Ricardo Rabanales

Software engineer, watercolor painter and guitar player 🇬🇹

[wispem-wantex @wispem_wantex]

Programmers are the least priestly class imaginable. There's never been a more open and democratic field. Computer programming is gated by cognition, not by membership in a secretive caste.

The degree to which this claim is false is astounding:

- Most programmers are self-taught.

- Encouraging people to explore and learn on their own is the cornerstone of online programmer culture. c.f. "RTFM"

- It's common at companies to ban programmers from business / sales meetings, because they'll blabber about details of how everything works in a way that "scares the hoes" (all non-programmers are hoes).

- *Open source*? Hello?? Programmers invented this

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

The absolute worst thing about opening this app is spotting a banger tweet for 0.2 seconds before the feed auto-refreshes and sends it straight into the void.

Gone forever.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.

I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).

The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.

In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.

They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.

I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.

I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.

I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.

Number one tip: act with agency.

[Ricardo Rabanales @jrslanski]

@rakyll If you don't mind me asking, what were your symptoms?

[John Kim @PremiumGoblin]

The really interesting point here is that most good engineering decisions are trades offs based off of the context of the project and the feature you are trying to build.

For example Strategy and Factory patterns give you flexibility but they inherently add indirection and makes your code harder to read.

Caching improves latency at the cost of consistency issues. There are a lot of examples like this.

Agents can confidently propose any of these patterns confidently but if you blindly follow the AI's suggestions you will end up building what sounds intelligent without it actually being a smart engineering tradeoff.

So next time you discover or re-discover some software paradigm that the agent is proposing and you have low understanding, take a moment to pause and dive in deeper and learn.

This is the best way to get better at AI coding.

[Yannick Buccella MD @YannickBuccella]

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine passed Phase 3, genuinely great news for melanoma patients!

What happens here? They sequence your tumor, find up to 34 mutations unique to it, and build a custom vaccine that trains your immune system to hunt those exact cells.

In a phase 2 trial earlier this year the vaccine with immunotherapy has shown ~49% lower risk of recurrence or death vs immunotherapy alone, which is the current standard of care. We are waiting now for the details of the phase 3.

After that that concept is now expanding to lung, kidney, bladder cancer and hopefully to many more to come.
Huge win for science!

[Ricardo Rabanales @jrslanski]

Can someone explain why recruiters so often send LinkedIn messages on Friday nights? I'm normally not in the mood to answer at that hour, and I tend to completely forget about them by the next week. Is the response rate actually better then?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

The amount of AI writing on OpenAI's docs makes me sick.

Filler sentences for nothing. Mannerisms and phrases humans would not write. Has a human even read this?

And all of this will change how other docs are written, and how we all talk - for the worse IMO.

🤮

[LayoffHedge @LayoffAI]

META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW

Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild.

This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit."

A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy."

Here is what's behind it.

Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees."

The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists.

"It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing."

At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes.

Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year.

That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact."

The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger.

META declined to comment.

[Juan Francisco Sandoval @JSandoval1982]

En la @USAC_oficial de Walter Mazariegos no hay clases presenciales, pero sí actos para inaugurar el Mundial de Fútbol.

Así convirtió el usurpador a la Universidad del Pueblo, con la complacencia de una Corte de Constitucionalidad que terminó legitimando su permanencia.

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Me using Claude Opus 4.8 to rename a file

[Ricardo Rabanales @jrslanski]

@Im_IrushiK Yup, at least yours is a little bit better

[⭕ AI & Design (Marco) @AIandDesign]

I'm not gonna lie, the @Meta layoffs are some of the most dystopian I've ever seen. They got told to work from home, they were sent the emails at 4AM in the morning. Those who weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move, preparing AI to take their job as well. They're literally training the AI that will eliminate their position as well.

Meanwhile, Meta is raking in RECORD PROFITS.

I am a massive, unapologetic AI enthusiast. Yet, this is NOT the future I had in mind.

I wish for Meta to crash and burn. This is not the way. Literally nobody benefits from this.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Meta laying off 10% of staff when revenue is at an all-time high, revenue growth is a beast (33% YoY!!), profits at an all-time high:

just depressing

These layoffs are not because Meta needs to lay off, but because Zuck wanted to lay off for whatever reason

[Glitchbyte @0xglitchbyte]

When are we going to stop pretending oneshotting bun’s rewrite was a good idea?

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

It’s 2018 and your coworker just sent you a 400 line pull request.

You get a cup of coffee and sit down to review it.

It’s beautiful. Elegant micro-refactors. Crispy method names.

You catch a few things, but that’s ok. It’s part of the dance. They didn’t consider extensibility on part of their API. Here’s a comment buddy.

They respond in an hour saying they think we should do one piece differently than your comment. Hey let’s jump into a room and figure it out. We can’t just agree to disagree, this code is too important.

The PR merges and goes to prod. You feel a shared sense of ownership and accomplishment.

That night you go to sleep and dream of that code. You can still see the shapes of it on the backs of your eyelids, your IDE syntax highlighting sparking neurons in your reptile brain.

You go to work the next day ready to go. You understand the system. N is your foundation. Time to build n+1.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

"Non technical teams shipping production code" - coinbase

[Ricardo Rabanales @jrslanski]

@DanielBlancoSWE ¿Tu esposa es guatemalteca? ¿O literal Guatemala nada ver por ningún lado aparte de que andan viajando por aquí?
¡Que disfruten mucho el país y felicidades por la boda!

[Linghua Jin 🥥 🌴 @LinghuaJ]

When I just joined @Google many years ago, my tech lead - who is an exceptional engineer told me on the first week - you are not paid by the number of lines.

Reduce the complexity of the system and reduce the entropy is always the goal to maintain complex systems. It is specially true today with all the AI generated code.

So how many lines can you remove?

[Ricardo Rabanales @jrslanski]

@DanielBlancoSWE No te voy a decir mentiras, el pan en Guatemala tiende a ser malo 😢