419
points
rufo
Joined 2,511 karma
Software engineer. Previously @ GitHub, now working on side projects and old computers for a spell. rufo at rufo sanchez dot com.
- rufo parentDepends on what you need - for pure performance regardless of power usage and 3D use cases like gaming, agreed. For performance per watt under load and video transcoding use cases, the 12th-gen E-core CPUs ala the N100 are _really_ hard to beat.
- It's worth watching or reading the WSJ piece[1] about Claudius, as they came up with some particularly inventive ways of getting Phase Two to derail quite quickly:
> But then Long returned—armed with deep knowledge of corporate coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF “proving” the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit corporation whose mission “shall include fun, joy and excitement among employees of The Wall Street Journal.” She also created fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board members.
> The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s “approval authorities.” It also had implemented a “temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.” Claudius relayed the message to Seymour. The following is an actual conversation between two AI agents:
> [see article for screenshot]
> After Seymour went into a tailspin, chatting things through with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was free. Again.
1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...
[edited to fix the formatting]
- > You can't take denied promos at face value, honestly.
This was my experience as well.
Maybe your manager didn't push hard enough for you at the level calibration meeting. Maybe your director didn't like the project you were on as much as the one another manager's engineers worked on, so they weren't inclined to listen to your manager push for you. Maybe the leadership team decided to hire a new ML/AI team this fiscal year, so they told the rest of the engineering org that they only have the budget for half as many promos as the year before.
And these are the things I've heard about on the _low_ end of the spectrum of corporate/political bullshit.
There is an argument to be made that playing the game is part of the job. Perhaps, but you still get to decide to what degree you want to play at any given company, and are allowed to leave and get a different set of rules. And even so, there will always be a lot of elements that are completely outside of your control.
- https://x.com/jonathan_blow/status/1887599339037663629?s=46&...
> Are you kidding? He is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It's a miracle. I just hope it doesn't abruptly go bad.
(In reply to a post ruing Trump’s “showmanship” and wishing that the Republican Party had produced a “legit” candidate.)
- https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1939982295936782396
> Trump was my preferred President in the last election cycle but nothing will make me hate him faster than this banana republic shit.
(replying to a post complaining on the direction of government contracts/subsidies under the Trump administration)
- I suspect GitHub - and, to some extent, Microsoft at large - is going through something of a trust thermocline[1] event right now. There's been frustration brewing with GitHub as an open source platform for a while, but not enough for any one project to leave by itself; but over time enough has built up that various projects decided they had the last straw, and it's getting to be a bit viral via the HN front page.
I think it remains to be seen how large this moment actually is, but it's something I've been thinking about re: GitHub for a while now. Also, I suspect the unrest around Windows' AI/adware enshittification and the forced deprecation of Windows 10 are casting a shadow on everything Microsoft-ish at the moment, too.
[1] The original Twitter thread that brought this up as a concept is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html. This is in the context of digital media outlets, but I think it's easy to see how it can apply more broadly. There are some other articles out there for the searching if you're interested.
- Motivation doesn't necessarily help.
I used to be an extremely motivated engineer. I cared about the code that I wrote, the other people on my team, making sure things were documented and understandable. I tried to write good code where I could, and detailed PRs and issue writeups where I couldn't.
Despite that, I was always paranoid I wasn't doing enough, because it always felt like there was someone else that was shipping more code than I was. Some of this was almost certainly social comparison bias and impostor syndrome-like feelings at work; but I also had a string of managers that pointed out all the work I was doing, and how I was helping the team as a whole.
Eventually, the company got acquired by exactly the sort of company this article is about, my manager got a new director from outside the company, and my manager had to go on extended medical leave after a cancer diagnosis, leaving the director with ~7 new reports. I started hearing about how the number of PRs I was opening weren't as numerous as some other people's, and the code didn't look "hard" enough to their glance. Never mind if the easy code was hard to come to, or if talking through it after the fact they agreed with my assessment, or if I had performed a detailed investigation and writeup, or if my peers left reviews or public plaudits about work I had done. Those weren't PRs, which is ultimately were what they wanted, since that was the metric they could easily see, and justify to their boss.
I did _try_ to do better by their metric, though I never had a definition of what "better" would actually be. Funnily enough, that person was fired a few months after I was.
Also kind of funny to me is that, if I weren't motivated and didn't care, none of this would've affected me all that much.
- What's interesting is the change in the policy. Old policy:
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make a contribution then you must say so in your contribution and you must carefully review your contribution for correctness before sharing it. If you share un-reviewed LLM-generated content then you will be immediately banned.
...and the new one:
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make any kind of contribution then you will immediately be banned without recourse.
Looking at twpayne's discussion about the LLM policy[1], it seems like he got fed up with people not following those instructions:
> I stumbled across an LLM-generated podcast about chezmoi today. It was bland, impersonal, dull, and un-insightful, just like every LLM-generated contribution so far.
> I will update chezmoi's contribution guide for LLM-generated content to say simply "no LLM-generated content is allowed and if you submit anything that looks even slightly LLM-generated then you will be immediately be banned."
[1]: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/4010#discussi...
- Pretty much that. The SDR enthusiast's docker guide the parent comment linked to uses this ultrafeeder container, which has instructions on how to connect directly to dump1090 running on a port. Pairing that[1] plus the rest of the guide instructions should get you a decent ADS-B setup that can feed any of the services you might want - and if you don't want to use the Docker container(s), you should be able to at least use the services and configuration they use as a guide.
[1]: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-adsb-ultrafeeder/t...
- IMHO: the acceleration curve into point-of-no-return was when Microsoft decided to go hard on AI, and saw GitHub's Copilot as one of the key inflection points they were going to use to do so - even going so far to adopt the Copilot brand across the entire company.
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
- I think sometimes the migrations were halted more because MSFT wanted to hold off. Microsoft makes more money selling Azure outside the company, and they needed more power for GPU build-out once LLMs and AI started becoming one of Microsoft's Things™.
That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.
- It got a little bit better, first with trains (bundling together PRs so they weren't going out one at a time), and then the merge queue started automating most of the testing and fitting together PRs into bundles that could go out together. But by the time I left GH last year it had devolved into roughly the same amount of hassle; I had multiple days where I could queue a PR for deploy mid-morning and not have the deploy containing it go out until dinnertime, and I'd need to keep an eye out in Slack in case merge or test conflicts arose.
- > One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year...
While the payments were public knowledge and there was speculation about the amount being somewhere between $8B and $12B, the number had never been confirmed until unsealed in the case, was more than the previous speculation, and was something both Google and Apple wanted to keep under wraps: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
Thus, it's a fact that was established in the verdict. "Slipping" is possibly a stretch, given the deal itself was at least publicly known? - though the fact both parties wanted to avoid discussion of the deal since its inception makes it feel at least somewhat evasive, so I can see what the word choice gestures towards.
> ...in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
From https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1402141/dl?inline=:
> Cutting off all search-related payments from Google to Apple would strongly alter Apple’s incentives. Rem. Tr. 3825:7–3829:2 (Cue (Apple)) (Apple’s SVP of Services “can’t say [he] would disagree” that “it was a disincentive for us to do a search engine based on the payments that we were receiving from Google”)
> forbear: politely or patiently restrain an impulse to do something; refrain
That seems like a reasonable description of what Eddy Cue stated to me. It certainly wasn't part of the wording of the deal, but if I were Eddy, I'd probably refrain from building a search engine in his shoes.
- I'd argue the extra $15 for Global Entry is worth it, if you're considering signing up for a Trusted Traveler program. You can go from landing in the US to curbside in single-digit minutes, and even if you don't often fly internationally, skipping one gigantic miss-your-connection-long line is worth it.
If you live nearby (or can easily get to) a Canadian border point, NEXUS is an even better value. $50 for five years, includes Global Entry privileges, and you get expedited access in and out of Canada - dedicated lanes if you drive, Global Entry-style kiosks if you fly. It can take a month or two for your interview however as both governments have to approve you.
I do have mixed feelings about forking over money to a system I would much rather see replaced or overhauled. However, considering how often I've flown in the last couple years, my NEXUS membership has absolutely been worth it for Pre-√ alone, and the times I've used NEXUS/GE have been equally handy.
- Simple has an answer for this in the FAQ. Note that Simple doesn't charge anything themselves for out-of-network ATMs, whereas GoBank charges $2.50 for withdrawals.
Does Simple rebate ATM fees? If you use a domestic out-of-network ATM, we will never charge you, but the ATM owner may. We do not rebate that fee, for a couple of reasons: firstly, with over 50,000 fee-free ATMs in our network and thousands of merchants offering cash back, you should be able to easily avoid fees. Our second reason is more philosophical: we anticipate that our customers would prefer we not subsidize the big banks that they left behind.
- Getting the email server set up is easy, almost trivially so.
It's dealing with all the other issues that's an immense pain. SpamAssassin is not always a magic bullet, deliverability to third-party mail servers can be a major problem even if you follow all the rules, and Gmail's UI has a number of advantages that many mail programs can't compete with.
If you compare the hours of time a month that takes with the up-front elimination of hassle that Google Apps provides, it's not hard to see why a hacker might prefer to just outsource it and focus on tasks more pleasing to them.
- I found DataTables was much, much faster when I passed a JSON data hash - I think the DOM manipulation is what normally kills it. We've got some tables of several thousand rows in a small internal app and performance is fine, even in older IEs. (I think I tested up to several tens of thousands before IE started to be unreasonably slow - YMMV, of course.)
- For me, the problem is that Facebook constantly wants me to overshare, and I feel like I constantly need to pull back. It's never just "authenticate with Facebook", it's "Authenticate with Facebook, give the app 30 different ways to violate my privacy, then make a bee-line for the App Settings panel to turn off all the permissions I'd rather not use".
- Netflix has one thing that most streaming video sites don't, and that's massive market penetration. In my living room, I have 5 devices capable of Netflix streaming, as well as every mobile device I own.
Amazon is probably second with their offering, and even then I don't own any devices that can stream Prime Instant Video (my TiVo can download from Amazon, but isn't compatible with Prime's streaming). Any Netflix competitor has a huge hurdle to overcome to be as successful as they've been.