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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Nope. Because I know I’m going to be a complete purge and I know that no one has uploaded any media, I just nuked the folders after being reasonably certain nothing bad would happen. I think that I’m going to end up writing a periodic proper purge script that is going to directly talk to pict-rs and will be awful for me to do because I know fuck all about docker, so some experimentation will be necessary.



  • That’s a good point. I’ve just been assuming that the media is the issue, but perhaps it’s just the pure database 🤔 Does doing a truncate purge the media? If not, wouldn’t I just be orphaning all these pictures, etc that have been downloaded? Also what about the fallout of your own users? I don’t really want to drop the content that was created on the instance itself



  • Because it’s inescapable. Web development is by far the most common type of programming work and even if you’re a backend developer you tend to have to touch javascript at some point, so everyone knows the pain of javascript’s foot guns and javascript has a lot.

    The fact that it’s mandatory to do your work invokes bitterness in people. For backend, you can kind of switch around until you find a language you like. For frontend, it’s javascript or nothing at all.

    Javascript as a language is very out of sync with other commonly used languages. Its footguns are very easy to run into. As a result you have a lot of rituals around just not shooting yourself in the foot. The rituals, libraries, and frameworks around avoiding Javascript’s foot guns have been very shifting and changing. Of course, because the javascript ecosystem changes far faster than other languages, there are a lot of rakes for developers to step on to add to the naturally existing foot guns.

    Javascript as a language probably shouldn’t be the sole language of the internet for a variety of reasons. It’s a very hateable language because of how easy it is for newbies to make new terrible code and how common it is. Until something like WASM takes off, the downpour of hate for javascript will continue.



  • I feel like this is only true of internal or enterprise software where switching is expensive. For business to consumer, the impact of bugs can cause a company to go under or at least become a zombie. For any type of company, the thread of a competitor is high and can cause your company to stagnant and slowly go under or bleed and rapidly go under.

    There is a real impact to a high amount of bugs, it just doesn’t happen in one quarter. It happens over years and results in higher stress foe the developers. A stagnating company doesn’t hire. It doesn’t give raises and slashes benefits. A lot of terrible things happen before a company goes under. We can watch Twitter speed running this.


  • I wasn’t talking about rewriting an existing system either. I’m talking about adding to a system. In order to do that effectively, you need to understand the system as it stands and consider how any requirement could clash or be impossible with the current set of requirements. This is why I bring up the AI needing to pull a set of requirements from the existing code. You cannot add requirements without knowing the requirements that already exist.

    I think that hallucination is still a massive issue. I don’t even like to call it hallucination because what it really is bad guesses. We should never forget that all any AI does is guess. It doesn’t reason about anything or connect information together. AI will hold contradictory positions because of this.

    Currently we have no way to make an AI declare that it just doesn’t know or even very often ask for more information in order to make a decision because the method of training an AI is literally guess and check.

    For that reason, I don’t think that AI will ever be the tool for the job when it comes to any kind of requirements gathering. I mean I guess you could, but I always run the risk of being like that lawyer who had made up cases in this result. AI made things up because all it does it make its best guess and it doesn’t care I’d that guess is grounded in much of anything at all.


  • I feel like AI would fall down even harder here. A lot of long running applications have “secret” rules in them that developers have as either tribal knowledge or they have to reas the code and see is the case. Will AI be sophisticated enough to read a massive repo probably dependent on several others and have a realistic understanding of the requirements inherent in that code system? Because that’s what we pay senior devs to be good at quickly figuring out. I find myself skeptical that AI will be able to do that in a trustworthy way with how it “hallucinates” now and doesn’t have the concept that it just doesn’t know sometimes. If a developer has to spend time checking the AI’s assertions about the rules, is that actually going to be faster than just keeping them in their mind or doing the research themselves?



  • I don’t think I’ve ever had a working definition of a business rule beyond what feels right intuitively. I’m going to carry this forth with me.

    Perhaps you’ve been reading this with mounting frustration: How about validating the address according to the SMTP spec?

    Indeed, that sounds like something one should do, but turns out to be rarely necessary. As already outlined, users can easily supply a bogus address like [email protected]. It’s valid according to the spec, and so what? How does that information help you?

    I feel like this is the difference between an academic and a professional. One is trying to do it provably right and the other is trying to satisfy a need with limited resources.



  • I don’t believe this will last. AirBnBs are crashing in non-tourist towns because people don’t have money. I firmly believe the remote revolution will push people out from cities and build up small towns so that work that has to be done in a physical location can thrive too. Small towns have the opposite problem of city centers where they have too much housing.

    I picked up a house in one of these areas. It was I’m the 3rd ring of a metro and thus too rural for most. I bought right when the first Starbucks got finished and now they have expensive “luxury” apartments like crazy. I’m pleading with my sister to take a house one more ring out because she has a chance to get a house before they’re too expensive. I got my house for 200K, but it’s worth over double that and it’s only been 2 years crazy.

    To say I’m within an hour’s drive of a big city I rarely go’s because this city was a small town first not a suburb, so it has all you need really and they build responsibility knowing that most of the population has no taste for going more than the next small town over.

    I feel like movement back to these small towns is the future. The internet will let us keep jobs there.




  • Education probably. Back in the day people didn’t have any problem understanding that different forums had different capabilities. When MMOs were in full swing, people didn’t have problems understanding what being on thr popular server during peak hours meant.

    Everyone has just gotten too used to centralization with a lot of money behind it. Eventually people will adjust their expectations. Even if Meta’s fediverse attempt takes off, there are always going to be niche communities that exist outside of those spheres, so if people want that, they’ll have to move.

    The point of the fediverse is having a choice. Some people are going to chose megacorp of the week’s offering and that’s okay as long a little pockets exist for when people get mad at the megacorp. Also federation leaves space for multiple dominant platforms in a way the current system doesn’t.

    In short, eventually some instances are going to be bankrolled either through a robust crowdcourcing effort or through being a company. That’s okay. The purpose of the fediverse is to allow for smaller niche ideas to be able to breathe without having to adhere to one group’s ideals. “If you don’t like it, make your own” is a fair statement now





  • They stopped doing flash sales when refunds were a thing. People could buy a game, see it was 90% later, refund and buy it when it was much cheaper. Or if you a week or two before the sale you could do the same thing, but the lightning deals has the biggest impact for refunds. Steam didn’t stop them, but the game devs just stopped in light of that.

    I know people really like refunds but I miss absolutely ridiculously low priced games. The games used to be so cheap, I couldn’t even care if a game was actually trash. Got it for a dollar who cares.