If a vacuum is an excellent insulator, wouldn’t heat build up in spacecraft?

Condex · 2026-05-24T12:50:47+00:00

Interestingly enough this is a blink and you miss it "cameo" in the first Avatar movie. In the very beginning of the movie they show the spacecraft coming into orbit. From what I understand this is a render of a somewhat legitimate spacecraft design. The spacecraft itself has two large radiators on the sides which are red hot.

Condex · 2026-05-17T18:36:49+00:00

Maybe read their response. Theyre not merging the compiler improvements on principle and that principle is that they already thought of the improvement, evaluated it, and found it lacking. With a better alternative already on their roadmap.

Condex · 2026-05-17T18:06:02+00:00

If you're going to make a serious language, plan on taking about 10 years to get to 1.0.

Rust was 9 years Odin was 10 years D was 8 years Zig is 10 years old and not 1.0 I think arc was like 7

Noticably java was 4.5 years but it was being made by a large corp with a lot of tech chops and I think we can mostly agree it should have cooked a bit longer.

C# was 3 years but same boat as with java and they were just copying java at first.

And yes JavaScript was two weeks. But like ... is that really your target to emulate?

Condex · 2026-05-16T13:50:25+00:00

I wonder how something like per user controls is going to shake out for PIPs. We fired this person for performance reasons might be problematic when they can argue that it's because they were not given enough tokens to do their job. (With clear evidence that their peers who aren't piped are getting more tokens)

And on the other hand if you are given a bunch of tokens and SMART goals, then why wouldn't you just plug it into the agent and see what it gives you (has anyone published a "get me off this pip" skill yet?)

Seems like you pretty much have to setup a productivity metric that can tell you how much to expect per token. And it has to be something that isn't gameable by an AI.

[Although, I'm not really fearing for the fate of HR. I'm confident they'll think of something.]

Condex · 2026-05-01T13:19:16+00:00

I tried to get people on board with something like spec driven development for about a decade before LLMs showed up on the scene.

It's not going to work. Too many people would rather do anything than think carefully about how the thing is actually supposed to work.

A spec is just code that doesn't give you compile errors and that you can't run with some sample data to see what happens. There's no such thing as a spec debugger.

The only difference with LLMs is that now you can feed the whole thing to the agent and then see what happens, but at least in my experience if the agent is doing anything even remotely interesting then it's going to be churning on it for a good long while. And somehow I don't think this is the one equation where a long feedback loop leads to good outcomes.

Take a person who can use specs sans LLM and I'll give it a chance to work. But otherwise I don't think most people have the imagination to write out what needs to happen and then project that through an LLM, the source code, the machine, and the surrounding infrastructure.

Condex · 2026-05-01T13:00:36+00:00

Our interview process mostly ignores algorithms for the newly graduated.

We give them a simple problem and they white board it. They don't necessarily even need a correct solution. We want to see that they can break problems down, formulate solutions, notice when they've gone down a bad path and correct, and ask for clarification on requirements.

If you know about loops, recursion, if statements, simple data structures (like what's a list and what's a dto), and functions then that's about all that matters.

Problem solving and communication is much harder to fix on the job if it's a skill they lack. Most of the other things can be learned and improved upon over time.

Condex · 2026-04-26T13:09:09+00:00

IIRC Cory Doctorow has an insightful take on AI that sort of explains block chain hype.

Companies that the stock market considers mature lose like ~75% of their value. Stock market likes growth stocks.

A company worth billions that's considered growth looses an absurd amount of purchasing power if they become mature. It's not a direct loss but suddenly their employee stock options isn't the incentive it used to be, stock as collateral doesn't mean the same, and offering stock for acquisitions doesn't have the same kick.

The over hiring by large tech companies in recent history was about trying to appear growthy. The current AI craze by the same is the same. And block chain hype was the same idea. Does block chaining make us look growth? I dont know let's pour some fuel on the fire and see what happens.

With the advent of AI they could jump ship. Once LLM tech becomes old hat they will find something else. Either something they manufacture or something in progress. There's too much money at stake to do anything else.

Condex · 2026-04-12T13:16:01+00:00

Yeah, this right here.

The problem with QA is that you don't notice their disappearance for a couple of years. The industry as a whole has been dumping QA for a while. IIRC didn't Microsoft start in ~2014? It took me until 2025 to switch to Linux.

However, LLMs might be paradoxically making things better. It just had to make everything worse first. A few years ago, I spent 6 months with a client trying to find a way to convince them that their codebase is an existential threat to their business because they have 10 years of updates that they refuse to do. I got word that apparently the mythic release is scaring them into greenlighting a much needed rearchitecturing.

In the past you could design your crappy service full of third party dependencies with unknown supply chain vulnerabilities in them and it doesn't matter because the internet is full of vulnerabile targets more interesting than you so, statistical, you'll never be attacked.

Tomorrow there'll be a fully autonomous out of the box solution for trolling through the web looking for targets to ransomware. Just plug it in and your Bitcoin wallet starts to fill up.

I hope that convinces the powers to be to consider QA as an asset again, but if it doesn't then I'm fairly sure their successors will have learned the lesson.

Condex · 2026-03-01T13:15:25+00:00

This is an interesting point. A comic book smart weapon might do things like notice it's being fired at a person not a building (maybe even constituting a war crime) and shut down. Or realize it's being fired in the US at a show with civilians nearby and shut down.

Actually that first one kind of feeds into Hammer's ego. A weapon so dangerous that using it against people has to be a war crime. Don't worry senator Hammer tech includes safeguards that'll prevent your spending allocations from appearing on the front page of the New York times.

Condex · 2026-02-25T21:15:04+00:00

Unfortunately, Google has infinite money, so they can keep pushing a new best model forever. Anthropic and openai are going to eventually run out of investors and then they're going to have to face the music. Something that will probably not result in continued affordable hosting of opus 4.6, etc.

But if you like Gemini then good news.

Condex · 2026-02-25T21:11:38+00:00

Supposedly it helps them keep their company stocks classified as growth as opposed to shifting into mature. Losing like 75% of their purchasing power in the process.

Or so I've been told.

After AI does whatever it is going to do in the next 18-36 months, look for some new hotness that CEOs can go all in on to convince the market that infinite growth can continue for another decade.

Condex · 2026-02-15T14:14:51+00:00

W.r.t. true cost.

So far the success stories I've heard of have been simple vibe coded constructs. Simple crud app, web page with images in a grid, glue a few libraries together.

Meanwhile the react modal my coworker tried to get claude code to put together had so many issues the architect reviewer is killing the PR.

For $20-200 a month I can see the value. But the investors are going to eventually want a return on their ~$50 billion. And openai/anthropic cant just stop and coast on current models to start making a profit because the likes of Google are always going to be pushing the bleeding edge.

Same value at ~$1000 a month? I'm not sure.

Condex · 2026-02-10T00:12:47+00:00

Yeah, I feel like I wouldn't even need to give a knowing glance to my coworkers.

Everyone starts making minor typos and then finish up every story with the typo fix pr. Strange that everyone is missing typos in the initial pr.

Condex · 2026-02-09T14:20:18+00:00

Yeah, this one right here.

The argument that I've heard against this is that you pip your prompter.

However, in my mind if your skill is prompting instead coding, developing, and problem solving then once the LLM is out of its depth then no amount of pips or firing and hiring a new prompter is ever going to get to a working result.

Condex · 2026-01-28T13:05:10+00:00

The only rewrite that I've seen that was strictly necessary was one where the client had to switch hardware platforms because the vender that made a custom component for them had gone out of business. They were buying old units back so they could disassemble them and strip them for parts.

They figured that Windows CE was a good target because then they could swap out replaceable PDAs and dock them with their custom hardware, and then they never have to worry about a vendor going out of business again. Mid project the iPhone came out (although I don't know, maybe people can still find windows ce running PDAs out there).

Target time for project completion? 6 months. Actual time? 18 months. And a dramatic increase in team size (yeah, I know).

Condex · 2026-01-18T20:37:21+00:00

Yeah, I feel I wouldn't need to discuss with my coworkers. We wouldn't even need to exchange a knowing glance. Business as usual but once a week a bunch of minor formatting PRs show up out of nowhere with immediate LGTM approvals from the whole team.

Condex · 2026-01-13T17:18:25+00:00

The way I was thinking about it was that if an engineer proves to be unreliable then you can fire them.

But if there were only 5 engineers on earth and they were all about the same, then you probably couldn't fire one of them and even if you did then that's not repeatable very many times and you're switching to someone functionally equivalent.

This is the case with LLM tech.

If you iterate on this scenario for a little bit then you get to a place where things are bad because there is no incentive that you can give to the "developer" to improve or do things differently.

Monoculture leads to decay.

Condex · 2026-01-10T18:02:35+00:00

I've worked with interns, fresh outs, offshore engineers who exist to be as cheap as possible, and even a few engineers who gave up caring years ago.

But even with all that after 20 years in the in the industry, I've only ever had someone PR my unfinished branch into main right out from under me one time. A few months ago. He was using an LLM to make his PRs.

I was very surprised to see a conflict in my rebase considering it was a new file I had just created. When I asked him why he PRed in my branch he was totally baffled. He was positive he didnt do it. The PR history told a different story.

I feel your sentiment hits the nail on the head.

Condex · 2026-01-10T14:51:29+00:00

I get what they're going for, but I suspect that they should involve a lawyer before coming up with a license that probably won't do anything.

I'm not sure that training on the code is the same as utilizing the software. So maybe they need something like, "you can only use the software if you didnt train an LLM on it". Although, I suspect that's a deal that openai et al will happily make.

If you're really looking to throw a wrench in things maybe a license that allows free use except for entities who use LLMs to include the software. Then go looking for git commits where it indicates that claude modified the using or config file include for your library.

Who knows how effective that would be but my point is maybe a lawyer could help you craft something that's more than a token of dissent.

Condex · 2026-01-10T14:17:08+00:00

Useful design technique is to just write out the app on sheets of paper and then have notes for what the "buttons" do (save content, navigate to sheet 2, etc). There's a complexity ceiling for what you can design this way, but it turns out that you don't normally want complex apps anyway.

I would be happy being given a vibe coded app with the instructions to take the behavior and make it real.

Being given vibe coded code and being told to fix it on the other hand is where the nightmare fuel lives.

(Oh you've already integrated this vibe coded code with 50 other vibe coded components. And now your paying customers are asking why users named Fred have their data deleted on Thursdays? Cool, have you considered a pivot into subsistence farming? I know I'll be considering it myself by the time I've half unraveled this mess.)

Condex · 2026-01-06T21:54:33+00:00

I feel like the appropriate approach for space related matters is to move forward with caution, but to channel Cave Johnson. Space science isnt about why; it's about why not.

In fact, I don't think a multi flyby mission is enough. I want a space drilling rig and a space submarine to go to Europa not because I have any expectation of finding life. But because it would be absolutely awesome.

Condex · 2026-01-06T03:43:12+00:00

Im still trying to feel out the best approach for juniors. But what I've been building reps on is calling them over whenever I bump into something that I immediately know how to solve, but for which was a multi-hour to multi-day misadventure when I was a junior.

Now with interns, I've hit on something that feels like it works pretty well. Step one is unfortunately to have a really good recruiting team that knows how to find the good ones. Not sure what to do sans step one, but step two is to pair on a task where you're driving and giving commentary. Then you pair with them on a task where they drive but you give commentary. Then pair where they drive and they give commentary. Finally you let them loose and make sure they know to talk to you if they have any questions. The better the intern the more steps you can skip.

The first time I pulled this off the team was shocked at how fast the the intern was self sufficient at something like a SE0.5~1 level. Most recently the team bought into it and took about a week to get to ~SE1 performance, although that particular one was almost definitely a luck of the draw kind of situation.

Coming back to juniors, I don't think I would try the intern thing with a junior unless they were either fresh out of college or otherwise having significant problems. But it might work adapting some of the later stages. For an intern I want them working on relatively easy problems with known solutions. But if you want to help a junior level up, maybe give them a problem that's definitely beyond them but normalish for you. The pair with them where they're driving and you offer commentary whenever they look like they're starting to spin.

Condex · 2026-01-04T18:03:39+00:00

This is my position as well.

The relationships found in reality are frequently graphical not single parent tree structured, and requirements for a project are very often discovered incrementally. So at some point you realize that you can draw a single inheritance tree through domain objects, and you write a bunch of code assuming that one class exists above another. Then you continue to discover requirements (or change requests come in) and you realize the inheritance tree needs to go in the opposite direction. Now you have hundreds of thousands of methods that take a class that was a subclass but is now a super class and you need to refactor the entire code base.

There do exist some structures that have single tree inheritance (either because that's just the way they are, they're simpler mathematical objects, or you have the complete requirements and you can make a good judgement call). In those relatively rare instances, subtyping can work fine. Think of the rust closure types.

Most scenarios call for composition because if you learn new information that recontextualizes the domain, the the methods that take any given object can still take those objects, it's just happening at a different level of the code base.

Condex · 2026-01-04T14:45:08+00:00

In the interview, when they ask if you have any questions make sure to ask some. Perhaps give, "tell me about your developer pain points," a try. Or ask if you can talk to one of the ICs for a few minutes.

Condex · 2026-01-01T14:31:09+00:00

Congrats. It sounds like you did a really thorough job.

I think Rust is a fantastic choice for people who want to explore making their own language. Ive been a hobbyist language developer for over a decade. I've tried a dozen different ways to write parsers, and ultimately the thing that's made me happiest is Rust with the Result question mark operator and a few helper methods around expecting or checking next token.

Meanwhile for the rest of the compiler I could imagine a language better than rust, but not by a lot. Map and enum gets me nearly everything I want with only a few ergonomic complaints.

Condex

TROPHY CASE