• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • This type of argument will never work though because guess what happens to an aborted fetus? They die. They. Die.

    Like the discussion can’t be around “making abortions illegal means women will die” because those who are behind these kinds of laws would just argue the opposite “making abortions legal means children will die” because they consider life to start earlier than others.

    The whole debate is around when a life is considered a life with one side saying it’s at conception and with one side saying it’s after 18 weeks or so.

    (I am pro abortion btw, I am just tired of people thinking they can change anyone’s mind with arguments only convincing the already convinced)


  • You’re more than welcome to link these studies!

    I would say that I had my concerns before Opus 4.5 and my Claude Code usage was on the decline as I only found it to be suitable for very small isolated tasks. I started to think that agentic coding might be further away than we might have thought. The agents needed so much babysitting. And then Opus 4.5 launched on Nov 24th and it has changed the game for me at least. I gave it a try again and so far (about a month in, I didn’t immediately jump onboard) I haven’t caught it doing anything “weird” or “wonky” like previous models do.

    It’s still not the 100x productivity boost all AI companies are talking about though. We are still very much limited by things like code reviews and how people need to understand the changes before they are merged.

    And we are what… 3 years into this era? People are still figuring out how to work with agents. You might still be skeptic but the speed which we are advancing at should be worrying to anyone writing code for a living.






  • Interesting!

    I have gone through my ups and downs. Lately I’ve been more and more convinced. I use Claude Code (Opus 4.5) hooked up to our internal atlassian and google drive mcps. I then ofc have to do a lot of writing (gathering requirements, writing context, etc) but instead of spending two days coding, I’ll spend half a day on this and then kick off a CC agent to carry it out.

    I then do a self review when it’s done and a colleague reviews as well before merge.

    And not for architectural work… Rather for features, fixing tech debt, etc.

    This also has the benefit of jira tickets being 1000x better than in the pre-LLM era.



  • I get the AI hate around art. But it’s quite a naïve (and frankly shows just how little you understand about AI) view to talk about broken AI products because I use AI to write some unit tests for me.

    I won’t go into details but pretty sure you use our product every day without reflecting over whether the code was written with the help of AI or not.

    Art is one thing and I agree. But you make it sound like you’d hate mathematicians who decided to use calculators, or hated programmers who used the first programming languages. Real programs are built with machine code!!



  • I don’t see the bubble popping at all.

    As a software engineer at a big tech org, there’s no way we’ll ever go back to the world before LLMs. It’s just too good to ignore. Does it replace software engineers? No, not all of them, but some. What previously required 70 engineers might now require 60. Five years from now, you might get by on even fewer engineers.

    What could cause the bubble to pop? We’re rolling out AI code at scale, and we’re not seeing an increase in incidents or key metrics going down. Instead, we are shipping more and faster.

    So maybe it’s too expensive? This could be the case, but even so, it’s just a matter of time before the cost goes down or a company figures out a workflow to use tokens more conservatively.





  • You can check out SPIVA which tracks the people like the guy you’re paying to predict the future.

    In all markets the results are consistent. Over a single year a professional has about a 50% chance of beating the average. This probability drops over time and over a 10Y period about 10-14% of professional investors beat the average.

    You paying this professional is essentially the same as you thinking that you are able to identify the top 10-15% professional investors. And maybe you just are that great and we should all follow suit. But I doubt it. It’s your risk to take though. No one is going to force you to choose the cheaper option with the better probability to give the best returns.


  • If you’re not putting your money into index funds you’re just fooling yourselves. You shouldn’t be paying any form of investor to pretend they can see into the future.

    This also means you will be investing heavily in the US. But don’t make the mistake of believing your invested money makes any difference in the world when it comes to ethical responsibility. A company isn’t affected by whether a fund invests or does not invest in them.

    Socially responsible funds are just for show because financial institutions have realised it’s something people will pay for. If you truly want to make the world a better place you reduce your monthly saving amount and donate the money to charities instead.


  • Just saw the other day that the Pixelfed developer pushed out a new feature pretty quickly and it reminded me of how much faster you can push new features out when you’re working on a small team with very few developers.

    Then I realised that… At the place I work at (an app most likely installed on your phone) - well every change will have a huge impact. If 0.05% of the users’ performance is degraded - that’s a shit ton of users. So we have processes in place. We test on all kinds of devices before releasing.

    Running a high quality service at scale is hard and it’s expensive and it’s not always fun because you have to leave your cowboy developer guns at home and do the homework before pushing to production.



  • Yeah, all apps advertise “no algorithms” - well those algorithms are what is pulling users back and back again and the more you get people to open your app - the more likely it is that they’ll contribute something.

    I have to remind myself to open Pixelfed. Which is how I want it to be and how it should be. But I also understand that none of my friends will go there and look at nothing and then check in again a day later.