tajd

what sort of prod apps are you running from it? keen to learn by what other people are doing

There has got to be opportunities here for abstracting over regulation to make it easier to comply with and prove compliance so that risk owners/govt can enact change faster. Now to figure out who would pay for that.

I feel like articles like this need to come with a diagram like this to put it in the context of relevant tradeoffs.

                       High Scale/Revenue
                              │
                              │
      Managed Services        │      Self-hosted K8s
      (Overpaying but         │       (article is
      no choice)              │       pitched here)
                              │
  ────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────
      Low capacity            │         High capacity
                              │
                              │
      Managed Services        │      Managed Services
      (Right choice -         │      (Wasting money on
      focus on product)       │       platform team)
                              │
                        Low Scale/Revenue

Or something like that. Maybe as a function of time as well but that might be harder to do in 2d.

Sure I can absolutely manage my own k8s, but there is no doubt it's easier for me to spin up postgres and ship faster on my own. At enterprise scale it's definitely a lot easier to do everything in k8s and be able to manage as many aspects as possible. I have experience of both.

Looking at an ancient game called Trias/Ternii Lapilli and learning/using maths to figure out if it can be solved https://tom-dickson.com/blog/trias-game-investigation/

It’s similar to tic-tac-toe but slightly different of course.

Found it a great opportunity to learn about new areas of maths. Trying to figure out where to go next with it.

Life is easy when you don't want to think about scale or security. Until you have to, that is.

this is a really interesting talk - thank you for sharing!

I do not but I think I'm growing one!

Potentially the heuristics would be about the level of user state management - e.g. if you're needing to do various workflows vs just presenting content.

I ported my personal website from Jekyll to Astro a few weeks back and I really liked it. Astro is much easier to build and extend for me (and that is a personal preference point - I (and by I mostly mean claude) - and it's cool to add react components in to create more interactive points (but I haven't deployed that element yet).

Speed is probably the same as jekyll - but relative to my react vite and nextjs apps it's about 10 times faster.

I would definitely use Astro for more complicated websites than content driven - but would probably return to nextjs or more hefty full stack solutions for complicated web apps.

Ah ok, potentially I was imprecise - the post office leadership appeared to assume that the software was completely correct. That is what I was trying to frame as "systems are imperfect and people should take care to validate what they are doing"

I think hopefully it raises that awareness that these systems are imperfect and do not allow people to delegate their decision making totally. I'm afraid rise of AI and the increase in more plausible sounding yet incorrect behaviours won't help us there. We should use this as an instructive example on how we can built more transparent/useful systems for all of our users.

This looks really cool! I can't remember what article I was reading the other day but it was advocating for local first software as being the true goal of creating user friendly software -> this app absolutely meet's that goal. Looking forwards to using it.

I really like using UV. I introduced it at work for builds and it made everything a lot faster which was awesome. Now I can remove the other components of the build process and just use one.

I am interested in how they're going to make money eventually, but right now it's working for me.

Does anyone have an idea about how they're going to monetize?

Created a dashboard to help people figure out what renewable energy solutions they could use for their homes in the U.K. https://renewable-home.verdient.co.uk/

Created a game to learn navigational marks in the Solent https://guess-the-mark.verdient.co.uk/

Putting together the landing page for my software business https://verdient.co.uk/

I’m also putting together an analysis of warhammer 40k games and applying operational research techniques to it.

love the receipt printer idea I'm looking into it now

I love this! definitely inspired, I'm quite good at using a journal but there's a lot I lose track of

Yes, 100% this. I’ve seen this idea before somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people started to basically develop more of their own software from first principles like this.

I was doing it today to create a gantt chart from mermaid.

I’ve built other applications inside react components as react seems relatively stable - I don’t really care about react though, only that it has a lot of training data for it.

Yeah maybe. But I think the thing I like is that is takes me a much shorter amount of time to create solutions for my users and myself. Then I can worry about “tech adoption” once I’ve achieved a relevant solution to my users.

If performance is an issue then sure let’s look at options. But I don’t think it’s appropriate to expect that sort of level of insight into an optimised solution from llms - but maybe that’s just because I’ve used them a lot.

They’re just a function of their training data at the end of the day. If you want to use new technology you might have to generate your own training data as it were.

I haven't seen anyone with zero computer skill build apps but I've definitely started building and deploying apps outside my day job that I've been able to put together quickly with the aid of Claude artefacts or copilot. It's really exciting!

Yeah it's interesting to see how it's getting on! I wrote my PhD simulation code in it from the ground up as it had nice fundamental abstractions for parallizable code. Of course now it's just Python and Scala/Java but Julia was great for my purpose.

Yeah - hard agree with this. There's a lot to be said about giving your best effort in proportion to all the other things you're doing in your life.

Thanks for your feedback! I built it as a hobby project to explore this space and learn a bit more so I’ll keep learning!

I shared the concerns of this author. I wrote a free tool to use simple heuristics to predict if text was generated by ai or not - https://isthistextai.com/

I actually built something similar last week

https://bestefforttools.com/workouts

I wanted something to create realistic yet slightly randomised warm ups and finishers - similar to CrossFit wods but more structured.

Behind the scenes I use a formula that estimates a total work capacity.

Feedback welcome!

This is really cool. Whilst it's been fun mucking around with next.js etc (and arguably that's for a different purpose) for an out the box website Jekyll has proven itself time and again. Looking forwards to trying this out.

Yeah exactly.

A lot of the time best practice can also mean “we did it this way last time and it was ok”. I don’t think anyone is saying don’t find improvements in “what is currently defined as best practice” and if they are then that’s your problem.

For the interested reader you can see a paper talking about this by Martin Kleppmann https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05393 - the author of DDIA.

“Ah I can just roll my own in half an hour!” Says the person with a learning curve ahead of them!

Onnx is really helpful for shipping models from development to productionisation environments. It's standard is only designed to allow "safe operations", anything to do with text manipulation, for example, you'd have to write your own operator or glue logic for.

Shameless self promotion here but I wrote a little bit about calling Onnx in Scala here - https://tajd.co.uk/2023/10/15/onnx-interface-scala

This website for comparing vector database solutions might be handy https://vdbs.superlinked.com/

I also arrived at this approach too! Totally agree with the thoughts here.

Writing things down really helped give me a better perspective on the process I use to organise work as well.