ekidd

27 ms·

301.
by ekidd 3y ago
I have used a number of orchestrator platforms in production, including AWS ECS (Docker + custom orchestration), EKS (Kubernetes) and Google Cloud's Kubernetes. I've also used Chef, custom RPM packages and classic Unix startup scr
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by ekidd 3y ago
> very context-specific expertise you only get through experience. When giving advice, I'm often tempted to point to a given situation, and to explain what rule of thumb I used to solve it. But then I would see a junior programmer
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by ekidd 3y ago
Also, registers are a relatively advanced feature mostly used for rapid edits. Registers aren't aimed at first-time users using a mouse. They're aimed at high-speed typists doing complex things. I used Emacs for decades, and never
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by ekidd 3y ago
Well, when I seach for "semgrep", I get a very nice corporate landing page with a "Book Demo" button. Which is a level of hassle that just isn't worth it for smaller teams, because "Book Demo" usually mean
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by ekidd 3y ago
No, but our professor assigned teams at random, gave us a buggy spec, and then changed the spec with one week to go during finals week. (This last part appears to have planned; they did it every year.) This was a surprisingly effective co
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by ekidd 3y ago
It might be possible to design a good Unix shell based on objects, with the ability to "call back into" programs. But I haven't seen one yet that I'd prefer over Ruby or Python. I do think objects make plenty of sense
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by ekidd 3y ago
> In PowerShell, structured output is the default and it seems to work very well. PowerShell goes a step beyond JSON, by supporting actual mutable objects . So instead of just passing through structured data, you effectively pass arou
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by ekidd 3y ago
> And I'm not even talking about the culture war, just yesterday I tried having DALLE generate a picture for a DND character and it kept refusing to (and no it wasn't some sort of weird hentai thing) because it felt like it wa
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by ekidd 3y ago
> 1. How many years of C++ programming do you have under your belt? How many years of Rust? 12-15 years of C++, 8 years of Rust. I generally used C++ because it was the only tool that could do the job at the time, not because I actuall
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by ekidd 3y ago
One reason that uuencode lost out to Base64 was that uuencode used spaces in its encoding. It was fairly common for Internet protocols in those days to mess with whitespace, so it was often necessary to patch up corrupted uuencode files by
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by ekidd 3y ago
The Emergent "utopia" is both horrifying and eerily believable. I've known some grad students and some tech workers who are way too close already. But it's reallly strange to try to map the Emergent political structure
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by ekidd 3y ago
One of my more cherished scraps of notes dates from the 90s, when I tried (and miserably failed) to invent something much like Rust. I've been waiting a long time for a language that's fast, safe and allows me to dabble in functio
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by ekidd 3y ago
"Death sentence" is an exaggeration, but accute and chronic lead poisoning are no joke: https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-sh... It causes long-term loss of IQ, and it is the main
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by ekidd 3y ago
> Ah yes, CLAs are not a real open source, which is why they're required by uhh FSF. The last time I saw a FSF CLA, it was part of a larger agreement that also imposed obligations on the FSF. In the long run, there may be risks to
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by ekidd 3y ago
> So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains. I think this is almost always false. And I say this as someone who has worked with many startups, and who has been both a lead en
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by ekidd 3y ago
There's a rather unusual strain of Marxism (not communism!) in anthropology. As I understand it, Marx argued that the conditions of the material economy would ultimately dictate what social structures appeared. Ideology was "downs
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by ekidd 3y ago
From my limited number of anthropology courses, I can assure you that the suspicion between the anthropology and economics departments is often mutual. You know the joke about how physics is the study of spherical cows of uniform density in
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by ekidd 3y ago
OpenAI is irresponsible in a really curious way according to their own beliefs about AI . If you pay attention to OpenAI's social circles, lots of those people really do believe that we're less than 20-30 years away making humans
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by ekidd 3y ago
Co-ops are a very flexible and successful business structure. For example, people in the northeastern US probably know of Cabot Cheddar. This is part of the Agri-Mark co-op, which does something like $1 billion in annual business and employ
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by ekidd 3y ago
One thing the article doesn't talk about is RAM prices in 1997. The computer used by the author has 56 MB. But before the great RAM price crash, most users were lucky to have 16 MB, and too many still had 8 MB. Most of that was being u
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by ekidd 3y ago
As I understand it, the Othello LLM was: 1. Trained using written sequences of moves from real world games, in text notation. 2. Prompted using written series of moves. So it has supposedly never "seen" an Othello board state at a
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by ekidd 3y ago
> LLMs have no real understanding A large language model trained on Othello games will actually build a "board representation" inside its neural network: https://thegradient.pub/othello/ . This was confir
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by ekidd 3y ago
Some thoughts: 1. Too much focus on user measurements can optimize products for the least engaged "marginal users": https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi... 2. Too much focus on measure
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by ekidd 3y ago
> For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Yup, this is very easy to do on Android. Long-press any notification, and you can change the notification preferences for th
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by ekidd 3y ago
I've been experimenting with Elixir lately. Phoenix LiveView, in particular, is a fantastic technology. I can think of a few reasons why this stack might not be more popular: 1. Many of Elixir's historic strength's involve ap
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by ekidd 3y ago
Honestly, category theory is more useful for programming language designers than for programmers in general. Here are some of the more interesting things it's good for: 1. The lambda calculus is the basis for most functional programmin
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by ekidd 3y ago
This is a great series! I noticed that the author was using https://github.com/hydro-project/rust-sitter as a parser. Which is based on https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ . I've been h
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by ekidd 3y ago
Here's my current favorite recipe for building complex job systems on PostgreSQL. I'm not thinking about "send an email"-type jobs, but bigger jobs that do complex tasks. The usual trick I use is to have a `jobs.state` f
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by ekidd 3y ago
I've built three distributed job systems at this point. A handy rule of thumb which I have promoted for years is "build for 10x your current scale." If you need to handle 70 requests/second, design for 700. If you need t
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by ekidd 3y ago
Parsing JSON using 'cut' and 'awk' and 'sed' sounds like the jankiest thing ever. Sure, maybe you get it working, after much pain. Then someone decides to format your input JSON a bit differently, and everythin

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