Alternative licenses like the Forklift Certified License are a good and necessary counter-reaction to open source becoming a corporate hollowed out shambles.
When people say that Kubernetes is complicated, this is the stuff they mean. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to play this complexity game reliably, so the only reasonable way through would be not to play.
If your reliability depends on heroic efforts or arcane knowledge from individuals, then you have no reliability. This week’s AWS outage shows that clearly. Whatever conclusions you draw from that is up to you.
We really should have Starlark as a configuration language everywhere because it’s very expressive and easy to read/understand. Instead we’re stuck with ever increasing piles of YAML and obscure configuration formats that nobody wants to deal with.
It’s always been my feeling that TLS has unacceptable collateral damage in how it breaks the web for normal people. That’s considered a bit of a crank opinion, but I’m definitely not the only person who feels that way.
The Bitter Lesson is an interesting concept. Stuffing the prompt runs into diminishing returns pretty quickly but on the other hand, getting your AI to play well with tools is challenging.
Every programming language has to strike a balance when it comes to abstraction and none of them get it right. Rust is written in a way that is often too abstract for the things that you want to do with it.
We should have more histories of software. There are lots of things that have been tried out and learned which if they aren’t captured will disappear entirely.
The guide to sqlite query planning and tuning is cool, but what’s even better is that this kind of scale and optimisations are possible at all with sqlite.
The situation described here where AI writes 90% of the code is almost entirely the same as how any software engineer works already. The only thing that’s changing is that instead of code you’re writing instructions to the LLM.
He is a Marxist who understands the importance of money and markets; without Marx, you cannot understand the movement of history, but without money, you can’t do anything about it.
This week economists have been congratulating themselves on following Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson into institutions. They are, in effect, proud to have discovered the rest of the social sciences.
At some point you have to ask yourself how many predators work at Meta. They seem hell bent on targeting children. You don’t have to be a predator to work at Meta but it helps.
The point is that once again China is teaching us to think at scale. The future scale of a more developed, post-Western world is gigantic. If we are to have any hope of climate stabilization the only realistic policy, therefore, is not some twee Western European vision of “sustainability”, it is radical and transformative. Cities will be bigger, energy needs will be bigger, production will be bigger than anything we have previously conceived.
Every time I have to cross-compile something (usually in Rust to run on the cloud somewhere) it’s always rather confusing to figure out the correct target triples. Weird that something that’s this fundamental is documented this poorly.
The write-up how Bun can be so fast is a good exploration in all the things that computers are good at now. Machines and our networks have gotten much faster and much more parallel which influences what an optimal approach to building software is now.
The disabled creating custom prosthetics and turning themselves into highly visible and fashionable “neo-people” is at least one positive way that cyberpunk is turning into reality.
Meta’s push towards sexualised chatbots for children is very concerning and nobody should let their kids use any of Zuckerberg’s platforms unsupervised.
Not the first time Meta created racy bots and it will probably not be the last unless Taylor Swift sues them. I guess they do need to get more talent in to create things that are actually useful.
A good description of how if software engineering was setup for speed of iteration we would have entirely different environments than we have now. Nobody is really opposed to speed, but nobody really wants it either so we end up with bloated development and bloated results that are the worst of all compromises.