jamamp (u/jamamp) - Readit News

jamamp commented on Alchemy joshcollinsworth.com/blog... · Posted by u/tobr

bananaflag · a month ago

Why do people want to present some tired point, that has already been made a thousand times, like some clever new insight?

At least, if you believe that, engage with some counter-arguments at least, to make your article worth reading. This blog post is exactly the kind of slop (though not AI) that the author is criticizing.

jamamp · a month ago

I would argue that the author has no obligation to engage with more counter-arguments, or provide something "new" (to you) to the conversation.

This is a blog. Blog posts are a way to show the voice of the author, share their thoughts on the matter, perhaps work through their own thought processes and come to a nice conclusion for themselves that they choose to share with the public.

I would find the internet and the community incredibly dull if the first person to post a criticism was it and everyone else always referred to their article. There'd be no further discussion whatsoever.

I found this article to be enlightening and a wonderful way to frame my disdain for AI-generated art and other content in a framing that I hadn't thought of so explicitly before. The analogy to alchemy is a welcomed and fresh take. I appreciate this article. Perhaps I'm one of today's lucky 10,000 to have made this connection.

I also appreciate this article because the author put effort into it and voiced their opinion. Voicing opinions don't have to be novel, since this isn't academia necessarily where you have to fight for uniqueness and new takes.

jamamp commented on Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography words.filippo.io/claude-d... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

pton_xd · 2 months ago

> Full disclosure: Anthropic gave me a few months of Claude Max for free. They reached out one day and told me they were giving it away to some open source maintainers.

Related, lately I've been getting tons of Anthropic Instagram ads; they must be near a quarter of all the sponsored content I see for the last month or so. Various people vibe coding random apps and whatnot using different incarnations of Claude. Or just direct adverts to "Install Claude Code." I really have no idea why I've been targeted so hard, on Instagram of all places. Their marketing team must be working overtime.

jamamp · 2 months ago

Unfortunately that might also be due to how Instagram shows ads, and not necessarily Anthropic's marketing push. As soon as you click on or even linger on a particular ad, Instagram notices and doubles down on sending you more ads from the same provider as well as related ads. My experience is that Instagram has 2-3 groups of ad types I receive which slowly change over the months as the effectiveness wanes over time.

The fact that you are receiving multiple kinds of ads from Anthropic does signify more of a marketing push, though.

jamamp commented on Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement lwn.net/Articles/1037577/... · Posted by u/pykello

jamamp · 3 months ago

> Another drawback is the difficulty of learning Typst. The official documentation is confusingly organized, with information scattered unpredictably among "Tutorial", "Reference", and "Guides" sections.

I would have thought that this method of organizing documentation is preferred, as I assumed The Grand Unified Theory of Documentation[0] was well known and liked.

[0] https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/

jamamp commented on What a developer needs to know about SCIM tesseral.com/blog/what-a-... · Posted by u/noleary

brabel · 6 months ago

The RFC is very clear about how extensions are supposed to be registered with IANA, which is always how RFC extensions in general work. You cannot have interoperability without a central registry.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7643#section-10.3

jamamp · 6 months ago

You're right. Section 10.4 does make that more clear as well for the default schemas.

jamamp commented on What a developer needs to know about SCIM tesseral.com/blog/what-a-... · Posted by u/noleary

jamamp · 6 months ago

Something I wish SCIM did better was break apart group memberships from the user resource. In the realm of SCIM's schema with the ability to have write-only, read/write, and read-only properties it makes a ton of sense to have a user's group memberships read-only and available to look at easily. But sometimes populating the list of groups a member is in can be taxing depending on your user/group db (or SaaS) solution. Especially because this data is not paginated.

SCIM allows clients to ignore the group membership lists via `?excludeAttributes=groups` (or members on the group resource). But not all clients send that by default. Entra does well to only ask for a list of groups or members on resources when it's really needed in my experience.

Some enterprise customers use SCIM with tons of users. Querying for the users themselves is simple because querying users is paginated and you can constrain the results. But returning a single group with 10,000 users in a single response can be a lot. It only really contains the user's identifier and optionally their display name, but if you have to pull this data from a paginated API it'll take a while to respond. Or it could still be taxing on some databases.

It'd be nice to query `/Users/:id/groups` or `/Groups/:id/members in a paginated fashion similar to `/Users`.

jamamp commented on What a developer needs to know about SCIM tesseral.com/blog/what-a-... · Posted by u/noleary

jamamp · 6 months ago

Another point: the SCIM schema can be confusing. The RFCs make it seem like you can define your schema however you like, and it provides a default schema with which it bases examples in other parts of the RFC.

In reality, most systems expect you to have the full default schema present without modifications and might complain when items are missing. Do you provide scim support without passwords (only SSO)? Okta will send a password anyway (random and unused). Does your application not differentiate between username and email? IdPs will complain if they can't set them separately. Do you not store the user's `costCenter`? IdPs will get mad and keep trying to set it because it never sticks.

Some of the time, you'll have to store SCIM attributes on your user objects which have no effect on your system at all.

The other side is making custom schema items. SCIM has you present these in the `/Schema` endpoints. But, no system (that I know of) actually looks at your schema to autopopulate items for mapping. Entra and Okta are great at letting your provide mapping from an IdP user to a SCIM user, and then you map SCIM users back to your app's users. But you typically have to follow app documentation to map things properly if it's not using the default schema entirely.

jamamp commented on (On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling go.dev/blog/error-syntax... · Posted by u/henrikhorluck

LinXitoW · 6 months ago

I have to ask, in comparison to what do you like it? Because every functional language, many modern languages like Rust, and even Java with checked exceptions offers this.

Hell, you can mostly replicate Gos "error handling" in any language with generics and probably end up with nicer code.

If your answer is "JavaScript" or "Python", well, that's the common pattern.

jamamp · 6 months ago

In primarily throwable languages, it's more idiomatic to not include much error handling throughout the stack but rather only at the ends with a throw and a try/catch. Catching errors in the middle is less idiomatic.

Whereas in Go, the error is visible everywhere. As a developer I see its path more easily since it's always there, and so I have a better mind to handle it right there.

Additionally, it's less easy to group errors together. A try/catch with multiple throwable functions catches an error...which function threw it though? If you want to actually handle an error, I'd prefer handling it from a particular function and not guessing which it came from.

Java with type-checked exceptions is nice. I wish Swift did that a bit better.

jamamp commented on (On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling go.dev/blog/error-syntax... · Posted by u/henrikhorluck

jamamp · 6 months ago

I like Go's explicit error handling. In my mind, a function can always succeed (no error), or either succeed or fail. A function that always succeeds is straightforward. If a function fails, then you need to handle its failure, because the outer layer of code can not proceed with failures.

This is where languages diverge. Many languages use exceptions to throw the error until someone explicitly catches it and you have a stack trace of sorts. This might tell you where the error was thrown but doesn't provide a lot of helpful insight all of the time. In Go, I like how I can have some options that I always must choose from when writing code:

1. Ignore the error and proceed onward (`foo, _ := doSomething()`)

2. Handle the error by ending early, but provide no meaningful information (`return nil, err`)

3. Handle the error by returning early with helpful context (return a general wrapped error)

4. Handle the error by interpreting the error we received and branching differently on it. Perhaps our database couldn't find a row to alter, so our service layer must return a not found error which gets reflected in our API as a 404. Perhaps our idempotent deletion function encountered a not found error, and interprets that as a success.

In Go 2, or another language, I think the only changes I'd like to see are a `Result<Value, Failure>` type as opposed to nillable tuples (a la Rust/Swift), along with better-typed and enumerated error types as opposed to always using `error` directly to help with error type discoverability and enumeration.

This would fit well for Go 2 (or a new language) because adding Result types on top of Go 1's entrenched idiomatic tuple returns adds multiple ways to do the same thing, which creates confusion and division on Go 1 code.

jamamp commented on Show HN: I Built a Visual Workflow Automation Platform – FlowRipple flowripple.com/... · Posted by u/shivsarthak34

cjonas · 10 months ago

I disagree...

What's the SDLC story? How do I move between environments, roll back, manage hotfixes alongside feature development, etc?

It's these "non-functional" feature that end up being the downfall of many of the integration projects I've been brought in to save.

John in accounting sets up a Salesforce to Netsuite integration that becomes mission critical and it works... Until it doesn't.

jamamp · 10 months ago

I'll also agree with you.

I want to start with the fact that building FlowRipples is a monumental feat of its own. Generic tools that are adaptable to lots of situations is a difficult task, and it's impressive what was built.

But the supporting functionality in any service like this is also so important. It's one thing to have a low friction setup and way to get started, with simple steps and a quick showcase video, so that someone can get to tinkering. It's another thing to fully adopt this as a tool within your team that would be integrated into a published product.

Suddenly, like you say, you have multiple environments (Dev, QA, Staging/Pre-prod, Prod) that you have to move changes into and out of. Replicating the same changes manually will inevitably lead to human error and what worked in QA will no longer work in Staging or Production. Even a simple export + import helps with this.

I think one thing that also needs attention is parallel changes. Two people are wokring on different changes in the dev environment. Promoting the current state of the Dev environment to QA requires that both tasks have to be dev-complete, or else unfinished changes could make its way to QA and cause confusion. This is difficult when the different tasks aren't synchronized in their testing (i.e. start testing one ticket but not necessarily the other). It's almost like you need branching and merging and diffing, a la git, to help resolve this. That's difficult to do in low-code visual programming apps.

jamamp commented on Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications restate.dev/blog/every-sy... · Posted by u/sewen

sewen · a year ago

Temporal is related, but I would say it is a subset of this.

If you only consider appending results of steps of a handler, then you have something like Temporal.

This here uses the log also for RPC between services, for state that outlives an individual handler execution (state that outlives a workflow, in Temporal's terms).

jamamp · a year ago

That makes a lot of sense, thank you! Extending out to other operations and not just event handlers/workflows would be neat.