ErrantX

You may not mean it but I do think sometimes framing it this way implies leading and managing is something that requires less ability (it's a skill in its own right).

What I think is true is people cap out their technical competency, and look to shift their skillset and, globally, we are bad at a) training them to be good managers (because there is a wrong assumption it's an innate skill) and b) weeding out the many who also lack the ability to be a manager.

I suspect this is written by someone who stepped into managing a team and no further.

My reflection overall is; he's probably heard of servant leadership but not understood it? It's not about sweeping away problems but more a mindset that your role is to empower. I feel strongly that all new managers should embrace and get good at this because it instills the mindset that the best leaders ultimately only succeed through their team.

A servant leader who becomes overworked is either not doing their job well (delegation isn't contrary to the mindset!) or, more likely, has a poor leader themselvesw.

I actually love the concept of transparent leadership but sadly I can't see it come through in his points. They are all things a good leader, a good servant leader, should also do.

For me transparent leadership becomes more critical as you move up the stack. Once you get to multiple teams or teams of teams leaders must pivot strongly to strategy setting, and in this your servant leadership comes in painting a clear destination for everyone to get to.

At this point I believe the best leaders are genuinely transparent and the worst keep secrets. One of my most respected mentors framed it as deliberately over-sharing. Which I love, even if I get into trouble for it constantly!

(I do like the writers anarchic streak; the best leaders are radicals)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say NextJs with Auth.js is pretty boring technology.

I'm struggling to see what you'd choose to do differently here?

Edit: actually I'll go further and say I'm guiding against accidental complexity. For example Auth.js is really boring technology, but I am annoyed they've deprecated in favour of better Auth - it's not better and it is definitely not boring technology!

I wouldn't call that accidental complexity? It's just a set of preferences.

Your last point; feels a bit idealistic. The point of code is to achieve a goal, there are ways to achieve with optimal efficiency in construction but a lot of people call that gold plating.

The setup these prompts leave you with is boring, standard, and something surely I can do in a couple of hours. You might even skeleton it right? The thing is the AI can do it both faster in elapsed time but also, reduces my time to writing two prompts (<2 minutes) and some review 10-15 perhaps?

Also remember this was a simple example; once we get to real business logic efficiencies grow.

Yeh I think you are right and I am also finding larger apps built using SDD steadily get harder to extend.

> For large existing codebases, SDD is mostly unusable.

I don't really agree with the overall blog post (my view is all of these approaches have value, and we are still to early on to fnd the One True Way) but that point is very true.

I did this first too. The trick is realising that the "spec" isn't a full system spec, per se, but a detailed description of what you want to do.

System specs are non trivial for current AI agents. Hand prompting every step is time consuming.

I think (and I am still learning!) SDD sits as a fix for that. I can give it two fairly simple prompts & get a reasonably complex result. It's not a full system but it's more than I could get with two prompts previously.

The verbose "spec" stuff is just feeding the LLMs love of context, and more importantly what I think we all know is you have to tell an agent over and over how to get the right answer or it will deviate.

Early on with speckit I found I was clarifying a lot but I've discovered that was just me being not so good at writing specs!

Example prompts for speckit;

(Specify) I want to build a simple admin interface. First I want to be able to access the interface, and I want to be able to log in with my Google Workspaces account (and you should restrict logins to my workspaces domain). I will be the global superadmin, but I also want a simple RBAC where I can apply a set of roles to any user account. For simplicity let's make a record user accounts when they first log in. The first roles I want are Admin, Editor and Viewer.

(Plan) I want to implement this as a NextJS app using the latest version of Next. Please also use Mantine for styling instead of Tailwind. I want to use DynamoDB as my database for this project, so you'll also need to use Auth.js over Better Auth. It's critical that when we implement you write tests first before writing code; forget UI tests, focus on unit and integration tests. All API endpoints should have a documented contract which is tested. I also need to be able to run the dev environment locally so make sure to localise things like the database.

Yes... That's much the point I was making.

But there is a lot more complexity than, I think, you are glossing over. For example, you also likely have at least one technical services partner in the flows, probably two.

Additionally, money often doesn't move in real time, especially when credit cards are involved. The process is, intentionally, split.

Your point on that is fair, but remember, many credit providers are also not banks, and the money is in a bank account owned by a third party. So, as a trivial example, I can't just assume money coming to me from Bank A is related to transactions from Bank A's cards.

A lot of people don't realise that the main way all of this works is through very large batch files with lists of transactions in moving back and forth between various parties behind the scenes.

(We are on semantic points, though, but I just wanted to clarify the complexity behind the scenes that most people don't see or understand)

Mostly identical. Credit cards will probably have different risk rules though - after all it's their money not yours :)

Yep you are completely correct; people don't realise how complex the chip is - it has what you'd legitimately recognise as an operating system! It can also be reprogrammed over the wire, if your chip and pin is taking a bit toooo long that might be what's happening.

Your correct on the risk spread. I wasn't confident last night (I'm not totally versed on the terminals) but looked it up. As I understand if you choose to accept offline only payments then you accept the risk of the transaction failing. If it's the issuers choice they own the risk.

Interesting! Did not know that offhand but just looked it up in the technical docs and this is part of the standard. Interesting to hear how other countries have adopted different approaches.

There are a few differences for sure. All entirely technical in how the money moves or clears. The most obvious point here is debit card moves your money from your account, credit moves the issuers money from their account.

But to your wider point; from a transaction fee point of view you are dead right. Of course a credit card has other attractions; for example it's credit :D but also things like section 75 protection.

Your card doesn't know the balance, it doesn't work like that.

Offline transactions mostly died off when the limit in the UK for contactless was raised to £100. At £20/30 (the original limits) issuers/merchants risk accept some payments not being valid (and the total limit before you had to chip and pin was fairly low top).

And worth saying, the merchant has some control on the terminal but mostly the decision of offline/online is down to the issuer and configured on the card.

They use largely the same rails/network (for example Mastercard). The only meaningful difference is on how and when funds are reconciled.

Some payment providers ask up front to simplify the flows as it's not totally trivial to determine what sort of card it is, and also because different fees apply - historically some merchants added specific fees to basket etc. (less so nowadays but the UI convention sticks)

There is some parallel here with the message of 1984. In that Orwell saw political entity as the vehicle for mass misinformation.

But in some ways Google AI results, with the trust they have, seem just another vehicle for "we've always been at war with Eurasia".

For me this is the real risk of AI: developing dependence on it's output

Another option is https://forwardemail.net/en which has a really good free tier (if you don't mind managing forwarding rules in DNS)

Another good one is; please always split any security updates from feature changes (and backport the updates per whatever versioning policy you have for those lagging the latest).

After many years of being burned I always delay system level non-security -related updates at least several days after launch to mitigate the risk.

Fair but apart from Virgin, many of those Altnets rely on (and pay for) OR ducts & poles.

Am surprised to see Gb coverage that low!

Edit: that link is super interesting but I think they need to break it down a bit more. E.g. CityFibre, YouFibre and LightSpeed all seem to be counted under Altnets but all are very different setups.

Ah the one upside to rural Lincolnshire I guess?!

Just for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical.

Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.

(We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )

> Trump is not an idealist- he will promise anything to anyone if it gets power and attention. Previously, he had attempted a political career as a leftist, and switched to the right because it was getting more traction.

This is a critical point. His explicitly goal is to be an autocrat, there is no other ideology other than what works.

That's why I think the only real bit of him is the one that admires Putin. That is who he wants to be.

It's why his moves seem so random.

Feels like a controls failure as much as anything else. Any decently sized company that allows unrestricted access to llms, well that's going to be the tip of the iceberg.

Also, the culture of don't care comes from somewhere, not ChatGPT

You might be misremembering (it's my fav DB show btw...)

It's not really revealed how he does the last trick. In the last bet she believes she loses because the horse he tips doesn't win - and during the race he reveals there is no system.

However, he places the final bet - not her - and after the race ends she opens the ticket to find it's placed on the winner, not the tipped horse.

Almost certainly it's slight of hand (which he is excellent at) but that is never revealed.

The original author looks to have been at Google till 2020.

https://nicolodavis.com/

I feel like this is a rose tinted view of media based on Hollywood movies...

News media has always been biased and often had some form of agenda, sometimes even driven by the government.

What you used to be able to do though was acknowledge the bias and read with that lense.

What I think was true is that there was an effort of fairness and truth telling that today is far less true. Many media companies are owned by very few billionaires and they explicitly see them as propaganda.

That said, I'd always marked the Guardian as one of the remaining old schoolers. They have some weird and dangerous views, but their ownership structure gives some confidence there is an effort of fairness overall.

(I am also lost on how a foreign media company could publish a political opinion illegally in that country under US election law??)

LLMs have no concept of facts or lies, or right or wrong.

And contrary to your rather morbid view of society, in general most WP editors try hard to get it right. And support rather than undermine each other (don't let the more contentious topics distract you from the much larger pool of contributions)

More to the point, with humans you can demand they provide a source and at scale the iterative process should get to the right answers for a good percentage of content. That won't work for LLMs because none of that has meaning.

Correct.

Corollary is that Risk Management is a specialist field. The least risky thing to do is always to close down the business (can't cause an incident if you have no customers).

Engineers and product folk, in particular, I find struggle to understand Risk Management.

When juniors ask me what technical skill I think they should learn next my answers is always; Risk Management.

(Heavily recommended reading: "Risk, the science and politics of fear")

Actually writing the content is usually the easiest part.

98% of writing these articles is research. Current LLMs are nowhere near good enough.

As always, there is an article about it :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controvers...

As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points

Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate.

Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.

Manifest approvals has been a reality for a while. But that works because, not despite, the bottlenecks.

Countries know goods must flow through certain choke points so they can essentially quality control the manifests.

Remove that and pre-authorised customs will go again.