TYPE_FASTER

Software abstractions have always made it easier to build software without having to understand the inner workings of the mechanism that has been abstracted. But that doesn't mean we don't have to understand how it works.

I saw this happen frequently with cloud infrastructure. Cloud services remove the physical and organizational barriers associated with building and scaling infrastructure. But you still have to understand networking to manage your network infrastructure in the cloud. When it doesn't work, you can talk to AWS Support, but they are there to support AWS services, not design your network for you.

The Java Streams API makes it easy to write fluent code. But the Streams API doesn't make that code efficient for you. You still have to think about the cost of each step in the fluent chain, and the optimal order. Does it make sense to sort and then filter, or filter and then sort? Think about it.

I was working on a Chrome Extension with Claude. The extension kept getting rate limited immediately on one site. Claude suggested a few approaches, but nothing was working. Then I realized, wait, "are we sending two requests for the content when we could be sending one?" "Yes, let me fix that." Dude.

Commercial airline manufacturers have been working on automating every step of the process for decades. But pilots still have to know how to fly the plane, and troubleshoot when things go awry.

We still have to understand O(n) notation and how it applies. We still have to understand distributed systems.

We still have to know how to fly the plane.

Not sure I agree. I remember e-mails being capitalized and punctuated.

It's not so much typos and laziness as much as incomplete thoughts and distraction. Communication as a whole has devolved from an e-mail with a complete thought and some details to a text or chat message without capitalization, punctuation or context.

The lack of capitalization and punctuation are just a tell to me that the sender didn't put thought into it.

I can't tell you how many times I get a chat message asking a question. I in return ask questions about context, and explain why I'm asking. Then the original sender gets annoyed and provides context. Then I ask more questions. Then the original sender gets quiet. Then I get an invite to a meeting to discuss with a wider audience.

I have a virtual instance of Win11 ARM running in UTM on my MBP. It's honestly been surprisingly rare that I have to figure out how to run something that requires x86. More and more Linux distros have an ARM version that I can run if I need to.

This is so true.

He was so funny. I need to watch some of his other films.

I didn't know about about this film. Thank you!

More details here: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/

The 10-K filed by Meta is linked to in that article, and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001...

If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025.

Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes.

So, while the effective Federal income tax rate for 2025 was about 30%, largely due to a 3rd quarter charge of $14B against deferred taxes (Meta's effective tax rate for 2023 was 17.6% and for 2024 it was 11.8%), they paid 3.5% of their income as Federal income tax.

I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived example.

The impact of that transformation remains to be seen.

I have access to Claude Code at work. I integrated it with IntelliJ and let it rip on a legacy codebase that uses two different programming languages plus one of the smaller SCADA platforms plus hardware logic in a proprietary format used by a vendor tool. It was mostly right, probably 80-90%, had a couple mis-understandings. No documentation, I didn't really give it much help, it just kind of...figured it out.

It will be very helpful for refactoring the codebase in the direction we were planning on going, both from the design and maybe implementation perspectives. It's not going to replace anybody, because the product requires having a deep understanding across many disciplines and other external products, and we need technical people to work outside the team with the larger org.

My thinking changes every week. I think it's a mistake to blindly trust the output of the tool. I think it's a mistake to not at least try incorporating it ASAP, just to try it out and take advantage of the tools that everybody else will be adopting or has adopted.

I'm more curious about the impacts on the web: where is the content going to come from? We've seen the downward StackOverflow trend, will people still ask/answer questions there? If not, how will the LLMs learn? I think the adoption of LLMs will eventually drive the adoption of digital IDs. It will just take time.

Recently, it so happened that I spent an hour reverse engineering and documenting a piece of a system. A co-worker asked a LLM to do the same. It generated some really nice documentation.

The difference is, I (as a team member) now have the understanding. Generating the documentation does not increase the understanding of the team.

Some of it was accurate.

Some of it was not.

Sounds familiar.