There is a quote of Linus that impacted how I select technology, something like
> I choose Fedora because it just works. I want to spend my time working on the kernel, not fiddling to get my OS to work.
So I choose mature technologies for the non-core competencies I'm working with, so I can focus on those core competencies. It's a medicine for NIH syndrome.
I'm personally switched from (n)vim to vscode for this reason, so I can now fiddle with a custom agent setup.
Storage Wars is making a comeback? Once that show came out everyone started bidding ridiculous amounts on overdue storage units. I guess maybe it's calmed down by now, but articles like this will just bring it right back and make it unprofitable.
This key point really hits home for us. We've had sites that have plenty of hardware behind it get slammed by crappy scrapers that just obliterate the site, even with caching and behind CloudFlare.
So they steal your content, keep people from actually seeing it on your site and then obliterate your site which requires you to pay more for hosting, all while not making money anymore.
"Uncontrolled web scraping inflicts heavy technical and financial burdens on publishing infrastructure. Automated bots consume massive server and CDN resources without providing any audience engagement, which spikes operational costs while degrading site performance for real human users. One Akamai customer reclaimed 97% of their request volume by using “tarpitting,” which allows publishers to frustrate these bots."
Never been a fan of iTunes, at any time. Definitely have preferred Winamp throughout my life. But, I've also always preferred to organize my music by folders as well and iTunes never really liked that.
I've been watching the /r/cli and /r/tui subreddits for some time. The amount of vibe coded apps posted there just continues to climb. Some people in the comments for these apps can be quite rude when they read the description and find out its vibe coded. Nevermind how vile some can be when it's not in the announcement but the author lets them know down the line in the comments.
/r/chrome_extensions feels like it's getting close to being 100% LLM generated, extension code, submission descriptions which read like you accidentally went to LinkedIn, and generic LLM replies
Ha! I got raked over the coals when I asked for some help in a vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem, what I tried to do to solve it and at the very end I also mentioned that I asked AI and that it gave me an absurd answer. So many people just read the one line and gave me an earful.
I don't love seeing slop everywhere and I don't feel good about models being trained on people's hard work, but... I also have a hard time believing my work was ever much different. I've always regurgitated and synthesized existing solutions. I took them from open source examples. I read people's blogs. I'm basically a really slow LLM most of the time. Is that a form of deception too? I really wonder how much of a difference it is sometimes. Maybe LLMs are just a shortcut of sorts to get where we've previously gotten using very similar means. Just absorbing and recycling ideas, learning by reinforcement, so on.
That's a valid take. I think there's substance to that claim. Maybe what I've been struggling with lately is how blurry the lines seem to be. When am I building on top of something, and when am I claiming credit I don't deserve?
Along these lines, an interesting category of work is when I have an LLM do something I could do myself. I totally understand the code, I instruct it all the way, I have it redo things, revise, rejig, etc... But I don't actually write any code. How responsible am I for any of that?
At work there are a ton of small scripts I use for piping data around ad-hoc, and this is often how I do it. Claude can make dumb pipes really well and remarkably quickly with reasonably clear specs given to it. I compose all kinds of specs, reports, plans, etc. using this workflow. And I find myself wondering... How much of this is me? How much credit do I deserve? The code is gone, the outputs remain, and I can't quite tell how responsible I am for the end product. It's a strange experience.
To me it's about effort more than anything. If you're sharing your work with others, people want to see things in which the author put effort into. Likewise, if I put effort into an endeavour I can feel good about the result.
Do you have to know Assembler to be able to write code in Java? With the point being that you rarely know the underlying mechanics - and the same if true for vibe coding.
Nah, but you have to actually put the work in to get the credit. Lazily vibe coding slop and then passing it off as your work is like claiming you cooked a microwave meal.
In my experience no, but I don't think that's a problem.
It's fascinating to see so many ideas and so much enthusiasm. I sometimes wonder if the fervor will die down as people realize it's still really hard to make truly fantastic software, but it's hard to say. There's a ton of inertia behind the vibe coding rush.
I also wonder if vibe coding is actually somewhat incompatible with the states of mind and contemplation that's often required to figure out how to solve problems properly. It isn't clear if you can brute force great solutions without putting in the initial domain distillation and idea incubation and so on. I'm sure there are exceptions but I have a feeling it'll never be trivial to come up with truly good and novel ideas for software, and vibing to get there might not make it any easier.
I am old enough to remember old programmers complaining about the wave of new shareware/freeware apps that people made with Visual Basic when that came out. Many of the apps were visually awful because it opened up desktop app development to people with no aesthetic experience.
I don’t see that awful style any more despite those tools for rapid UI creation still existing, did those people get better or did they get bored and move on to other things?
I guess the same will happen with vibe-coders, they’ll get the experience to make better software or their poor quality apps won’t give them what they want and they’ll move on.
To be fair, he did say that this crackdown and investigations would happen everywhere. He definitely didn't need to single out Democratic states, that's just dumb. Though the most recent fraud exposure pieces have shown rampant fraud in both MN and CA.
Too tired to write a novel like I usually would here, but we control the printing and, in large part, the distribution of USD. We don't control anything about gold. Then the USD was king, it entailed tremendous power and control in many ways beyond the obvious like the ability to try to kick people out of the 'global' economy. This is the not-so-secret purpose behind BRICS and dates back to issues starting in 1971.
I've been seeing lots of sites ban AI content, so it's not just you. At the very least, I think there should be a law that requires AI content, videos, etc. to be identified as AI. It's getting really hard to tell what is even real and what isn't now :(
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
I'm sure I watched a documentary that said it basically wasn't feasible to launch the other shuttle. All checks and preparations would have to be done in absolute record time, with no mistakes and under timelines never attempted before. But even if they tried, you have the obvious question of - we know the core issue isn't solved and we're about to launch the second shuttle with the exact same design into orbit, if it suffers the same problem then what? But afaik the second one while important wasn't as much of a blocker as the first one. It just wasn't possible in time - it's not like the first shuttle could stay in orbit indefinitely too.
Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?
It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
And Buran(soviet copy of the shuttle) could and in fact did fly completely unmanned. In a way it's a shame the collapse of the soviet union killed that program, because a crew less shuttle would have been a huge asset to have.
I'm not surprised more people don't know about the X-37, but it's in effect the distillation of the Shuttle program to a very effective vehicle: Crewless, reusable, cheap, and effective.
Bureaucratic requirements and institutional jockeying largely ballooned the Shuttle into something it was never supposed to be.
You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
It's certainly about their lives, but it's also about not tanking the program due to catastrophic failure. The astronauts are going to do it regardless of the risk.
You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then.
SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
By that logic, the fatality rate in NYC skyscrapers on 9/11 was something like 1500%, since there were <200 skyscrapers and ~2,700 people died.
It doesn't make any sense. Your numerator and denominator need to use the same units. The rate of fatal accidents was 2/135. The rate of crew fatalities was 14/355. The rate for crew-flight fatalities (separately counting multiple flights by the same person) was 14/852.
If you were evaluating your risk for another flight, the number of crew aboard doesn't affect the risk and it's pretty reasonable to assume that an accident results in either a 0% or 100% fatality rate, so the relevant figure would be the fatal accident rate of 2/135. If your flight follows that profile then that's your probability of dying in an accident.
Probabilities don't explain why they are what they are. If you flip a coin a bunch of times and find that it lands on heads 52% of the time, that doesn't tell you anything about what's going on with that coin to bias it. It's not supposed to. That's a different field altogether.
Strange to see what seems to be one of the most successful companies in the world, that can't keep up with demand downsizing. At least it's management positions it appears.
He didn't like any of the OS's out there, decided to make his own and it's essentially taken over the world.
He didn't like any source control systems, decided to make his own and it's essentially taken over the world.
Just kind of mind boggling... it's hard enough to design something once that people really love. Doing it twice like that is still amazing to me.
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