programmer in exile

[Frank @jedisct1]

Rust is having its left-pad moment.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

I don’t want technology to “evolve” another bloody inch. I hate that everything demands an app or QR code. I hate supermarket self-checkouts that scold you for “unexpected items” as if you have committed a hate crime with a packet of biscuits. I hate ringing a company and suddenly you’re trapped in a doom loop of an endless conversation with a robot before being left on hold long enough to waste an entire afternoon. I hate how local bank branches are closing and customer service is no longer communication with a bank manager but with an AI bot. I hate websites that force you to prove you’re human by enforcing a dystopian farce quiz to spot 3 sets of traffic lights in a fog of pixelated misery. I hate digital app passwords, verification codes and subscriptions. I hate how town centre car parks often no longer accept cash payments and the only way to park is by registering to another bloody app. I hate receiving unsolicited phone calls from an AI automated robot. And I really hate how the whole digital circus excludes half of the country’s pensioners simply because they never signed up to live inside a smartphone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Rant over.

[Arslan @_ai_jedi]

I've tasted the 9-to-5. I've also tasted being a founder.

I highly recommend being born into generational wealth.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down.

[programmer in exile @swe_in_exile]

Social networks showed that most people have nothing to say. LLMs showed most developers have no ideas to build.

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

When operating LLMs in a conversational mode, it's clear that they are deeply subject to suggestion, and spend a lot of energy just following the implications built into the questions you ask.

"Estimate this quantity." It does so, gives you a long explanation, and it seems convincing.

"Wait, don't you think this number should be higher, because of reason X?" It will say yes of course, I didn't properly consider X, here is a higher answer.

"Wait, don't you think this number should be lower, because of reason Y?" Yes of course. It will give you a lower answer.

People use these for programming.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

This. ⬇️

[NTSC-Jay @VersaceVegeta_]

I’ll never forgive them for fucking up our tech future for data centers.

We were THIS close to $100 4TB SSDs

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Muslims are truly brilliant in the manner by which they've been playing the West (as they repeatedly explained that they would). They use pervasive "woke speak" such as colonialism (to criticize the West) when Islam is the grandest of all colonial powers ever. Fifty-seven countries today are part of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation each of which was once 0% Muslim. Muslims are truly in no position to lecture ANYONE about colonialism other than to accept the crown as the Lionel Messi of colonialists.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

This scene from White Lotus is very poignant. It perfectly captures every progressive person that I know especially academics. It is unthinkable to them that a person might not share their political orientations.

[programmer in exile @swe_in_exile]

@ptrschmdtnlsn At what temperature throttling begins? And how does 50 vs 90 affect the thermal paste?

[Zara Zhang @zarazhangrui]

This paper gives a fancy name to a problem you can already feel in your bones

"The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons." Checking AI output requires deep expertise. Deep expertise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats

So we're building systems that need expert supervision while dismantling the only known process for making experts

The paper calls the shared pool of human expertise the "cognitive commons." Every profession drinks from it. Nobody's refilling it.

By eliminating junior roles, each company is acting totally rationally, and the collective result: a profession that can't catch AI's mistakes anymore because it never learned to do the work in the first place

Who checks AI's homework in 15 years?

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

"You can make any software you want now!"

??? you could always make any software you want

[Noah @NoahKingJr]

Someone should buy LinkedIn and turn it off

[Manish Gill @mgill25]

I chuckled at this HN comment re: recent Github outages:

"These are folks that routinely make it a point to press on system design and scalability during interviews. Now they suddenly can’t scale or design systems but we should accept that?"

[Calum E. Douglas FRAeS @CalumDouglas1]

Top Tip, if you have to start offering your product with a "Switch to Classic View" button, it means your project team are morons and should all be fired for spending a fortune making a product which is shitter than the one you already had and then pissed off all your customers.

[GrapheneOS @GrapheneOS]

Revolut recently banned using GrapheneOS without any justification. They're falsely claiming to do be doing it for security reasons. In reality, they're enforcing licensing Google Play. Revolut doesn't enforce security standards. It runs on Android 9 with no patches since 2018.

[Larry Sanger @lsanger]

Wikipedia's ex-founder here. Four consequential policy discussions are happening on Wikipedia right now. Three of them would empower mainstream media to control what the encyclopedia says, and more importantly, what it doesn't say. A thread. 🧵 👇

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!

Yes, you'll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You'll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you'll never get.

Don't take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?

No. And they won't. Because that's where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.

I've been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you're accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.

Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run!"

You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can't predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won't happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.

The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.

The Microsoft specific problem is Azure - which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.

Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that's not where my long-term fortress is. I'm not saying they're actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.

The bottom line is that it's just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.

The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It's time.

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

Tangentially: the only reason OP is able to "stop looking at assembly" is because a bunch of other people still do. There are compiler codegen bugs constantly, but OP never knows about them because other people who do read ASM find, report and/or fix them before they cause too many downstream problems.

Another way to say this is that the "compiler" does not "get it right". A ton of people, constantly reading the ASM that the compiler outputs, work together to "get it right".... eventually :)

So the proper way to look at this is, if you've stopped reading ASM, that's not because codegen was solved, but rather that you have implicitly decided to outsource to other people the problem of keeping codegen working reliably.