scuff3d

It's funny because I miss this one all the time. I got use it in Sublime and VScode before making the jump to Neovim. I know you can get similar functionality from macros and what not, but it's just not the same.

Lol. Wasn't paying attention, my bad.

I try to be fair minded, but some things warrant strong reactions in my opinion. Journalists shilling for corporations exerting more control over a platform they already have too much control over is one of them.

The mods or whoever are welcome to remove my comment if they think it's too far out of line.

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The linked tweet leads to another tweet which leads to an article that doesn't say anything about OpenAI. It's talking about a new compression algorithm from Google potentially making memory usage 6x more efficient for LLM workloads.

Because humans make design decisions, AI just bangs it's head against the problem until it gets something that "works".

I'm sure it's a comfort to the parents and families of 150 dead kids that this is actually a very low error rate.

Probably vide-coded their infrastructure

Been saying this for a while now. I work in aerospace, and I can tell you from first hand experience software engineers don't know what designing a spec is.

Aero, mechanical, and electrical engineers spend years designing a system. Design, requirements, reviews, redesign, more reviews, more requirements. Every single corner of the system is well understood before anything gets made. It's a detailed, time consuming, arduous process.

Software engineers think they can duplicate that process with a few skills and a weekend planning session with Claude Code. Because implementation is cheaper we don't have to go as hard as the mechanical and electrical folks, but to properly spec a system is still a massive amount of up front effort.

Agreed. I wasn't saying it's a bad thing, just interesting.

The thing that really stuck out to me was the dot syntax:`.SomeVariable`. I'm guessing those are enum accesses where the compiler can figure out what it is from context? It's all over Zig, and it seriously screws with me lol. I know it's a me problem, but I can never keep straight what's what.

Great write up, had to bookmark so I can go through it more later there so much good stuff in there.

For the CTRL + R tip, you can make it even better if you install fzf. Massively improves searching through history. It's worth the install just for that one feature.

Best thing I ever did as a dev was start spending more time in the terminal. Getting familiar with the tools and how they interact makes life so much easier.

I'm reading the first of the blog posts. I've never actually seen any Swift code before, but looking at the package definition I'm struck by how much it looks like Zig. I've never heard Andrew Kelly call Swift out as an influence, but it seems some Swift DNA is in Zig.

Also, brave calling it swift-claude-code given Anthropics behavior.

... Because this thread is about a project that's a security nightmare, bought by a massive corporation currently ignoring the hugely problematic ethical issues surrounding their products. Corporations which btw, have more money and more power then most of the governments on the planet. Governments do terrible shit too, but it's less relevant to this conversation.

But I'm more interested in this framing. Are you saying that tobacco companies are somehow less responsible for their actions because the government didn't stop them from killing their customers? If the government just didn't exist, and tobacco companies could do whatever they wanted, do you think there would be less deaths from cigarettes?

I doubt reading it would have helped. The MAGA folks and anyone adjacent to them on the political spectrum are so propagandized right now it's nearly impossible to have a rational conversation.

I also love that he goes right to how much America and Israel have been pummeling Iran when the article acknowledges that to be the case, but rightly points out that even with that being true, the US is still in a losing position.

I've been sick of it since 2022.

Multiple agents in parallel "working on different features" is where people lose me. I don't care how much friction you've eliminated from the loop, eventually that code has to be looked at. Trying to switch between 5 different feature branches and properly review the code, even with AI help, if done properly is going to eat up most of not all the productivity improvements. The only way around it is to start pencils whipping reviews.

That's what we want, corporations waging "cyber-war" in the name of national security. Brilliant...

Was talking with someone about this yesterday. From cold start, for me to get to the VM I do my actual work on I have to

1. Enter a password to decrypt the computer

2. Enter a username and password to log into my account

3. Enter another set of credentials to access the corporate VPN

4. Enter another username and password to access the network the VM is on

5. Enter another username and password to get to the actual machine

6. And then navigate a nest of authorization for docker/git/etc to actually do anything useful

What point do you think you're making?

Not sure men fighting for their lives in WW2 is the best comparison point for dev teams having too many standups and retros.

Because I hate dynamically typed languages for anything besides scripting and glue code.

Or are you asking why I haven't had success? Mostly because the people I work with are dead set that Python is perfect for everything. I had one guy argue it should be used for embedded work

Just about anything, as long as it's statically typed.

The domain I work in is basically perfect for Go, so I've been pushing for that.

Millions of people die every year from tobacco, and tobacco companies fought for decades to deny their product causes cancer. In the 20th century alone it's estimated something like 100 million people died world wide thanks to smoking.

That's just one example off the top of my head. There are countless others involving corporations killing people either directly or indirectly in the pursuit of profits. And that's before you start looking at human rights violations, ecological damage, overthrowing of sovereign governments around the world...

Give it a hundred years or so and we're gonna have robots wandering around who about 10% of the time go totally insane and kill anyone around them. But we'll all just shrug and go about our day, because they generate so much revenue for the corporate overlords. What are a few lives when stockholder value is on the line.

It just makes me laugh when people complain about China propping up it's industry to complete globally. The US has overthrown governments to protect its geopolitical priorities.

I've got no love for China, but I'm not gonna shed a tear for a large corporations crying over someone else having an unfair advantage.

It's not like the US hasn't proped up our own industry to push out competition and dominate global markets. Nope, definitely never did that.

We're gonna have to learn some lessons from other engineering fields in this regard. Electrical, civil, mechanical, aerospace... They've all had to put processes in place to intentionally slow things down for a long time. I could throw a circuit board layout together 1000x faster then a team of engineers could have 50 years ago, but that industry has developed a culture of rigorous review processes to ensure quality, which means I couldn't actually move nearly as fast as possible.

Undoubtedly a lot of that comes down to production cost and safety. A plane is far more likely to kill people and it costs a shitload more to produce then an app (though plenty of software is mission critical). But now in software we can move quick enough up front that if we don't start applying some discipline it's going to bite us in the ass in the long run.

Humans are notoriously bad at multitasking. In the "traditional" way of writing software, you'd spend hours focused on one or two things. You'd tick one thing off the list and move to another, usually with some kind of logical connection between them. Its similar to reading a novel, one long continuous narrative requiring prolonged attention. It's exhausting in its own way, but it doesn't leave you feeling fragmentation and wrung out.

But whereas that's like reading a book, the way people are using agents is like scrolling tick tock. If you have 6 or 7 agents going, and you want to keep the pipeline full, you are constantly context switching. Your brain never has a chance to get into deep focus mode. Your attention is constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.

The same thing happens to me if I let myself get distracted at work and try to focus on too many things at once (emails, teams, Jira, actual work...). My brain feels like a fractured mess.

There are some good books on the subject if you're interested:

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — by Nicholas Carr

Amusing Ourselves to Death — by Neil Postman

Dopamine Nation — by Anna Lembke

I mean we could just... not use the damn things. I don't mean completely refuse to use gen AI, but you do not have to be moving at break neck speed all the time. It's okay to let things sit idle, or have one less agent doing shit. Pacing yourself will produce more long term stability and a higher quality product.