yoran

Just installed my plug-and-play panel this week in my small garden. 400W so not enough to power all my appliances. But I'm happy that I'm at least a little hedged against the negative geopolitical developments we're going through.

Anthropic support is reserved only for famous devs on X with > 100k followers.

How does an LLM approach to OCR compare to say Azure AI Document Intelligence (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document...) or Google's Vision API (https://cloud.google.com/vision?hl=en)?

It still worked a few years ago but no longer :( (http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/)

I feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.

All these tools seem to be GitHub-centric. Any tips for teams using GitLab to store their repositories?

We use it extensively in our codebase. We started without any types, and added Sorbet later. It's similar to Typescript as that you can gradually sparkle your code with types, building up the typing coverage over time.

I just completed a big refactoring. We have a good suite of tests. But Sorbet has provided an added layer of confidence. Especially when it comes to the treatment of null values. Sorbet will raise an error if you try to call a method on an object that may be null. So it forces you to think through: what should happen if the object is null?

So the tests combined with Sorbet typechecking made that we could just almost blindly deploy refactoring after refactoring, with only a handful of bugs for several 1000s of lines of code changed.

Useful resource!

Seems far-fetched. No one is forcing you to buy an S&P 500 fund. And you could have sold your S&P 500 shares the day Tesla entered the index.

"Every industry that has enough political power to utilise the state will seek to control entry." - George Stigler, Nobel prize winner in Economics, and worked extensively on regulatory capture

This explains why BigTech supports regulation. It distorts the free market by increasing the barriers to entry for new, innovative AI companies.

Agree. I can't stand the coldness of brutalist architecture, it's dystopian. It's disagreeable in summer, let alone on a grey winter day.

For most startups that raise money, tech is hardly a big cost. Most of the money goes towards fueling growth through paid marketing and so on.

We adopted Sorbet for our codebase a couple of months ago, and I couldn't be happier with that choice. Sure, it's not as powerful as Typescript (e.g. no way to specify a union of constants like `type Result = 'ok' | 'error'`), but it's worth it just for the nil-check alone. And it's great for documenting too. It's easy to forget what type a method expects for its parameters.

I remember visiting this underground city a couple of years back, and thinking, what were these people so scared off in the outside world that led them to build this? It's an incredible feat, I think even with today's tools, let alone back in the day. Very intriguing.

Same. They seem to be one of the few airlines that are well run. Maybe cause the founder is still CEO, I don't know.

I also respect their honesty. They tell you "we get you from A to B the cheapest way", no more. Traditional airlines' ads are all about traveling in luxury, which is extremely dishonest considering 99% of their travelers experience a not-far-from-Ryanair level of comfort.

For sure. As the only developer in the team, it saves me a bunch of devops time that I can instead dedicate on the business, while we're trying to get product-market fit.

I'm sure that there are limitations for larger teams or if you have specific requirements. But I think it's a great choice if you're a small team and/or your application is more or less run-of-the-mill from a technical point of view.

What does Render.com do that Heroku doesn't? (seriously asking)

In my current work, which a GraphQL backend API, I've identified only two use cases for unit tests:

- complex pure functions. For instance, I have a street address "cleaner". The input is an unclean street address (weird capitalisation and so forth) and ouputs a clean address. Unit tests are perfect here because they're fast, and it's an isolated piece of logic that has no side-effects (no writing to DB or network request).

- wrappers around third-party libraries. Yes, in theory you're supposed to trust that a library will respect its API unless major version changes etc. In practice, it's not the case. And I'm also lazy and don't want to read all the release notes of all the libraries when doing updates. By wrapping a utility function from a third-party library and unit testing that function, I can have real confidence that the library still works in the way I'm expecting it to work. And it fails loudly when it no longer does.

Outside of these, I only have end-to-end tests that test the whole stack: send a GraphQL query and check that the resulting JSON is what I expect.

I think every solo developer should read "The E-Myth Revisited" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisit...). It describes exactly this problem.

For your business to succeed, you must play each role:

1. The Entrepreneur: a future-focused visionary who pursues opportunities

2. The Manager: a past-focused worrier who plans and organizes

3. The Technician: a present-focused worker who concentrates on the task at hand

Solo developers (also technical startup founders) spend too much time in their Technician role. But you need all 3 for your business to succeed.

Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't California one of the more progressive states with a stronger social safety net than say Arkansas or Alabama? So isn't that counter to your argument?

I don't think many people want to move to Texas, for instance abortion is illegal in the state. I doubt people want to move back to the 1950s, certainly not startup people, who tend to be more progressive. I personally would never want to move to Texas.

It's paradoxical that entrepreneurship is less of a thing in the EU than in the US. After all, Europeans can afford a lot more risk than Americans. There's a strong safety net in the form of social security. Health insurance is not tied to your employer. European university graduates don't start with lives with several $100k in debt, while having gotten an education of similar quality. Maybe the culture is shifting?

Unfortunately that is very impractical. And way too broad of a measure. There are plenty of cloud-based services that have a business model that is based on providing that service and not on selling ads.

I'm an experienced web developer but I'm happy that we chose Webflow for the website of our mobile app. It allows my non-technical colleagues to make basic changes to the website, like copy changes or moving blocks around. But Webflow doesn't abstract away the underlying web technologies (just makes it visual) so it's still easy for me to go in and make more "complicated" changes. It's not a panacea but I think they are striking a nice balance between ease-of-use and extensibility.

I agree. I adopted changesets in my Rails codebase after having used them in Phoenix.

OK, the US doesn't strictly have a two-party system. But in practice it is, at least at the federal level (which dominates the political discussions). Sure, in theory a Libertarian or Green candidate could become president in 2024. But that will never happen, because the media landscape is strongly colored by either the Democrat or Republican party . So they have no incentive to let anyone but from their own party come to power.

I get your point that denoting it a "two-party system" only makes it worse. But I don't know how to bring it up without mentioning it :-)

Yes I believe so.

I think Americans don't give enough attention to the bi-party system as an important cause for the current political divide, and increasingly, civil divide.

My hypothesis is that a two-party system creates the divide because it encourages such a powerful "us vs them" feeling. I've never seen such disdain or hatred towards people on the other side of the political spectrum as in the US. I'm from continental Europe and that divide there is much less present. And I think it's because we have so many different parties, that the "us vs them" feeling isn't so powerful.

Sure, social media and the completely politicized media landscape exacerbate the issue. But I think the root cause is the two-party political system.

Not directly relevant to the discussion, but I'm glad to see some (ex?) KU Leuven people involved in this.

By following a few principles of immutability and purity, React frontends were generally better written, stabler and easier to debug, compared to contemporary alternatives such as Ember or Angular.

I have the exact opposite experience. Our large Ember application is a lot more maintainable, and requires a lot less boilerplate code to get things done, than this React Native app that I'm working on.