Im also wondering how he is able to see calls to AI providers directly in the browser, client side api calls? Thats strange to me. Also how is he able to peer into the rag architectures? I don’t get that, maybe GpT4.1 allows unauthenticated requests? Is there an OAuth setup that allows client side requests to OpenAI?
I hit it quite frequently with a particularly popular eks node instance type in us-east-1 (of course). I’m talking requesting like 5-6 instances, nothing crazy. Honestly, I wonder if ecs or fargate have the same issue.
Respect, sometimes we forget that our software is actually supposed to do stuff. Will say though you can have both, especially now with llms where you don’t have to trim each piece of wood yourself. Also, it’s not always about cutting corners to make a buck, sometimes it really is about creating a great product that people love using. Engineering quality is part of that.
I think dismissing social realities as not being part of that hard, unyielding reality is a mistake. Part of intelligence (maybe a different part) is being able to bend the social fabric to achieve desirable outcomes. The other thing is you don’t always know why people do what they do, the world is a very subjective place. The people at work who don’t call things out, they might just be collecting a paycheck and are happy to not call things out. The poor conservative from Florida, they might actually hate immigrants more than they care about quality healthcare.
My two cents: what you describe mainly applies on the micro level: advancement within peer groups. But if you step back and look at the macro level, accounting for biases, you can sometimes make giant leaps.
Absolutely agree, for the most part. Luckily I think the tide is going out and developers are going to be forced to start actually solving problems in their domain out of necessity.
No more easy money = no more engineering for engineering’s sake, and companies are increasingly becoming more privy to the fact that architecture astronauts are a liability, and cloud is a 95% distractions meant to absorb time energy and money from IT orgs within large companies.
I’ve personally switched out of devops and to a domain aligned software team within my company. I am absolutely fed up with how wasteful and distracting the state of devops is to the actual business.
I'm not sure many successful engineering orgs did much of that but also the environment our creations live in is much different now.
It was a huge task just to get our programs to run at all not very long ago. When I first started coding I was working on some code for a VLSI problem and I spent like a month just figuring out how to get the problem to fit on disk (not main memory, but on disk!). Now there are similar things that run on a laptop [0]. And it's not like I'm unique in having to come up with crazy solutions to problems tangent to the primary problem in this space. [1]
Now the infrastructure for our code is amazing and the machines that execute them abound in resources, especially in the cloud. Now that the yoke has been cast off it makes sense more time is spent on the solution the actual problem you set out to solve in the first place.
I don't know, my own DevOps practises evolve around straightforward shell/go/js snippets that try to enforce the absolute bare reasonable minimum of infrastructure as cheap as possible, but with scaling paths laid bare if needed ever. sometimes a few lambdas/workers+CDN solve problems for essentially zero cost, sometimes people are amazed how far a single VPS can carry them nowadays. Or how fast SQLite can be. DevOps is about the art of shipping value to customers as fast as possible, at scale, with minimum cost (but not being the developer itself usually). With continuous improvement loops. But I can count on a single hand how often I actually needed to "scale up" something so hard I needed full on data migrations and all.
This is a fascinating idea, imagine a company spins up a super complex stack using llms that works, becomes vital. It breaks occasionally, they use a combination of llms, hope and prayer to keep the now vital system up and running. The system hits a limit, say data, code optimization, or number of users, and the llm isn’t able to solve the issue this time. They try to bring in a competent engineer or team of engineers but no one who could fix it is willing to take it on.
It’s horrible but also kind of so good. The bugs are absolutely horrendous, swift is an abomination, the menus are completely impossible to figure out, the builds are wacky. But I’ll be damned, SwiftUI and the build and deploy process for iPhone apps is so straightforward if you can just paddle around the rocks.
They should have created a systems language to replace objective C and an easy language like Python or JavaScript for app dev, instead they created a language that tries to do everything and the result is a mess. For example SwiftUI, UIkit, you’re constantly running up against weird type system errors and compiler errors. Like dude I’m trying to make a list, swift will say “no you can’t make a list there and I’m not sure why”
That stuck out to me as well, physical fitness is super important for so many reasons, one being it is one of the best tools to help improve your mental health.
I think part of really growing up is first recognizing how little you know, humility, and second still acting despite knowing you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, bravery (without bravado)
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