galbar (u/galbar) - Readit News

galbar commented on Matrix messaging gaining ground in government IT theregister.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/rbanffy

bsaul · 18 hours ago

I wonder why matrix isn't more widerspread at this point. It's open, it's e2ee, it works, it has client lib for integration with any tool..

What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ?

galbar · 17 hours ago

I am a daily user, family and friends chatting on Matrix.

My take is that there are two layers of friction:

a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine

b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix.

And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten.

I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.

galbar commented on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton areweanticheatyet.com/... · Posted by u/doener

sofixa · 2 months ago

> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers

Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.

galbar · 2 months ago

For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.

Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.

IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.

galbar commented on Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial (2024) github.com/anthropics/pro... · Posted by u/cjbarber

fragmede · 4 months ago

> Throwing new prompts at a machine with built-in randomness to see if one sticks is DEFINITELY not engineering.

Where does all the knowledge, laws of physics, and rules learned over many years to predictably design and build things come from, if not by throwing things at the wall and looking at what sticks and what does not, and then building a model based on the differences between what stuck and what did not, and then deriving a theory of stickiness and building up a set of rules on how things work?

"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." -Adam Savage

galbar · 4 months ago

They come from science. Engineering applies laws, concepts and knowledge discovered through science. Engineering and science are not the same, they are different disciplines with different outcome expectations.

galbar commented on The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management blog.nilenso.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mogambo1

danparsonson · 5 months ago

Well OK, but that's just the same thing with extra steps.

The point I'm making is that there are large cross-cutting concerns that shouldn't be sliced up by feature, but rather that the features should arise out of the composition of the cross-cutting concerns.

A single user story commonly requires the holy trinity of UI, 'business logic' and data storage, and my contention is that it's more efficient and robust to build those three layers out holistically rather than try to assemble them from the fragments required for all the user stories.

galbar · 5 months ago

Our job as SWEs is to convert the vertical slice of functionality into something that fits well and robustly in the various technical layers that need to be touched.

The process that I outlined above explicitly creates the space for SWEs to consider the wider implications of the required changes in the architecture and make robust.

Part of that is understanding what the roadmap is and what is the product vision in the mid term, so that the tech layer can be built, step by step, towards what fits that vision.

galbar commented on The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management blog.nilenso.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mogambo1

danparsonson · 5 months ago

I seem to be in a minority but I find user stories or features to be really awkward and unnatural units of work for building software. Sure these things help to define the expected result but they shouldn't directly drive the development process. Imagine building a house that way - you don't build the living room, then the kitchen, then the bathroom etc.; you build floors, walls, the roof... The 'features' or use cases for the building arise out of the combination of different elements that were put into it, and usually right near the end of the build. The same is true for basically anything else that we build or create - if you're making a sculpture, do you finish working on one leg first before you move onto some other part?

Features are vertical slices through the software cake, but the cake is actually made out of horizontal layers. Creating a bunch of servings of cake and then trying to stick them together just results in a fragile mess that's difficult to work with and easy to break.

galbar · 5 months ago

My take on this is that, from a SW development POV, user stories are not the right unit of work. Instead, I treat user stories as "Epics". Stake holders can track that Epic for progress, as the unit of work from their POV.

Internally, the team splits Epics into "Spikes" (figure out what to do) and "Tasks" (executing on the things we need to do).

- Spikes are scoped to up to 3 days and their outcome is usually a doc and either a follow-up Spike or Tasks to execute.

- Tasks must be as small and unambiguous as possible (within reason).

galbar commented on LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/flail

hluska · 6 months ago

> If they don't then they're stupid

They’re just not experienced because this has never happened before. But when you call them stupid, they’re not going to listen to you because they won’t like you.

galbar · 6 months ago

Hasn't balancing quality (in this context due diligence) and speed (AI code gen.) been the name of the game in the industry for ever? Management should have enough experience by now to understand the trade-off.

galbar commented on Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021) catern.com/inheritance.ht... · Posted by u/aquastorm

kragen · 9 months ago

I'm on the fence about inheritance myself; I often regret having used it, and I never regret having not used it. On the other hand, it's awfully expedient. I designed and implemented a programming language called Bicicleta whose only argument-passing mechanism is inheritance, and I'm not sure that was a bad idea.

The object-oriented part of OCaml, by the way, has inheritance that's entirely orthogonal to interfaces, which in OCaml are static types. Languages like Smalltalk and, for the most part, Python don't have interfaces at all.

galbar · 9 months ago

Python has Protocols. They work like Go interfaces

galbar commented on The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything notashelf.dev/posts/curse... · Posted by u/Lunar5227

erulabs · 9 months ago

Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you.

I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot.

   Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better.
   Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists.

Everything, everywhere, is greasy and lousy and half broken. Sysadmins, we accept that everything is shit from the very beginning.

galbar · 9 months ago

I have said many times to teammates: the only code that is perfect is the one that hasn't left our minds. The moment it's written down it becomes flawed and imperfect.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it as good as we can, but rather that we must accept that the outcome will be flawed and that, despite our best intentions, it will show its sharp edges the next time we come to work on it.

galbar commented on Self-Hosting like it's 2025 kiranet.org/self-hosting-... · Posted by u/finnlab

raphinou · 10 months ago

Exactly, my first reaction was "I should write a blog post about why I still use Docker Swarm". I deploy to single node swarms, and it's a zero boiler plate solution. I had to migrate services to another server recently, and it was really painless. Why oh why doesn't Docker Swarm get more love (from its owners/maintainers and users)?....

Edit: anyone actually interested in such a post?

galbar · 10 months ago

I just want to add that I also have a Docker Swarm running, with four small nodes for my personal stuff plus a couple of friends' companies.

No issues whatsoever and it is so easy to manage. It just works!

galbar commented on Gemini 2.5 Pro vs. Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Coding Comparison composio.dev/blog/gemini-... · Posted by u/mraniki

skydhash · 10 months ago

Do you like writing all the if, def, public void, import keywords? That is what I’m talking about. I prefer IDE for java and other verbose languages because of the code generation. And I configure my editors for templates and snippets because I don’t like to waste time on entering every single character (and learned vim because I can act on bigger units; words, lines, whole blocks).

I like programming, I do not like coding.

galbar · 10 months ago

I'm not bothered by if nor def. public void can be annoying but it's also fast to type and it doesn't bother me. For import I always try my best at having some kind of autoimport. I too use vim and use macros for many things.

To be honest I'm more annoyed by having to repeat three times parameters in class constructors (args, member declaration and assignment), and I have a macro for it.

The thing is, most of the time I know what I want to write before I start writing. At that point, writing the code is usually the fastest way to the result I want.

Using LLMs usually requires more writing and iterations; plus waiting for whatever it generates, reading it, understanding it and deciding if that's what I wanted; and then it suddenly goes crazy half way through a session and I have to start over...