fucking black hawk flying over my house, russian decoy drone found 90km away from where i live, ukrainian woman murdered on the bus, charlie kirk shot and dead, israel bombing doha, genocide going on in palestine, russian invasion of ukraine.

Guess which Blackberry patent expires on Saturday....

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Now that wokeness is over, can we go back to master being the default branch name?

OpenAI appear to have settled on their definition of the term "agents": "AI agents are AI systems that can do work for you independently. You give them a task and they go off and do it." - @sama in the Operator intro video Does that definition work for you?

The easiest way to motivate software engineers is to communicate why their work is meaningful and/or how it could be more meaningful.

The easiest way to demotivate software engineers is to tell them their work is mostly fungible or going to be short lived.

All work is short lived

If you know why x > y, you're a good C developer!

I am both surprised and not surprised the US Postal Service website's banner alerts are simply someone commenting and un-commenting the html. Random indents and all.

Interestingly, some devs actually valued the discovery aspect of finding information they needed to know Essentially, no go-to-def means you need to find it yourself, and the exploration can reveal important/interesting details in the docs or source:

Copilot is now free! Probably the biggest news for developers in 2024.

Rust syntax is disgusting, I’m sorry but wtf is this

things get pretty interesting when you give the AI access to your file system

What would it mean to replace TCP? We've been using TCP for almost 50 years, since it was designed for ARPANET in the late 70's. Back then, network links struggled to send kilobits per second, now, they send gigabits per second--literally a million times more flow. Through all that time, TCP has kept up, providing reliable connectivity across the entire world. I really like this paper because it convincingly argues that despite all of TCP's successes, there's one area where it no longer works well: the modern datacenter. TCP was designed for wide area networks where hosts are miles apart and take seconds to communicate, but it's being used inside datacenters where hosts are next to each other and want to communicate in microseconds. To make that more specific, one issue with TCP is that it's designed to stream bytes through long-lived connections, whereas most datacenter applications want to send individual messages to potentially thousands of recipients. Implementing these operations on TCP leads to high overhead, as servers need to find memory for thousands of mostly-idle connections and must use costly protocols to parse streamed data into discrete messages. At scale, these problems require elaborate workarounds, such as deploying fleets of proxy servers to manage connections and dedicating cores for message handling. As an alternative, the paper proposes a new protocol called Homa, a message-based, connectionless transport layer for the data center. It's practical because it requires no new hardware and can be implemented as the transport layer for common RPC frameworks like gRPC. John has been working on Homa for many years, so it's extremely interesting and there's a lot more about it in other papers. What's the takeaway? Software has to evolve with hardware, and especially the context in which the hardware is used. TCP has been incredibly resilient for our normal Internet use, but connecting datacenter applications is a radically different problem that needs new technologies!