jiggawatts

> this same rule applies for human engineers as well, one of the reasons why I generally oppose too many layers of abstractions/middleware.

You don't understand! It's job security and a money-printer for contractors.

> What categories of bugs would you say we eliminated going from macro assemblers to compilers?

Entire classes of 'safety' bugs that just don't exist in modern compilers.

E.g.: forgetting to "POP" something you "PUSH"-ed, especially when it was a conditional allocation for a temporary.

Similarly, type errors were much more common, especially signed/unsigned, or accidentally overwriting things in scenarios that just don't occur even with ordinary C code. Function args were easy to push "correctly enough" that it "worked", but not really.

This is my biggest worry, especially since PostgreSQL uses "process per connection" and generally doesn't seem to cache query plans...

> from MSSQL to Postgres

How's that going? Any lessons learnt you'd be willing to share?

Most software used to be written in assembly language. Microsoft DOS was mostly .ASM files, for example.

That era is over, compilers are used for almost all software, eliminating entire categories of bugs.

They must yearn for the before times when text could be in an encoding specified only as: "your guess is as good mine!"

> They should all align to the same direction though.

With the measurement direction, yes, but the other axes are not constrained, and hence measurement along those directions returns unpredictable values.

Similarly, if you squint at B-trees, they are just unrolled linked lists with "skipping".

There is nothing mysterious about this if you simply assume the electron aligns with the measurement direction.

It does this because it necessarily interacts with the measurement apparatus, which in this case is an anisotropic magnetic field!

“Things rotate when they are rotated! News at eleven!”

The vast majority of quantum mechanics has easily explained with ordinary wave mechanics.

Depends on the model. I’ve found Gemini to have the most silver tongue and Anthropic models to be the most harsh critics to the point of hilarity.

I’ve been burning spare weekly quota on fringe-adjacent physics. I often copy-paste the LaTeX format “paper” back and forth for “peer review of a friend’s work”.

Gemini: “Your friend’s insight hits the nail right on the head!”

Opus: “Tell your friend to stop wasting his time now, it’s more kind than to keep indulging him.”

Brutal.

The new Siri is Gemini rebranded, so Apple does sell tokens, they just charge for it as a bundle with the hardware.

Documentation in "plain english", architecture diagrams, comments, and documentation are notorious for being unreliable, out-of-sync, and not as precise a specification as the code itself.

The issue with using "the code as the spec" is that humans can't read 100K lines of code in a day, can't hold the entire ball of unstructured mud in their brains all at once, and generally require hierarchical "structure".

Modern AIs just don't have these issues! Their context windows are big enough to encompass an entire codebase, so they can "see everything", all at once.

Each line of new code they write is compared against every relevant line of code in the original, which they treat as a spec.

My main issue in my experience is that that AIs tended to reproduce the legacy behaviour "bug for bug", which was not my intention.

Similarly, the AIs were hamstrung by external constraints: I typically prefer to leave the DB schema unchanged, which meant the torturous workarounds were needed for design errors in some stored procedures, etc.

The older the code, the bigger the issues with baked-in assumptions about transactions, stateful sessions, data types, string formats, etc.

This trips up AIs just as much as humans. You can't trivially maintain backwards compatibility and modernise the codebase! Those are conflicting goals, no matter what.

The initial support tech is typically outsourced and responds with: “Yes, it is broken… by design.”

Attention means an engineer who can fix the problem, not an off shore phone jockey paid to make you quietly go away.

> frozen middle

That’s the best new term I’ve learned in months!

Reminds me of an incident where I had to go pick up a missed delivery (an expensive photo printer) from the dispatch warehouse because the shipping company couldn’t get a signature after three attempts.

Whatever, I drove down to this set of huge industrial warehouses with trucks coming and going by the dozen and found the customer service office.

“That’ll be half an hour, I recommend waiting at the cafe.”

“Half an hour for what? Aren’t all the packages right here?”

“They are, but looking up the package ID in the system takes at least 30 minutes, maybe 33.”

“33!? Wait… don’t tell me, let me guess: it has been getting slowly and steadily worse over years? Predictably taking longer and longer, right?”

“Yeah, six months ago it was 27 minutes! How did you know?”

“Umm… isn’t this a bit of drag on your operations?”

“Absolutely! Everything takes forever, every shipment is delayed, … <long rant> …”

“I… bet. Why hasn’t anyone fixed it!? It’s a one line fix!”

“No budget!”

This was one of the biggest logistics companies in the country about to undergo a multi-billion-dollar merger.

Their core business software was missing database indexes even on primary key columns!

Madness.

I love Americans making arguments against things like paper ballots or health care on the basis of "it's too expensive for such a large country", as-if these things aren't paid for on a per-capita basis.

Every other country, big or small, can afford to do these things.

(Meanwhile, the voting machines are more expensive!)

Systems and procedure are created by people.

Culture is literally just “how people collectively behave”.

It’s people all the way down!

If you update the artefact without replacing its creator, they’ll just “fix” it to their taste again when you leave.

If Trump can be sent to jail, then any billionaire could be jailed! Can you imagine!? Surely we all agree this is an unacceptable turn of events, right, fellow billionaires?

Realistically, the worst consequence he will ever face is his name being passed over for naming the next generation of aircraft carriers.

No USS Donald J Trump in our future is the best you can look forward to.

You’re wrong: they have our human experiences! They have them second hand, but they do have them.

See: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ade575f-61e0-83ec-95c8-3cee48f338...

A great mental model here is that if you talk to many people, each one has their verbal ticks, their repeated phrases, the preferred idioms, but... you don't notice because you speak to each acquaintance only for a few minutes or hours at most at a week. If you really know someone, since you were both kids, or whatever, then you can often learn their particular style and even mimic it.

If you think of the the frontier AI models as people, there aren't hundreds or thousands of "intelligent human-like machines" that you're speaking to, there are like... two: whatever the best model is made by Open AI or Anthropic right now.

A programmer might be reading (or at least skimming) thousands of pages of text from just one (or at most two or three) models a week, week after week, for months now.

It's like the entire world is talking to two aliens that have stepped of their glittering spaceship. The aliens can hold millions of conversations at once, but they have only two personalities, so... that's what everyone is getting, and everyone has learned to recognise.

What makes things even more obvious is that unlike humans, the models don't "self adjust". On the contrary, they are inherently amnesiacs, and hence don't realise that they're awfully repetitive! A human using the same phrase fifty times in a row will dial it back a notch, but these dials are the weights of the models and are frozen for each released version.

It's the difference between Architects and Draftsmen. We still need the former, but the latter is gone, replaced by Solidworks, AutoCAD, and digital plotters or large-format printers.

In 90s the show Friends, Chandler Bing’s job is “statistical analysis and data reconfiguration” which is likely unfamiliar to you because it is gone!

This was a job to manually collate financial reports into aggregated sums to sent up the hierarchy to the next level up.

This is now a trivial BI query and doesn’t require manual processing by humans.

A bigger shift is that now I only see CEOs or at most CxOs with secretaries. Mobile phones and Outlook calendars have largely wiped out that profession.

Reality is making you question your sanity.

The comments are just accurately describing that new, insane reality.

Before I forget: Sam Altman will need a lock of your hair, a blood sample, and first you will need to breathe into this tube and say “my voice is my passport.”

I assure you this is perfectly formal, and for your… “safety”.

It’s a Swiss Army knife for data!

I just used DuckDB 2.0 last week to compress 7 terabytes of Azure logs (NDJSON) to 2.5% of the original size in Parquet format in under two hours with a medium sized VM!

Those logs were then small enough and efficient enough to run ad-hoc queries in tens of seconds directly from the archive blob storage.

I created a “frozen DuckLake” and sent the signed blob URL to the security analyst.

No need for a server, no need for Splunk!

It’s easy to use, fast, can be plopped anywhere on a network, and it’s free!

If it just had KQL syntax support, it would be perfect…

What I meant by good design is the "core" Azure Resource Manager (ARM) design. It's straightforward and elegant: single "pane of glass", single API surface, but it is extensible and scalable.

> I personally feel the web UI is terrible.

AWS tried to keep these things isolated so there isn't one AWS Console, but dozens, and each regional instance is separate. Every task requires admins to "context switch" at least three or four times.

I much prefer the Azure web UI where everything is a single UI and you can search and filter across regions, subscriptions, and resource types without having to "switch" to a totally different console linked only through SSO.

Here in Australia I have been very pleasantly surprised by our renewable energy build out being far ahead of my jaded expectations.

We’re plopping down enormous grid scale batteries like it’s Sim City.

Electricity in the middle of the day is free!

Azure’s design is elegant and even — dare I say it — beautiful.

Its implementation is clumsy and ugly.

Its documentation is worse.

Its support… isn’t.