danpalmer.me
SRE, Software Engineer, making 4bn phones, tablets, cars, and toasters more reliable.
Previously content protection and app downloads for Google Play, backend/infra/iOS in a startup, mobile security.
Liberal metropolitan elite
Posts are my own opinions
128 posts
97 followers
144 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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To get started and try out the features of Logseq, I'm building a knowledge graph for my notes on The Blue Prince. It's got a very interconnected lore that puzzle solving depends on, so I've been scribbling down unstructured notes, a graph would be so much easier to refer to.
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The US already felt a little worse than the UK when I visited last year. That it might be accelerating rather than trying to turn it around is sad.
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The UK had a period of “austerity” after the global financial crisis, many consider it to have been an overreaction.
It’s stark, shocking, having moved to Australia, to see a country that did not go through that. Public services work. The environment is nicer to exist in. People have time to care.
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Oh, and new live album art for no one except U2 to adopt!
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Of course nobody tests a property for meth unless they either a) think it looks like a meth kitchen, or b) get sold a meth test for $130 by some company spreading FUD based on bad stats.
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Fake? That seems a bit far? People are running the whole stack now, and federated PDSs, arguably the most important bit, are pretty common.
Personally I’m here over Mastodon because ATProto is a more mature take on decentralisation, and I find the culture here more inclusive than Mastodon.
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Saw them at the Sydney Opera House a year ago today. Life changing. Enjoy it! Seeing Sigur Ros there tonight for this year’s festival.
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We need to make it socially unacceptable to reply to questions with “well I don’t know but I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said”.
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Maybe a little unclear from the description if this is just the bucket thing or the actual “electrolytes”/etc, but for $1k I’d guess it’s the latter.
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So just for a laugh I decided to ask Gemini why Brawndo’s is good for plants.
It explained the movie reference, clarified the satire and said it would be harmful if real…
…but then pointed out this product called Brawndo which is actually a legit product for plants
terravera.com/products/bra...
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Is it good for people who sort of gave up around Captain America? I enjoyed early Marvel films, but I’m never going to watch them all and they seem to rely heavily on having seen them all or already knowing the characters.
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Here in Australia it wasn’t quite a foregone conclusion in the polls before Trump. It was looking a bit likely power would shift.
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I wonder if non-engineers will get better code out of these tools at the early stage of a project than engineers because of this?
That won't scale though, the models need so much guidance beyond a few hundred lines of code.
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Overall, I'm not surprised that non-developers are getting great *early* results with "vibe coding". I'm also not surprised that experienced engineers are ruling it out completely, as it does break down relatively quickly.
That said, I can see myself writing a lot more small tools this way.
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The bad, continued: It's very apparent that 400 lines / 4 files in, I'm reaching the end of the model's ability to make significant edits. The models are less able to reason about the code, less able to make edits that a competent engineer would write.
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I think Copilot is trimming my context. Despite including full files, I'm now getting results that suggest that the model isn't actually seeing the full file content. I get better results copy/pasting entire (small) codebases into the Gemini web interface.
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The bad: Copilot is slow, cumbersome, the editing UI is awful. I've used Cursor for all of 10 mins but can see why it's currently winning just on UI alone (but UI reliability is not a moat).
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This is an opinion thing, I could probably tune this with better prompting, but I'm also trying not to over-engineer my prompts. I don't think I've rewritten a prompt after my first pass yet (It's a good thing that I haven't needed to).
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The ~eh: The model I'm using really doesn't write code like I do, and I'm spending a lot of time simplifying the code. Mostly it's just that I know over 400 lines that some dict definitely has a key (or I'd rather the program crashed), and I don't want verbose checking everywhere.
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I also got boilerplate for querying a database with psycopg2, making HTTP requests, etc. Not hard, things I've done before, but it's nice to get them in ~seconds.
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The good: Saving 75% of my time on it is amazing.
Most of this saving comes from me not needing to know Textual (the TUI framework, I've spent ~3 mins in the Textual docs for this), or the Ollama API (I spent ~30s checking something), vs starting from scratch on these.
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I've now managed to get something working, and in probably 25% of the time I would have taken writing it fully manually. I probably wrote ~1/3rd of the code myself, 2/3rds generated. Now just over 400 lines of code.
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Scope: I wanted a Python tool that would take a query, go wide on potential matches in database queries (not the interesting bit), then present pairs for me to rate the better of, computing ELO scores for each result, and eventually giving me a top-N results to save for later evaluations.
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He’s probably hiring him because he’s one of his biggest customers. Jared has run 2 crewed space missions via SpaceX now, I’m sure he has more planned, and he’d shift NASA policy and purchasing in SpaceX’s favour significantly.
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Not seen anything else from this creator, so this may be old news, but this guy’s takes are so hot, he has commentators giving commentary on his commentary (and it works).
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The last call I received from a Dell rep was 2.5 years after leaving the company it was for, and 1.5 years after the company folded.
Better than Adobe though who tried to bribe me with a personal licence to not end my company contract.
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People say macOS has gone down hill, but 10 minutes of using Windows changed my mind on that one. MacOS is doing fine.
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I don’t understand how millions of people use this thing every day. And I don’t mean that in the fact it’s full of racists I don’t want to talk to, I mean in the very literal sense of *how* do they manage it?
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Damn that’s so dystopian.
I still haven’t got around to learning to drive because I’ve been in places that haven’t needed it. I’ve always been able to walk to supermarkets, bars, coffee shops, easy transport to friends. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.