Here’s an idea: I think video documentation of extremely risky behaviour (parkour, rooftopping etc.) and self-harm (mutilation, mukbang, ana) should be banned on all the major video platforms.
I often joke that Kubernetes is nothing more than a Docker installation and a bunch of shell scripts interacting with each other. In fact, at the most basic level, if you don’t have any knowledge, you could definitely build a very fragile cluster that way. It might even be fun!
A shift that I’ve seen around me as well where people get disillusioned with the ‘principles’ and flakiness of Google phones and just use iPhones instead.
“My expectation is surely in 20 years we are going to see AI tools generating mathematics that in many measurable ways are better than every human mathematician,” Litt said. “I would be shocked if that doesn’t happen.”
The whole point of driverless cars is that they can be programmed to follow the law even if the people in them don’t want to. There’s no point in deploying this technology if the code in it will break the law.
If LLMs are trained on GPL licensed code (and as it seems now they are trained on that and on pretty much everything else the companies can get their hands on), why doesn’t that make the LLMs and all the works they produce GPL licensed?
This level of anti-competitive behaviour from Anthropic and the other firms should be made illegal. The power disparities in AI are already stark, baking them in a way so that they can never be levelled is malicious.
A beautiful story of how iteration on an app is a process that’s worth it and that can yield something close to perfection like with Pedometer++. I wish every app had a person like this behind it who goes the distance and sweats every detail.
It should surprise nobody that ed tech is mostly an excuse to shovel money to whoever has an open line to the politicians making decisions at the moment.
We have been working in the “What comes after” for as long as I can remember because 1. it’s obvious1 2. you need to be ruthless about anything that does not add value.
Sovereign Tech Fund investing in KDE points towards some concerted effort into weaning Europe off big tech. KDE has come a long way and with a bunch more more pushes like this, it could become a more than worthy alternative to Windows.
It’s not so clear cut as it’s made out to be here. Of course writing code should never have been your bottleneck to begin with. What LLMs have done is to remove “I need to write the code” as an excuse.
Filing this for when I get the itch to learn Haskell again though there has been some recent rumbling that as a language it’s too clunky and increasingly irrelevant outside of a narrow academic context.
This interview with Cat Wu, head of product at Claude Code, is interesting for some of the tidbits around how the different roles in software teams are changing. But there’s one thing that stood out for me.
It’s a fair take but it ignores that it’s all path dependence. Any decision whether on the product side or in engineering cements a structure that is painful to change later. Whether you have AI helping you there or not is mostly irrelevant. It handles the more basic things but the hard choices are still hard.
I read some stuff by Zitron a while back and even back then it seemed untenable and divorced from reality aiming mostly to score points with an audience that’s more than eager to believe him.
Knowing what to build, knowing when the system is telling you something, knowing when to cut, knowing when the fast path is the wrong path — these were never just “execution.” They were always the harder parts and to pretend they’re solved by AI is questionable, to say the least.
19 - Hand & Wheel # “Is it still an adventure if you find the treasure and to lose it or is it just a sad fucking life?!” “I’ll do whatever it takes.” —“it’s going to take a lot of us feeling that same way.” “I was going to repay all that was given, by giving you your brother back” “If you want someone to come for you, I will be that person for you”
The care for these kind of minute details of map design is part of what makes Google Maps such a standout product. What products do you use day to day where the makers sweat out the tiniest of details like this?
This is an interesting realignment of the org chart. I’m not sure whether we’ll reach that endpoint, but it’s obvious to divide the team into the factors laid out in the article.
One person helping another because they have a relationship and the work needs doing. Sean frames these as workarounds. Necessary but awkward and illegible. But what if they’re not workarounds? What if they’re the actual thing?
A quick little interview with the creator of Tantivy a Rust based search technology that I’m hearing incresaingly more about and which I’m very eager to try out in production.
After hearing so many good things anout it, we normal people finally get to use a SAP solution as well. I wonder how quickly they’ll get out a first version for us to test and how wonderfully usable it’s going to be.
Here’s an idea: Developers should go through a proficiency test before they are allowed to use LLMs to generate code. Think of it as an AI driver’s license.
“This amazing snippet of code was languishing in the docs of dead software, which in turn the original formula was scrawled away in a math textbook from the 60s.”
To me, an obvious benefit of using jj is the power of the tooling and how intuitive it is to use. Once you have internalised the mental model, it doesn’t take many commands to achieve what you want.
Using my external 40% keyboards has always been very annoying with my Macbook. I type Dvorak so that’s what the keyboard layout is set to but that only really works properly if the laptop is set to the US layout. But when I type on the laptop directly I have to switch it to the Dvorak layout. This is already a pain but the remapping also messes with many keyboard shortcuts.
Using Postgres logical replication to stream a video call through the database is a brilliant hack that displays both the power of the database and of standard web applications.
People who need them being able to vibe out essential accessibility apps using just Claude Code is definitely making a difference. It’s hard to argue against this.
If you removed hand-written code but didn’t add explicit invariants, you lost rigor. If you’re generating implementations without rigorous evaluation, you lost rigor. If you’re accepting code because it runs rather than because you understand it, you lost rigor.
More stuf by Sean Goedecke that I came up with independently myself. Being unreasonably effective is one of the best ways for career success. Getting that way requires critical thinking and consistent application.
how Amazon’s traditional viciously customer-focused approach to development was a poor match for the research-style work that was required for developing AI