Spyke

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xkcd

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xkcd #3262: Sports Commentary

The reaction to sports pseudo-stats is what really separates casual viewers from real fans. It's the only way to raise stakes on otherwise forgettable games.

"This team is on a 5 game win streak": 🥱

"This player has never lost an away game in June": 😯🍿

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Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them

Things I've realized while working with AI (Claude code):

  • It's fantastic for very small macros and medium length scripts. Think dev ops stuff, pre-commit hooks, transforming data. Keep it small enough to manually review and something you can run without destroying anything important. This can massively boost your codebase QoL. [Double bonus for not wasting tokens to solve the same problem over and over]
  • It's decent-to-good at debugging but not consistent with fixes. It can find some utf encoding edge case that might have taken you 1hr+ but suggest the dumbest bandaid fix you've ever seen. Also very good at spinning up unit test suites for basic edge cases.
  • Due to obvious training bias, it's pretty good with common libraries and cloud platform infrastructure. It could probably help with writing a complex cron call, debugging regex or fixing an IaC config. On the flip side it won't bother to use the latest package version or know your niche/new library.
  • It does better with greenfield because exploring your codebase introduces a ton of bias. It might try to fit in an ugly hack when a refactor to simplify everything is way easier.
  • It's absolutely garbage with UI, just throws the most disorganized HTML together that isn't reactive or reusable. OK enough for ugly internal stuff but God help anyone relying on it for that.
  • This is setting up to be the biggest rug pull in history. People that buy into it heavily just to save a couple bucks on engineer payroll are going to be fucked when they start ratcheting up the token price.

All in all it can be useful when used with care but will never be a magic bullet.

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stop over engineering

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Couple of reasons of varying importance:

  • Security. Even when you limit operations or table access it's very easy to mess something up. Some new employee starts storing sensitive data in the wrong place or a db admin accidentally turns off the wrong permissions, etc...
  • It's secretly more overengineered than a standard api despite looking simpler. If your app needs extremely robust query capabilities then you probably have a use case for an entire analytics stack and could use an open source option. Otherwise your users probably just need basic search, filtering, sorting, etc...
  • Ungodly, Flex Tape tier tight coupling. Part of the purpose of an api is to abstract away implementation details and present a stable contract. Now if you want to migrate/upgrade the database or add a new data source, everyone has to know about it and it's potentially a major breaking change.
  • Familiarity. If someone else steps in to maintain it it's much easier to get up to speed with a more standard stack. You don't need a seven layer salad of enterprise abstraction bullshit, but it's useful to see a familiar separation of auth, queries, security, etc...
  • Having the option to do business logic outside of the database can save countless headaches. Instead of inventing views or kludging sprocs to do some standard transformation, you can pull in a mature library. Some things, such as scrubbing PII, are probably damn near impossible without a higher tier layer to work in.
  • Client support. Your browser/device probably has a few billion options for consuming a REST/HATEOAS/graphql/whatever api. I doubt there's many direct sql options with wide support.

I probably wouldn't do it outside of a tiny solo project. There are plenty of frameworks which do similar things (such as db driven apis) without compromising on flexibility, security or features.

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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

The post misses a few things:

  1. The ai bubble is currently being subsidized to an unimaginable degree. If you were to actually pay true cost for your token usage, you wouldn't be saving that much over an engineer's salary. Probably even worse once AI companies start to extract a real profit. 95% of companies diving into agentic labor will be in for a rude awakening when they balance next year's budget.
  2. The cost to keep ai useful in its current form has a high floor. Unless you keep up with expensive training, your models will drift. You can only scale your model intelligence with more hardware (roughly). In two years, Claude opus 4.8 will still be bloating context to learn about the latest cloud platforms and libraries. A human engineer will get those passively at no cost to the company.
  3. As the complexity of the task grows the complexity of the ai babysitter must match it. Even if Ai stays cost effective, companies can now save money by spinning up bespoke in-house software to cut out vendors (think observability platforms, task tracking, product design, marketing systems, etc...). No matter how many adversarial reviews and sub agents you spin up, an Ai can't grasp the full context of your company and it's shifting priorities. The software engineer role transitions to a pseudo-sysadmin + product architect.

C-suites don't want know about software and don't care about non functional requirements (security, availability, audit ability, etc...). They just want to wave a magic wand and have a product appear, which is what Ai provides the illusion of. That's why all current Ai software is garbage, but the smarter companies will catch on

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[Video] Missiles barrage hits Tel Aviv

Comment sections have been absolutely fucked since this started. I've seen some reports that these are hitting military targets but apparently I should be cheering about rockets landing a few dozen meters from this apartment?

I remember a video of an Israeli rocket hitting just outside a shop window in Yemen/Iran at a similar distance and people were balking that it could be hitting anything of strategic importance. Suddenly pictures of collapsed apartments and hospitals are fine because it's the guys you don't like?

Apparently it's a bad take for me to think civilians shouldn't be bombed regardless of how much Zionist brainwashing they have. People talking about "they deserve it" and pointing to Isreal opinion polls showing 60% support X awful thing. Last time I checked, a rocket doesn't take a survey before it explodes. So 4/10 people in that explosion deserve to die by association?

You all make me sick, down vote away.

me_irl

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Me_irl

Someone should make a site that quizzes you on time travel knowledge. Go through the ages: how do you start a fire, how do you make steel & what's the best method of smelting, what is germ theory & the best methods for preserving food, what are the causes of common diseases, how do you make a steam engine, what is penicillin & how do you produce it at scale, how do you make a battery, how do you make a solar panel, how does nuclear energy work, etc...