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I find it ironic that the concurrent logic added by my colleague, design to (theoretically) save the a nanosecond or two from each API request, has cost me an hour and a half of my time trying to debug it. I doubt the API will see the 27,000,000,000,000 requests needed to offset these “savings”. 😕
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Today’s comp sci’s version of a Freudian slip: typing
whomaiinstead ofwhoamiin Bash. “Whom AI” is the question of the day, apparently. 😛 -
The bridge is open again. My long, personal national nightmare (i.e. mild, almost insignificant, inconvenience for a couple of days) is finally over!
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Kind of crazy seeing Go packages which are effectively WASM builds of C libraries running in a Go WASM runtime, like this sqlite3 port. So that’s WASM sandwiched between two layers of Go. A “WASM smash burger,” if you will. Still, if you want to avoid using Cgo, then I can understand the motivation.
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Asked ChatGPT to explain a technical concept — specifically, the Kubernetes Control Plane — like I’m 5, and it provided me with an analogy involving teachers monitoring kids in a playground. Interesting choice of setting for the analogy. I mean, that is sort of what I asked for.
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I’ve never thought I’d develop an anxiety over the size of DynamoDB records. They max out at 400 KB, and I worry I’d go beyond that whenever I’m extending an already large record. They do take up less space than they seem, though.
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Putting up the Christmas decorations (this is why the ped bridge I use to cross the Yarra is closed.)
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Devlog: Dynamo Browse - Item View Annotations and Asynchronous Tasks
Adding to the UCL extension support in Dynamo Browse the ability to annotate displayed result items, plus scheduling tasks that will be executed in the background. Continue reading →
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Delta of the Defaults 2025
It’s been two years since I published the default apps I use after listening to Hemispheric Views #97 - Duel of the Defaults. A year later, I published a delta listing the changes I’ve made since that original list. Now that Cup Day is here, it’s time for the update no-one asked for. Like last year, I’ll simply list the changes. You can see the original list of defaults here. Continue reading →
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🔗 Birchtree: Browser agent modes are fucking stupid
The demos seem designed for people who don’t book their own plane tickets, who aren’t concerned with cost when doing anything, and who haven’t been grocery shopping in a decade.
I’ve not used any AI browser agents, mainly because I have no personal need of them, so I can’t lay claim to how relatable these demos are. But it is amusing to consider the people coming up with these demos being so out of touch that they would benefit from getting out more often than I do. And this is from someone who doesn’t get out that often. 😀
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🔗 Annie’s Blog: Duck duck duck dichotomy
I was a bit late in coming to this one but this post really resonated with me.
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Manage to catch a sighting of the Long Island Steel Train passing through Albury. 🚂
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Back at “Broady 3”, the standard gauge line between Melbourne and Sydney, waiting for the XPT to Albury. Photo looking upline towards Melbourne.
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Just a reminder that the curated bookmark list on Flamed Fury is amazing. The blogging tag is a favourite of mine.
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Simon Willison quoted François Chollet:
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.
This has been my experience in my career: I have to have had a hand in building something to truly understand it. You can throw at me all the documentation, tutorials, or Slack messages you want; but my understanding from that pales in comparison to working on it myself.
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Found the bug that was plaguing me all week! 🎉 I’ve never been so happy to see faulty code in all my life. Note to self: look closely at the traces next time.
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Marketing emails teasing releases without actually saying what is new are so lame. “Today is a big day for us at Corp. For X years we’ve been champions of doing Thing the best, and all this time we’ve been building up to what we believe is our biggest launch yet. To find out more, watch this video…” Just tell me in the email! I’ll pay attention if I think it’s worth it.
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Either the code or the logs are lying to me! The code is saying “everything is present and accounted for,” while the logs are saying “mate, I’m telling you: this field is not effin’ there.” Who am I to believe? May have a word with a neutral third-party: deployment pipeline.
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One thing I miss about Java docs is that you get a list of types implementing a particular interface. Quite useful when exploring unfamiliar packages. It would be nice for Go’s docs to do something similar. Maybe clicking an interface could highlight the implementing types, for instance.
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Discovered a fatal flaw in attending boardgame night, namely that I don’t know many boardgames. Will need to go through the library and see if any sparks my interest, and learn to play them. Or, I could just bring along Wingspan.
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Interesting factoid about my commute: the time it takes me to walk 2 tram stops equals the time between successive trams on my line. That means that if I miss a tram, I can just walk 2 stops and make it just in time for me to miss the next one.
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Maybe one day Amazon will learn about this great new technology called hypertext and start using links that work. You would think that clicking a link to a security group would bring me to that security group’s config page. Yet you do that in a Lambda’s config section, and it invalidates my session and bring me to the VPC marketing page. AWS links really are the Pachinko machine of the web.
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🔗 ByteSauna: AI can code, but it can’t build software
When you look at the code these people send you, you realize that “making the app production-ready” really means torching the whole thing and starting from scratch.
I do use GenAI in my personal projects occasionally, but I wouldn’t describe what I do as vibe coding. I know what I want done and how I would do it, which helps in knowing whether the generated code is any good. The thought of doing this for an entire software project without the knowledge of what good code looks like doesn’t give me confidence that these vibe coders would see much success for long. Pretty soon, someone who knows what they’re doing will eventually need to come in and clean up the mess.
The fact that I get these requests says something about software engineering. I mean, if software engineering was automated, no one would be looking for technical cofounders.
Indeed.
Via: Birchtree
