kivikakk.ee

Imagining that LLM assistants will help with what is essentially an exercise in theory-building seems deeply mistaken.

  • Creating stable and maintainable software requires knowing the properties of the environments in intimate clarity (envs e.g.: Elixir, the web, AWS as a whole, HTTP in particular, whatever domains you cross), and having a clear theory of the software under development: as a whole, working project; as an implementation of ideas in a certain language or framework or otherwise; as an artefact being worked on over time (vis-à-vis version control, project management, etc.); and so forth with different lenses.
  • LLMs can help with none of these, and actively hinder several aspects.
  • Today’s best approaches only really serve to distance the user from all of these concepts. The work becomes instead “convince the generative model to produce code closest to what I want”, but “closest” is a non-specific property that a generative model will naturally exploit. It will give code a certain way (per its (quite literally) illegally and unethically sourced training data! woo!), and that will then dictate a bit more of the shape of the code you write (or generate) next. There is an entire class of tiny decisions you are repudiating, and difference in craft between the two (and I do mean by craft a proxy for intelligibility, performance, reliability, etc.) is one that will become more and more obvious as time goes.
    • rarely bother to “predict” anything, so this is interesting. Usual assumptions apply: don’t particularly feel it or anything will be true, mostly because always extremely prepared to be disappointed even more. e.g. may well not happen, well-written/reliable software might just cease to exist in the large instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • If typing speed has even been the bottleneck for your programming you are Doing It Wrong. LLM-centric approaches, even in an agentic scenario (or whatever! the model fundamentally hallucinates! in these approaches, they always will. stop falling for the next thing every 6 months, it’s boring!), decentre all of the theory-building aspect and the hands-on experience necessary if you ever again see yourself having to work on this by hand (vs. declaring it write-only, hoping the agent definitely gives you good things to paste in the console when there’s an incident and you can’t understand the data flow yourself!).
  • Where do you honestly see this going? Has there ever been any indication that this isn’t another bubble? Do you not already see the horror stories? I haven’t even mentioned the environmental costs; the ones that threaten to displace all other costs with its effects. Or are you going soft on “global warming” too?
  • X11 vs Wayland
  • Rust in Linux
  • LLMs are/can (not) x
  • Whether trans people are subhuman or not
  • Whether something may or may not properly be called a “renderer”
  • Copyleft is stupid, irrelevant and self-defeating/you’re aiding arms dealers if you use BSD/MIT

I think one of my biggest surprises in going to Estonia was discovering that European wasps are just called wasps there.

1179648

// This is a weird looking number! We really want our first request size to be 1MiB,
// which is a common IO size. But Linux's readahead will try to read an extra 128k on on
// top of a 1MiB read, which we'd have to wait for a second request to service. Because
// FUSE doesn't know the difference between regular reads and readahead reads, it will
// send us a READ request for that 128k, so we'll have to block waiting for it even if
// the application doesn't want it. This is all in the noise for sequential IO, but
// waiting for the readahead hurts random IO. So we add 128k to the first request size
// to avoid the latency hit of the second request.
//
// Note the CRT does not respect this value right now, they always return chunks of part size
// but this is the first window size we prefer.
const INITIAL_READ_WINDOW_SIZE: usize = 1024 * 1024 + 128 * 1024;

github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3/mountpoint-s3-fs/src/s3/config.rs:243-254

estar

by (what feels to me) some huge coincidence, i find myself increasingly actually believing myself to be more “awake” or aware or something than nearly everyone around me — and not in a way that feels obviously generically megalomaniacal or whatever, but in specific, measurable ways. i’m 100% clear that i’m not delusional in the ways i’m finding myself having a by-the-numbers relatively extraordinary belief.

and that would be just the expected ~phenomenology~ of such a delusion, and this too has never failed to occur to me. it just is what it is, and ngl that’s kinda weird.

this post brought to you from subconscious-overthinking while thoroughly learning k8s in my own time, becoming accustomed to feeling mostly disappointment in work time, and a fair bit of meditation in between

Estonians are renowned for their social charm, and for good reason are considered second to none in business. Here follows an exemplar of such, when an order from a motorcycle gear and accessory store was unable to be realised in full.

Email from “Moto24”: Tere! Tänan esitatud tellimuse eest. Oxford Aqua T-50 Roll Bag - Grey/White toode ei ole kahjuks saadaval. Parimate soovidega / Best regards, Moto24

Hello! Thank you for your order. Oxford Aqua T-50 Roll Bag - Grey/White is unfortunately not available. Best regards

I was a little unsure of how to proceed, but figured I could try asking for a different similar item. They all appeared to be in stock on the website.

Tere! Tänan kirja eest. Kas Teil on hoopis see? (link) Kõike head, Amelia

Hello! Thank you for your email. Do you have this one instead? All the best

Hello! Unfortunately also currently out of stock.

Hello! How about this? (link) Best

Hello! Not available.

Hi! Okay! How about (link) ?

Hello! Not available. All the oxford models are not available unfortunately. If website not showing availability then item is not available from warehouses.

Hello, Oh, okay! It’s not clear since the one in the original order (link) shows as “dispatch in 4 days”. How about this one? (link) It says dispatch in 5 days.

Hello! System is not working as expected unfortunately. Link is not active.

Hello, Works for me! Here’s a screenshot: (picture of a bag on their website showing stock). SKU is (sku).

Hello! Thank you. Currently 1pc available from supplier warehouse.

Hello, OK! Can we substitute that for the unavailable bag in the order?

Hello! Yes, will add it to roder.

They did not refund the difference between the original item and the one I requested, but given the level and speed of service I received in lieu, I didn’t even feel like asking for it!

diary entry

it is so simultaneously disembodying and hyperembodying to be in pain

editor!

wip: WYSIWYG editor (just added the little language editor bit to code blocks) which is entirely CommonMark-driven! Behold:

iex(7)> Kv.Content.get_item!(139).body_md |> IO.puts
[debug] QUERY OK source="items" db=0.9ms idle=335.6ms
SELECT i0."id", i0."kind", i0."path", i0."title", i0."metadata", i0."published_at",
i0."published_at_slug", i0."tags", i0."body_md", i0."inserted_at", i0."updated_at",
i0."author_id" FROM "items" AS i0 WHERE (i0."id" = $1) [139]
↳ :elixir.eval_external_handler/3, at: src/elixir.erl:386

* echawwo mi kin, **hereeee**
  * yesssss
  *

```rust
func main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
  // nyonk!
}
```

yeehaw

```plaintext
o//
```
:ok

siguiente

Follow-up to cosas pequeñas:

  • The little blog engine slowly grows more capable. It’s been nice.
  • Decided to turn that homelab server into a gaming PC instead, haha psyche! Instead decided to learn better how to cross-build things and operate k3s without trying to shove everything through a NixOS module.
  • Ketamine infusion probably happening around August.
  • Clonidine effectiveness wore off, increased dose, wore off, increased dose, wore off. Just saw my psychiatrist again and he, like every other specialist, is “drawing a blank”. Going to keep increasing the dose of that/try not to fall over/try not to run out and get hit with rebound hypertension, consult again in 4 weeks. Not feeling super good about this but wcyd
  • Autumn has been lovely, hello winter!