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don't you then have to keep your IDE config synced across them an open a whole instance for each project? Why even have an OS underneath it at this point?

Sometimes it feels like I'm just being asked to install a real linux distro inside my linux distro so I can actually do things. Here's you nice shiny desktop and app store! Oh you want to do more than browse the web? Better install linux again in a VM.

Maybe i'm just stuck in legacy paradigms, but I kind of like just booting IntelliJ and picking the project i'm on today.

Or sometimes I want to move stuff between projects i'm working on, that's a lot easier if my one IDE instance can hit them all at the same time.

I think ultimately you still have to pay down tech debt eventually. Either through bankruptcy (throwaway the project) or servicing the debt (refactoring, rearchitecting etc).

It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.

I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.

That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.

It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.

mostly i'm trying to get out of the terminal and most IDEs don't understand devbox/distrobox well without lots of finagling.

Sure but that's orthogonal.

Yes you use the right tool for the job.

But if the job requires the best intelligence you can get with an LLM, then you use that.

Taking as an assumption that the quality of your product is a function of the quality of the inference you are using: if you use an inferior model because "what if it gets export controlled again" and your competitors don't, then your competitors are likely to win.

If you don't need frontier models for you job then this is all moot, but the thread started with

You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model

Which is silly. HN likes to roleplay bringing everythgin "business critical" in house because sometimes vendors mess up. Self host, don't use the cloud, run open models locally, built redundant supply chains in case of another covid, etc etc. Sometimes the risk is real, but most of the time the risk is rare and the cost of an interruption event is less than the cost of bringing everything in house or using lower quality vendors "just in case"

beats Claude in our Cyber Benchmarks

Beats which model in Claude? Whenever a "benchmark" doesn't put precise model numbers in their headlines I am immediately skeptical. Either they don't know the difference (bad) or they are benchmarking against weaker models (misleading, also bad).

It's like when studies say "AI is bad at X" and they used GPT-3.5 in current year.

One day, maybe not far from now, a breakthrough will allow huge LLMs (say 200B in size) to run well on an old 5 year old Dell desktop.

But if you have such a breakthrough could you not also apply it and run 200T models on todays datacenters?

The conspiracy version of this is each bad windows release is purposefully extra bad so the next "good" version is perceived as artifically well.

It's a shame too, I feel like the underlying OS has some really good engineering in it, but the layers of cruft and anti-features on top make for a poor overall product.

This follows the standard windows pattern of every release alternating between bad/good.

98 good

ME bad

XP good

Vista bad

7 good

8 bad

10 good

11 bad

When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.

I would wager all of those are distributing malware.

This looks increasingly a good idea.

Why?

Right I get tha. The point I’m making is that from a users perspective it’s functionally very similar. A non deterministic llm or a non deterministic company full of designers and engineers.

Web apps kind of already do that with most companies shipping constant UX redesigns, A/B tests, new features, etc.

For a typical user today’s software isn’t particularly deterministic. Auto updates mean your software is constantly changing under you.

You're strictly correct, but the rules for chess are infamously hard to implement

Come on. Yeah they're not trivial but they've been done numerous times. There's been chess programs for almost as long as there have been computers. Checking legal moves is a _solved problem_.

Detecting valid medical advice is not. The two are not even remotely comparable.

It’s not a questions of being able to reverse. It’s a question of being able to diagnose that one of these changes even was the problem and if so which one.

Seeing ads can still affect you psychologically even if you don't click them.

Also lots of ads prey on people with worse impulse control who bankroll the rest of us who don't click ads. Similar to how casinos are bankrolled by the addicts at the slot machines or many games are bankrolled by the addicts spending all their savings on in game items.

Doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Plus there's something just aesthetically pleasing about an ad-free experience. I started paying for youtube premium to avoid ads and I must say its a much nicer experience.

Awesome!

I find the bus tracking of this app in my city is pretty poor unfortunately. Probably not the apps fault probably an issue of the municipality but still annoying.

That being said, if this app could convince cities to also be used for payment that would be a game changer. Uber for public transit would really remove so much friction from using transit.

Sure I guess, I don't know why UAC gets so much hate while sudo gets so much praise.

UAC is strictly better than sudo IMO.

Does UAC solve security for windows? Of course not, but we were comparing against sudo here.

The main difference is that UAC is automatically triggered by the OS and takes over the whole display making it harder to fake/intercept. It’s trivial to put a fake sudo in someones PATH and steal their password

I'm convinced computers are much better at it, but lawyers suffice.

This is just wrong though. The effect of the law is only what humans determine it to be.

Computers can't be better at it by definition. If a computer claims a law says one thing but a judge/court determines the other, the judge wins because the law is a human system.

Don’t need landing legs/gear on the ship. Saves weight

Maybe if the product is shit, the color of the buttons doesn't matter.

This should really be on a poster in many offices.

They are suggesting that it’s easy to make mistakes when writing the JWT auth code as opposed to just talking to the IdP using TLs

Were there tolls on your trip?

Totally, but most IoT customers are not homelab hobbyists, so I think its defensible for IoT vendors to just hard code known good DNS in their devices instead of relying on broken ISP resolvers.

Related story, there was a period of time where my ISP's resolver that would replace hostnames with no DNS record with their own ad filled garbage page.

So you mistype google.com to foofle.com or something and instead of getting "host not found" you get... ads.

Disgusting behaviour IMO.

Most isp resolvers are shit and broken

If you can get your work done in only a few hours and you are not marked as a low performer and fired something horribly wrong with your job expectations and your management.

I don’t know. Could you imagine if you were in charge of investigating something like this and you _didnt_ check one of the computers involved just because the guy who owned the computer claimed it doesn’t have anything useful on it?

There could be logging bugs in Tor that you were unaware of, or the owner could be using Tor as a cover. It would be negligent _not_ to at least check the device logs for anything useful.

Exceptions are slow in some languages based upon how they are implemented. I'm not convinced that is fundamental to exceptions and rather a choice of how they were implemented. In Java exceptions arn't actually that slow, most of the cost is just allocating the exception object (and allocations in Java are fast).

Exceptions lead a developer to miss errors, or to not handle them in a finegrained manner - e.g. generic "catch all, log error, maybe" style error handling.

I don't see how Go error handling makes people handle things any more explicitly than exceptions. Most people just `if err != nil { return err }`, which to be honest is the _correct_ logic in many cases, and it's pretty easy to forget to check if err and keep on trucking. At least with exceptions if you don't catch it your thread terminates making unhandled exceptions

Exception bubbling means its easier to catch the error at the level that makes sense, and because they are real objects type checking is easier as opposed to the performance of `errors.Is()` which is surprisingly slow.

Go error handling is brutal.

I miss exceptions