ghoul2

Why not implement it via the ISP? the isp just bills the customer 0.055eur per GB downstream, and remits the tax collected to the govt?

yes, somewhat sarcastic - but the point being, they DID seem to understand the stupidity, and thus the long-way around approach: ISP -> classifies the origin and reports to govt -> then presumably govt sends a tax notice to the origin?

I am a programmer cause thats what clicked in my head at 6-7 years old, with access to a ZX Spectrum and its manual. I didn't know one would eventually make a career of it.

Coding, computers, building whatever shit I wanted: that's the first thing that 'made sense' to me. And remained the only thing. What else am I gonna do?

Touches on a pet peeve re India: Selecting India locale changes ALL numbers to the lakhs/crores style separators (first separator is at the thousands' mark, then subsequent ones are just two decimal digits, not three: "4,567", but then "12,34,567", not "1,234,567")

Now the thing is, this convention is typically used in India for money, and possibly for stuff like population counts (though a lot of companies have converted to the western-style millions/billions seperators even for money) - but not in general for scientific/engineering stuff. One never says 1,23,456 kCal. But theres no way to define this in the locale.

So I end up just being on en-GB instead (en-US has that messed up mm-dd-yy thing, so is a nono).

I do something exactly like what the parent said, and my own view.

The question isn't about figuring out junior or senior. Its about the candidate being able to think thru a problem. They don't even necessarily have to be good at articulating their thought, I just want to see how (and if at all) they are splitting open the problem, walking thru it, figuring it out and then converging on something that (at least to them) feels like a reasonable solution.

If they get stuck, I am happy to help them out, without disrupting them or deviating them. If they go down a wrong rabbit hole, I may ask a leading question that helps them realize the issue and gets them back on track.

The bar isn't being set higher. Its just that there are a LOT of people interviewing (in my experience) unfortunately, who seem to be unable to model problems in their head, model how their code would work (mentally model the execution of the code), and reason things out. They have frequently coasted on blind copy paste from stackoverflow/help/tutorials. A huge fraction.

I also have been coding for a LONG time (older than you), and in the early days, this sort of conversation didn't have to be explicitly asked for, it happened naturally, like in every interview (where I was the one being interviewed) - cause you present me with a problem, and I can't help but be nerd-sniped by it. People who were candidates for tech jobs were there only cause they actually went into it with a bit of love/passion/skill.

But then it became a large industry, and most people who went into it were not 'hackers (problem solvers)' at all. They just liked the great pay. They may even be intelligent, but a lot were not capable as independent code owners. Still useful for basic crud with the right frameworks/etc. So thriving in enterprise applications, java/c# mega-platform/mega-framework domains.

no NFS?

I searched around when ubuntu did that 'unity' switch a LONG time ago, found Mint, and have been on it all this time. The team has repeatedly showed themselves to be calm, sober, sensible decision makers - I still use mint the same way I started. They are not prone to fits of 'redo everything', force this, snappify everything, simplify everything so that nothing can be done. Version to version, things just keep getting better, slightly, improving upon the previous version, without breaking what was working fine.

Linux has been daily driver for ever, I have never, in my 30+ years run windows as my main desktop (went from DOS directly to linux, slackware at that time). I hate things being forced on me, changing out from under - its very disruptive.

Linux Mint - just works. And has been for a long long time. Thanks to a small, brilliant, sensible, stable team.

I expect mainly because the coding models are trained to roleplay that process and don't work as well if they can't pretend to use git

The article doesn't cover this, but, a huge contrast is Torrent Power (Ahmedabad/Surat), which has consistently (over many decades, the ahmedabad power company is actually over 100 yrs old) maintained world-highest levels of electricity supply and service quality, distribution losses, billing efficient. Beating Tokyo, equaling Singapore.

Zero load shedding, on-site within 10 minutes typically in case of fault reports, ALL supply lines underground. Planned maintenance schedules communicated week+ in advance (rare, once every few years).

it was just

  10 PRINT "my first name"

on my zx spectrum, as a 6 year old. did me in. not even a loop. Just seeing that on our color TV (also new at the time, in my country).

I would say ALL of science, not just "much" of it. The difference between math and science is that in science, hard reality is the bottom line. No matter how good your model, how much data you have, what p values you get against simulations - hard reality wins everytime. Thats also why the so called soft "sciences" aren't sciences at all: they are not dealing with hard, objective reality at all.

Math + real world observation -> science

The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider.

In anycase, then they should document it clearly that they have unacceptable insertion latency in india and the free plan is entirely unusable for india. Instead of advertising '10 pops in india!!'

I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai.

I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved.

Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare).

Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan.

Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.

This seems a worsening that seems to have started at Opus 4.8. When I (was forced to) switched from 4.7 to 4.7, I noticed that 4.8 had a very strong bias against viewing tool output or reading files. It ALWAYS wanted to 'grep' things. So for example, it would run the test suite and grep for 'PASS', thus completely missing the 4 tests that FAILed. Its bias is so strong, that it does this despite explicit instructions to the contrary, and continues to do so even after having noticed its own mistake, in the same (claude code) session.

For editing files, it again seems to prefer writing small python scripts, rather than read the file and rewrite it (even small files, like notes). This again causes it to constantly miss duplications, inconsistencies, etc.

And from 4.8 to 5, it doubled down on this. At this point not moderately-long-horizon task is getting done consistently, due to its pigeon-hole view of the workdir.

Anybody else notice this?

if sqldump isn't a backup, what is?

Exactly.

I am now looking at 9 to 10x the app code, for non trivial stuff. And this is not just the usual unit/integration/e2e suites too. Extensive deadcode, field use, code shape tests (ast walking) - god objects, 15-param helpers, wrapper-piled-upon-wrapper, badly named (a skill) functions/methods/objects, path-dependent artifacts, etc. There is no way I could have written all this manually.

It doesn't guarentee high quality OR reliability or readability or maintainability, but does reduce churn and makes me feel a bit more confident about deploying route A work product in prod.

> Lint rules, type errors, commit lint, anything

These are basic: they work for human coders and are typically quick to setup. But gates at this level are far from enough for agentic coding. You need an extensive test suite/e2e suite/benchmark suite. Typically much larger than the code base itself: This is what enables those "i ported bun to rust in a weekend" headlines. Where ever such extensive 'gates', high quality ones, already exist, the agent can do a good job of making things work, cause it can automatically iterate.

But: every hole, every gap in coverage, will be eventually found by the coding agent and 'exploited'. So you need full, extensive coverage.

This suite itself is a LOT of work, much more than what it would be if you only had to worry about human coders. So if YOU are writing the gates yourself, you are going to fall between A and B: you still have a convoluted, unreliable, impossible-to-reason-about prod app, AND it still took you eons to build it cause you spent that time writing the gates. This is no win at all, on either front.

Where gates, extensive ones, help in route A is they can significantly reduce the churn/spinning, fix-x-break-y, to just the parts that are gaps in coverage (which the agent will keep finding at a ridiculous rate). And your work would be to have it ALSO keep filing in those gaps with more tests/etc.

One of the reasons go coding with agents works better than other langs is cause I even include AST based enforcements in my governance suite. Its still route A, but with somewhat more confidence, somewhat less frustration.

The problem, in my experience is:

1. It writes SO MUCH code, in minutes, that theres no way I as a human can review it.

2. I am not very motivated to read/review this code anyway: it was cheaply written, by some _thing_ that is not going to improve from my feedback.

3. If you DO review it conscientiously , it becomes a never ending thing: you keep finding issue upon issue.

4. If you report the issues for fixes, the fixes normally fix that immediate issue, and typically add another parallel path/another option/another 100-odd lines of code, instead of a structural fix.

5. If the code base is large, and if you let AI write a meaningful amount of code in it, its no longer _your_ code. You lose the depth+width of understanding needed to reason thru things mentally, cause you no longer KNOW enough about the code.

6. If you do review seriously, and either fix things yourself, or have the ai/harness fix the issues for you, the rounds of fixes take so long, if you look back you realize it would have been better to just do it yourself in the first place.

My personal opinion there are really only two choices:

A. If you want to build FAST, using an agent, just let the agent write tests, validations, extensively, have it keep running them (it likes to call them gates), and just let it loose. Give up on the idea that its your code, and that you understand it. The bottom line becomes: does it work, and WHEN it breaks in weird ways, just use the agent to find and fix the issue (probably breaking something else in the process).

B. limit AI use for non trivial, prod-quality projects to limited research, very tiny targeted changes, write most of the code yourself still, and review every line. You won't get much speedup, maybe 20-30%, but it will still be YOUR code, and you will still be able to reason about it.

Isn't it an age old maxim: democratic governments should remember to not build tools/give them selves powers that they won't want the opposition to be able to use WHEN they come to power.

I just had claude write me a statusline:

https://gist.github.com/abgoyal/bde7af4ba0ba4d19094361667dac...

Shows the 5h and weekly usage %, when it resets, current model, estimated spend in the session, context used, cwd and project.

Save it in .claude/ and then add a snippet to settings.json:

  "statusLine": {
      "type": "command",
      "command": "bash $HOME/.claude/statusline-command.sh"
    }

India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many 'truly remote' locations.

India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.

There is a hilarious one in the Indian direct tax (Income tax) code right now:

If your (taxable) income is less than 7L (inr), no tax is assessed. If your income is greater than 7L, but upto 12L, tax is assessed, but a tax _rebate_ (a discount on payable tax) is granted for the exact amount of tax owed. This means net tax paid till 12L is zero. But if your income is 12L + 1, this rebate no longer applies, so the entire tax assessed (on the 7L+ income) is now due. This means that a person who earns 12L+1 INR makes ~70K inr less, post-tax, than the person who earns 12L INR.

After complaints, to correct this, they added another layer: If your taxable income is >12L but less than 12L+~70K (the tax thats due), then the maximum tax due is just the amount your income exceeds 12L bye. So you stagnate at the same post-tax salary from 12L to 12L+70K.

Recently, banks where also asked to put their official websites/netbanking on *.bank.in domains. I have wanted that for SO long.

Isn't that exactly what gvisor does?

Its a fantastic project, but seems almost inactive now. I have a tiny PR pending for weeks, even reviewed, but not merged. I have another patch I have not submitted as I want to first navigate the earlier PR to completion. Both were bugs that bit me, and I ended up wasting quite a lot of time trying to find it:

1. go:embed supports "all:<pattern" while tinygo silently ignore it. I ripped my hair out trying to figure out why my files were not showing up in embedfs. PR pending.

2. go allows setting some global vars at the build cli (think build version/tag etc). In the code, one can define a default, and then the value provided (if any) on the cli can override it at build time. Tinygo fails to override the value at build-time, silently, if a default value is provided for the var in code. This PR I have not submitted yet, as its more intrusive.

I hope it picks up steam again soon. I love using go for embedded and CF worker use and tinygo makes both of these use cases much more viable than regular go. Honestly, I hope tinygo can be rolled over into the main go toolchain as "target arch".

Honestly, I am vastly more interested in how they built the model: its not backprop-trained, it was done manually. And how did that bug find its way it?

I hope they next blog about that.

I long time ago, I was operating a "social network" which allowed image uploads. (India local, didn't amount to much as was shutdown.).

Immediately at launch, we started having a huge amount of (image) pron being uploaded into the pages. We put in some rate limits etc, but did not want to put any major restrictions of user signups etc as that would hurt signup figures (important to the ceo!).

We already had some content review people thru a temp agency on site, so we checked with them and they were fine doing this manual filtering of these images for us. All young (early 20s) women. While my team built a quick "dashboard" for them to be able to do this image filtering quickly and conveniently, I had a detailed conversation with them as I was very concerned about having them review this kinda stuff for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Truly nasty stuff.

They were _perfectly_ clear that they had no issues with it, and they told me in so many words to not give it a second thought and to let them get back to work.

It was a surprise, but it was a point of realization: there are much worse things they could be doing. And looking a porn has shock value only the first time. I was under-estimating these women and assuming they were some "snowflakes" who could not deal with something this silly and non-threatening.

Just my own person anec-data.

As a RA-ship student in the US, I still had taxed withheld on my meager grad student "salary", and was required to file a 1040NR-EZ. I obviously did not want to spent 50$ at H&R block, to claim like 200$ back. Fortunately the local library had sessions where you could grab a blank form (the library had boxes full of them), and someone walked a bunch of us (i think there were like 40 in the room), to filling it out. The session mailer had already listed the stuff we were supposed to bring with us at the session. Even if someone forgot, they could leave a place holder and take care of it later.

The session was an hour long, and I was done with my return by the end of the hour. I dropped it off in the mail on my way back from the library and that was the end of it. From the subsequent year onwards, a pre-printed form arrived in the mail with like 90% of the stuff prefilled, and it took like 5 minutes to fill out the rest and drop it in the post box.

I honestly didn't think it could have been any easier - of course, not having taxes withheld from a far-below-minimum wage salary would have been nicer.

When I lived in the US(5 yrs), early 2000s, from my second year onwards, I used to receive a pre-filled 1040NR-EZ with my W2 info already printed/filled-in on it. Typically, I would just add a deduction, and mailed it back. Does that program not exist? Or was it only for NR?