Tistel

  Location: Toronto (EST)
  Relocate: Maybe (depends on job/location)
  Technologies: python, ts/js, elixir, SQL, react, Django, nodejs, postgres, AWS, GCP, Terraform
  CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-anderson-53208053/
  email: james.anderson.nb.ca [at] gmail.com 

I have seen code bases that are amazing. I have seen ones that look bad, but work. About a year and half ago I saw my first fairly large scale fully AI generated project and it filled me with dread. It looked like the figma, which is very impressive. But under the hood it was bizarre. It was like those sci-fi movie tropes of teleportation where one of the people teleport and the destination coordinates are wrong and the merge with a tree or rock or whatever. There was so much unused junk that had nothing to do with anything. Ugh. My task to was to figure out why the initial render took so long. (unsurprisingly it was loading all the data then rendering, so with toy dev loads it was fine, in production nightmare and getting worse). So I just got to it and made some progress. But the new grad (who thought I was a dinosaur (might be right)) who made it was working in parallel and reintroducing more slop. So it became this Sisyphean task where I am speeding things up (true dinosaur so measuring things) and they were cutting and pasting and erasing the gains.

I have always found management to be just silly exercise in day full of meetings. I like to make things. I could retrain, but, the salary drop would be very hard. Hope to find one last gig and have enough to retire. I still get that spark of joy when all the tests pass.

I heard on some podcast that there is such a thing as: "Microsoft Excel World Championship" and someone named Diarmuid Early won it last year. I would pay $2.56 to watch an Excel battle between a slop skipper and him. Money is on him. I am team John Henry.

  Location: Canada (EST)
  Remote: yes
  relocate: probably not
  Technologies: python, JS, TS, Elixir, golang, Postgres, CouchDB, Terraform, k8s, React, django (a bunch more, want to be brief)
  Resume: available on request
  email: contact (aT) tisteltech.com

I am not worried about personal atrophy. I am worried about young people who never learn the fundamentals and blindly believe everything the llm say.

I am a Luddite holding on.

1) solving the problem myself is the fun part of the job 2) writing emails or whatever, I want it to be my voice, not some bland average of everything slop 3) I can't sppeell big word because auto-correct does that. I don't want to lose logic and thinking to "auto-think ai™" 4) is the output trustworthy?

For four, imagine some malevolent entity (North Korea or insert whomever you hate) procedurally generates thousands of tutorials (with slight cosmetic variations to trick the crc checks) with unique URLs. The tutorials teach some tricky thing like SSO. The tutorials reference some library (or tricky math heavy function) that has been altered by black hat hackers. The LLM reads all the urls and that affects its output. Then low knowledge "vibe coders" just blindly cut and paste their way to victory. voila, security nightmare.

It doesn't have to be code, it could be insults to political leaders (some emphasized, some excepted). Political policies. LLM lose money so start to sell out to advertisers (you pay, we push your product).

When I am procrastinating on other sites, you see it everywhere. Someone posts something the first comment is "grok explain the post." Its worse than orwellian, they had only the 5-minutes of hate monitoring. People are offloading their thinking to a handful of companies. Also, people apparently really open to the pseudo humans, will those personal private thoughts be resold to make up for cash burn?

I pretty sure I will lose, but, its worth a shot.

I did CS and have been writing code for 20+ years. For the past two years, helping clients adopt LLMs into their business logic. It has lots of good use cases.

But, I can recognize when it makes mistakes due to my years of manual learning and development. If someone uses LLMs through their entire education and life experience, will they be able to spot the errors? Or will they just keep trying different prompts until it works? (and not know why it works)

Its like the auto-correct spell checker. I can't spell lots of words, I can just get close enough to the right spelling until it fixes it for me. I am a bit nervous about having the same handicap with LLMs taking that away from me in: thinking, logic and code.

Fully aware I can be dismissed as a dinosaur.

Is it still Paul Graham/Robert Morris working on it? Skimmed the article but did not see a ref.

need to check out what it adds to CL: http://arclanguage.org/

its a one liner with:

https://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-tools.php

The "solution" stated is hilarious.

Might spawn a new occupation: sniff sommelier!

This might be fun:

Train on java compiled to class files. Then go from class back to java.

Or even:

Train java compiled to class files, and have separate models that train from Clojure to class and Scala to class files. Then see if you can find some crufty (but important) old java project and go: crufty java -> class -> Clojure (or Scala).

If you could do the same with source -> machine instructions, maybe COBAL to C++! or whatever.

I am in Toronto, Canada. I don't have the open to work flag on in LinkedIn. Two years an ago, even with the flag off, would get recruiters reaching out daily (> 20 years experience). Now it's 1 per week. I do get lots of job openings alerts in the area though. Not looking, hoping current company does not blow up (betting heavy on LLMs. Fun demos, no real products yet. Concerned it's an expensive fad) this year. But, feels like something bad is brewing (might just be crazy state of the world).

There is a nice book that goes into detail of his life called: "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution"

Peter Schweizer's great book Blood Money goes into the current state of the art with TikTok (and a bunch of other stuff).

People should check out Google's JAX. Work in a high level language and run anywhere. Nvidia should just be commodity hardware if people avoid vendor lock in.

It will happen someday. Still decades away. No true learning in the current LLMs just plagiarism so far to get better. I work at a place that is trying to use LLM to do a thing. just hired two humans to double check the work. They now do almost all of the work ...

I have tried to use VSCode more, but, the original emacs keyboard movement is burned into muscle memory. VSCode has a keyboard mapping for emacs, but, its does not feel right. At the end of the day, who cares? Its just a tool, whatever works.

I worked at a place that had a half built distributed system that we still needed to use (many bidders buying Ad space from a API based market). one great thing with tramp is that you can tramp into multiple systems simultaneously. So you are editing say files from 5 different systems (tweaking the yaml or whatever) at the same time. You could then start eshells on each of those systems at the same time. It made it really easy to adjust the settings and restart multiple apps really quickly (big screen, 5 files on top, 5 shells on bottom). I always get a kick out of people saying "you use that! you need to switch to editor X it has feature Y!" And me thinking yeah, that feature has been in emacs since before you were born. it is getting a bit crufty in its age though. Its main attraction is for people who like LISP. There a project called lem (IIRC) that is rewriting it in much higher performance Common Lisp.

search for "shane macgowan teeth" for a laugh.

Famous Irish band's singer that was big in the 80-90s. If you have ever been in an Irish themed pub that plays music, you have probably heard one of their songs:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvfcW8XVa2Kj802P4l302Yw

Shane was the lead singer for their heyday and was eventually kicked out of the band due to his drinking while touring. He went solo (pretty good) and the band tried to go on without him (so so). He was a famous wild man whose health has been in decline for many years. Many people were surprised he was still alive! RIP.

a lot has changed and 15 years and also python's traditional slow pace of change is less true (Guido van Rossum liked it that way and the BDFL has moved on).

to just get a refresh of the basics (then search for the rest) the tutorial is pretty good: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html

if you want to get more depth a good book is Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho.

as a 20+ year developer, this is excellent. One of the bigger leaps for me (which the author mentions) was going from toy CS assignment projects where I wrote all the code and knew it inside and out to huge multi year projects with hundreds of developers. It was a giant spaghetti code of math heavy C/C++. I was always surprised it worked at all. You don't even know where to start to add some feature (don't panic!). Some highlights where comments above a particularly tricky function was something like: "do not change this, you think you understand it, but, you don't. move along" and something like: "In Graecia antiqua, pueri tui similes in extremis rupibus remanserant mori." (latin for "In ancient Greece, children like you were left on the edge of cliffs to die.")

I worked in it for 13 years (worked on one of the biggest non shooter games in the world). (this was ten years ago). I moved to new city to work and did so much overtime that when I go back to the same city now it feels strange to me. no familiarity whatsoever. The main problems I experienced were insane hours, low pay (base salary sounds good till you do the back of the envelop calc of pay over time and realize its less than minimum wage. lol.) and business people (who don't play or like games) making decisions that overrode the decisions of people who actually like games. Yahtzee is the only game reporter/reviewer whose name I still remember. I far as I can tell, he was the channel. you could tell he liked games. He will be fine, he has talent.

Dated!? Dated!? You think that is dated looking? Ha! If you want to see dated do an image search for: "Oscar EMR Canada" and you can feast on dated UI. Socialist software forever! Kidding aside, that EMR is used by hundreds of doctors and small hospitals in Canada. Yikes.

The control key is in the right spot for emacs! Bravo on the project. I wish I new hardware better.

Agree. The beauty of lisp dev is that it’s a REPL that maintains state. You can edit the editor while editing. without restarting Write a defun and evaluate and it’s there. All the state persists. Most JS involves restarting the whole app on script change. I don’t use MS VS code because I can’t stand MS (if you know their history … you understand) Maybe they have the same feature now. Don’t know. The WYSIWYG editors are all web based. Maybe make a open source cloud hosted office suite? Google and MS should not have the only offering there.

Looking forward to Michael Lewis’ book about it. Hopefully he can stay objective. Given the heavy hitters he allegedly screwed over (Sequoia VCs etc) I am surprised there is not more legal action. Maybe they would rather not underline how gullible they were.

There is a guy on YouTube, who is a PhD physicist, called Thunderf00t (sp?). He thinks it might be a duck in the Cmd. Frasier (sp?) video. Some species of duck do crazy kamikaze dives into the water. Flapping wings might not show up due to camera shutter speeds. Given wind speed variation at differ altitudes and the relative velocities of the plane and bird it might appear to be going much faster than it is from the birds frame of reference. It’s a much more sane theory. Speed of light and distance between planets and all that. Or it could be the dirty commies messing with the US with some drones.

It’s fun to combine jupyter notebooks and py scraping. If you are working 15 pages/screens deep, you can “stay at the coal face” and not have to rerun the whole script after making a change to the latest step.

I have been using Linux for a little over 20 years. I remarked a the start it did not sleep when it closed. My current laptop is also Linux and it still does not always sleep when I close it. I need to get up to speed on BSD or something.