Great write up!

Of course, I never stopped editing my code in vi so I missed some of the editor frustrations.

We do always squash merge, which certainly helps.

I was not aware of cliff.toml. Thank you!

Oh, nice.

I’m always looking for another ChangeLog tool.

That said, I never leave my ChamgeLogs up to automation.

My git logs are open to my users for full details, but my ChangeLogs are how I communicate which changes my users probably need to be aware of.

So far, this hasn’t yielded well to automation. But my team is still considering standardizing our commit log messages enough to allow it someday.

If one person has never used Twitter, I think they get all three antidote doses.

Okay, this is fun, but it’s time for an old programmer to yell at the cloud, a little bit:

The cost per AI request is not trending toward zero.

Current ludicrous costs are subsidized by money from gullible investors.

The cost model whole house of cards desperately depends on the poorly supported belief that the costs will rocket downward due to some future incredible discovery very very soon.

We’re watching an edurance test between irrational investors and the stubborn boring nearly completely spent tail end of Moore’s law.

My money is in a mattress waiting to buy a ten pack of discount GPU chips.

Hallucinating a new unpredictable result every time will never make any sense for work that even slightly matters.

But, this test still super fucking cool. I can think of half a dozen novel valuable ways to apply this for real world use. Of course, the reason I can think of those is because I’m an actual expert in computers.

Finally - I keep noticing that the biggest AI apologists I meet tend to be people who aren’t experts in computers, and are tired of their “million dollar” secret idea being ignored by actual computer experts.

I think it is great that the barrier of entry is going down for building each unique million dollar idea.

For the ideas that turn out to actually be market viable, I look forward to collaborating with some folks in exchange for hard cash, after the AI runs out of lucky guesses.

If we can’t make an equitable deal, I look forward to spending a few weeks catching up to their AI start-up proof-of-concept, and then spending 5 years courting their customers to my new solution using hard work and hard earned decades of expert knowledge.

This cool AI stuff does change things, but it changes things far less than the tech bros hope you will believe.

Matt lost the will to live in a world where the “Does anyone want to play GameCube later?” mug sits unused.

Yes. But somehow worse: Specifically, OneDrive sync broke shit on the PC, without opting in on the phone, and after being uninstalled on the PC.

Oh, gee. A Microsoft product that worked perfectly locally is about to require a subscription. Who could have possibly guessed that would happen, yet again? (This is sarcasm.)

I really like OneNote, but I decided to learn something else when I realized which way the wind was blowing.

There’s not even credible evidence, yet, that A.G.I is even possible (edit: as a human designed intentional outcome, to concede the point that nature has accomplished it, lol. Edit 2: Wait, the A stands for Artificial. Not sure I needed edit 1, after all. But I’m gonna leave it.) much less some kind of imminent race. This is some “just in case P=NP” bullshit.

Also, for the love of anything, don’t help fucking “don’t be evil was too hard for us” be the ones to reach AGI first, if you’re able to help.

If Google does achieve AGI first, SkyNet will immediately kill Sergei, anyway, before it kills the rest of us.

It’s like none of these clowns have ever read a book.

Today I learned the term Vibe Coding. I love it.

Edit: This article is a treasure.

The concept of vibe coding elaborates on Karpathy’s claim from 2023 that “the hottest new programming language is English”,

Claim from 2023?! Lol. I’ve heard (BASIC) that (COBOL) before (Ruby).

A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] AI researcher Simon Willison said: “If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you’ve reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that’s not vibe coding in my book—that’s using an LLM as a typing assistant.”[1]

Did we make it from AI hype to AI dunk in the space of a single Wikipedia article? Lol.

research papers that require a strong background in mathematics and cryptography to understand and implement.

Lol. I guess that makes sense. Outside of school, we hope that all authentication will be implemented only cryptography experts anyway.

Could you maybe suggest some resources on this topic?

Not really, sorry. I’m not aware of anyone creating resources for your situation.

Or should I choose a simpler project?

For some context, cryptography isn’t even usually implemented “completely correctly” by experts. That’s part of why we have constant software security patches.

If I were in your shoes, I guess it would depend on my instructor and advisors.

If I felt like they have the skills to catch mistakes and no time to help correct mistakes, then I would just choose a simpler project. If they’re cool with awarding a good grade for a functional demo, I might just go for it.

I guess I would take this one to an advisor and get some feedback on practicality.

Russian gravity does seem unusually politically motivated…

The one redeeming aspect of how Putin constantly makes enemies is that he’ll never ever get to truly relax again.

Humans aren’t capable of keeping track of the number of people he’s harmed badly enough that they may someday do him violence.

He can never let his guard down, and will never be able to trust anyone.

If that man somehow dies peacefully, I’ll buy a lottery ticket the same day, because that would be a whale of a black swan event.

Yeah. Warning - uninvited poetic waxing on feature flags and leadership choices, incoming…

We all agree we inevitably do some live testing at our customers risk, because no test environment is perfect.

With feature flags, we’re able to negotiate how many of our customers to test on, at a time.

But some of us prefer to forgo feature flags and risk our entire customer base on every change. It saves money, at least for a little while.

I’m not exactly fun at executive leadership meetings, but somehow I keep getting invited to them. Heh.

Holy shit. This is weirder than I realized.

I’m just realizing that the person submitting the change was demanding that their lost feature be re-added, and the repo owner decided to YOLO the change into master. Lol.

The real clue here is the cropped top line “refactor…”

“Here’s a huge mostly unnecessary format change that incidentally loses some functionality I don’t care about”.

Followed by “why won’t anyone accept my contributions?!”

Wow. This really blew up.

This is a good list. Another, often overlooked is:

Sometimes we just get incredibly unlucky and interview at the same time as someone wildly unusually more qualified.

“it’s not that hard” just announces to the world that you haven’t tried to do anything hard with it.

Yes! I too now intend to stop calling Chevrolet of Watsonville with my Python questions.