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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I mean, I also have some autism flavor with enhanced memory, and I don’t either remember my age most of the time. It’s just not terribly relevant information and it keeps changing every year as well. And for the few situations when I do need it, I can work it out with maths, it’s fine.




  • Yeah, I find it really tricky, because LLMs excel at adding yet another implementation to the side, whereas they will barely ever introduce an abstraction to cover both requirements.

    And the humans often don’t really read the code anymore either. They ask the LLM to make a suggestion, then check the diff for plausibility and that’s it. They don’t have to solve it themselves, so they never properly dig into the surrounding context and therefore cannot notice the missing abstraction either.

    And in the end, it’s not just that the humans don’t know the code, it’s also that it becomes near-impossible to refactor, because it’s just too much code to fit into a brain at a time.

    You can’t anymore realize that one part of the codebase should’ve been solved by an already-existing abstraction.
    Instead, you find five places in the codebase that really look like they should’ve been solved with a shared abstraction and then good luck figuring out what the common denominator is and how each of those places should be adjusted to fit this common abstraction, oh and also you didn’t see two more places that really should also be solved that way, but for them your chosen abstraction doesn’t make sense anymore, and then you ask the others and they tell you, oh man, that never made sense, we never really thought about it, because it was so easy to just tell the LLM to build it, and now that feature has to be removed in its entirety, so you just wasted two weeks trying to understand code that never made any sense in the first place.

    Ask me how I know. 😑







  • Was visiting my parents this week and at some point, we were talking about air fryers. Now, we’re German and my parents don’t speak English, but the term “Air Fryer” is still a thing here for marketing bullshit reasons.

    Then my mum had to repeatedly try to pronounce that correctly. And I just saw my dad getting more and more confused, because it sounded a lot like “Er Freier”.

    “Er” is German for “he”. But a “Freier” is, well, the customer of a prostitute.

    🫠


  • I bought a somewhat fancier tea kettle on sale a while ago and the whole day, you can hear it making some noise when you get your head close. I’m guessing, it’s a form of coil whine.

    And yeah, that just irritates me so much. It doesn’t need to do anything at all, unless I press a button on it, so why is it whining?



  • Yeah, I enjoyed when fish shell did their rewrite and people were arguing whether it makes sense technologically, like it’s a mature codebase, so it’s not likely to reduce the number of bugs and yadda yadda yadda.

    None of this mattered, because fish is developed by a group of hobbyists. They didn’t want to continue developing in C++, because it was a pain in the ass. And for sure, one of the reasons they wanted to switch to Rust is because it’s new and exciting.
    These reasons are perfectly valid, because they’re volunteers. If they’re not having fun, then they will just developing.






  • “Oven is going to be a grind, especially the first nine months or so. If work-life balance means a lot of time spent not working, it’s probably not a good fit.”

    Oh man, someone here recently shared a blog post on startup culture in software companies, which likened software to an oven, where you’d add a specific button for a customer and that fucks up your whole architecture for years to come etc…

    For just a moment, I thought this was a direct quote from that blog post.