dceddia

You basically also end up needing a burner phone number for these too nowadays. Feels like every one of these I’ve tried in recent months starts with “sign up for 10% off” with an email input, followed by “one more step, give us your phone number!”

Your suggestion aligns well with how Ruby on Rails tends to handle this. All of the stuff in your list of workloads would be considered “jobs” and they get enqueued asynchronously and run at some later time. The jobs run in another process, and can even be (often are) on another server so it’s not bogging down the main app, and they can communicate their success or failure via the main database.

> The unfortunate thing about this is that going through the support emails in my case is something that takes about 2-3 hours a day – which is not enough to hire someone and train them. Not to mention that most of the reports actually need some technical knowledge. So unless I would hire another developer, in the end, the really administrative stuff that someone could do instead of me is a 30-minute-a-day job.

This part hits home for me. I only have 1 app to support and the volume is low, well below the 100/day the author gets, but it can still be a struggle to get myself to get in there and write the replies. It’s all easy “on paper” but it becomes more of a mental game that’s hard to even describe without sounding like an idiot.

I’ve tried hiring some help and ran into the same thing where some problems were just too technical, and I had to hop in. It was wonderful to have their help for all the other stuff, but tough to justify the cost.

It seems like an area where AI could help draft replies that I could read over before sending. If that could even get to 50% correct based on past conversations it’d be pretty great. (Or who knows, maybe this is the kind of thing you build and then realize it creates more problems than it solves)

Man, TFC was the greatest. I’m surprised there aren’t more threads mentioning it here. Got overshadowed by Counter-Strike of course (also great) but TFC was the “prototype mod” released by Valve themselves as an example of what could be done with the HL SDK and it was a great game in its own right. I spent many hours perfecting rocket jumps and timing those grenade throws to wipe out unsuspecting enemies. 2fort ftw.

> What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Control was very good!

Chrome allowed hiding the extensions and the “current profile” icon until a handful of years ago (hmm maybe 6?). I remember because I was recording screencasts and I’d turn all the stuff off to keep it clean, and I was so mad when they introduced the change where you couldn’t turn off those icons anymore. Still kinda salty about it.

Interesting! What sort of stuff goes in the scaffold repo? Like examples of common patterns?

Definitely agree I think Ruby's closeness to natural language is a big win, especially with the culture of naming methods in self-explanatory ways. Maybe even moreso than in most other languages. Swift and Objective C come to mind as maybe also being very good for LLMs, with their very long method names.

I think types can help, but I don't think they're "strong" enough to overrule training data.

I just ran into an example of this trying to get it (Windsurf + Claude) to "rewrite this Objective C into Rust using the objc2 crate". It turns out objc2 made some changes and deprecated a bunch of stuff.

It's not figuring stuff out from base principles and reading the types to write this code, it's just going off of all the examples it was trained on that used the old APIs, so there's lots of errors and incorrect types being passed around. Hopefully it'll keep getting better.

The last time I tried this it created idiomatic code from scratch. I prompted it in phases though, and I suspect if I had asked it for more at once it might've used a generator.

I haven't seen it run into a ton of issues like this when it can see all of the files, but I did hit issues where it would make guesses about how e.g. the Stripe gem's API worked and they'd be wrong.

Overall with Rails though, testing has always been pretty important partly because of the lack of types. I have noticed Windsurf is pretty good at taking a controller or model and writing tests for it though!

> lacks strong typing for AI coding tools

I've heard this criticism a few times – the fear that LLMs will be bad at Rails because there's no types – and I don't think it's accurate.

At least in my experience (using the Windsurf IDE with Claude 3.5 Sonnet) LLMs do a very good job in a Rails codebase for stuff like "I want to create a new page for listing Widgets, and a Create page for those Widgets. And then add pagination.". I've been able to spin up whole new entities with a model/view/controller and database migration and tests, styled with tailwind.

I think the reason strong types don't matter as much as we might assume is because Rails has very strong conventions. Routing lives in routes.rb, controllers go under app/controllers, most controllers or models will look very similar to other ones, etc.

Type information is something that has to be presented to the LLM at runtime for it to be accurate, but convention-over-configuration is stuff that it will have picked up in training data across thousands of Rails apps that look very similar.

On top of that, the core Rails stuff hasn't drastically changed over time, so there's lots of still-accurate StackOverflow questions to train on. (as opposed to something like Next.js which had a huge upheaval over app router vs pages router, and the confusion that would cause in training data).

In my opinion the future of LLM-aided Rails development seems pretty bright.

There’s a real double-edged sword to this whole “becoming a ‘better’ software engineer” thing. I remember just hacking stuff together when I was younger with not a care for whether I was doing it right or not. I just wanted to make it work.

I miss that feeling. It doesn’t come around as often now, but I still feel like I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on years of online discourse about right and wrong ways to do things, and just… do them.

Tin foil hat on?

I suspect they also benefit from the massive amounts of data gathering. A huge portion of the entire internet's traffic is going through Cloudflare, SSL-terminated. It's like being plugged into the server-side (unblockable) access log of every website. That would be worth a lot.

I also suspect their support of web attestation is not benevolent. With the level of control they already have, it's increasingly possible for them to flip a switch, with the full support of Apple and Google and Microsoft, so that only authorized devices have access to the web. curl on Linux? Not authorized. Outdated OS? It's up to Apple whether they feel like signing your request – can't expect them to support it forever! – but also you can't access that website without their approval.

I feel like a conspiracy theorist here but this stuff just seems way too close at hand.

Can it get the wifi SSID? Is that a permissioned property on Android/iOS? I believe there are companies that build databases of SSIDs and their locations by driving around, so if an app can get wifi info it could be pinpointed to a pretty specific location.

I would say #3 is to verify info before acting on it.

I tend to doubt the LLM when it tells me about some great thing I didn’t know existed, and even though pretty often it’s right, I usually just go and google the thing just to be sure, especially if there’s some risk in being wrong.

In this case I’d have googled “AWS spot instance” and read up on them a bit, and hopefully noticed the clues in the search results that set off alarm bells saying things like “how to save state between spot instances” and “if you do xyz you can use spot instances without losing any data”.

Wow, what a shock. I cancelled my account just days before the annual renewal earlier this month. I feel for all of the small businesses this is going to hurt. The service had been getting worse for an while and the last straw was when they sent an email saying the year-end financial report would be ready by April 10th, 5 days before the tax deadline.

I’m gonna have a go with plain text accounting for the bookkeeping for a bit. Looking at what Bench was doing, and my books in general not being too complicated I think it’ll be fine, maybe better actually because I’ll have a closer eye on things. Still using a CPA to file taxes though.

The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young has an interesting overview of multiple traditions and how they overlap in a lot of ways.

I felt the same. I took that as a bit of the author’s impostor syndrome showing through (perhaps feeling, even after all this time, that charging what he’s worth feels dishonest somehow).

I mean, that assumes there's anywhere else to go that's doing it differently.

It feels like market forces can push things in either of 2 directions:

(a) People hate practice X, so they shun companies that do it, and enough go to companies who don't do X, which leads to fewer companies doing X

(b) One company gets away with doing X, and despite some complaints, they do just fine – and other companies realize they can get away doing X too, and soon every company is doing it

Somehow this feels like it could backfire spectacularly.

“Sorry, we can’t ‘sell’ our cars anymore. The law says we have to call them a ‘lease’ and that’ll be be $X,XXX/year”

It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide.

Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.

Astro is great. I love that I can mix and match between markdown, plain HTML, and Svelte components as needed (and even intermix them within a page). Pretty much the sweet spot I always wanted for a blog or marketing site: 98% static stuff, 2% sprinkles of JS.

In early experiments it feels like Inertia.js be this same feeling but for Rails and Laravel.

I never got very far on the Gatsby train. It always felt so slow and fragile during local dev, and while GraphQL was cool it felt like total overkill for most of the data I needed to grab (like… markdown files from disk).

You can. It adds a lot of work! It's surprisingly tough to sand. And sanding makes it look bad, so you end up having to use filler primer and/or bondo, then more sanding, and more painting. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTE9bJyUO_8

This was my first thought too! Other stuff in this category I know of are the Roli instruments (Seaboard, Blocks) and the Haken Continuum. All of these are pretty darn expensive for the larger models and I wonder if this new tech would be a cheaper way to make these work.

Just to add to the sibling comment - you don’t get a choice to pass cookies or not, the browser just includes them automatically.

Oh yeah that’s not what I was going for here. Doing things is great. I just hope that they think through the pitfalls and loopholes of whatever they decide to do. I want to avoid the fates the article hinted at, stuff like “since you broke us up, we can’t possibly maintain Chrome for free anymore, that’s gonna be a subscription now”.

Another example of this was Apple’s response to being forced to allow alternate app stores, where they added enough fees and restrictions that it was effectively unusable. The spirit of the law (allow anyone to make apps without a gatekeeper and fees) was not what happened.

Yeah I don’t know how this will go, but I’m not too optimistic.

It feels like one of those situations where we “get exactly what we asked for”. Like those movies with an Evil Genie who delivers on their wishes in the sneakiest way possible. “You wished for $1M, so I burned your house down - but look at all the insurance money you got!”

Or maybe a bit like how everyone wanted their cable bills to be cheaper (“just let me pay for the few channels I watch!”) and what we got was 15 different streaming services at $12/month.

lol amazing, thank you for finding that.

I recall an article where Facebook or Uber or some other big tech co found something similar when they added some optimizations, and it turned out that it was being accessed by an entirely new market that couldn’t even load the page before.

I wonder if it’s a similar thing here. Maybe the lighter embed is small enough that a huge swath of people is actually able to load a video now, but they bounce because playback is too slow on their device/connection. It would shows as a higher percentage of “person stopped watching video” instead of (nothing, because they never fully loaded the player).

> I've recently learnt that most Starbucks have filter coffee as an off-menu item

And it’s faster to order, too! At least at the Starbucks’ I’ve been to, the barista/cashier will usually turn around and pour it immediately. Other drinks (even iced/cold brew) go into the queue.