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skeeter2020

7,288 karma · joined November 15, 2020

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skeeter2020··on An end to buggy web apps
I'd suggest that their solution of a swarm of agents generating QA slop makes the cure worse than the disease.
skeeter2020··on An end to buggy web apps
did you intentionally just test and fail point one?
skeeter2020··on An end to buggy web apps
>> It is possible now to reliably and automatically detect and fix every bug which users are encountering on the web.

proceeds to give a trivial and then vague example related to usability, the first probably created by AI and the second a notoriously difficult problem to assess and solve for humans with context, let alone AIs...

skeeter2020··on North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist
fake interviews might be excessive but lots of companies send tempting phishing emails as part of the secops, then both collect org-level stats and educate (or shame depending on your take) the employee for getting duped.
skeeter2020··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
"in academics the in-fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low" - interesting to see what happens now that that stakes are just democracy and an entire country!
skeeter2020··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
which is why one or more gravitate to academic administrator, eventually become a professional politician and we're right back to where we started. In the meantime either something exciting or absolutely nothing might happen!
skeeter2020··on Building an AI-native engineering org
and IME the #1 rule for us is work in a profit center, not a cost center. When you're cutting there's a law of diminishing returns, but the floor is so incredibly low you don't want to be near it just to clear the blade.
skeeter2020··on Building an AI-native engineering org
>> I've started largely using this site in a read-only fashion. The SNR here now is too low and I'm too busy. Found my time better spent in more focused offline and online communities.

How's that going for you?

skeeter2020··on Building an AI-native engineering org
I have seen at least one example develop in real time. You typically spent years building before you had a platform, then lack the enthusiasm from senior leadership to invest the next 12-18 months with no new features and hard to quantify - maybe no - returns. Then you get displaced by newcomers who are "platform native"; what this really means is their engineering misteps haven't been discovered yet, or even if they guessed correctly the world has turned and made their previously correct solution now a failing one. And now we have something called "AI-native" that is going to solve this once and for all with some sort of magic, and you can't lead these companies unless you truly believe in the magic.
skeeter2020··on Building an AI-native engineering org
We shipped more code! We merged 5x faster! We spent more tokens!

>> Every time we sped up one step, work piled up at the next... we started going through the entire process of shipping software, one step at a time...

I feel like I'm being gaslit here. You can become CTO with this lack of business fundamentals, and a basic misunderstanding of systems engineering?

skeeter2020··on Commodore 1600 VICmodem
tangentially related - I remember my Dad bringing home a Vic-20, pecking in a sample program and then nothing but syntax errors, despite it being entered exactly the same as the printed manual. Turns out the number 0 and the letter O are not the same thing to a computer.
skeeter2020··on MiniLake Is a Local Databricks API Emulator with SQL, Delta Lake and Spark
Why are you writing tests on the actual provider? IME these types of tests are slow, brittle and don't give you much value. Even if you get a true positive, what can you do about it?
skeeter2020··on DoorDash to Acquire Instacart
Based on the ground you're treading I'd be careful with your casual use of "death sentence" when talking about something that is nothing of the sort, but behaviours that are only a few steps from the real thing.
skeeter2020··on DoorDash to acquire Instacart
>> but also given the insane behavior of the Trump administration, it seems like Instacart had no choice

That's a terrible attitude that's resulted in some of the worst behaviour of capitulation history has ever recorded. What will you call their "pragmatism" when your the target?

skeeter2020··on Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either.
skeeter2020··on Websites Should Be Printable
>> I will take books...

and you can, without attacking the GP statement about their PERSONAL preference, or clumsily trying to tar them with some sort of pejorative NASCAR paintbrush.

skeeter2020··on Challenge Is Gone
My initial reaction as well. If you believe AI has made what you do irrelevant, change what you do. If you really want to do something different, stop playing the knowledge arms race game with a computer program. There has been "analog" LLM-like ventures (aka big, rich tech corporations) for a long time, yet they didn't previously solve all engineering problems; you can now use technology as a great equalizer, or change your focus to something AI can't even do if you don't want to play the game.
skeeter2020··on Challenge Is Gone
Maybe you're not actually solving a problem, but revisiting a solved problem? Maybe you need to pursue bigger problems, or stop playing this version of the game? How can the title be "Challenge is Gone", then the post be about how what you used to do is (you believe) no longer relevant, and you're not sure what's next - isn't this the answer you're looking for?
skeeter2020··on Lego collaboration with Daft Punk
MY kids are now teenagers and stopped playing with lego years ago, but even when they were ALL about the lego it was a very different approach. They have a lot more than I ever did, and it was collect-assemble-display for the most part, compared to my childhood remix approach. I guess when you have a shark that's essentially two-pieces snapped together, or branded minifigs it dramatically cuts down on flexibility & imagination...
skeeter2020··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
isn't this essentially a state broadcaster? You might get one decent show but the committee and bike shedding mostly gives you terrible niche programming that's unsustainable without massive subsidies - and most still show adverts.
skeeter2020··on Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
>> It’ll increase your opportunities to let people know what OS you’re running by at least 10-fold.

Two types of people will benefit: 1. the genuine & naive who want to help but don't make much progress; 2. those who attended Harvard.

skeeter2020··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
it's not hard to imagine Google stating "we're removing this opt-out path because next to no-one uses it, and it will help streamline Android, which will protect the children!"
skeeter2020··on Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown
it's maybe histronic, but definitely drives home their point
skeeter2020··on Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers
I'm in Alberta, Canada where energy is (at least for now!) cheap and plentiful. I'm with a community-owned energy marketer and pay 6 cents per kwh, and just of $3 per GJ. If we paid anywhere near your rates the seperation referendum would have turned out differently!
skeeter2020··on Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case
I thought they were a despot :)
skeeter2020··on Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case
it's not that they don't take it personally and actually feel the pain/ disgust / fear / <whatever>, it's that they hold the tenets of law as absolute and the most important part of the system. This definitely takes a particular type of person.
skeeter2020··on Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash
I find you get more space & amenities for the same price, but it's not much - if any - cheaper.
skeeter2020··on Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash
I recently used airbnb quite a bit in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and found quite a bit of that old vibe, ranging from a spare room in a young brother & sister's house, to more suite-style accomodation. I was very happy with all my stays, specifically the hosts who balanced privacy with friendly helpfulness.
skeeter2020··on DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”
yes, makes sense because bandwidth is less likely to be the bottleneck
skeeter2020··on DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”
Helps use all of the available bandwidth by not blocking (otherwise idle) worker threads waiting for data to arrive. Requests and processing are managed independently, so you essentially get better utilization & improved performance.
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