jon@blankpad.net
- jon-woodThe fossil fuel industry really doesn’t need a devil’s advocate, they’ve got more lawyers than you can shake a stick at already.
- This is something I’ve been learning in the completely different context of bouldering since I took it up a few months ago. When you start out you instinctively move slowly, so you can be sure of your footing and won’t fall off, but somewhat counterintuitively it’s better to move as quickly as you can. This has two advantages - firstly the quicker you move the less time you’re on the wall, and the less energy it takes, just staying in place takes energy when you’re dangling off a wall by your fingertips. Secondly you can use momentum to your advantage, instead of stopping and then having to get yourself going every move you just bounce from hold to hold.
I have no pithy summary of how this applies to the world of business or software development. It just reminded me of that.
- Counterpoint: No it won’t. People are using LLMs because they don’t want to think deeply about the code they’re writing, why in hell would they instead start thinking deeply about the code being written to verify the code the LLM is writing?
- So, not a home user then. If you make your living with computers in that manner you are by definition a professional, and just happen to have your work hardware at home.
- In the context of background jobs idempotent means that if your job gets run for a second time (and it will get run for a second time at some point, they all do at-least-once delivery) there aren't any unfortunate side effects to that. Often that's just a case of checking if the relevant database updates have already been done, maybe not firing a push notification in cases of a repeated job.
- You're absolutely right on that - what eventually killed the business was an influx of VC cash and demands for massive expansion during a period when we almost had delivering in a single city nailed.
- This is why next day delivery slots worked - shops were able to pack orders during quiet periods rather than suddenly getting slammed with delivery orders that will be picked up in 20 minutes just as the lunch rush arrives. Some of the shops we were delivering for had people they employed specifically to do this, and generally they loved it because it meant their staff were doing something during otherwise quiet periods.
- Yeah, but if you're having to turn to a machine to compose your thoughts on a subject they're probably not that valuable. In an online community like this the interesting (not necessarily valuable) thoughts are the ones that come from personal experience, and raise the non-obvious points that an LLM is never going to come up with.
- Or simply not participate in that conversation. It’s not obligatory to have an opinion on all subjects.
- Strongly agree with that. Its slower, but I will always prefer building actual database records as either part of the test or in the test context rather than relying on some predefined fixtures. That makes the test behaviour clearer, and it means you don't have a bunch of unrelated tests failing because someone changed a fixture to accommodate a new test.
- I think there's a space for something in between Ocado and Uber Eats, in the 2010s I worked for a startup where you could book an Ocado style delivery slot for the next day from a bunch of different butchers, bakers, etc and then we'd send a van round to collect from all of them and deliver it to you. Annoyingly they ran out of money just a little bit too soon, I'm pretty sure if they'd managed to hold out until 2020 they'd have seen a huge increase in sales as everyone fully got on board with online delivery and been laughing.
I think the big win with that model vs Ocado is that scaling down is fine, you work with whatever shops are in the area and don't need to deal with building fulfilment centres. Maybe you need a car park somewhere to put the vans overnight. Scaling up is a case of moving into different areas, or onboarding new shops. Absolutely agreed that last mile is a nightmare but we mostly had it down I think, the biggest pain there was that we were relying on a bunch of third parties to pack an order, and if any of them got something wrong we ended up with an unhappy customer on the phone and needing to deal with it.
- 100% this. Go and spend time with the people using your software. Even better, use it yourself.
One of the companies I’ve worked for did food delivery, and in food delivery during Christmas week everybody works operations - either you’re out in a van with one of the regular drivers helping them carry orders that are three times larger than any other week, or you’re handling phone calls and emails to fix whatever problems arise. Either way without fail January every year would see a flurry of low effort/high value updates to the software those parts of the business used. Anything from changing the order of some interactions to fit the flow of dropping a delivery to putting our phone number in the header of every admin page.
Absolutely nothing beats going out there and doing the job to discover where the tools you’re responsible for fall over. Bonus points if you can do it at the most stressful time of year when if anything is going to fail it probably will.
- Yeah, also SDL didn't exist until a year after WinQuake's release.
- I’ve had multiple managers over many jobs who’ve said they were on board with this. I’ve had CEOs saying from the top down “decline meetings without an agenda”, and yet somehow it never changes.
- This isn’t backed by the constant conspiracy theories about voice assistants listening to everything you say and then farming that off to third party ad providers so that you see ads for things you’ve been discussing.
- Or if the moderation was good someone would go “nope, take that bullshit elsewhere” and kick them out, followed by everyone getting on with their lives. It wasn’t obligatory for communities to be cesspits.
- You don't have to work this out from first principles, the EU have already done this in the form of GDPR. Building a database mapping people's location and selling it to third parties without their consent would be squarely illegal under GDPR, and result in massive fines given the entire business model is a breach rather than this being an oversight.
- Back in the day when phones of this style were the only ones available we learned to hold the handset between our shoulder and our ear, leaving both hands free for other things.
- > If you ask Claude to fix a test that accidentally says assert(1 + 1 === 3), it'll say "this is clearly a typo" and just rewrite the test.
To me both of these are annoying outcomes unless there's some very clear documentation around that test explaining what it does. Ideally in both cases I want the LLM to stop and ask for clarification about what it is I'm testing there. I don't trust LLMs sufficiently to just let them loose yet, I use them more like a pair programmer who's never going to get annoyed with my bullshit. (So yes, I usually have them set to require approval on any edits, and will nitpick my way through them like the most annoying code reviewer you've ever met)
- Most routers shipped by ISPs have remote management enabled, they can be reconfigured by the ISP themselves without having to involve the end user in the process.