joshuak (u/joshuak) - Readit News

joshuak commented on Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome colton.dev/blog/curing-yo... · Posted by u/coltonv

allanmacgregor · 25 days ago

I'm skeptical of the 10x claims for different reasons than the author focuses on. The productivity gains might be real for individual tasks, but they're being measured wrong.

Most of the AI productivity stories I hear sound like they're optimizing for the wrong metric. Writing code faster doesn't necessarily mean shipping better products faster. In my experience, the bottleneck is rarely "how quickly can we type characters into an editor" - it's usually clarity around requirements, decision-making overhead, or technical debt from the last time someone optimized for speed over maintainability.

The author mentions that real 10x engineers prevent unnecessary work rather than just code faster. That rings true to me. I've seen more productivity gains from saying "no" to features or talking teams out of premature microservices(or adopting Kafka :D) than from any coding tool.

What worries me more is the team dynamic this creates. When half your engineers feel like they're supposed to be 10x more productive and aren't, that's a morale problem that compounds. The engineers who are getting solid 20-30% gains from AI (which seems realistic) start questioning if they're doing it wrong.

Has anyone actually measured this stuff properly in a production environment with consistent teams over 6+ months? Most of the data I see is either anecdotal or from artificial coding challenges.

joshuak · 25 days ago

Olympic athletes don't exist because no one at my gym runs that fast.

You are right that typing speed isn't the bottleneck, but wrong about what AI actually accelerates. The 10x engineers aren't typing faster they're exploring 10 different architectural approaches in the time it used to take to try one, validating ideas through rapid prototyping, automating the boring parts to focus on the hard decisions.

You can't evaluate a small sample size of people who are not exploiting the benefits well and come to an accurate assessment of the utility of a new technology.

Skill is always a factor.

joshuak commented on Show HN: Glasskube – Open Source Kubernetes Package Manager, alternative to Helm github.com/glasskube/glas... · Posted by u/pmig

leroman · a year ago

Somehow I am able to get bye with Kustimise. Cant stand the mess that is helm and its eco system.

joshuak · a year ago

Agreed.

Adding black boxes on top of black boxes is not a good way to abstract complexity. Helm does nothing more than any template engine does, yet requires me to trust not only the competency of some random chart author but also that they will correctly account for how my k8s environment is configured.

When I inevitably have to debug some deployment, now I'm digging through not only the raw k8s config, but also whatever complexity Helm has added on to obfuscate that k8s config complexity.

Helm is an illusion. All it does is hide important details from you.

joshuak commented on Hybrid-Net: Real-time audio source separation, generate lyrics, chords, beat github.com/DoMusic/Hybrid... · Posted by u/herogary

joshuak · a year ago

I would think that by comparison to image models synthetic data would be relatively easy to generate for audio model training. I’m curious then why it continues to be so difficult to build a nearly flawless audio separation model. Is synthetic data being widely used? Is it just too hard of a problem to train even with this data? I don’t have a good sense of what the most challenging aspects are of audio models.

joshuak commented on Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering ruxu.dev/articles/ai/maxi... · Posted by u/ruxudev

joshuak · 2 years ago

It seems to me (at the moment) that the 'engineering' of "prompt engineering" happens at the level of taking a word prediction model AI and turning it into a Q&A AI, and the art of decomposing requests into state and behavior that can produce an A from a Q. Also the chaining of prompts, self prompting, etc.

It's functional composition that's interesting. A system of prompts. Not the phrasing of a single question, no matter how clever.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

jolmg · 3 years ago

> For me Go is unique in that it can produce a fully static binary that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint.

What do you mean? C, C++, D, Rust, Haskell, and Common Lisp seem to be capable of static linking. (Admittedly Common Lisp seems to require a fork of SBCL that was written about last year, but still)

joshuak · 3 years ago

In Go that quote is literally true. If you do nothing on a new computer but download Go you can immediately build a statically linked application that can fetch from an https endpoint. There are no implied additional steps.

I don't believe this can be said of the other languages. I know that C, C++ and Rust do not include https in their standard libraries, so while they can be made to compile statically and use a library that provides https functionality, those are additional steps that must be taken by the developer, and it is the responsibility of the developer to choose the correct source and version of the https library to use. This will also include understanding and setting any additional compiler flags that the library may require, setting any optional defines or other library configuration settings and making the appropriate changes for every platform they wish to build for.

Go requires none of this.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

jolmg · 3 years ago

> Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon.

I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

> The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such libraries.

I think you're taking our discussion as if it were about if the language is cool or not. I never argued against that.

joshuak · 3 years ago

> I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

Can you clarify what you mean by this because to me there is literally nothing about static linking that implies https as a consequence. The point about Go is centrally not that it uniquely has access to an https library.

The point is that it is included. This may not at first appear all that noteworthy, but this is a substantive quality of life improvement. The standard library not only provides a vary large set of common functionality it is packaged with the distribution, works on all the platforms supported by Go without user intervention, and is bound in lock step to the release version of the compiler.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

cratermoon · 3 years ago

I love case-based visibility. I don't have to look at any declaration beyond the name to know if I can use the identifier outside of the package it's declared in. In most other languages case is just convention and visibility is determined by another keyword.

Yes, I know programmers who came from a Java or C# background who continue to use naming conventions from those languages, to their detriment. I don't blame Go for their problems, though.

joshuak · 3 years ago

I really hated this feature at first, but it's one of my absolute favorite things about Go now. In general Go communicates more information than other programming languages without nearly as much visual clutter. When reading code one rarely needs to check elsewhere to fully understand what is intended.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

jolmg · 3 years ago

> https is a part of the standard library and one of the elements that the op finds unique about Go.

Where do they say that it being part of the standard library is unique? I don't even see the words "standard library" mentioned.

EDIT: Look, this back and forth seems kind of pointless. This started with a statement about Go being unique for being able to be statically linked and talk HTTPS. If a language can be linked to compiled libraries, static or not, it's surely able to at least use libcurl, so I and the other commenter you replied to took it as Go is unique for being able to link statically. I assumed they meant, ignoring C/C++, static linking is rare, which I found interesting. I found other languages and asked for clarification. That's all.

joshuak · 3 years ago

I just addressed this question more directly on your other comment.

I do not agree that it is incumbent upon a speaker to anticipate the listeners knowledge, so I do not think it is a reasonable expectation that every qualifier be included. It's simply not practical. But I do think this is an interesting conversation you bring up.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

jolmg · 3 years ago

It's glossed over because it's trivial, isn't it? Just statically link libcurl through a binding. And at least Haskell also has Haskell-implemented HTTP and TLS libraries. There's even options.

joshuak · 3 years ago

Then why not assume it is the static linking that is trivial? Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon.

The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such libraries.

I also work in C++, and it is infuriating the amount of time that must be spent sorting out the correct libraries for all the various aspects of an application one is not inclined to write themselves. People who don't fully grok the Go ecosystem overlook this cost when they claim that you can do the same thing in some other language. What they are missing in the subtext is the fundamental quality of life improvement.

joshuak commented on Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang? · Posted by u/nassimsoftware

jolmg · 3 years ago

You're not replying to the same person. In a separate comment, I asked for a clarification on that specific part of their comment. The other pros, they're not part of what I asked about.

In the comment I replied to you, I'm just stating that you're bringing up something that's not in discussion.

joshuak · 3 years ago

Sorry for the misattribution, my mistake. Nevertheless, the fact remains that https is a part of the standard library and one of the elements that the op finds unique about Go. It is unambiguously part of the conversation, and the ostensibly negative comment that focuses on static linking is missing the point.

But I didn't even make the assumption that I was right on that understanding. I simply asked for more detail. Which was so that either I would learn something new, or the parent would.