Tommy

Software engineer @ PAILOT GmbH || opinions are my own

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

In the last couple of weeks I finally got around to re-creating my portfolio/blog website, and today I'm kinda relaunching it: https://t.co/kEwi4SspTL

Having this as a place to vent my thoughts was really fun last time and I'm happy to have it all back up in a new coat of paint!

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

Shovel seller urges other shovel sellers to stop developing better shovels, as shovels are starting to become dangerous according to them.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Anthropic has urged for a global pause in AI development as artificial-intelligence models are nearing capability to improve without human intervention, per WSJ

[Ladybird @ladybirdbrowser]

Ladybird is moving into a new phase as we work toward our first alpha release.

We are tightening how code enters the project: going forward, code changes will only be introduced by project maintainers, and we will no longer accept public pull requests.

https://t.co/iauF4r9f3q

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@ThePrimeagen If they hadn’t spend so much time here, maybe someone over there would have also realized that it’s a really bad idea to give a public-facing AI power over resetting people’s passwords.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

2 days ago> "You want an extra 8gb of ram thus costing the company an extra $75? I'll have to talk to the VP about this... Your productivity is not worth $75"

1 day ago> "We now are a country of geniousesese and I need you to tokenmaxx, we are going to the moon babe"

today> Guys, I think we fucked up

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

rsync is one of the most critical pieces of Linux userspace btw. It powers infinite amount of backup and sync workflows. Using unsupervised clankers on it is a real war crime

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

@L771834 > languages that ditch "program is a simple text, that we need to parse"

LISPs are unironically this. And experienced LISP programmers use structural edits instead of simple text editing, where they operate on s-expressions directly. See paredit: https://t.co/xJe82RcIhc

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@LowLevelTweets @ThePrimeagen We are using GitLab at work. It’s just a different sort of hell. Last Friday I got a PR with 100 comments, because GitLab reposted my reviewers entire review half a dozen times. Also CI workers regularly aren’t available, so you better host your own.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@HumanWatchVsAI @atmoio It isn’t hard, but it doesn’t sound quite as good to investors.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@valigo NixOS is weaponized autism for “supply chain border control”.

Speaking of which, I’ve used NixOS on my personal machines for years in the past, probably should have been a sign for my now-diagnosed autism lol

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

Follow this advice

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@mindmansions @ThePrimeagen That’s a sales pitch, not a prediction.

Don’t be surprised that the companies trying to sell you shovels are saying that you don’t need any other tools very soon.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@DarrenWest10044 @ThePrimeagen No, ewww. Font ligatures make precise movements with Vim and vim-style bindings hellish. They also look bad.

[Taha Torabpour @TahaTorabpour]

Folks, I'm looking for a new job.

My experience is in low-level systems programming, based in Stuttgart.
Game engines, UI engines, physics and rendering engines.
If this aligns with what you're seeking, please DM me or email me at [email protected]

Portfolio link in the replies.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@NikilKuruvilla @ThePrimeagen Okay, maybe we just have a different understanding of “ecosystem” in this context. The ecosystem is the community, so to me this was about the community from the get go. The ecosystem isn’t even part of the language, but rather would formed around it. And OP said “ecosystem”.

[Łukasz | Wookash Podcast @wookash_podcast]

So many people in replies puzzled.
"Bro, why not use Process Explorer from sysinternals?"

You're missing the point. The time-to-market mentality has clouded your mind.

There are people in this world that have passion. Some of them have passion for programming.

They love growing their knowledge in how systems work, diving deep into internals, learning how to do things in a software realm so that it's aligned with how hardware works.

Some coined the term "mechanical sympathy"

People explore their passions. They don't necessarily want to:
- maximize the efficiency
- beat the competition
- deliver value
- sell the product
- run a business
- automate all the inconveniences
- use higher level languages to be concerned only about their unlimited ideas or w/e

There are people, who left to their own devices, would be very happy to be in their room, tinkering.

That's it.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@NikilKuruvilla @ThePrimeagen Why are you doing this? What’s the incentive for misconstruing what people are saying? Nobody’s talking about JS as such.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@NikilKuruvilla @ThePrimeagen Yes it was. If people didn’t yolo their dependencies that would greatly contain the spread by orders of magnitude. This is relevant to any npm supply chain attack.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@NikilKuruvilla @ThePrimeagen Not JS, but the JS community for whom it’s apparently acceptable to resolve dependency versions at build time and don’t bother to configure npm to only use package versions at least a week or two old.

[Tommy @tommyb_dev]

@k_flowstate Not “for all of us”. At least 50% of my free time goes into programming, I programmed before it was my job and I taught myself because it’s incredibly fun to me. I don’t think I’ll ever stop, even after retiring.
But it’s the people that got in for the money that ruined it, ngl.

[Joran Dirk Greef @jorandirkgreef]

We’ve had on the order of 3 memory bugs in 6 years of TigerBeetle. None RCEs.

On the other hand, our own simulators have proactively found hundreds of (devastatingly catastrophic) distributed systems correctness bugs per year.

Given how hard TigerBeetle’s domain is, in terms of mission critical financial transaction processing, I’ve never for one minute believed that writing TB in a memory safe language such as say TypeScript would somehow magically (!) make any material impact compared to the 100x correctness multiplier of TigerStyle.

That’s because—rather than fall for the fallacy of composition, i.e. to see distributed correctness as a language problem—TigerStyle instead takes ultimate responsibility for the “end to end” correctness of the distributed system as a whole.

Per systems engineering, correctness is always a systems design problem. For example, how to build a reliable whole, (especially) out of unreliable parts, such as broken firmware, bitrot, programmer error etc. In other words, application of the end to end principle.

But when you TigerStyle the design in this way, the world of systems engineering also completely opens up to you and changes how you evaluate systems languages (now things like “power to grammar ratio”, or explicitness, checked arithmetic and precision become more critical and valuable to you).

Of course, it is harder to care about correctness, to take responsibility for correctness end to end.

Yes, you’re forced to begin to worry about the more serious concerns, starting with the basics of static allocation, explicit limits, assertions, deterministic simulation testing and moving to more advanced topics like protocol-awareness and storage fault-tolerance.

But then again, TigerStyle is such a force multiplier, that you achieve mission critical quality, and in less time and with greater velocity.

If you’re tired of production issues, and if you want to “engineer your engineering”, I would encourage you to lift up your thinking to the level of systems design and end to end correctness.

Start thinking about your methodology and begin embracing TigerStyle.

https://t.co/fgtyNCO7SE