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eterm

8,205 karma · joined February 13, 2013

blog.eterm.uk
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eterm··on Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?
"Ironic" bad behaviour is still just bad behaviour.
eterm··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
What's even more surprising is that it can be given a grafana API key and reason about bugs from the hints of patterns in the logs even with pretty sketchy and inconsistent logging in places.

It can then raise, investigate and resolve those problems while also patching up and rationalising logging to improve future work.

The AI deniers have their heads in the sands at this point and are demonstrating they simply haven't tried a modern agent. ( Or perhaps are forced onto copilot? )

eterm··on Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles
Yet the HN submission UI has a box, and if you write in it, it gets posted as comment.
eterm··on Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
It was being discussed on here hours prior to the Chainguard release.
eterm··on EA is shutting down BioWare
Yes, the mourning for the company that made KOTOR and NWN was done years ago, it's effectively a completely different company now that's shutting down.
eterm··on Tsrs: A Port of TypeScript to Rust
Faster feedback loops almost always deliver improvements elsewhere.
eterm··on France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months
AI is ruthlessly effective at finding vulnerabilities.
eterm··on France's supermarket fridges were vulnerable online for months
Things will only meaningfully change when insurance companies stop paying out when reasonable steps weren't taken by companies to protect themselves.
eterm··on Personal software factories are a waste of time
I know a few entrepreneurs and they all independently started building these kind of factories around the same time, so this is definitely not a straw-man.

I'd say give it another couple of months and you won't be able to move for announcements about this kind of thing.

The "sales pitch" is that factories are to agents what agents were to models; Personally I'm not convinced we need an extra automation layer, with all the downsides that come with even more disconnection from the product being built, but some people are starting to swear by them.

eterm··on Thinking will become a hobby
When I went to a bank recently, I discovered my local high street "bank" branch is now mostly just internet kiosks with an under-trained and probably underpaid assistant there between the handful of kiosks to help people log on to it.

It is nothing like the experience of growing up in the early 90's and what banks were then.

Consider that everyone did their banking in person and people dealt with a lot of cheques. Oh, and banks didn't tend to open at weekends, you had to find time during the week.

There was a need for a lot of tellers, and banks were incredibly busy places.

"99% closed" is obviously hyperbole, especially counting by branch, but if you were to count by tellers or by people visiting their bank, I could well believe it.

eterm··on Triple-A Minesweeper
I don't remember which game it was, but I'm pretty sure it was a ubisoft game, maybe AC3, where it felt so much like a tutorial that I spent the entire game wondering when I'd get out of the tutorial and onto the real game.

It ruined the game for me, because I never felt like I was let free to actually play the game.

eterm··on US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS
The EU level doesn't have enforcement mechanisms, EU law is applied through member states changing their laws.
eterm··on Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived
Someone will no doubt correct my hazy memory, but I wonder how much to blame was the fact that default QT apps were so ugly around the time that was the height of RAD, and QT was the only(?) well-supported cross-platform cross-DE gui framework at that time.

On windows you could RAD your way to a good looking windows application that looked and behaved like everything else. On linux, default behaviour was either ugly, or not very compatible, or heavily customised anyway, and that didn't change until much later with improvements to GTK.

eterm··on Chess Atlas
It took a while to find one, but the "Hermès Chess Set" has the board the wrong way round, with the white square bottom left. I like to call this "hollywood configuration" because of how often this happens in film & tv.
eterm··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?

That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.

My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.

eterm··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen.

> 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect

https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:

> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”

From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html

But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though.

* Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.

eterm··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
That sound quality did something weird to my brain, I was convinced sound was accidentally coming out my laptop speakers not my headphones. I'm not even on my laptop, and I still took my headphones off to check.
eterm··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
You're right, I better do a 360 on my comment ;)
eterm··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
Given how long it took visual studio to get 64bit support, I wouldn't hold your breath!

( Edit: I should probably inform the layperson: It was Visual Studio 2022 )

eterm··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
There have also been repeated statements from NSA & CISA that they recommend all development should be done in memory safe languages.

It's abundantly clear that there is a strong headwind towards memory safety, whether that's Rust or GC'd languages.

eterm··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
> The biggest problem was that the first ~couple of hours were spent getting all of the PCs connected, updated, and working properly-enough.

Every lan party would have that one guy who turned up with nothing pre-installed or patched, and would finally, after a couple of hours, get their copy of Unreal Tournament working and join the game just as everyone had grown tired of it and were ready to hop into another game instead. This would rinse and repeat for almost every game.

I had some sympathy, but not too much, because we were generally fairly organised about sending out game lists in advance.

There was something delightfully chaotic about trying to get a good game of anything actually played, because even without technical problems, you'd get a situation where at most a third of the players were keen, another third were mildly amused and another third were basically just barely tolerating it because they wanted to play something next and didn't want to ruin the vibe, but clearly would much rather be playing almost anything else. Of course, as games rotated, so did these groups.

There was also that corner of people who had no intention of playing anything and were just there to utilise the ability to privately swap their terrabyte sized "anime" collections across fast ethernet ( or via physically handing over hard-drives ). I tended to leave them well alone.

eterm··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
I've found it does this in two situations:

Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR.

But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else.

It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.

eterm··on Show HN: GET Together – A social network where you don't need POST to Post
It's the classic rules as intended vs rules as written.
eterm··on .gitignore Everything by Default
Oh, that's neat.

The -p presumably stands for pInteractive with a silent p :)

eterm··on .gitignore Everything by Default
What does that do, add already tracked files only?
eterm··on Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%
I don't feel like this was a piece by someone who has used LLMs too much.

I'm fairly confident this is just LLM writing the majority, possibly tweaked by a human.

Opening line is a form of, "It's not X, it's Y": ".. isn't thinking. It's I/O".

Then the start of the second paragraph is that weird breathless kind of writing:

> Reading five files to answer a question about one method. Generating a test file that follows the exact same pattern as the twenty test files next to it.

More "It's not X, it's Y": The seat license isn't what hurts, it's the tokens.

The softly pressed insistence that AI is worth it, really: "The tooling pays for itself but only if..."

eterm··on GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter
It's so meme-worthy next to the astra-max for any situation of "What you were promised" vs "What you received".
eterm··on .name Termination
I own a .uk and it still feels weird not having something in-between.
eterm··on Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
A large part of the problems of Javascript are corollaries of lacking of a good standard library, and the relatively long time it took and is still taking to fix that.

It wasn't really until ES2015 that a better standard library really started to take shape, and, thanks to IE11, it was a very long time before that didn't need poly-filling.

In a sane world, you'd just parse whatever you're after and then check for NaN or null.

You can't do that. Pop open your favourite javascript runtime and type:

    Number.parseInt("123Garbage")
eterm··on Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
You're right, I was reading the stats for "is-number" and mixing them up for "is-even":

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number

170M downloads / week.

Same author, similar vintage. Arguably a necessary package, but that just further indicates how messed up javascript was.

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