stevepotter (u/stevepotter)

stevepotter commented on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions davidgomes.com/async-queu... · Posted by u/davidgomes

heresie-dabord · 2 months ago

> When I interview a candidate, I focus primarily on what they've done.

I like to hear candidates explain how they understood and met the customer's requirements. The code is only part of the success.

stevepotter · 2 months ago

Agree, although this is often an undeveloped skill in newer folks. There are many other things I like to discuss in an interview: past mistakes, things they are especially proud of, times they trimmed scope to meet a deadline, working with difficult people, etc.

My goal for interviewing is to either hire the person, or not hire the person but have them walk away feeling like they got something out of our time together. Often I can quickly tell that the person isn't right for the role, in which case I will politely explain that to them and offer whatever advice I can.

stevepotter commented on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions davidgomes.com/async-queu... · Posted by u/davidgomes

quibono · 2 months ago

> didn't have anything public on github/company gitlab/dockerhub/researchgate/

What if the company GitLab/DockerHub instance is restricted and you can't get code samples (I think this is very common)? Or a different example: I have a few public repositories on GitHub but most of them are private - it seems like that's something you'd perceive negatively?

stevepotter · 2 months ago

Great question. I'm okay with someone who doesn't have public code, although they will have to work a little harder to verify their skills match their story.

You have some public repos. That's plenty. Even some gists will work

I tell people all the time, if you want to make it easier to get hired, put some work online. This is especially helpful for those without great credentials or history. Take advantage of this, as it's not possible in many other professions.

stevepotter commented on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions davidgomes.com/async-queu... · Posted by u/davidgomes

stevepotter · 2 months ago

When I interview a candidate, I focus primarily on what they've done. Ideally they'd have a body of work online that I can view beforehand. Then I go through a high level system design and have a collaborative conversation. Last, I give a pretty straightforward coding question, whose purpose is only to make sure they aren't full of shit, which often they are.

The mistake I see interviewers make is that they are looking for the candidate to solve some kind of puzzle, and the focus is kept on whether they had that "ah-ha" moment vs a clean implementation. Maybe this would be a good approach for a job that required defusing a bomb, but this is relaxed desk work haha.

I once had someone bomb the coding, then email me a few hours after with a clean answer. One of the best hires I ever had.

stevepotter commented on Microsoft Is Deleting Old Drivers from Windows Update and It Might Break Your PC nerds.xyz/2025/06/microso... · Posted by u/speckx

nodja · 2 months ago

The title is just fearmongering, it's removing the driver from being automatically installed from windows update, not preventing it from being installed altogether. They're also not revoking the signatures either so downloading and installing directly from the vendor site still works (and is still the recommended way to do it).

The equivalent in the linux world would be removing a driver from the main repo, requiring the user to either install the rpm/deb manually or use a third party repo.

stevepotter · 2 months ago

This comment should be at the top

stevepotter commented on Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API voxelmanip.se/2025/06/14/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

uncircle · 2 months ago

  public static final String DISALLOW_FUN

The default value is false. [...] Type: Boolean [...] Constant Value: "no_fun"

Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag...

---

How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?

stevepotter · 2 months ago

Someone else pointed out the reason for the datatype. A more subtle problem is the use of double negatives. Boolean APIs like "disable" will throw off users of your API.

stevepotter commented on YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection arxiv.org/abs/2401.17270... · Posted by u/greesil

ipsum2 · 3 months ago

SAM doesn't do open vocabulary i.e. it segments things without knowing the name of the object, so you can't ask it to do "highlight the grapes", you have to give it an example of a grape first.

stevepotter · 3 months ago

Try this: https://github.com/luca-medeiros/lang-segment-anything

stevepotter commented on After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain albertofortin.com/writing... · Posted by u/a7fort

jclardy · 3 months ago

I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-60 min to implement depending on complexity, now it takes 5.

I also use it for building things like app landing pages. I hate web development, and LLMs are pretty good at it because I'd guess that is 90% of their training data related to software development. For that I make larger changes, review them manually, and commit them to git, like any other project. It's crazy to me that people will just go completely off the rails for multiple hours and run into a major issue, then just start over when instead you can use a measured approach and always continue forward momentum.

stevepotter · 3 months ago

I do a variety of things, including iOS and web. Like you mentioned, LLM results between the two are very different. I can't trust LLM output to even compile, much less work. Just last night, it told me to use an API called `CMVideoFormatDescriptionGetCameraIntrinsicMatrix`. That API is very interesting because it doesn't exist. It also did a great job of digging some deep holes when dealing with some tricky Swift 6 concurrency stuff. Meanwhile it generated an entire nextjs app that worked great on the first shot. It's all about that training data baby

stevepotter commented on Plain Vanilla Web plainvanillaweb.com/index... · Posted by u/andrewrn

c-linkage · 3 months ago

> deploying native applications is simply too costly.

I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments.

Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed.

Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless.

EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

stevepotter · 3 months ago

I love ClickOnce and am amazed that it never got that popular. Installs and updates are seamless.

I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.

I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.

stevepotter commented on VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer github.com/facebookresear... · Posted by u/xnx

nmfisher · 5 months ago

My brother is an orthopaedic surgeon, so I’m curious to know more. Do you have a website?

stevepotter · 5 months ago

redefinesurgery.com - I'm steve @, would be happy to talk to your brother

stevepotter commented on VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer github.com/facebookresear... · Posted by u/xnx

davedx · 5 months ago

I'd love to hear what the use cases are for this. I was looking at Planet's website yesterday and although the technology is fascinating, I do sometimes struggle to understand what people actually do (commercially or otherwise) with the data? (Genuinely not snark, this stuff's just not my field!)

stevepotter · 5 months ago

I'm working on a system that uses affordable hardware (iPhones) to make orthopedic surgery easier and more precise. Among other things, we have to track the position in space of surgical tools like drills. Models like this can play a pivotal role in that.

As someone mentioned, this is great for gaussian splatting, which we also do.