rufius

This is an interesting idea. I was thinking about something similar in Smalltalk or Erlang the other day. Mostly building on the actor/object+mailbox concept.

I didn’t actually do anything with that idea yet but may look at the idea in Elixir this weekend.

IME, the LLM when used well also gets closer to correct.

Android Auto is in the vast majority of cars that also have CarPlay.

What’s your point?

(without sarcasm) Is this a serious question?

If so - maintainability, testability. This is old software engineering best practice at this point.

You shouldn’t hyper optimize for deduplication, but it’s usually worth considering. Fewer places to fix issues or improve as well.

While this is true, it is often stunning to me how long it took to get to `uv run`.

I have worked with Python on and off for 20+ years and I _always_ dreaded working with any code base that had external packages or a virtual environment.

`uv run` changed that and I migrated every code base at my last job to it. But it was too late for my personal stuff - I already converted or wrote net new code in Go.

I am on the fence about Python long term. I’ve always preferred typed languages and with the advent of LLM-assisted coding, that’s even more important for consistency.

As a Texan, I can assure you that ERCOT will find a way to add 6 layers of middlemen, over extend capacity, and generally screw it up.

I watched it progressively get worse growing up. I don’t live in TX anymore, but I’ve still got family there and it’s more of the same.

Wouldn’t matter if they did. There’s no penalty for getting it wrong so the human is always incentivized to say yes and then say oops if it was wrong.

If there’s no feedback mechanism, verification doesn’t matter.

I think it does for a substantial portion, especially those with more traditionally aligned values. We know families, through our extended social groups, that would cringe at the Skibidi Toilet stuff.

I'm not sure why? At least some part of it, I suspect, is related to the "outrage economy". That is, outrage that can drive social media engagement. You don't do it because you're, in good faith, bothered by it. You do it because you can raise a stink and rally others to engage and make yourself popular.

That last bit is just a theory of mine. It seems anecdotally supported though from my own observation, but I am not a sociologist so I'm not going to claim any expertise here.

For sure. Im the parent of a couple Gen Alpha kids on the younger side. I showed the skibidi toilet videos to my wife and her response was a shrug and “looks like dumb videos we watched in college”.

But as other posters say, not everyone was into that corner of internet culture as millennials. Especially the weirder offshoots.

Well my trip to Costco make infinitely more sense. I saw these 3 foot tall dolls for sale of the camera head characters. They were titled “skibidi toilet titans” but I was only familiar with the song mashups, not the web series.

Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents. It’s just part of parenting and being a kid. My parents hated my love for the weird shows on Adult Swim like metalocalypse and squidbillies.

Big shrug - no one should be surprised this portrays a non-narrative future. The future feels pretty chaotic and undirected to me as an adult. I can’t imagine how it feels to a 12 year old.

It’s more of the same. At least in my experience, much of work amounts to “yes sir. Will that be all sir?”

You take the input, mostly ignore it, and move on. YMMV on that strategy, but if you are deft with it then you can dodge a lot of bullshit.

It does require that the things you do decide to do pan out though. You’ll need results to back it up.

See also, the OODA loop.

This lesson shows up periodically in different contexts. In the case of OODA, it was fighter pilot dogfighting training.

It’s a good practice to build into different parts of life.

I don’t think AI makes me 10x more productive. It does make me close to 10x less bored though.

Much of production software engineering is writing boiler plate, building out test matrices and harnesses, scaffolding structure. And often, it’s for very similarly shaped problems at their core regardless of the company, organization, or product.

AI lets me get a lot of that out of the way and focus on more interesting work.

One might argue that’s a failure of tools or even my own technique. That might be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m less bored than I used to be.

Companies that don’t want to invest in new infrastructure.

That’ll always be the blocker with rail. Moving humans, even a lot of them, by rail isn’t cost effective by most company’s definition outside luxury pricing.

Rail wins when you need to move goods in bulk though.

Annoys the hell out of me. I much prefer train travel, even if it’s slower. But in the States, Amtrak is passable at best depending on the particular line. European rail was a lot more pleasant. Neither comes close to Japan though. Their high speed rail is a reason I’d consider living there long term.

Water’s wet, fire’s hot. News at 5.

All code is legacy code from day one.

Probably a hard question to answer. IME, cultural norms around documentation vary pretty wildly.

Some orgs I've worked for were very "wiki" driven - there's a big expectation of using Confluence or Notion to navigate documentation. This applies both big (5000+) and small (50+) organizations for me.

Other organizations I've worked in were very document centric - so you organize things in folders, link between documents (GDoc @SomeDocument or MSFT's equivalent). Those organizations tend to pass around links to documents or "index" documents. Similarly, this applies for both big and small organizations in my experience.

Of the two, I tend to prefer the latter. Without dedicated editors, the wiki version seems to decay rapidly, especially once the org grows above some size.

Knowledge management is hard...

I mean it’s Notion. That’s par for the course.

What if your text editing and presentation experience was slow and laggy? That’s Notion.

I mean if the joke that Google is just an Ads company with a software engineering org is true, then Oracle is just a Sales company with a software engineering org.

The static site generator for my personal website. It was something I wrote in an evening. The code[0] isn’t the best but it’s been easy to extend as needed.

It basically takes a couple json files for configuration, and some markdown.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~zacbrown/zsitegen

Another anecdote - I hate slack. Indifferent to teams, but loathe slack.

Fair enough - also lol at people downvoting. It was an honest question.

I’m curious what materially changed beyond Slack complaining.

Microsoft has long bundled Lync/Skype-for-Business with Office 365. Hell it did that, I’m pretty sure, before Slack even existed.

Is there a brief blurb about how this differs from Obsidian? Just curious mostly.

Well. This sounds like it will be exciting to upgrade to.

Having watched this first hand, you won’t be treated the same. Maybe that’s a good thing, but people will assume you get to do whatever you want which, generally, shouldn’t be true.

It sets a strange precedent sometimes too if not well communicated and managed.

This blog post felt unsatisfying. I’m not sure I’ve talked to anyone in the last decade about distributed systems where:

- CAP came up

- all parties immediately agreed that CA was impossible

I still think it’s a useful model for forcing people to think about their failure modes though. Systems, largely, tend to fall into either CP or AP or be horrendously expensive.

You have to choose your trade offs.

I wish the author had expounded a little further on better options. I’ll read the paper linked, but there’d be more punch with more inline content.

Two options from my own experience:

- Allocate a regular time to read the papers/articles. Accept that the list may forever grow. Bonus points if you tag the content going in so that you can prioritize a tag/topic to make progress in a space you like.

- Expire out old content you aren’t going to get to. I triage my list periodically, sorted by oldest. If I don’t remember adding it or don’t feel interested based on a skim of title and intro, it gets deleted.

I pulled these from how I treat feature/bug backlogs at work. If it’s older than 90 days since any activity and a feature - delete. If it’s a bug, it gets archived (in case of repro steps needed).

I empathize with this. I’m similar to your son - no amount of practice ever made me faster or “more prepared”.

I’ve learned to accept it and manage expectations with people.

One thing I discovered about myself was for many things I have a “gut feel” that I trust unquestioningly. I might not be able to explain why something is wrong/right, but I know it is. Given a bit of time, I can explain it sufficiently and convincingly.

I’ve never had the gift of quick answers with explanations. I’m okay with that.

The time I the most Rust was the couple of years before Rust's async/await settled. I worked on what is now a large code base that processes a lot of data quickly.

It was multi-threaded but no async/await. When I tried to start converting things over, it was really painful. I have no idea where it landed, but I remember coming away from it thinking that I'd prefer to just not deal with the async code in its current state.

I mostly write Go now and haven't had to think about this. Sounds like it's still painful.