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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Quick google shows that Kanban is a method. Mainlu around picking up things as the come, but also limiting how much can happen at once.

    The project I’m has a team that uses Kanban for the “Maintenance” tasks/development, take what is at the top of the board and do it. Adapt if higher priority things comes around, such as prod bugs. Our developments teams are trying to implement Scrum, where interruptions are to be avoided if possible during sprints. You plan a sprint, try to do that work, and can present it, and iterate when users inevitably changes criteria.

    In the meme, kanban does somewhat make sense, since getting armrests is never going to get a high priority as part of building a rocket. Scrum isn’t exactly right, but I can see where it’s coming from. They are all agile methods though.


  • I kinda get where he is coming for though. AI is being crammed into everything, and especially in things where they are not currently suited to be.

    After learning about Machine learning, you kind realize that unlike “regular programs” that ML gives you “roughly what you want” answers. Approximations really. This is all fine and good for generating images for example, because minor details being off of what you wanted probably isn’t too bad. A chat bot itself isn’t wrong here, because there are many ways to say the same thing. The important thing is that there is a definite step after that where you evaluate the result. In simpler ML you can even figure out the specifics of the process, but for the most part we evaluate what the LLM said or if the image is accurate to our expectations. But we can’t control or constrain the output to exactly our needs, because our restrictions largely are just input in a almost finished approximation engine.

    The problem is, that companies take these approximation engines, put them in their product and consider their output fact. Like Ai chatbots doing customer support, and make up facts like the user that was told about rules that didn’t exist for an airline, or the search engines that parrot jokes or harmful advice. Sure you and I might realize that these things come from a machine that doesn’t actually think about it’s answers, but others don’t. And throwing a “*this might be wrong because its AI” on it is not an acceptable waiver of accountability.

    Despite this, I use chatgpt and gemini a lot to help me program, they get a lot of things wrong but also do great. It’s a great tool, exactly because I step in after the approximation step, review and decide. I’m aware of the limits. But putting these things in front of “users” without a review step means you are advertising that you are either unaware of this flaw, or just see the cost-benefit analysis and see that if noting else it’ll generate interest during the hype.

    There is a huge potential, but throwing AI into a situation where facts are needed when it’s only making rough guesses, is the wrong way about it.










  • Why wait and hope for C++ to get where modern languages are now? I know there’s value in the shared experience in C++ that if adapted would make it stronger, but I can only see a development of C++ having to force a drop of a lot of outdated stuff to even get started on being more suitable.

    But the language is just not comfortable to me. From large amounts of anything creating undefined behavior, the god awful header files which I hate with a passion, tough error messages and such. I also met a fun collision of C++ in Visual Studio and using it with CMake in CLion.

    I’ve just started looking at rust for fun, and outside not understanding all the errors messages with the bounded stuff yet, figuring out what type of string I should use or pass, and the slow climb up the skill curve, it’s pretty nice. Installing stuff is as easy as copy pasting the name into the cargo file!

    Rust is just the prospective replacement of C++ though, people act like the White house said that C++ should be replaced by rust now. But the just recommend it and other languages, C# will do for a lot of people that does not need the performance and detail that the aforementioned languages target. Python is targeting a whole different use, but often combined with the faster ones.

    C++ will live a long time, and if the popularity dies down it will surely be very profitable to be a developer on the critical systems that use it many years from now. I just don’t think an evolution of C++ is going to bring what the world needs, particularly because of the large amount of existing memory related security vulnerabilities. If things were good as they are now, this recommendation would not be made to begin with.



  • Just learning Rust for fun, but decided I wanted to make a simple website. I don’t like web stuff that much, but seen htmx, so I gave that a shot. Found popular actix for the server side, and set out to make a simple blog.

    Making a page is simple, using htmx is also simple. Setting out to create an blog that is all in a single evolving page? Not so much. Either you don’t get the essential back and forward navigation, or you add that but a site refresh will call just the partial endpoint and screw things up. There’s some quite nice work arounds, but at the end result is that sometimes going back will leave me on a blank site in one step.

    I’m probably going to settle for each blog entry being a seperate page if I make the site public. Or just let the small flaws be there, because I hate sites these days being slow. So loading literally only the text/html that’s supposed to change is very cool.

    Next steps is going to remove chances of path traversal and reading literally any file on disk by modifying urls…, some markdown to html crate, and see how image loading works. If I ever get around to any of it.


  • I made do with my IDE, even after getting a developer job. Outside shenanigans involving a committed password, and the occasional empty commit to trigger a build job on GitHub without requiring a new review to be approved, I still don’t use the commandline a lot.

    But it’s true, if you managed to commit and push, you are OK. Even the IDE will make fixing most merges simple.





  • I do think the idea is pretty neat, although it’s pretty close to returning structured data like json.

    A slight disclaimer that these people are smarter than me, and know better about what we are talking about, so I may be wrong here on some assumptions. But I do get a bit of feeling they are trying to solve a trivial problem, at least in their use case. Ultimately there are only so many lecturers, and so many man lectures at a given time. The total data amount wouldn’t be so much, and you can easily group by and sort on client side to achieve the original table which is show on a per lecturer basis. A little redundancy is in my opinion preferred over a query that returns 3 tables that then needs additional complicated work. I also find arguments about overlapping names to not be something the database should be handling, it falls on the data owners/manager instead. Academia is a wild west at times, but either this table is presentation only or a link to lecturer or lecture. And in the latter case, you’ll already throw in the ids so they can be used in an URL to some other site.

    While this can have significant less bandwidth, it also risks falling as soon as more data is introduced, as you’re putting the large join operations on the client when you can get free optimizations from the SQL engine you use. I know not having duplicate data could be a thing for something where I work, where essentially we have hourly breakdowns but fetch at least the entire day for a single set of parameters. So that means 24x data for a surprisingly high amount of columns. When we only need 2 of them on the hourly level! But in this case, the data doesn’t strictly need many joins as it has a lot of the information itself, along with there being too much data to join on the client side anyways for this to feel ideal. I feel you’ll increase the complexity a bit too much as well. A big advantage of sql is how easy it is to understand what you are getting.

    Its somewhat of a solved problem, if the performance becomes a problem, since we can return nested data anyways. So we can already today technically return a row where the hour(I think, never tried a date before) and value columns have arrays instead of a single value. We just haven’t done it because it is not a big enough problem yet.