Technologist, nerd, refined rural citizan. I only post in good faith.
Joined December 2019
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Wes Deviers retweeted
A question for you: what's the most useful (non-obvious) thing that you have AI agents do for you?
Solid take. In the meantime, senior engineers are going to have to wheelbarrow a lot of tar to stay employed.
Would be interested in your critique on this message I sent back to my son-in-law, a senior QA engineer whose company is drinking deeply of the AI-Will-Fix-Everything koolaid.
—-
SIL: Can I ask your honest opinion on AI? Where is this going to land?
Me: Here’s where I think things are headed.
There are a number of firms and individuals who are learning how to properly leverage AI and are doing amazing things with it.
Everyone else who is using it are setting themselves up for serious problems, especially since a lot of them won’t recognize those problems until damage has been done.
I think general public use of AI is going to run into the “unreliable narrator” pitfall: trust what the AI says and does when the information may be biased, misleading, or just plain wrong. This is not just the hallucination problem; it’s also biased or wrong information getting baked into the LLMs (eg, how much LLM training has been done based on Reddit threads).
SIL: Some of my managers seem to ignore things like Skill Atrophy. I had the view that those in senior positions now are ok because they have the experience to help understand how to fix the issues with AI Coding. However, they seem to think those issues are just a matter of training AI to do better. But, skill atrophy is real, developers are writing about it and I know I've read some papers about studies into it. Things like Critical Thinking are decreasing because people rely on AI to do it for them.
So I wonder if AI will really overcome these issues and become just as good if not better than humans at this. Are we going to see a takeover of engineering by AI?
Me: No, because I think those efforts will lead to massive technical debt and serious maintenance problems. But I fear things will get ugly before then.
Look, as it is roughly 2/3rds of software project are late, over budget, underperform, or fail altogether. As an industry, we’re just really bad at large software projects. AI will solve some of those problems at first, or at least appear to, but because of all the human reasons we’re bad at software, I think a lot of firms will end up in a AI legacy tar pit that will be hard to climb out of.
Wes Deviers retweeted
It’s a good question but it’s hard to answer in the abstract since there are many types of unreasonable.
Wes Deviers retweeted
I worked on a smaller scope of this problem ~20 years ago at the Library of Congress
Our mission was to digitize everything the Library held BUT make sure it was recoverable for someone 100 or 1000 years ago
To emphasize the point, my boss would bring two items to meetings: a handwritten captain's journal from a ship in the late 1700s and an 8" floppy. He'd pull out both and say "one of these is 200 years old, the other is 20. We can only read one of them"
What we quickly decided is that EVERY digital format would become replaced and potentially unreadable over time
Therefore, for the digitization steps, we would document the entire process - equipment models, settings, etc - and capture the uncompressed, raw output (tiff, wav, etc). The physical media was destined for an N-filled vault in Culpepper, VA
The raw masters were kept unedited for preservation but then downsampled into smaller, more mobile formats (jpg, mp3) for presentation
The goal was that every X years, archivists could pull the masters and update them to a new masters (likely keeping the old) and then generate then-modern compressed formats
Thinking about "how does someone read this file format in 100 years?" was a *really* cool thought experiment to put into practice
And btw, yes sometimes finding equipment to play the physical media was an adventure unto itself. The wax cylinders were the most novel and using images to "play" a record were the most novel but Edison's first motion pictures were something else entirely..
With that "something else" including nitroglycerin..
Japan <-> USA twitter is the most OG Internet thing that has happened in a decade. It feels EXACTLY like the late 90s when you could just...talk. To people.
One of my favorite ways to relax is watching no-voice Japanse short order restaurant cooking videos on YouTube... and scream in angst when 8 types of sauce go on omelets! What are you doing?!?
This is the life!
Backend development is simple, you just need to learn these
HTTP methods
Status codes
Request headers
Response headers
Authentication
Authorization
JWT tokens
Session management
Cookies
OAuth 2.0
API design
RESTful APIs
GraphQL
WebSockets
Server-side rendering
Database design
SQL queries
NoSQL databases
Database indexing
Query optimization
ACID properties
CAP theorem
Normalization
Denormalization
ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)
Connection pooling
Transactions
Migrations
Seeding data
Caching strategies
Redis
Memcached
CDN integration
Rate limiting
Throttling
API versioning
Middleware
Error handling
Logging
Monitoring
Application performance monitoring (APM)
Load balancing
Horizontal scaling
Vertical scaling
Microservices architecture
Monolithic architecture
Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Message queues
Pub/Sub patterns
Event-driven architecture
CQRS pattern
Saga pattern
API Gateway
Service mesh
Docker containers
Kubernetes orchestration
CI/CD pipelines
Environment variables
Configuration management
Secrets management
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
CSRF protection
XSS prevention
SQL injection prevention
Input validation
Output sanitization
Password hashing
Bcrypt/Argon2
Salt and pepper
Two-factor authentication (2FA)
Single sign-on (SSO)
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control)
File uploads
Streaming data
Pagination
Filtering and sorting
Full-text search
Elasticsearch
Background jobs
Cron jobs
Task scheduling
Worker processes
Async/await patterns
Promises
Callbacks
Thread pools
Process management
Memory management
Garbage collection
Performance profiling
Benchmarking
Testing (unit, integration, E2E)
Mocking and stubbing
API docs (Swagger/OpenAPI)
Postman/Insomnia
Version control (Git)
Code review practices
Debugging techniques
Production deployment strategies
Wes Deviers retweeted
Open source isn't dying because of AI.
It's dying because we all fucking suck.
Users. Maintainers. The whole ecosystem. All of us.
We fucking suck as users.
We use OSS to do our jobs. To build products. To make money. Our employers depend on it. Our startups run on it.
But the second a maintainer mentions compensation? We lose our fucking minds. "It should be free." "That's not the open source way."
Meanwhile we're extracting value from someone's unpaid labor every single day.
We file issues like we paid for a support contract. We demand timelines. We get snippy when our bug isn't the priority.
We're not customers. We're guests. Start acting like it.
We fucking suck as maintainers.
We wanted the GitHub stars. The conference talks. The Twitter followers. We wanted to be the person who "owns" that thing everyone depends on.
But now people actually depend on it and we're annoyed.
"Talk is cheap, show me the code."
So someone does. They spend hours on a PR. We ignore it for months. Close it with no explanation. Or we screenshot their issue and mock them publicly for not reading our minds about what we actually wanted.
We invited contributions then punished people for contributing.
We don't want to maintain projects. We want to be admired for maintaining them. Not the same thing.
We suck at this together.
Both sides want the benefits without the responsibilities.
As users we want free, maintained, high quality software but won't contribute a damn thing. Not money. Not code. Not even basic respect.
As maintainers we want the status of running critical infrastructure but won't communicate, won't collaborate, won't treat people like humans.
We all know this shit doesn't work. And yet here we are.
Okay Josh, what do you suggest then?
If we use OSS and profit from it, we contribute something. Anything. Money, docs, triage, kindness. We stop expecting infinite free labor.
If we maintain OSS and we're burnt out, we say so. Archive it. Hand it off. Ghosting is worse than walking away.
And if we can't treat each other with basic respect? We don't get to participate. Full stop.
Open source runs on people. On us.
None of us owe each other a god damn thing. But we could choose to stop being assholes and do better anyway.
Wes Deviers retweeted
i stopped dvorak because i just wanted to share a keyboard with my kid, who is learning to program.
he uses arch, btw
Wes Deviers retweeted
Cowboy cooking hits primetime! Our friend @Kent_Rollins is bringing the fire with the new series premiere of Cast Iron Cowboy this Monday at 9:30 PM ET on @OUTDChannel. You won’t want to miss it! Keep your eyes peeled for the Hasty Bake + Bertha in action!
Agree - but this is additionally true for any profession people engage in. As a whatever-I-am (IT Cloud Linux Database etc etc Dude), there are many people that I vehemently disagree with, yet still respect.
It is infintely more important for professors and researchers to do so.
Wes Deviers retweeted
Scrooge McDuck, too. Guy was so capitalist that monopolists infuriated him, he became angry when someone tried to take something that didn't belong to them (though he was the the frequent target of that), well-paid his housekeeper, and gave her grandaughter a place to live rent free with no complaints. Also frequently doted her on like he was her uncle as well.
And let's not forget him acting as a good role model for his grandnephews, encouraging them to engage in hard work, to earn what they have, and frequently taking them whenever he left town on trips that were both educational, and got them plenty of fresh air and exercise.
And let's not forget him acting as a jobs program for some of the most incompetent ducks in Duckberg. Launchpad McQuack should never be put behind the yoke of an aircraft, yet Scrooge employed him almost exclusively. Fenton Crackshell was a horrible scatterbrain with an autistic ability to count anything instantly, and an UTTERLY unqualified accountant, but still a valuable McDuck employee even before the Gizmoduck armor bonded to him.
I feel like I lost my tribe. I tried tiling window managers years ago and hated them. Like... I never ever have the entire window visible. How much wasted space is that??
But now all of my people are using Omarchy and love tiling but I tried it again and it still sucks.
