figassis

This is one reason, the other is just fraud. Being from a developing country, I am well aware of the stigma of saying I don't know, which I had to strip out of me as I became an engineer to the point of me being immediately suspicious when someone tells me they know about some moldy complex topic, even if it's in their profession.

The fraud part is that I developing countries, almost all activities that require some skill have lots of people claiming to be experts. 99% of them are lying. You take your car to a shop and they tell you they will solve your problem. With skepticism, (because they asked no clarifying questions) you try to give them some context and they tell you not to worry.

1 day later they tell you parts X, Y and Z need to be replaced, it will just cost $$$. You ask if there is no way the current parts can just be repaired, and they tell you no, they must be replaced.

You ask what was the actual issue, and they tell you the parts are completely damaged, or worn out, need to replace.

Sure, you pay, and they give you the car, works for a few days, maybe week, then breaks down. You plug in a portable OBD scanner and it tells you the exact component they just put in is failing (likely not even compatible with the car).

You give them back the car, tell them since you paid $$$, you will only take the car back once it works perfectly, and you won't pay a cent more.

They then spend the next few days looking for an actual expert, that comes in and repairs the original parts, for $, and they take the "new" ones back to the store and give you your money back.

They don't know anything about cars, they experiment on yours, with your money, by swapping parts. This was easier when cars were less strict with parts.

This is fraud, not face saving, and it's in every developing country.

Understand what you want to build. Architect it. Talk to it like a junior. Ask for a plan, ask it to write the plan in plan.md, ask it to update the plan after every task (for example add this to CLAUDE.md), tell it to look at the plan and resume from last priorities. Let it one shot solutions where you care less whether it uses a standard approach. Sometimes you will know it will take an incorrect standard approach, and you can preempt it and tell it where you want it to go, which algos/libs to use, etc.

After every working solution, commit. Because you never know when it will fall into a salad loop, you want to be able to reset to last commit and start fresh.

It’s addictive yes, keep your mind sharp by using the extra time you have to learn more stuff, build in other fields, etc.

These people won’t have to be experts like the tailwind team? Quality will be spontaneous?

Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.

I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.

Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?

I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.

I don’t think we were ever supposed to be programmers. A lot of us are scared because they assumed knowing every detail of a system or language and being able to conjure a system with code was the point of your profession. But it was always building things, or, engineering, just with different tools. If we get to the point where we can ask AI to 3d print a spaceship and also build JARVIS into it for navigation, then your job will become something else, like figuring out how to build brain computer interfaces as we get on our way to becoming cyborgs or whatever for FTL journeys. Building interfaces will not be a thing we will do anymore, as UIs will just be conjured on the fly, contextually, by the AI.

Our challenge will always be to keep track of all the foundational knowledge so we can rebuild it all if it comes crashing down (AI or some other event tries to end us).

You should feel exited about it, and level up to the next thing where you will be needed, which is to build reliable heterogeneous, self healing systems, often without having a contract between them.

This will mean you can conjure up an entire tax management system, a financial system, a government management system, quickly and have them all talk to each other so people can just go about their lives.

A dam is built, and you immediately have a system that can operate it and all of its equipment.

This may give manufacturers freedom to innovate without worrying about breaking things. Just install it and let the AI learn it, tell you if it needs to calibrate the new equipment, or adjust the existing system to better integrate it, take better advantage of it, etc.

There is so much to do in that and many other directions (I mean healthcare, etc, why not eat bigpharma’s lunch?) that we should be excited and not afraid. Of course current AI is nowhere near this, and maybe what enables this will be in an entirely different shape, but that we’re all putting effort into getting there instead of worrying about Angular vs React is what I love the most.

Sounds like a great idea. I would love to be able to swap technologies, like use a go or node backend, maybe use an entire framework like Echo or NestJS (I’m going for maintainability here, and I feel frameworks provide good guardrails). Bonus if it can be self host able (paid or licensed regardless) and maybe adding in browser rendering so AI can do visual testing. I could be one of the first customers.

I love and live inside linux, so please go easy on me but...there is some level of product design that an OS needs to be a viable consumer OS. Linux has 100 ways to do any thing, this is 1: paralysis inducing, 2: causes high cognitive load when all you need is to edit/share a spreadsheet, 3: does not create a common experience that you can share with people across jobs. Everyone will do it differently, so you will have an issue communicating how to do task X.

But I see no product people on Linux, I see only engineers wanting maximum Linux. We aren't willing to be more single minded, we want to be nothing like Microsoft (good), but we also want to be nothing like Apple (good in some ways, very bad in others).

Regular users do not need to know what apt is, what a repository is, or any of the 1000 linux things. But those things need to work so consistently well that they could use the OS without ever, and I mean ever, having to know what they are.

Then, I haven't used a linux desktop in a while (tried elementaryOs 2y ago, was a bit lacking), but the desktop environments need to stop looking like some college student's java GUI project.

Finally, I don't know much about the driver/nvidia issues that I hear so much about (that's not where my job takes me), but I don't think we need to solve those before we can get Linux to be a daily desktop driver. I mean let's some up with a list of Linux certified cards and let OEMs pick from those? Maybe this is already done, but if not, we could start there.

I think this would be a great product, and yes, I see value in it. Maybe this could go deeper. Many engineer founders want a Christmas tree of features. This process could help them trim the fat and actually optimize for PMF.

Being an intelligent being is not the same as being considered intelligent relative to the rest of your species. I think we’re just looking to create an intelligence, meaning, having the attributes that make a being intelligent, which mostly are the ability to reason and learn. I think the being might take over from there no?

With humans, the speed and ease with which we learn and reason is capped. I think a very dumb intelligence with stay dumb for not very long because every resource will be spent in making it smarter.

I agree, but this would mean that almost anything can’t be called hacking, bc it usually relies on vulnerabilities and implementation defects. If something is poorly encrypted and you retrieve data, you didn’t hack because it wasn’t encrypted to begin with. That can’t be the standard.

It becomes social because inevitably it will be shared. They are the source material.

Yup. All my servers are behind Tailscale. The only thing I expose is a load balancer that routes tcp (email) and http. That balancer is running docker, fully firewalled (incl docker bypasses). Every server is behind herzner’s firewall in addition to the internal firewall.

App servers run docker, with images that run a single executable (no os, no shell), strict cpu and memory limits. Most of my apps only require very limited temporary storage so usually no need to mount anything. So good luck executing anything in there.

I used, way back in the day, to run Wordpress sites. Would get hacked monthly every possible way. Learned so much, including the fact that often your app is your threat. With Wordpress, every plugin is a vector. Also the ability to easily hop into an instance and rewrite running code (looking at you scripting languages incl JS) is terrible. This motivated my move to Go. The code I compiled is what will run. Period.

In docker, simply clearly define the interface (ip) and port. It can be 0.0.0.0:80 for example. No bypass happens.

There is never a need to store a pin in the database, store it in temporary storage like redis. Set the TTL to the expiration date. You can hash if needed, but I’m less concerned that someone hacks into your reds instance and steals your pins from the last 10 minutes, bc everything else is gone.

There should never be a need to return a pin to the client. You’ve already texted/emailed it to them. They are going to send it back to you. You will check against your temporary storage, verify/reject, and delete it immediately after.

Sure. But why are we blaming libraries. This is the development process. Are BE developers not looking at their output anymore? Are we just vibe coding everything? If the UI does not complain then go to prod? This can’t be the expectation. And then you claim that your app is secure. Based on what review. Does not look like you even did an internal review? If you’re going to design a PIN feature, and don’t consider securing it, what part of design did you do?

I keep seeing people try to explain away incompetence by blaming unaccountable things aka the tool or system. Exposed password? Must be the library. People really should stop using it. No, the library is not wrong, ppl should be better developers.

Peer reviewed paper is full of AI slop, must not be the reviewer’s fault, the citations were there, they were just fake. What is going on?

Focus on short sentences and simplicity is an American trait. It is a bit different with UK English. As a native Portugese speaker, I spent my time before the US doing exactly the same as the author, I could write well structured prose by the time I was in 5th grade. I grew up with a dictionary. My mother would come back from work and ask me for the list of "difficult words". The expectation was that I spent time reading and would have found some new words, looked them up and now needed to sync with her to see if I got the correct meanings in the context where I found them.

Then I moved to the US and noticed that even the books were sort of written in a way that required no extra effort. The English I learned while playing RPGs (with no speech at the time) was enough to read most books from the library and a dictionary was only needed occasionally. And everyone basically just knew the same set of words, youth and adults alike. I also noticed that US English has a distinct tendency of making up new words that are simpler and more intuitive than the original expressions. It turns things into verbs. This is why people Google, Tweet and Vibe.

Then I went to an Engineering College, and it teaches us to distill everything into it's simpler fundamental components. I like it, and I now want people to be as direct as possible.

As a non native english speaker, I've always had to speak and write better than native speakers, and always had to tolerate the "You speak/write really well, where are you from?". Today they no longer ask, AI is their answer and they judge accordingly.

building on imaginary someone else? That's exactly the same as lying. Is a review not about verifying that the paper and even data is correct? I get reviewers can make mistakes, but this seems like defending intentional mistakes.

I mean, in college I have had to review papers, and so took peer review lectures, and nowhere in there was it ever stated that citations are not the reviewer's job. In fact, citation verification was one to the most important parts of the lectures, as in, how to find original sources (when authoring), and how to verify them (when reviewing).

When did peer review get redefined?

It is absolutely the reviewers job to check citations. Who else will check and what is the point of peer review then? So you’d just happily pass on shoddy work because it’s not your job? You’re reviewing both the authors work and if there were people to at needed to ensure citations were good, you’re checking their work also. This is very much the problem today with this “not my problem” mindset. If it passes review, the reviewer is also at fault. Not excuses.

Really appreciate you listening, looking forward to taking another look

I’ve read some opinions where cameras are actually a good idea, and when we get there it will be awesome. That’s fine, if we get there I agree it will be awesome. But did people not buy the car now on a promise that this would be here now (considering when the promises were made)? At which point does the legal definition of fraud apply?

The free market is an interesting thing. I assume a lot of regulation is not applied as hard because throughout the decision process many are HODLing TSLA. What would happen if Tesla had to refund all these sales and presales?

So we sort of have to just keep giving stern warnings and issuing very selective recalls.

To add a little bit to this and why I am so principled against this. I will subscribe to a service, because a service means ongoing work. If you spent months or years building software, and have finished it, charge people what you believe is fair for the work you did up to now. Charge $50, charge $500, your call, sell to 1M people, your call. You have no running costs, you're just selling an app.

If you were running this on some cloud, maybe had some other extras built in that cost you time and money, then there could be a subscription.

If you want to keep your software updated, and are pushing updates daily, weekly, monthly, etc, I could squint at a subscription, but I would rather you just do critical fixes (bc if your product is broken you do owe paying customers a fix without a charge), and put new features in a new version that you will also sell.

People are selling git clients, calculators, db clients on subscription. it's crazy what the world has come to. We don't work to pay you guys rent.

The second I saw this app I was about to click buy (looking for a table plus alternative), went to pricing, saw subscription and immediately dropped it without even trying the free version.

It's a no for me. I don't want a subscription. Charge whatever you need, give us 1y of updates, charge next year for an upgrade. Do not pull folks into yet another subscription.

And it is new. Before iPhones, no one cared how long you held a phone for. Now it's an economic crisis.

I can't imagine how they were not paid to publish this.

Did you guys notice the number of steps that need to happen to share something as simple as a photo?

This is terrible. Of all things k8s, ingress was the part I just did not want to have to mess with. It just worked and was stable, this gateway is completely unnecessary. And it seems to me that nginx retiring is just because people were pushing for the gateway so much that they threw in the towel. Infra is not react, people need to leave it alone.

They are aware, they have learned to not waste their limited lifespan fighting a losing battle, often, they've already given enough, lost enough loved ones that they'd rather enjoy what little life gives them. They're not less intelligent.

If time is not real, your renderer already knows you peeked at that galaxy, maybe they expected you to, so that is likely the only galaxy that is actually rendered. You might find all the bugs inside back holes :-).

It’s promises make me interested, but the syntax is my main turnoff. I am a Go person, and I think what brings people to go is the opposite of what brings people to Rust. I am willing to sacrifice some memory safety (because I maybe naively think I can manage to write software without many memory bugs) for the simplicity and dev experience that Go offers.

I think the value of the interaction matters. Who ever got an LLM to reply wanted to learn? be thoughtful? argue? what? And will this interaction be valuable for anyone replying to it? reading it? I think yelling at the void and hearing the coherent echo of a million people is not the same as having a conversation.