One of my favorite LLM uses is to feed it this essay, then ask it to assume the persona of the grug-brained developer and comment on $ISSUE_IM_CURRENTLY_DEALING_WITH. Good stress relief.
Readit Newsmcqueenjordan commented on The Grug Brained Developer (2022) grugbrain.dev/... · Posted by u/smartmic
I haven't read all the comments and I'm sure someone else made a similar point, but my first thought was the flip the direction of the statement: "Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft /because/ people are willing to pay more".
mcqueenjordan commented on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions feldera.com/blog/the-pain... · Posted by u/qianli_cs
Usually if you’re using it, it’s because you’re forced to.
In my experience, the best strategy is to minimize your use of it — call out to binaries or shell scripts and minimize your dependence on any of the GHA world. Makes it easier to test locally too.
mcqueenjordan commented on Linux laptop maker called me a Zombie thelibre.news/this-linux-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
This is a silly extreme case, but it's kind of an absurd example of what happens when you live a life devoid of the principle of charity[1].
I think tons of interpersonal engineering issues boil down to a failure to apply this principle.
mcqueenjordan commented on Did Semgrep Just Get a Lot More Interesting? fly.io/blog/semgrep-but-f... · Posted by u/ghuntley
Hold on, hold on. You're missing a step here.
I agree completely that an LLM's first attempt to write a Semgrep rule is likely as not to be horseshit. That's true of everything an LLM generates. But I'm talking about closed-loop LLM code generation. Unlike legal arguments and medical diagnoses, you can hook an LLM up to an execution environment and let it see what happens when the code it generates runs. It then iterates, until it has something that works.
Which, when you think about it, is how a lot of human-generated code gets written too.
So my thesis here does not depend on LLMs getting things right the first time, or without assistance.
Yeah, I more or less agree about the closed loop part and the overall broader point the article was making in this context — that it may be a useful use case. I think it’s likely that process creates a lot of horseshit that passes through the process, but that might still be better than nothing for semgrep rules.
I only came down hard on that quote out of context because it felt somewhat standalone and I want to broadcast this “fluency paradox” point a bit louder because I keep running into people who really need to hear it.
I know you know what’s up.
mcqueenjordan commented on Did Semgrep Just Get a Lot More Interesting? fly.io/blog/semgrep-but-f... · Posted by u/ghuntley
> But I just checked and, unsurprisingly, 4o seems to do reasonably well at generating Semgrep rules? Like: I have no idea if this rule is actually any good. But it looks like a Semgrep rule?
This is the thing with LLMs. When you’re not an expert, the output always looks incredible.
It’s similar to the fluency paradox — if you’re not native in a language, anyone you hear speak it at a higher level than yourself appears to be fluent to you. Even if for example they’re actually just a beginner.
The problem with LLMs is that they’re very good at appearing to speak “a language” at a higher level than you, even if they totally aren’t.
Can't use the "reliability is hard" excuse when you are quite literally in the business of selling reliability.
It’s just not that big of a mystery. It’s not an excuse; it’s just true. Also, they’re not especially selling reliability as much as they’re selling small geo-distributed deployments.
This is probably 5th or 6th major outage from Fly.io that I have personally seen. Pretty sure there were many others and some just went unnoticed. I recommended the service to a friend, and within two days he faced two outages.
Fly.io seriously needs to get it together. Why it hasn’t happened yet is a mystery to me. They have a good product but stability needs to be an absolute top for a hosting service. Everything else is secondary.
Reliability is hard when your volume is (presumably) scaling geometrically.
Based on the ole' joke about outfitting custom planes, "If you want to do anything to a plane... /anything/..., it's 250. New coffee machine? 250k. Rotate the sofa? 250k." -- $149,072 for a soap dispenser might well be a screaming deal.