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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Well, politics isn’t about finding the one principle to rule them all. The folks/companies that find restricting access to children important, probably don’t particularly care about some Linux devices being excluded. And other folks/companies find not restricting their Linux server really important, so that’s a compromise that can be made.

    I imagine, they landed on specifically open-source being excluded as the more abstract rule, because open-source in particular has a problem here.
    Anyone can download open-source software and run it. In most cases, there is no central backend, which could handle age verification.

    And even if there is, it’s not really financially viable to offer that for anyone who downloads the software for free. Requiring payment to access the binaries or the source code would also effectively kill the open-source ecosystem, which is also not in the interest of most people.





  • Yeah, I find it really tricky, because LLMs excel at adding yet another implementation to the side, whereas they will barely ever introduce an abstraction to cover both requirements.

    And the humans often don’t really read the code anymore either. They ask the LLM to make a suggestion, then check the diff for plausibility and that’s it. They don’t have to solve it themselves, so they never properly dig into the surrounding context and therefore cannot notice the missing abstraction either.

    And in the end, it’s not just that the humans don’t know the code, it’s also that it becomes near-impossible to refactor, because it’s just too much code to fit into a brain at a time.

    You can’t anymore realize that one part of the codebase should’ve been solved by an already-existing abstraction.
    Instead, you find five places in the codebase that really look like they should’ve been solved with a shared abstraction and then good luck figuring out what the common denominator is and how each of those places should be adjusted to fit this common abstraction, oh and also you didn’t see two more places that really should also be solved that way, but for them your chosen abstraction doesn’t make sense anymore, and then you ask the others and they tell you, oh man, that never made sense, we never really thought about it, because it was so easy to just tell the LLM to build it, and now that feature has to be removed in its entirety, so you just wasted two weeks trying to understand code that never made any sense in the first place.

    Ask me how I know. 😑







  • “Oven is going to be a grind, especially the first nine months or so. If work-life balance means a lot of time spent not working, it’s probably not a good fit.”

    Oh man, someone here recently shared a blog post on startup culture in software companies, which likened software to an oven, where you’d add a specific button for a customer and that fucks up your whole architecture for years to come etc…

    For just a moment, I thought this was a direct quote from that blog post.