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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It’s pretty much a vibe coding issue. What you describe I can recall being advocated forevet, the project manager’s dtram that you model and spec things out enough and perfectly model the world in your test cases, then you are golden. Except the world has never been so convenient and you bank on the programming being reasonably workable by people to compensate.

    Problem is people who think they can replace understanding with vibe coding. If you can only vibe code, you will end up with problems you cannot fix and the LLM can’t either. If you can fix the problems, then you are not inclined to toss overly long chunks of LLM stuff because they generate ugly hard to maintain code that tends to violate all sorts of best practices for programming.




  • This all presumes that OpenAI can get there and further is exclusively in a position to get there.

    Most experts I’ve seen don’t see a logical connection between LLM and AGI. OpenAI has all their eggs in that basket.

    To the extent LLM are useful, OpenAI arguably isn’t even the best at it. Anthropic tends to make it more useful than OpenAI and now Google’s is outperforming it on relatively pointless benchmarks that were the bragging point of OpenAI. They aren’t the best, most useful, or cheapest. The were first, but that first mover advantage hardly matters when you get passed.

    Maybe if they were demonstrating advanced robotics control, but other companies are mostly showing that whole OpenAI remains “just a chatbot”, with more useful usage of their services going through third parties that tend to be LLM agnostic, and increasingly I see people select non OpenAI models as their preference.








  • Note that this outage by itself, based on their chart, was kicking out errors over the span of about 8 hours. This one outage would have almost entirely blown their downtown allowance under 99.9% availability criteria.

    If one big provider actually provided 99.9999%, that would be 30 seconds of all outages over a typical year. Not even long enough for people to generally be sure there was an ‘outage’ as a user. That wouldn’t be bad at all.




  • Well, there only so much in gaming that reasonably can be done server side.

    Sure, the server could identify that a player shouldn’t be visible and not transit that location to a client, addressing seeing through walls, in theory.

    But once a player is hypothetically visible, aimbot can happen. If you are crawling in a ghillie suit in the grass, but the other player has a client that skips rendering grass and replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones…

    Now intrusive anti cheat isn’t worth it, but it is an unavoidable reality that it is up to the client to preserve the integrity.

    Closest you get would be streamed gameplay, where the rendering even is server side. Also not worth it. But even then I could see cheating machine vision and faked controls to get an edge unfairly.



  • Well even with your observation, it could well be losing share to Mac and Linux. The Windows users are more likely to jump ship, and Mac and Linux users tend to stick with the platform more, mainly because it’s not actively working to piss them off. Even if zero jump to Mac or Linux, the share could still shift.

    The upside of ‘just a machine to run a browser’ is that it’s easier than ever to live with Linux desktop, since that nagging application or two that keeps you on Windows has likely moved to browser hosted anyway. Downside of course being that it’s much more likely that app extracts a monthly fee from you instead of ‘just buying it’.

    Currently for work I’m all Linux, precisely because work was forced to buy Office365 anyway, and the web versions work almost as well as the desktop versions for my purposes (I did have to boot Windows because I had to work on a Presentation and the weird ass “master slide” needed to be edited, and for whatever reason that is not allowed on the web). VSCode natively supports linux (well ‘native’, it’s a browser app disguised as a desktop app), but I would generally prefer Kate anyway (except work is now tracking our Github Copilot usage, and so I have to let Copilot throw suggestions at me to discard in VSCode or else get punished for failing to meet stupid objectives).


  • “Agentic” is the buzzword to distinguish “LLM will tell you how to do it” versus “LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right”.

    Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM ‘how-to’ would still be tedious to walk through yourself.

    Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn’t do what I want, I’m no where near the point where I’d trust “Agentic” approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can’t do anything that can’t trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the “jail” placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I’m not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.


  • My career is supporting business Linux users, and to be honest I can see why people might be reluctant to take on the Linux users.

    “Hey, we implemented a standard partition scheme that allocates almost all our space to /usr and /var, your installer using ‘/opt’ doesn’t give us room to work with” versus “Hey, your software went into /usr/local, but clearly the Linux filesystem standard is for such software to go into /opt”. Good news is that Linux is flexible and sometimes you can point out “you can bind mount /opt to whatever you want” but then some of them will counter “that sounds like too much of a hack, change it the way we want”. Now this example by itself is mostly simple enough, make this facet configurable. But rinse and repeat for just an insane amount of possible choices. Another group at my company supports Linux, but just as a whole virtual machine provided by the company, the user doesn’t get to pick the distribution or even access bash on the thing, because they hate the concept of trying to support linux users.

    Extra challenge, supporting an open source project with the Linux community. “I rewrote your database backend to force all reads to be aligned at 16k boundaries because I made a RAID of 4k disks and think 16k alignment would work really well with my storage setup, but ended up cramming up to 16k of garbage into some results and I’m going to complain about the data corruption and you won’t know about my modification until we screen share and you try to trace and see some seeks that don’t make sense”.



  • I think a key difference is that firefox is a eternally evolving codebase that has to do new stuff frequently. It may have been painful but it’s worth it to bite the bullet for the sake of the large volume of ongoing changes.

    For sudo/coreutils, I feel like those projects are more ‘settled’ and unlikely to need a lot of ongoing work, so the risk/benefit analysis cuts a different way.