yallpendantools

> I also understand the code.

and the product, the team, and (no matter how shallowly) the organizational pressures and politics. Whether we like it or not, those are part of the problems developers solve. Even something as rudimentary as knowing what is feasible to test given your deadline isn't something you can encode in a model[1]. Code does not exist in a vacuum.

I say this even with the latest models, it seems as soon as your development practice falls out of the ideals written up in blogposts of the previous ZIRP decade, you have to course correct. I use this term because the AI is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically useless, if not also irresponsible.

Recent anecdote (literally today): we've been having Claude write exhaustive test suites to eat at the coverage backlog. Lately, we noticed that tests in develop are even more flakier than usual. Our whole suite runs in 30-40min but lately it could exceed an hour and then fail.

It seems Claude took "exhaustive tests" to mean "exhaust the compute resources of the Jenkins node". What's worse is it wrote those tests for features that have been disabled and would soon be rewritten anyway.[1] I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites and this is the first time an LLM "failed" this assignment for me.

Code is cheap. The right code (or lack thereof) for the right situation takes meatspacebrainpower.

[1] The solution here is to run your company/team 100% as agents so they have the full context of project timelines, resources, customer feedback, etc. ala stevey and gtan but my reasons why I don't believe in that has already been articulated elsewhere.

"Paperclip factory thinks everything is raw material for more paperclips"

Honest question, is it worth it for an average user to file reports?

The first time I tried this was the last time I tried. It was ca. 2012 on an Acer laptop that I personally configured to dual-boot. My memory is not to be trusted but

- the biggest problem for me was that it asked for a core dump/logfile, which I agreed to, but for some reason or another it could not produce/extract said debug info and I got stuck in a loop of whoopsie trying and failing.

- smaller grievance (I might be wrong) is that I had to create some account (Launchpad?) in order to report the bug. Why can't it be anonymous?!

Everytime I turned this Acer laptop on, there will be 2-3 such prompts from Ubuntu that something report-worthy went wrong. You learn to blend it out like the cookie consent dialogs but still annoying. Plus, everything is still perfectly usable so it does seem like the OS is just making a mountain out of a molehill.

Ayenertia, 'tis not to be under-estimated. Tis why, with certainty, many a hacker here maintain some rudimentary Facebook account despite an open disdain for Meta.

I started off with Ubuntu in the 2010s because I wanted to try out Linux but was sure as hell didn't have the patience nor resources to make consumer conveniences like WiFi just work. The local LUG was also heavily promoting it; that's even more inertia.

Then I got fancy and started really customizing my configuration---I got a dotfiles repo. The oldest commit touching a top-level file in my dotfiles is 11 years ago (almost unthinkable to me!). I haven't really tried it out on any other distro but I'm pretty sure I've written some shim or personal bash command relying on something Ubuntu-specific.

I happen to be in the market for a new laptop right now. I'm looking at Starlabs but unfortunately they do not ship with Debian. Today, however, I saw a random woman in a cafe with Linux Mint so that might be my sign to investigate that ecosystem.

Gasp...were we the paperclip maximizers all along?!

Err...have you actually asked someone to get into a Cessna?

Also, "fear of heights" is a totally valid excuse. Fear is a gut reaction and may have nothing to do with one's justified true beliefs. Eg., I know spiders on probability won't harm me but there simply won't be any amicable co-existence between me and any arachnid.

No coincidence it is the textbook example of a complex system.

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

I think the demise of the SE network (not just SO) owes a good bit to this rigid application of the "hacker" mindset (more or less) to a lot of fields that do not benefit from the hacker mindset.

From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!

Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.

Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Last I heard it was 10 or 11 but definitely not 0x3.

At the end of the film "Only Lovers Left Alive", Tom Hiddleston's vampire character comments on an artist they found performing in a bar in Tangier "I hope, for her own sake, she doesn't make it big."

I feel similarly blessed nowadays. I did try to play the fame game with my Github projects but I could never find a problem that enough people cared for to get any kind of traction. Or maybe I really just suck at marketing. Either way, I find myself still fulfilled when doing my personal projects. They are not "side hustles" or a "home lab" or a "software factory". They're really just small projects that solve a problem for me. A lot of it also has to do with my very specific decade-old daily personal driver running Linux; my reticence to guarantee support for Mac and Windows (beyond what Node or Python ships by default) could not be helping my case.

And that's fine! Software with an audience of 1 but really fits in seamlessly with my lifestyle. Plus, if I want to change something, I can do so with zero consideration for other platforms. The reason why I wanted to learn to program in the first place is because I wanted the computer to do what I want it to do. Bend to my will ye golem of bits!

Can you elaborate how this sanitizes input on a password field? What unsanitary password input does it prevent?

I think statement from TFA basically boils down to "stop enforcing maxlengths on passwords, neither in the form field nor the DB". I'm no security expert but I'm a `correct horse battery staple`-adherent so if anything, password fields should have a minimum length, not maximum. Short passwords should be what's considered dirty.

It's like watching flat earthers launch yet another experiment to prove the earth is flat. We already know the outcome, including the subsequent press release that has the words "very promising" and "flawed assumptions" in the same sentence. But this "flat earther" has billions to burn and enough clout to keep investors and the media in the carousel for the better part of the next few years.

We need https://xkcd.com/1742/ but maybe with a different scale category.

Unlike most other people here, I wouldn't really say I've developed a radar for "the vibecoded webpage design"; I thankfully don't dabble as much with FE nowadays so if you told me this is default Bootstrap 4 or something, I'd have believed you. But as I scrolled through the claims, my AI-generated text radar pinged hard and I was caught in a moment of dissonance between the sleek design and the AI-cadenced copy.

Suddenly, I would've had more confidence if this was a black default font text on a white webpage, served from a .edu domain.

> The nightly is rebuilt from every push to main and published as a pre-release on GitHub. Unsigned, so the first launch asks you to confirm.

But with only two commits within the hour this really reads more like a concept of a release plan than an actual regimented/automated release process.

My problem with vibecoded projects was never whether if it was going to work but whether if the failure modes are known. And you can only know the failure modes if you check your work. Hence why, I realized that a history of alpha and beta releases for an opensource project is a signal of quality.

I've been doing martial arts for more than 20 years, some in TMA, some in modern boxing/kickboxing. I have yet to meet an "out of touch Kung Fu master" in person. Nobody thinks they can clear the bar or win in a ruleset they haven't trained for. I mean I don't deny Frank Dux, George Dilman, and the DUST guy exist, nor do I support their claims. It's just that they are larger-than-life personalities to start with and I haven't met them in person.

Similarly, most of the programmers skeptical about AI---me included---don't really do so out of a threat to a domain we've mastered. The problem is, models, to this day, need supervision so they understand requirements, so they know where to properly look for prior art, so that they "understand" the existing architecture. That includes you, Claude. Our kung fu has been six months away from obsolescence since roundabouts 2022 and in 2026 they even rehired a bunch of out-of-touch kung fu masters.

> The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies.

Eh? Martial arts has always been a mix of utility and cultural artifact.

Greco-Roman wrestling flourished in a/alongside of military utility. Greeks and Romans had swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Boxing also traces its history all the way back to the Greeks.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese arts developed in a society with, also, swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Notably these cultures often included weapons training ("kobudo" in Japanese) in their curriculum but that did not phase out the empty-handed aspect of the art.

Catch wrestling developed among sailors who would not be strangers to guns and rifles.

BJJ developed, well, today.

There has always been a component of sportsmanship and self-improvement in martial arts. Carmack misreads this introduction, methinks.

[MIGHT HAVE INACCURATE IMPLICATIONS BUT PRESERVED FOR POSTERITY:]

In Germany I don't think that counts. "Software Engineering" as a title isn't regulated (as kcexn is asking for). The German term "Softwareentwickler" more literally translates to "Software Developer" (as opposed to "Ingenieur") but I don't see companies having problems translating that in job posts and even contracts to "Software Engineer". I've never seen "Softwareingenieur" used tbf.

Getting into Germany as a Software Engineer (for app development) is also as relatively frictionless as it gets in comparison to more-traditional engineering fields.

Verdi is the German trade union so they have to make these kinds of distinctions about which professions they can represent. Don't quote me on this one but I think Verdi represents very little of the modern "app development" software engineers. I guess those who work for more traditional German industries like auto-manufacturing can fall under their umbrella.

---

[LESS INACCURATE EDIT AND MY THOUGHTS IN LESS WORDS:]

In Germany "Ingenieur" (Engineer) is a loaded term with legal implications so "Software Engineer" is "Softwareentiwickler" (Software Developer) instead. But really this is an HR sleight-of-hand trick. At the end of the day, getting into professional Softwareentwicklung is the same in Germany as in elsewhere that calls it "Software Engineering" (and IMO is what kcexn was asking about anyway).

I think we often don't realize how much performance is part of the user requirements (i.e., "the thing it was meant to do") because users don't specify that as a requirement. And when they do we get all engineer-y about it and start asking about TTFBs, throughput rates, TPS's and nobody gets anything sensible out of the conversation. But users don't mention it because they don't know how slow complex systems could be or how complex a mere CMS could be that for them this is one of those requirements that don't even need to be said.

Anecdata time...

There was once a scrappy start-up who, like all scrappy start-ups, was taking on the heavyweight incumbent gorilla of the industry. They started poaching the small customers from the gorilla, just enough for the gorilla to notice. These customers often cited how "fast and lightweight" the start-up's platform was compared to the gorilla.

The claim wasn't really supported by Grafana. The numbers weren't bad; in fact they were very average. For some metrics, the gorilla was actually still the gold standard the scrappy start-up targeted. The engineers suspected "fast and lightweight" had more to do with the user experience (they had smoothly-animated loading screens) than actual server performance. Still, it's not a complaint so they took that as a win.

After a couple of years of steady growth poaching from the gorilla, they started getting bug reports of slow performance. The customers have been seeing more and more of the smooth loading screen animations and less of the data they actually need to work on. And this time, the claims were supported by Grafana! There was no way to massage the statistics to even claim the reports are outliers or to pass the blame on to the unreliable ISPs.

The problem, it turns out, was that they were sending emails as notifications for a bunch of user actions and at that point there were about 2-3 such user actions per minute. While they could async some of those, there were a bunch whose succeeding states assumed that the notifications have been sent.

After three weeks of profiling and going through the whole performance optimization playbook, the fix boiled down to a one-liner in SQLAlchemy that offloaded loading notification mailing lists to Postgres cursors rather than loading whole lists into memory in one go.

Moral of the story: no one is asking you to build a racecar but that doesn't mean performance is not table stakes. A good senior engineer knows just where the balance is to still deliver business value. That is the salary you are paying for.

We have a partial list from https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

Even if the authors died immediately after publication there is no way the copyright has expired.

I'm not really the most AI-friendly person around but this news cycle is just as equally annoying.

"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.

From https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.

Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.

> But fuzzy searches can be extremely useful. Most folks are "fuzzy." > > Google built a pretty huge empire, on simple, fuzzy search.

I was considering whether OP's complaint is an engineer's thing. My conclusion, based on my own experience is, the more your user base tends toward power-users/highly-skilled use cases, the more deterministic your search should be.

A random guy might try to look for a kid's novel series about wizards that sounds like "Happy Fathers". That's when you need Google-level fuzzy search to bridge that gap and suggest "Harry Potter". As a general search engine, Google encounters this a lot.

Same guy asks a librarian, the librarian would instantly know what he's talking about. The Librarian searches the catalog for "Harry Potter" but might misspell it "Harry Poter" or search for "the philosopher's stone" in a US catalog. These cases can be fairly covered by deterministic search methods/classic indexing.

Amen! I hate this trend towards fuzzy-first for everything. Deterministic should be default, fuzzy should be a special toggle.

I'd say close to 90% of my daily searches could be served with exact matching. The next 8-9% could be solved by a little more deterministic sophistication (e.g., edit distance, equivalence classes for synonyms). Then the last 1-2% is when I really need some fuzzy magic; mostly to give me an idea what to do with obscure programming-related problems.

I say let the coaches have the right to initiate a VAR review. They inform an official they want a certain moment/decision/action reviewed. As long as the review gets resolved in their favor, they can keep invoking VAR. This would disincentivize review spamming, disrupting play. If there are too many VAR calls in a game, you can squarely blame the ref.

Coaches get in the face of the officials already anyway. This just gives the action a chance at being productive rather than an opportunity to get a red card.

Yes, this is based on the derided review system of Olympic Taekwondo. It's horrible in a fight sport but football is a ball game; somebody tell Paredes and Paraguay please.

I'm almost too afraid to ask but what the hell...what makes a good half-time show?

I ask in earnest. I'm not American. I know there's a huuugggee buzz on who gets to do the Superbowl half-time show. But they all look the same to me: overly-polished extravagant pop performances. That can be an insult or a compliment depending on your mood but I say that as a fact. That description applies to the WC half-time show too so I don't see what makes it bad. Maybe you can accuse it of being even more over-the-top and garishly extravagant but does that make it bad?

Bad Bunny's half-time show seems to be generally considered good. Well, he's a good performer definitely and performed his show well. But what makes that different from the universally-panned WC one?

For the record, Bad Bunny isn't even in my daily playlist. I do have Coldplay but Chris Martin was so peripheral to the WC spectacle I didn't even notice him during the live broadcast.

It feels to me there's something else merited here other than just the performance itself. Bad Bunny, given his background and off-stage activism, was largely seen as a political statement. The WC show just seems too foreign for the core non-Northern American market.

I watched the WC final in a noisy bar. During the halftime the bar had its own entertainment while a muted Justin Bieber playing his guitar emoted on the big screen. I've since watched it in Youtube and I still don't get the universal disdain for it. Maybe they should've called in a bunch of Eurovision performers?

That's really not a good comparison. When you screenshare, even when you forget, you are the one who initiated the action. You also have the power to stop it when you realize it. Neither is the case with these glasses.

If everyone did it, welcome to 1984 beyond Orwell's wildest imagination, where the Flock cameras have legs and look human. Who needs an elaborate entrapment operation when you can observe up close how someone twitches upon mention of Dear Leader's name?

You are thinking of a very shallow America's Funniest Home Videos scenario without considering that there is a lot of daily-life scenarios that rely on the assumption that you are not being filmed by some rando.

- In a lot of places where there is still stigma on various health issues, this kind of implicit privacy could be the difference between people seeking help or not.

- We give off a lot of small but probably "confidential" signals just because we can reasonably assume we are not being recorded. From simple allusions during casual conversation to maybe a quick still frame of someone's notes. What would've been an innocuous statement could become NDA violations when recorded at the fidelity usually reserved for deposition hearings.

- And speaking of innocuous, as anyone who's spent any length of time in the internet would know, it's so easy to take thirty seconds of a two-hour conversation out of context. Now you are giving everyone an eat-all-you-can buffet of your life to take out of context. Company valuations have been decided from less.

All in all, these perv glasses would make society more guarded and less open, and that in an age when people already have a hard time forming relationships.

I think it has to do with how closely people think they are being recorded.

Someone filming/shooting in a park with a kit 18-55mm lens is fine. Swap that with a bulky 300mm or more and you are bound to get some questions asked.

A content creator casually shooting content in a mall is fine but if you start interviewing people, aiming your camera directly at them, it's at least common courtesy if not legal requirement to ask for permission.

Personally speaking, I wouldn't mind someone wearing these creeper specs in public but if they talk to me or if we eat at the same table, I would expect the courtesy of them putting the glasses away.

Is https://didtheyghostyou.com/companies/robert-half an artifact of vibe coding you think? Robert Half is apparently an HR consulting firm but in TFA it links to a very sus `https://www.google.com/aclk`. What an oversight given the assurances that submissions are reviewed and moderated. Or is Google outsourcing HiRing to Robert Half now?

All true what you say. My question is whether (a) AI models drew significant investor attention before GPT3 and (b) whether AI models at the time had any credibility to make the claim of being too powerful and needing control.

Regarding (a): I know that AI funding came and went (i.e., there's no AI winter to speak of if there wasn't a hot summer of funding in the first place) but that funding, to my knowledge, came mostly from government grants, not investors seeking an IPO payday. They were in it for the military superiority (e.g., being able to decrypt Russian comms on the fly without need for a trained translator) which leads us to...

Regarding (b): Way I see it, AI advancements in the 70s and even the 2000s (when I first got into computers) or the big-data boom of the early 2010s (when I got into this industry) could not raise the existential crisis narrative of post-GPT3 companies because they were not generative[1] nor agentic. Post-GPT3 LLMs are the first class of AI agents/algorithms which could've credibly triggered this narrative.

(Not a judgment on whether the HF incident is true or not. Just the fact that we're even discussing this implies "credible trigger".)

Thinking about it, I guess jackb4040 is making a reference to the beginning of TFA but all that claims is that Microsoft invested more into OpenAI after they made similar claims about GPT2 but sorry I don't consider Microsoft as "investors in general"; as a big tech company/monopoly they are actually in the business of making moonshots one way or another in things that advance computing. I'm talking more about VC firms, who are maybe slightly more into investing in a future-profitable unicorn than advancing computing.

Sorry for babbling; I don't have my brevity flag on at the moment, among other human failings. All I'm saying is, at the time of GPT2, OpenAI was still cosplaying as a non-profit so it was hardly in the "general investor market".

[1] I mean, okay, we've had Mark V. Shaney, and No Man's Sky is a handful of years pre-GPT3 but, again, they could not sustain this kind of narrative at scale.

> Investors have rewarded every story of "our models are too powerful to be controlled" since before ChatGPT.

Can you elaborate/refresh my memory? IIRC before ChatGPT 3 there wasn't really an investor market for AI models, rather crypto. I remember playing with the likes of Stable Diffusion pre-ChatGPT 3 but only the likes of Altman and Musk were talking about AI too powerful to be controlled (which is notably the rationale of OpenAI's original charter); still investors in general were hardly invested at the time.

> Is that by weight? By volume?

It's holding up 3300 pounds. Pounds is a unit of weight.

> Even so, spaghetti strand is not known for strength or tension resistance even when considering the weight/size/volume.

That's...kinda the point? We have something we don't give two thoughts about (slug tooth) comparable in scale to something not known for strength or tension resistance (spaghetti) holding up to something ginormous as if it's magic. Clearly, we should study slug teeth more!

Imagine if a strand of spaghetti can hold 3300 pounds. It's not possible with spaghetti but with slug teeth, it is! Now imagine the possibilities!

Reminds me of the tensest moment in my first month driving and with a brand new car too.

I started driving and something beeped. I was in pretty thick traffic at the time so I nervously (I can't emphasize this enough) found a quieter side road to troubleshoot.

I think there was also an indicator on the dashboard to couple with the beep but if it did, the icon representation left much for guesswork. After about five minutes rifling through the manual, I figured out the car was telling me the handbrake was not fully disengaged.

It's not as catastrophic as it sounds---the car drove smoothly when I started it. I was only off by a few millimeters. The way I disengaged the handbrake at the time padded my knuckles between the lever and the panel, leading to a gap from full disengagement.

I would still be confused in traffic had I known what the issue was from the get-go but I would also be way less nervous. The kind of nerves a rookie driver could really do away with. I could've addressed that problem on a red light.