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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If the only problem is that your code is slop and nobody can work with it without AI, then it’s probably not that bad. Text models I can run locally on my five year old Macbook are maybe a year behind in terms of coding assistance. So AI for coding is probably never going away. The worst case for someone in this scenario is just that it gets a bit slower and dumber and that they have to hire more engineers again. It’ll suck but I think it’s survivable. Someone would have to make a new Stackoverflow though if we’re going to google stuff again.

    Now if you integrated multiple AI services into all your business workflows and into the products you sell, on the other hand, that might be a different story. In a way the risk is the same as with cloud providers. You get locked into a stack and then your product literally dies if the provider decides you’re not paying enough, because you have no feasible way out. Tbh I would much prefer working at a post-bubble era software company fixing the codebase to working at a random company now extracting their IT from a hyperscale cloud. But in reality, most companies that bet on AI are in this scenario. Nobody only installed Claude and called it a day.





  • GPT Researcher is a research agent, just one of many AI tools.

    I think the idea is that these tools let users configure mcp servers, and because mcp doesn’t necessarily use the network but can also just mean directly spawning a process, users can get the tool to execute arbitrary commands (possibly circumventing some kind of protection).

    This is all fine if you’re doing this yourself on your computer, but it’s not if you’re hosting one of these tools for others who you didn’t expect to be able to run commands on your server, or if the tool can be made to do this by hostile input (e.g. a web page the tool is reading while doing a task).



  • Swift is a modern language that offers good performance paired with a lot of safety features you’d otherwise go to Rust for (type safety, memory safety, concurrency safety,… although memory safety based on ARC is slower than Rust’s approach, and Swift makes it easier to disable safety features). Personally I like it more than Rust because the syntax is a bit cleaner and it has exceptions.

    The problem is, using it on e.g. Linux is a completely different experience from using it on Apple platforms and it doesn’t really transfer over. Apple devs will use Xcode and all the Apple tooling and will get used to Apple APIs. On Linux you don’t have Xcode, you rely more on Swift Package Manager for dependencies than on Apple platforms, you suddenly have to learn what part of the libraries you’ve been using are Swift standard library and what parts are Apple only or are from the Objective C runtime that’s not used on Linux, and the ecosystem is much smaller.

    A lot of things that also mean that code written for Apple doesn’t often work on Linux unchanged, not because of Swift as such, but e.g. before Swift had Regex you’d use the one from Objective C, which just works on Apple, but isn’t there on Linux.

    I haven’t tried it for Android development but I imagine it’ll have similar issues.








  • You don’t have to be the first person. I joined a startup a long time ago as a regular engineer and they made me team lead within a year. Startups generally move a bit faster and a lot more chaotically. Especially when they’re growing fast. You do have to be good but having a vision also helps.

    I stuck with them through acquisitions etc. and everything slowed down a lot. Should have gotten out of the large corporation life earlier tbh.



  • 30 games for 822 hours. Not sure how I managed that as a working adult with a family who also spent more than a month abroad without my Switch. And apparently didn’t play on Switch in January or February. (Probably something on Steam Deck got my attention but I don’t remember.)

    Top game is Xenoblade X at 143 hours. My favourite Wii U game so not surprising. It would be a lot more hours too if I hadn’t played it before on Wii U. In the full 9 year range it’s only rank 8.

    FWIW I’m not in the NA region and the link worked for me too.