible can take.
- Multiblocks power fail and void, but then your machine shuts down until you restart it. This is much better than suggested above, where you'd void over and over, but it can still utterly mess up a large craft being orchestrated thru AE2, which is still waiting forever for he failed craft to submit a part back into the system.
- You should look into MineColonies, if you haven't yet!
- There are more situations than just "a 55mph head-on crash" that need to be considered. What about getting clipped at 5mph when the driver is turning, and on a Cybertruck you've now got a brutal gash dug into you. And a camera that covers a full 360 isn't really all that useful when you're making a normal turn and not looking at the camera, but have your normal vision heavily obscured by the massive frame.
It's not perfectly safe. If it were, it would be legal everywhere and it's not.
- Again, you're going wildly off the rails in your logic. Sure, "executable by a human" is part of the definition for Turing machines, but that's only talking about Turing-specific capabilities. If you want to argue that a Turing machine can emulate the specific definition of Turing machine capabilities that humans can perform, that's fine. But you're saying that because humans can ACT LIKE Turing machines, they must BE Turing machines, and are therefore emulatable.
This is the equivalent of saying "I have set up a complex mechanical computer powered by water that is Turing complete. Since any Turing complete system can emulate another one, it means that any other Turing complete system can also make things wet and irrigate farms.
Human intelligence is not understood. It can be made to do Turing complete things, but you can't invert that and say that because you've read the paper on Turing completeness, you now understand human intelligence.
- > we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it
You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic.
Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test".
It's like mixing up the terms "Strawberry jam" and "traffic jam" and then going on to talk about how cars taste on toast. It's nonsensical.
- You can build this today exactly as efficiently as you can when inference is 1000x faster, because the only things you can build with this is things that absolutely don't matter. The first bored high schooler who realizes that there's an LLM between them and the database is going to WRECK you.
- That sucks if that's your experience, but it's not the universal, or even the common, experience.
For reference, I get a sore-ish shoulder the next day, and that's it. Also for reference, when I got Actual Covid, I was knocked on my ass for almost two weeks. So for me, at least, the choice is easy.
- This is incorrect for a lot of reasons, many of which have already been explored, but also:
> with every new iteration of the AI, the internal code will get better
This is a claim that requires proof; it cannot just be asserted as fact. Especially because there's a silent "appreciably" hidden in there between "get" and "better" which has been less and less apparent with each new model. In fact, it more and more looks like "Moore's law for AI" is dead or dying, and we're approaching an upper limit where we'll need to find ways to be properly productive with models only effectively as good as what we already have!
Additionally, there's a relevant adage in computer science: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." If the code being written is already at the frontier capabilities of these models, how the hell are they supposed to fix the bugs that crop up, especially if we can't rely on them getting twice as smart? ("They won't write the bugs in the first place" is not a realistic answer, btw.)
- I forget where I read it originally, but I strongly feel that AWS should offer a `us-chaos-1` region, where every 3-4 days, one or two services blow up. Host your staging stack there and you build real resiliency over time.
(The counter joke is, of course, "but that's `us-east-1` already! But I mean deliberately and frequently.)
- The thing about this, though - cars have been built before. We understand what's necessary to get those 9s. I'm sure there were some new problems that had to be solved along the way, but fundamentally, "build good car" is known to be achievable, so the process of "adding 9s" there makes sense.
But this method of AI is still pretty new, and we don't know it's upper limits. It may be that there are no more 9s to add, or that any more 9s cost prohibitively more. We might be effectively stuck at 91.25626726...% forever.
Not to be a doomer, but I DO think that anyone who is significantly invested in AI really has to have a plan in case that ends up being true. We can't just keep on saying "they'll get there some day" and acting as if it's true. (I mean you can, just not without consequences.)
- You're still thinking too small. Think back to the heady days of intense Java popularity and strain your brain to remember your Gang Of Four...
What's better than a Factory?
A FactoryFactory!
Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?
- This is a well-written report, but... Does anyone NOT know this? I've deleted all my social media and actively try to limit my news ingestion and none of this, not the facts nor the conclusions, was novel to me.
I honestly don't think the problem is that people don't know, it's that a) nobody's doing anything to stop it (at least not very effectively) and b) a whole lot of people are doing their utmost to support it.
- As an FYI, I had a similar issue and tried a whole lot of things, including different mechanical keyboards, with which I had a variety of successes and failures.
But ultimately what REALLY helped was going to physiotherapy and identifying muscle groups in my back that were weak, causing me to sit weird and support my arms with muscles in my shoulders that weren't designed for that. And because all of this is connected in weird ways, the pain I was feeling in my wrists originated way back in over-stressing those shoulder muscles.
After a few weeks of an exercise program designed to target those muscles, all my RSI pains aren't just reduced, which was the sum total of the results I got from different mechanical keyboards, they were GONE. Plus, I had the added benefit of naturally sitting and walking "better" and feeling better about it.
So if you've tried different mechanical keyboards with only limited degrees of success (or have a fave keyboard you don't want to have to switch from), consider an exercise program designed to improve your posture! It is literally the single biggest thing I've done in the past year to make me feel significantly better, and not just in the case of the RSI!
- And if you want to get the same "we serve the code directly" benefit as well, you can set up an npm proxy and require its use. That way you're getting a very specific version, and downloading that version from a location you control.
(And then for the ultimate level of "slow your project to a crawl, but hey at least it's really secure", you can only allow versions that pass an internal security review to be added to the proxy and disable automatic fetching of un-cached versions. Ain't no sneaky code getting in unawares there!)
- I, too, am still rocking the 13 mini, which they made good enough that nothing they've made since has made me wish to upgrade, though the fact that every phone since is Too Damn Big has made me happy I haven't yet.
We've got about three years left before these things are unsupported. Three years of hope for them to release _something_ a little smaller than "uncomfortably large."
- I've begun to hate the term "democratizing."
In fact, I now tend to see it as a strong shibboleth from people who don't actually value the thing being "democratized" - computing, art, music, and who think in terms of "barrier to entry" instead of terms of understanding and appreciating.
In the end, this bizarre drive just ends up cheapening our enjoyment and interactions. We get shallow music, soulless art, and miserable computer programs, because there's no active intelligence involved in their creation that truly understands what's being created.
- Don't forget gaming back in the day! Facebook games started taking off, then Facebook decided that the _only_ way you could get paid on the Facebook platform was with Facebook Credits, and to incentivize Facebook as the gaming platform of choice, Facebook would give out free Credits to players to spend on Facebook games. Of course, if your game was the one they chose to spend those Credits on, you wouldn't actually get paid, not with promotional credits, what, are you crazy?
No, I'm not still bitter from that era, why do you ask?
- That battle was long-ago lost when the leading LLM companies and organizations insisted on referring to their products and models solely as "AI", not the more-specific "LLMs". Implementers of that technology followed suit, and that's just what it means now.
You can't blame the New Yorker for using the term in its modern, common parlance.
- Objects should also stop having always-on blue LEDs for power indication or whatever. When I turn off the lights at night, my living room basically stays the same luminescence, because of the wash of blue LED light from every stupid little gadget that is desperate for me to know at all times that it has power.
- > 99% of programming is repetitive plumbing
Even IF that were true (and I'd argue that it is NOT, and it's people who believe that and act that way who produce the tangled messes of spiderweb code that are utterly opaque to public searches and AI analysis -- the supposed "1%"), if even as low as 1% of the code I interacted with was the kind of code that required really deep thought and analysis, it could easily balloon to take up as much time as the other "99%".
Oh, and Ned Ludd was right, by the way. Weavers WERE replaced by the powered loom. It is in the interest of capital to replace you if they are able to, not to complement you, and furthermore, the teeth of capital have gotten sharper over time, and its appetite more voracious.
There's no context in those names to help you understand them, you have to look at the code surrounding it. And even the most well-intentioned, small loops with obvious context right next to it can over time grow and add additional index counters until your obvious little index counter is utterly opaque without reading a dozen extra lines to understand it.
(And i and j? Which look so similar at a glance? Never. Never!)