My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.

I’m skeptical of AI, but I’m finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you’d otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I’d rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying “do this same thing across these 200 other files”, can have pretty good results.

In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.

I don’t trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase… Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.

Let me preface with a fuck microsoft.

Yet you’re praising copilot, and likely using an editor built and maintained by Microsoft (VS Code). I’m confused.

This is also something I mentioned to them, but some people just don’t like facts and logic.

Thanks for the info. I haven’t used BASIC in a very long time and can’t remember much about the syntax. Must be over 20 years ago now. I switched from VB6 to C# when .NET Framework 2.0 was released.

of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses

Did sub calls normally have parentheses in BASIC?

I was arguing with someone on another social media site because they were posting nonsense about EVs being horrible for the environment because all the power comes from coal.

Turns out they live in Houston, where 92% of power generation is renewable. lol.

Even across the whole USA, coal is only 16% of power production. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I don’t think I’ve met any anti vaxxers in California, but I live in a well-educated area, so maybe it’s different in more rural areas. California has some of the strictest vaccination laws for kids in school, with no exemptions allowed.

You could say the same about any social media site really.

The whole point of social media is to communicate with other people. Facebook is the largest one, so if you want to contact a business or person, they’re more likely to be on Facebook than any other site. Probably the main exception are younger people (and companies run by them), where they’re more active on TikTok and Instagram.

Even for companies that have sites, they often get more people contacting them through social media instead of their site. Social media sites tend to have better SEO.

That’s especially the case for younger people as they search Instagram and TikTok more than Google. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2024/03/11/genz-dumping-google-for-tiktok-instagram-as-social-search-wins/ ).

I’m just using regular Firefox at the moment. I briefly tried Floorp but it felt a bit slow.

Well, except at work where we’re forced to use Chrome for security reasons. They rely on Chrome Enterprise as part of their endpoint security solution, which has features like preventing copying from sensitive/confidential work webapps then pasting onto non-work sites, and other features that big companies use.

I completely forgot that Zen is Firefox-based. I’ve been avoiding some of these newer browsers because they’re based on Chromium. I’ll have to try it out!

I’d say 9/10 aren’t doing proper backups given most people don’t actually do DR runs and verify whether they can fully recover from their backups. If you don’t test your backups, you don’t have backups!

Which containers do automatic DB backups? Normally the database is a separate container, unless the app is using SQLite. Is there a MySQL or PostgreSQL container that does automated backups?

Unfortunately that’s the goal of a lot of startups. A startup is considered “successful” if they get acquired by a large company and employees of the startup make a lot of money.

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Where’s the MySQL option? Some of my servers are running MySQL instead of MariaDB because it allowed binding to multiple IP addresses (although I think Maria has implemented this now), and some query plan optimizations were implemented in MySQL but not MariaDB.

You still need to know what database system is being used in order to make backups of the database. You can’t just snapshot or backup the data directory while a database is running, because you might end up with an inconsistent state that won’t restore properly. You need to either stop the DB before doing the backup, or use the relevant DB-specific tools to perform a backup.

You have to meet clients where they are. These days, clients are far less likely to find you if you only have a site with no social media presence.

If only it were that easy. :(

I don’t miss winter

This is one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area - great weather year-round. Summers aren’t too hot, at least in the peninsula (although it did get pretty hot over the past week!), and winters aren’t too cold.