Readit NewsI do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the site of the data center. Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?
I understand why they didn’t choose Germany: they didn’t want to buy the GPUs in cash and send the receipts via Fax.
rednafi commented on In retrospect, DevOps was a bad idea rethinkingsoftware.substa... · Posted by u/aard
DevOps is a good idea. But most have no clue about the Ops part
All the devops I have encountered so far have been “sysadmin in a trench coat.” Most couldn’t write anything beyond basic Python and Shell scripts. It was mostly ops folks jumping into a fancy new title. So every time something would go poof, they had to pull in devs to debug the most basic stuff.
rednafi commented on In retrospect, DevOps was a bad idea rethinkingsoftware.substa... · Posted by u/aard
Most of the DevOps folks I’ve encountered, unfortunately, couldn’t code much. So it was mostly ops work with a fancy new title.
The idea of a single entity being responsible for development, operations, observability, and support is flawed from the start. That’s not a one-person job, and the expectation simply doesn’t scale. So DevOps often ends up being either ops folks or dev folks, and rarely a true blend of the two.
What we need are feature-focused developers, ops-savvy devs who can deploy their own work, and a strong team dedicated to observability and applying modern SRE practices.
So I think curious developers who aren’t afraid of infra, along with a solid platform engineering team, are a real improvement over the status quo.
rednafi commented on The special hell of Bolt, Europe's Uber clone brandur.org/fragments/spe... · Posted by u/Metalnem
Sums up European tech in general. Moving to Germany from the US made me realize how broken basic things are in Europe overall. But I was told Germany has it the worst, and it’s a bit better in other places.
I’ve encountered similar issues before and ended up switching to Uber permanently. Luckily, Uber is available where I live. The same goes for banking apps and brokers here. Half of them have a weird mix of German and English when you try to change the language, and most of the time they just don’t work at all. I guess the cliché that tech has never been Europe’s strong suit has some truth to it.
Software programming used to be a blue-collar thing in the early days, when hardware wiring was all the rage.
Then it became hip, and people would hand-roll machine-specific assembly code. Later on, it became too onerous when CPU architecture started to change faster than programmers could churn out code. So we came up with compilers, and people started coding at a higher level of abstraction. No one lamented the lost art of assembly.
Coding is just a means to an end. We’ve always searched for better and easier ways to convince the rocks to do something for us. LLMs will probably let us jump another abstraction level higher.
I too spent hours looking for the right PHP or Perl snippet in the early days to do something. My hard-earned bash-fu is mostly useless now. Am I sad about it? Nah. Writing bash always sucked, who am I kidding. Also, regex. I never learned it properly. It doesn’t appeal to me. So I’m glad these whatever machines are helping me do this grunt work.
There are sides of programming I like, and implementation isn’t one of them. Once upon a time I could care less about the binary streams ticking the CPU. Now I’m excited about the probable prospect of not having to think as much about “higher-level” code and jumping even higher.
To me, programming is more like science than art. Science doesn’t care how much profundity we find in the process. It moves on to the next thing for progress.
rednafi commented on Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001) w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHer... · Posted by u/theandrewbailey
I’m reading the comments and thinking: only the HN crowd could get so worked up about something so trivial.
There is no engineering involved in using AI.
It's insulting to call begging an LLM "engineering".
This. Convincing a bullshit generator to give you the right data isn’t engineering, it quackery. But I guess “context quackery” wouldn’t sell as much.
LLMs are quite useful and I leverage them all the time. But I can’t stand these AI yappers saying the same shit over and over again in every media format and trying to sell AI usage as some kind of profound wizardry when it’s not.
I really don’t get this rush to invent neologisms to describe every single behavioral artifact of LLMs. Maybe it’s just a yearning to be known as the father of Deez Unseen Mind-blowing Behaviors (DUMB).
LLM farts — Stochastic Wind Release.
The latest one is yet another attempt to make prompting sound like some kind of profound skill, when it’s really not that different from just knowing how to use search effectively.
Also, “context” is such an overloaded term at this point that you might as well just call it “doing stuff” — and you’d objectively be more descriptive.
Slow feedback loop will add the above 15-20 minutes as soon as you switch to something else because it took more than 15-30s (on average, though).
I like to note that there are also people who are amazing good at both regaining focus, and not getting flustered by switching between tasks. I am not one of them, though :)
Of course, it's impossible to run the full fleet locally if it's a substantially large system, but investing in the local workflow for a particular domain is absolutely paramount. Otherwise, the context switch required to integrate and work with a system like this is absolutely massive, and the lead time for a new feature will take a major hit.