crazygringo

No, latency hasn't gotten worse.

It just hasn't gotten better.

Fundamentally, whenever latency gets too bad, developers fix it. But often not until then. So it always just kind of sits there at the edge of just-barely-tolerable. Which is defined by human behavior, not chip speed or similar.

I remember iTunes in the 2000's taking several seconds to respond to user actions. I remember using software like PageMaker in the 1980's that would take forever to respond. Lotus Notes in the 1990's was horrible. Running antivirus would slow your system to a crawl. Other stuff from the 2000's -- Acrobat Reader, or Outlook.

It's always been an issue with apps on the computer.

Oh, I certainly have. In fact, I had to give me kind of a three hour crash course afterwards when I needed to figure out what kind of further optimization was most likely to work.

But that was still to answer very targeted questions that I would never have been able to ask on my own in the first place without months of study.

And when we are talking about the speed up from LLM's, we are generally comparing to a world without LLM's. Not to some mythical world where LLM's are able to teach us about anything but not actually able to write the code or find the technical solutions themselves.

I am a huge fan of having LLM's teach me what I need to properly guide them in domains that are outside my expertise. It's kind of funny when you think about it. A really big part of learning how to be productive with Claude is indeed trying to find precisely the areas where you yourself, not only provide value, but provide irreplaceable value.

But in this case, most people really truly don't have an issue with it.

It's a very small minority who cares.

I mean, it was about changing the size of the certain layers of the model in order to fine-tune with the new shape.

I am entirely sure that it would have taken me many months to figure out that that was the actual thing that needed to change. It wasn't just some kind of tooling configuration issue. It required a deep understanding of the size of every single different layer of the model and how they fed into each other.

I recently needed to adjust an existing open source model for an app that I am building, to get it to work in a certain way. I have no background in machine learning.

Claude was able to identify the approach that worked, and even the long Python command that was needed. In, yes, probably about 10 seconds.

For me to figure that out myself, it probably would've taken something like a year of study. Of the entire stack of machine learning and all of the Python tooling associated with it.

That's where these absolutely incredible astonishing speedups come from.

Because it's one thing for Claude to be able to write code 20 times faster than I can. But it's a whole other thing when it is able to create things in domains that I know nothing about at all. That would take me one or more years to become an expert in. But where I can still just verify its results, so I don't need to be an expert in order to judge the quality or suitability. If the end product works, the end product works.

I have similarly had it come up with mathematical formulas that would probably have taken me a year in going back to studying math if I had to derive them myself. But where it is trivial to show that they are producing the correct output for known test cases.

So trying to come up with some kind of factor multiplier here almost kind of falls apart. It might as well be infinite. Because these are things that I just wouldn't have done otherwise. The software wouldn't have gotten built because I would have had to hire somebody else to do it, and there was no budget for that.

Yeah I'm aware it's hit-or-miss. But I use it in Infuse, which is a third-party app that supports it, even with its own framework.

Yes, this is standard. And the point is performance. The needs of user-facing ID's (short alphanumeric, randomly ordered) tend to be pretty orthogonal to the needs of internal ID's (raw bits, monotonically increasing, maybe timestamp data).

It kind of lives on, on the Apple TV remote.

You know that ring around the main button, that kind of functions like a D-pad with four arrows?

If you're paused while watching something, you can drag your finger clockwise or counter-clockwise around the ring to seek forwards or backwards. It's really nice, much finer-grained control than normal skipping forwards or backwards.

The wheel doesn't actually spin, but it also doesn't really need to.

There are really quality TV shows, and films on streaming, out there.

Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.

Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.

There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.

It takes up space, you've got to clean out the dust from the fan grill every so often, it requires constant maintenance in software updates every time you turn it on, unless you leave it on all the time in which case it's using non-trivial power all the time. I have an Xbox. But there's no question that it would be a much simpler setup to not have one.

If you buy the expensive piece of hardware and the game, you can play it on your tablet for free. With Remote Play! You've always been able to do that. Nothing changes.

This is about not buying the expensive piece of hardware. Then obviously it makes sense to charge you for the expensive hardware you're now using in the cloud. Or if you bought the expensive piece of hardware, but for some reason are choosing to use an Xbox in the cloud instead.

Game streaming from the cloud has never been part of the licensing of purchasing a game. It's always been part of a monthly Game Pass subscription. And with games in Game Pass, you don't even have to buy the game in the first place.

I get that some people may not love the change, but it's just more accurately reflecting costs, and there's absolutely no bait-and-switch here. Nothing has changed about what comes with a game you purchased. Nothing at all.

Seriously! They're not charging you for the "streaming" or for the "game you already bought" -- they're charging you for renting the Xbox in the cloud that is running the game, the GPU.

I get that it was free before as part of a subscription, but now GPU's are more expensive. Nothing that you paid for up-front is being taken away. The subscription plans just changed is all.

I think you may be misunderstanding.

The point is that previously, changing code in a major way might take months of refactoring. Large changes were simply not contemplated unless they were justified by similarly large additional profit. Once you designed your architecture, you were pretty much stuck with it.

Now, the kinds of changes that were simply unrealistic before are now entirely realistic. A refactor/migration that would have taken 6 months before, you can now get a working version done in a day, and another few days of QA. That's what this post means -- code is no longer stone, it's clay. You can change it quickly in ways that were previous unimaginable.

This has nothing to do with the concept of code being liability or asset -- that's a totally separate conversation.

99% of people? Gun control? Career ruining? Life endangering?

You speak in hyperbolics, my friend. You may be lacking some realistic perspective here.

Plenty of people who are using LLM's within technical organizations, as opposed to script kiddies vibe coding, are encountering the same kind of issue. And people spend lots of time fixing bugs in existing code anyways. This is just a simple question of newly-visible tradeoffs.

I mean, it depends on how you use an LLM like Claude.

You can not know what you're doing and use it to write slop.

Or you can set up your project with best practices in every way with full design documents and code that flows from design and full rigor around everything.

I do it the second way. And so yes, I find myself being confronted with so many edge cases that I just never thought about before. And I'd say it about doubles the time it takes me to deliver stuff, and I'm not always sure it's worth it.

Same here. It's been a real eye-opener.

Previously my main concern was with LLM's writing worse code. Now my concern is the ability to write better code than I was ever able to write before -- considering every possible potential bug and race condition and error state and what have you -- but at what cost? How much more time do you have to spend researching, designing, making decisions around every possible edge case and state?

Before, you couldn't even attempt to balance quality with speed, because you couldn't see the quality in advance. You had to wait for bug reports to come in. Now, you're confronting quality up-front in a much deeper way. Which allows for much more reliable software, but then you have to decide how much effort is worth it and how much isn't?

$100/mo. is basically the cost of a cable TV package. Often $120-170, actually.

If you're the kind of person who gets enjoyment being able to code all sorts of things you were never able to before, or 20x faster than you were able to before, then $100/mo. is extremely reasonable in comparison.

I'd argue it's money much better spent than on cable.

Also, if a hobby of yours runs you $100/mo., that's actually very much on the cheap side for a lot of hobbies.

Also, $20/mo. is for hobbyists using it for 2 hours at a time a few times a week. $100/mo. is for people working on a side project every evening and every full weekend.

Because sounds are made by shapes. The shapes of our mouths and the shapes of objects colliding. And sounds have shapes, shapes over time.

The point is, if you don't use regex that frequently, you can completely forget that ^ means start and $ means end. And adding those as line comments ("^ # Start of expression") would be dumb.

That's why a well-designed DSL tries to make its syntax as self-explanatory as possible. Using "start" instead of "^", or "digit" instead of "d".

We're not doing equations here, we're doing engineering. Analogies to proofs are not helpful. There is a very good reason why, in coding, we give descriptive variable names such as "accountBalance" rather than "b".

Conciseness is not a virtue in programming. Clarity is. Things should not be longer than they need to be -- but neither should they be shorter. The name of something should not be 100 characters long, but neither should it be 1 character long. A word or two is generally the sweet spot.

If somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, then they shouldn't buy a house that belongs to that little club in the first place. Pretty easy.

I couldn't care less if it looks more like XML or Python or C or whatever. It's just an example.

I just care that things have readable text names rather than inscrutable punctuation and single letters.

Yes, it is a DSL. Just like, you know, Python or C or HTML or CSS. Just because it's a DSL doesn't mean it can't actually use keywords instead of punctuation.

Regex is conceptually incredibly easy to understand.

But regex is also syntactically designed by Satan himself.

Most programming languages use commands that are semantically understandable, like "for" and "let" and "return" and mostly symbols we already know like "+" and "=". They use newlines and indentation for organization. And they put multiple commands on multiple lines and you can add comments and everything.

Regex is exclusively punctuation, with its own idiosyncratic meanings, all compressed into a single line, zero organization, zero comments, and impossible to remember what each symbol does if you don't use it daily. Not to mention the nightmare of escaping regexes when expressed as strings, on top of escaping regex symbols within the regex itself.

I swear it's high time we come up with a regex replacement that looks like normal Python code or HTML or something. So instead of:

  ^(\+\d{1,3}-?)?\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$

We would write something like:

  <start>
    <optional>  # Optional country code
      "+"
      <digit>[1-3]
      "-"
    </optional>
    <digit>[3]  # Area code
    "-"
    <digit>[3]
    "-"
    <digit>[4]
  <end>

Same thing. But one is completely inscrutable to someone who hasn't learned regex, while with the other you can guess pretty easily how it works...

Was there a traffic jam or closed road or something?

That is obviously not true, and seems like a strange thing to say.

> Software is never perfect and always a work in progress.

Relational databases are one of those things where you really do want to get a whole lot closer to perfect than a lot of other software.

Not in my experience. I've pointed agents like Claude at existing codebases I work on, and it does a pretty solid job at identifying bugs. It's not garbage or slop at all.

There's a big difference between randos getting agents to hallucinate bug reports on GitHub, vs. when your own internal workflow of LLM-assisted code review is identifying real, legitimate problems in your new features.

This totally matches my experience. It's actually kind of insane how well LLM's like Claude are able to find edge cases, race conditions, overflows, states you didn't think could be reached. It really makes you think about code quality in a whole new way. Becoming aware of so many potential bugs when you write the code, vs. finding out from users over the coming months/years -- it forces you to really consider the costs of quality all at once in a way that simply wasn't possible before.

Well, they are human beings who do sometimes need to take bathroom breaks.

This is fun, but since when are calculators made out of paper...?

This actually makes me wonder what a desktop plus basic office suite would look like if it really tried to adhere to a physical object paradigm.

No windows at all. Instead, every e-mail is a folded piece of paper (inside of an envelope?) in a basket. Every word-processing document is just a stack of sheets. The tool palette in a paint program is actual tools scattered around the edges -- pencil, pen, bucket of paint.

It would score poorly for usability, but on the other hand, it feels like the kind of thing that could be vibe-coded for fun.

OK, so you're clearly confusing two entirely separate things.

When you talk about being "deducted from the seller's account", you're talking about its third-party marketplace business. But when you talk about Vendor Central, you're talking about Amazon's first-party wholesale business.

Under first-party, Amazon is still purchasing the goods wholesale. Amazon absolutely spent the $25 for the $50 shirt. That's just how it works. That's the main discussion we're having. For you to claim otherwise is just flat-out wrong.

The drop-down about the return reasons, and about a seller choosing what to do with returned merchandise, that's about the third-party marketplace. That's a totally separate discussion, but it has nothing to do with the chargeback model you were talking about, and those are decisions sellers are making, not Amazon. And sellers are still making those decisions based on what is most profitable. If an item is "perfectly resellable", then they're still being restocked and resold. Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it. If they think there's value in it, it gets resold.

Also:

>> Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it.

> You keep repeating this but the investigative reports with GPS trackers put inside new items immediately returned to amazon to trace where they go and hidden cameras at landfills and industrial shredding facilities that receive truckloads of Amazon customer returns shows otherwise. The volume of it has been reduced somewhat, but not eliminated.

Just because it happened once with some items doesn't mean it's a pattern. Obviously, journalists are looking for a "gotcha" here. They're focused on finding the times when Amazon misclassified returns, or when the item is no longer selling, or whatever. They're not writing up stories when their GPS trackers showed that the items got resold.

You're trying to push an agenda here, and I'm done talking. You are falsely mischaracterizing how Amazon returns work and the financial incentives. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't throw out some returns that aren't worth reselling -- literally all retailers do this -- but this narrative that it's somehow magically cheaper for Amazon to just throw out otherwise resellable returns as a matter of standard practice is just false.

The chargeback model does not operate the way you are describing.

Yes, major retailers have various agreements with manufacturers. Sometimes it's return-to-vendor, because the manufacturer wants the returned items back in order to refurbish and resell itself, etc. Sometimes there are return allowances, such as a 3% rate, meant to cover an expected return rate regardless of return reason, or they negotiate with Amazon for it to determine which returns are genuinely defective, and then those and only those get effectively reimbursed.

But it is completely false to say that Amazon is generally able to pass on the cost of all its returns to manufacturers, that this makes returns zero-cost for Amazon, and that it therefore just tosses returns in landfills. That's not how anything works. Neither manufacturers nor Amazon have any kind of financial incentive to just dump returned merchandise that can still be profitably resold.