Im planning a change that will save 20k a month of storage.
I absolutely could come up with the details and implementation by myself, but that would certainly take a lot of back and forth, probably a month or two.
I’m an api user of Claude code, burning through 2k a month. I just this evening planned the whole thing with its help and actually had to stop it from implementing it already. Will do that tomorrow. Probably in one hour or two, with better code than I could ever write alone myself.
Having that level of intelligence at that price is just bollocks. I’m running out of problems to solve. It’s been six months.
In 2020 I became a full time Java developer, coming from a infrastructure role where I kind of dealt with Java code, but always as artifacts I managed in application servers and whatnot.
So when I first started dealing with the actual code, it scared me that the standard json library was basically in maintenance mode for some years back then. The standard unit test framework and lot of other key pieces too.
I interpreted that as “Java is dying”. But 6 years later I understand: they were are feature complete. And fast as hell, and god knows how many corner cases covered. They were in problem-solved, 1-in-a-billion-edge-cases-covered feature complete state.
Not abandoned or neglected, patches are incorpored in days or hours. Just… stable.
All is quiet now, they are used by millions, but remain stable. Not perfect, but their defects dependable by many. Their known bugs now features.
But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript.
There must be something inherently human about changing and rewriting things.
There is indeed change in the Java ecosystem, but people just choose another name and move on. JUnit, the battle tested unit testing framework, had a lot to learn from new ways of doing, like pytest. Instead of perturbing the stableness, they just choose another name, JUnit5 and moved on.
> But it seems that no one truly want that. We want the shiny things. We wrote the same frameworks in Java, then python the go then node the JavaScript the typescript.
I think that people are just afraid that if they use a library in maintenance, they will run into a bug and it'll never get fixed. So they figure it's safer to adopt something undergoing further development, because then if there are issues they will get fixed. And of course, some people have to deal with compliance requirements which force them to only use software which is still updated.
I think there's a huge "it depends" caveat. In the JS world I remember browserify, it did what it was meant to do and it was extendable. A really nice Unix-like minimal software.
The reality is that it was just a small piece in a larger ideal build chain. So for the past 10+ years, we've seen an explosion of more complete build tools that do everything.
Browserify now sits there "finished" and receiving bugfixes. Nobody uses it anymore, even if it popularized npm for the frontend.
I remember we made a switch to redis because java's memcached library was unmaintained. I made I joke that it's just feature-complete and cannot be improved upon, people chuckled, but we still did the switch.
Quite a bit of risk telescoping there...because you had the source code to the memcached library so in the theoretical case you found a bug in mature code (how many times have you seen that?), you weren't SOL. So instead you switched to an entirely new system? If you were trying to minimize risk and cost, you did the opposite unless memcached was doing something else that was a problem.
It wasn't entirely just that, we had to switch to redis for another sub-system and IIRC there some positive implication for cache layer as well. It's been awhile it wasn't just because memcached libary was unmaintained.
Honestly having looked at the memcached clients available for Java recently, I don't think any of the options could be considered feature-complete. None of the main ones support the meta protocol at all, meaning most of the advanced features aren't possible (and these are things that can't be emulated on the client side).
Hell, the main feature I needed (bulk CAS get) didn't even require the meta protocol or recent memcached features - spymemcached just never bothered to implement it. I ended up abandoning the change I was working on, because the upstream never looked at my PR and it wasn't worth forking over (bigco bureaucracy etc).
There are also quite a few legitimate bugs open for years that haven't had so much as a comment from maintainers.
Brazil’s free software initiative in 2000’s was all about technological dependency.
Brazil was hoping to leverage governmental spending to kickstart a national software development industry. Some sort of leap into the future, jumping over first the industrial era and then service-based economy we missed.
It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress, but then America had a very favorable public view as a nurturing and democratic partner. Some sort of older brother guiding you into adulthood.
Currently, at least in my bubble, the public view of America is more like a predator with Trump as a protodictator. Not necessarily true, understand me, just as that older brother view wasn’t. But it’s public perception.
A good part of that disabling of the Brazil initiative was simply free Google workspace for public universities (which were in the government plan).
I suppose that given the existencial threat level of anxiety caused by current developments will probably make Europe government immune to American lobby (at least in the short term), so I suppose this can actually happen.
Let’s see how it develops when they try to ban Microsoft from the universities. That would be the acid test.
> It was killed with fire by huge Microsoft (and American, I suppose) lobbying in congress
Well... the bad quality of the decree itself helped at least as much as Microsoft.
Government organizations often discover it's easier to publish their software in github than to make the publishing agency accept it.
There was no migration plan, and the option that was actually pushed from the central organizations required constant contracts that were about as expensive and hard to manage as the ones with Microsoft, but hiring the government.
At the same time, the same organization that others were supposed to contract was getting delisted worldwide for bad security practices.
It is by the juice of Zig that binaries acquire speed, the allocators acquire ownership, the ownership becomes a warning. It is by typography alone I can now turbopuffer is written in zig.
Let’s be honest. The whole thing is just the prevent Claude from “rm -rf / “.
It’s it someone is trying to avoid the thing talking to the internet or reading your emails, it’s just that it sometimes has the strange itch to change some files outside of the project.
There are thousands like you now. How many does it take to run the economy? What would the rest do.
Think of it like what a tractor did to agricultural work. The fist guy that used a tractor probably thought: this is not replacing me, I’m just much more productive. Well, turns out you only need one guy per farm now.
But now many suburban homeowners also have a little lawn tractor, and lots of people on small acreage have a utility tractor. None of them are farmers, but they get value out of the technology as well. Plus, we're feeding a lot more people for a lot less money than we did before tractors.
Yeah, but we used to employ hundreds of people per farm, or per plantation, to be exact. Thousands maybe to do the sugar cane work, as an example. Replaced by 5 high tech, GPS driven, human on board to supervise, not even to drive, tractors.
So human doing lawn with mechanized tools: efficiency goes though the roof. Still one per home.
Human doing high volume manual labor job where there were much more job than single human could handle: number of humans doing the job now is amount of work divided by amount of work human can handle.
Of course we get ambitious, like Panama Canal building ambitious. But even that can’t absorb the previous admin of people doing that kind of work.
gemini-cli being such a crap tells me that Google is not dogfooding it, because how else would they not have the RL trajectories to get a decent agent?
One thousand people using an agent over a month will generate like 30-60k good examples of tool use and nudge the model into good editing.
The only explanation I have is that Google is actually using something else internally.
Is he? My impression of Clawdbot was it was a good idea but not particularly technically impressive or even well-written. I had all kinds of issues setting it up.
I mean, is it possible that they could run the full-size model on it, but doing so on the smaller amount of hardware that they have is a worse trade-off for now, and it's better to run more of the smaller model so that it can actually provide capacity to people?
I absolutely could come up with the details and implementation by myself, but that would certainly take a lot of back and forth, probably a month or two.
I’m an api user of Claude code, burning through 2k a month. I just this evening planned the whole thing with its help and actually had to stop it from implementing it already. Will do that tomorrow. Probably in one hour or two, with better code than I could ever write alone myself.
Having that level of intelligence at that price is just bollocks. I’m running out of problems to solve. It’s been six months.
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