Clankers and Data Races

A Year from Now, You’ll Be Grateful You Started Today

Truth.

A year from now you'll be glad you started today

Using LLMs at Oxide

Lots of interesting stuff in here:

  • Good for reading
  • And research
  • Not so for writing things intended to be read by humans
  • Great for writing code though!

The revolt of the reader

Some of the things we read on the internet now will have been written by clankers. It’s obvious and obnoxious. Many of us will choose not to read stuff like this.

Voyager and the Art of Graceful Degradation

Really cool how tech from decades ago continues to work to this day albeit in a degraded mode. That’s not the way we build things these days.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Be Reviewing All This Code

I’m a believer in their being value in code review. I think the other tools she talks about here are good too and I’m glad we have them. Not everyone learns in the same way and not every workplace has the same work culture as thoughtworks.

20× the CI traffic without getting slower: How we rebuilt Git serving at Datadog

We don’t have the scale of datadog and the number of builds they run in a day. They self-hosted an internal gitlab instance as a mirror for github and setup relays for scaling git checkouts.

Terence Tao on solving math problems with clankers

In fact, it is now the identification of a promising problem which is the scarce and precious resource. We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.

DuckDB and the changing physics of analytics

Duckdb labs joins amazon. Duckdb is a library for analyzing data. Many datasets don’t need to be map-reduced into submission. They’re perfectly tractable on the computers we have today and only one of them. This starting point is great.

The other thing they did here was to make it a library. Any application can link in their library and suddenly have access to all sorts of data analysis capabilities.

Practices I Abandoned with Agents: An Ode to Test-Driven Development

His workflow is start with a spec, get his clanker to write very high level end-to-end tests for that, and clank until the tests pass. He wasn’t getting the benefit of clanker coding working in a TDD style and likely smaller chunks of behaviour.

Thoughts on the Buildkite Aug 25 incident

  • Multiple services
  • Multiple autoscalers
  • Difference in autoscaling speed for clusters vs services
  • Many starting tasks puts extra pressure on a cluster dns service that doesn’t autoscale

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

The first release of quake as a shareware program that shipped with the whole game release on cd that could be unlocked by a code. Shortly after release a code generator was written to unlock the full game purchase or not.