mtlynch

4 ms·

1.
by mtlynch 11d ago
Good in terms of prompt communication and fix. Absurdly bad in terms of reward. Earlier in the article, it mentions that Baseten is valued at $13B. They can't dig into their couch cushions to give a few thousand dollars to the research
2.
by mtlynch 12d ago
> I do agree with you put I would push a little further - is it that complexity itself is the enemy? Or is it that the secondary outcomes of complexity (bugs, more effort to make changes, confusing code) are the enemy? I agree, but I t
3.
by mtlynch 12d ago
It's hard to say without knowing what things are like at the company/team you work for, but I can say the things you're describing sound unusual to me. Most significantly, it's strange for the person writing the design d
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by mtlynch 12d ago
I find that LLMs are still worse than humans at limiting complexity, which is one of the most important outcomes of a design review. If I tell a senior SWE that I'm creating a Discourse-like discussion forum, and I want users to have t
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by mtlynch 12d ago
Thanks for reading! What you're describing sounds like toxic team dynamics rather than something specific to design docs. Do you work effectively with your teammates outside of design docs, or is there similar tension/hostility ev
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by mtlynch 12d ago
I answered this in another comment,[0] and I don't think there's widespread agreement on this, but I think design docs should be a short-term doc that lives until the design implementation is complete. I don't think design do
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by mtlynch 12d ago
Fun piece of trivia, Joel published one of his functional specs.[0] As a huge fan of Joel's writing and engineering ideas, I was actually underwhelmed by his spec. It wasn't bad but it also felt like he missed a lot of opportuni
8.
by mtlynch 12d ago
> The biggest thing AI enables is cheap code. Agree, but in my experience that doesn't change much about the design doc. I think it's helpful to the author to be able to say to an AI agent, "Hey, put together this quick
9.
by mtlynch 12d ago
Thanks for reading! This is a good question, and I have a super long answer that's been in my head for like 8 years about how to influence your teammates to adopt good engineering practices. The short answer is that most useful softwar
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by mtlynch 12d ago
Yeah, this is difficult. My rule of thumb is to ask myself, "Is there a chance my reviewers would not have signed off had this been in the design doc they reviewed?" If the answer is yes, I send it out for a follow-up and explain
11.
by mtlynch 12d ago
> I think in the age of AI coding, these rationales are a bit outdated. And if you think they're not - I'm curious to know why you think so. Can you share more about how you think AI invalidates these rationales?
12.
by mtlynch 12d ago
Thanks for reading! > Isn't much of this made redundant by being part of an existing system? I haven't found that to be true in my work. If you're only making a minor change to an existing system, then you may not need a
13.
by mtlynch 12d ago
OP here! I'll admit a lot of bias because I think design docs are extremely useful, but I find that when people hate design docs, it's almost always for one of two reasons: 1. The developer has worked on teams where design docs ar
14.
by mtlynch 12d ago
OP here. Thanks for reading and for the thoughtful feedback! > Only real criticism I have here, is I would not include any code in a design doc, unless it is really really vitally important. ; Yeah, that's fair. If I were setting g
15.
by mtlynch 12d ago
Author here. Happy to take any feedback about this post. I learned to write design docs at Microsoft and Google, and I thought they both had good culture around docs that hasn't percolated out as well as other engineering practices at
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by mtlynch 12d ago
I haven't seen Greg's stuff before, but I discovered Disco through this, and it looks neat: https://disco.cloud/
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by mtlynch 16d ago
> Binding arbitration on individuals should be illegal, full stop. The only use case is taking away people's rights as consumers and workers. Or dodging responsibility for deadly mistakes like the Disney+ incident. Hijacking to li
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by mtlynch 17d ago
I love this idea and hope to see more on-device models. How do they make money, though? I tried out their demo for Clear, the audio quality improvement model.[0] I'm not sure if it's just I don't have refined enough an ear or
19.
by mtlynch 20d ago
> That's a lie. 9€ is not the max you pay, it's metered and extra traffic costs extra. So what you said about others can just as well apply here. From the pricing FAQ[0]: > Can I set a spending limit for overages? >
20.
by mtlynch 20d ago
Which vendor are you talking about? As I mentioned upthread, statichost.eu uses Bunny under the covers, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that Bunny isn't a CDN. surge.sh has servers in 10 regions.[0] It's not trivia
21.
by mtlynch 20d ago
> Can I just point out that either the vendor is small and therefor can’t actually offer the N+2 reliability you list as a weakness of self-hosting, or they are large enough for N+2 but then stop being small. I don't understand wh
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by mtlynch 21d ago
I've seriously considered it, but then the VPS is my single point of failure. If there's a new nginx/apache/caddy/linux 0day that could compromise my server, I have to care about it and update. My websites typically
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by mtlynch 21d ago
What's the price that you expect to pay to a service run by a single person that has to keep your website available 24/7? I get frustrated that people seem pretty aware of the enshittification and centralization of large services,
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by mtlynch 21d ago
> An EU tiny VPS on Scaleway with unlimited bandwidth costs 5€. This thing costs 9€. With limited bandwidth. statichost.eu is a CDN,[0] not a single static host. Your VPS is the single point of failure, so if that one system goes down,
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by mtlynch 21d ago
I've been looking for a new static host recently since Netlify raised prices and is terrible at preventing bot traffic. Here was my assessment of Netlify from the perspective of a small customer who just wants static hosting (and not b
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by mtlynch 25d ago
Isn't ERSC aiming to be for jj what GitHub was for git? In which case, this would be great news for jj.
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by mtlynch 25d ago
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post capture
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by mtlynch 27d ago
Worth noting that TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.[0] [0] https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scrip...
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by mtlynch 28d ago
I couldn't understand what this article was saying. There's nothing nefarious about EDIDs. EDIDs are just a way of the monitor to announce its capabilities to the device so that the device and the display can agree on things like
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by mtlynch 1mo ago
> So, what am I missing? Gerrit/CodeApprove/Reviewable-style reviews are actually designed for exactly the scenario you're describing. The thing you're missing is that it's helpful to see a diff view of, "

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