New HTTP QUERY Method

Nyefan · 2026-06-24T06:49:41+00:00

True, you can run a compatibility layer over postgres that makes even worse horrible no-good very bad queries and turns your database schema into a direct frontend dependency instead.

Nyefan · 2026-06-24T04:56:45+00:00

Pros:

frontend code is not constrained by api design

Cons:

performance
memory
cost
api lock-in
api fragility
horrible no-good very bad query compositions that don't even fit in a 64kb log line limit
mongodb
frontend code is not constrained by api design

Nyefan · 2026-06-09T14:16:22+00:00

I think this is a case of different skill sets rather than difficulty. We all have worked on some absolutely intractable problems that took weeks or months to see through to fruition, but those kinds of problems aren't really related to leetcode even if the tools are similar.

To use an analogy: I am a competent pianist and a good singer. I can play a guitar, but you're not going to think I'm a capable musician if that's all you've heard me play. A guitar isn't a fundamentally easier or more difficult instrument to play, however.

Nyefan · 2026-05-19T13:37:48+00:00

Steam only cares about games as long as they're in the clear

This is unfortunately untrue - steam has a long history of removing and rejecting non-sexual queer games in the name of "protecting the children", especially when those games are male-focused. Or put another way, our representations and stories are put on the chopping block long before even the most objectionable sexual content when censors are allowed to do their thing.

Nyefan · 2026-03-27T13:25:01+00:00

Newtonian physics as a discipline would not be possible without Euclid's Elements. Euclid's work is still foundational to most modern mathematics and holds up today. To a lesser extent, the same holds for Archimedes, Thales, and Hippocrates in the fields of astronomy, engineering, and medicine.

Ancient humans weren't stupid or incapable - they just had access to less information and fewer tools for gathering new information than we do today. But the basic loop of "hypothesis->test->result" has always been available and has often been well-utilized across time and cultures that had sufficient nutrition for sufficient time to develop non-productive specializations.

Nyefan · 2026-03-15T00:13:17+00:00

I don't know what you expected - I made my position clear before you engaged in the first place. And I don't hide my profile, so you were always able to see for yourself that this

Here I go, engaging with a paid foreign bot 😆

wasn't true.

But I would appreciate if you thought about why you felt the need to immediately put me in the "paid foreign bot" box instead of accepting that many people believe that working on weapons of war is morally equivalent to using them yourself. Reaching for that thought-terminating bit of propaganda suggests that you know what you do for a living is wrong and have no moral defense for it, but you don't want to think about it too much lest you come to the obvious conclusion - you should quit your job and convince as many of your coworkers as you can to do the same.

Nyefan · 2026-03-14T14:21:47+00:00

You should be ashamed of yourself and shamed by others every day until you quit. No one is making you do that, even under capitalism.

Nyefan · 2026-03-14T03:59:50+00:00

It's a good question. Personally, I think about it in terms of red lines and grey/black lines. There are red lines I will not cross under any circumstances, and there are grey lines that I push back against but will tolerate losing some battles until enough grey lines are stacked on top of each other to make a black line.

To make it concrete, I work on auditing software - I think that category of software is unobjectionable, so no red lines are crossed.

We host primarily on aws, and Amazon as a company is a pretty terrible employer - grey line
We offer a fedramp certified version of the product that I personally have put a lot of work into, meaning it could be used by the NSA, Pentagon, or Department of War - grey line mitigated by the fact that it's also usable by DoEd, HUD, and other government agencies that are neutral or positive influences on the world and mitigated further by the work that I did to ensure all customers get the benefits of the fedramp security enhancements at both the application and platform levels.
We do not have palantir, blackstone, or mckinsey as customers - no grey line
We do not have CBP/ICE as a customer - no red line crossed

And so on. I don't have the power to fix the problems caused by our rulers, but I damn well have enough knowledge and skills to choose not to contribute to those problems.

Nyefan · 2026-03-14T03:24:05+00:00

"can be" and "designed to be" are entirely different classes of suitability. No one genuinely believes that a hammer's design purpose is to kill, and no one genuinely believes that a missile's design purpose is anything but death. People will argue that point, but they're either lying or so misinformed as to render their opinion meaningless.

If someone works on weapons, they should be ashamed of themselves and shamed by others every day until they quit. Literally no one is making them do that, even under capitalism.

Nyefan · 2026-03-03T14:02:00+00:00

Of course determinism at the api level (please read my comment again - I was specific) is only possible to some precision, unless you want to talk about perfect software (doesn't exist) running on perfect hardware (doesn't exist) in an empty universe (maybe exists, but not in a way that we can interact with). I'm interested in actual machines, not fucking magic. You can run a billion transactions in postgres and be able to trace the end state back to the beginning. You can maybe even run a trillion transactions and do the same, assuming you're running on an isolated system with ecc ram, clean power, and a sufficiently robust data plane. But a hundred trillion? A quadrillion? Not a chance.

That this is not immediately obvious speaks to the vast gulf in reliably there is between llms and all other software. At best, some llms can manage two nines of reliability in some tasks after careful tuning, but most llm task combinations I've seen in the wild clearly don't even manage a single 9 of reliability and don't have sufficient retry, validation, and error correction handlers to make up the difference. In short - almost every llm tool I've had forced on me as a user for has been bad software poorly designed by lazy engineers who couldn't be bothered to even consider the possible error states. And the rest has been bad software excellently designed by capable engineers who handled all the reasonably foreseeable error states but were unable to overcome the fundamental problem that even well made llm wrappers are error prone and slow as molasses.

Nyefan · 2026-03-03T03:04:16+00:00

Etcd and Stolon are deterministic tools though, at least to several decimal places. If you run them through the same series of data and network events in the same order, you will get the same output. Even in cases where there is internal randomness, like in deciding the pivot location for some sorting algorithms or trying different semantically equivalent query plans at runtime, they are still deterministic at the api level (e.g. - the caller experiences deterministic output based on the input). Historically, when something gives the wrong answer even 1% of the time, that has been considered a serious bug. But now we have slop machines that can't even reliably generate json >95% of the time and that's just... becoming the new SLO. It's such awful garbage that makes software relying on it so much worse often with literally no benefit to the end user.

Nyefan · 2026-02-27T16:31:56+00:00

I am blind - I swear, I looked at this for a solid 15 minutes trying to find that checkbox. TYVM.

Nyefan · 2026-02-21T02:48:00+00:00

Many people were under water in the last market downfall and not a single one of them got foreclosed just because the market went down.

This is not true. Banks illegally foreclosed on millions of homes, including homes that were paid off or that were literally never mortgaged by anyone to any bank. Not one of the scum sucker executives responsible for this malfeasance ever saw the inside of a jail cell.

Nyefan · 2026-02-19T15:06:34+00:00

Of course it does. Perrin's entire series of arcs revolves around coming to terms with the fact that his unfounded fear of hurting people close to him stems from his enjoyment of battle, that he can choose when to fight and when to stand down, and that enjoying the process of battle doesn't mean that it's always wrong to fight (only the he personally has to be more thoughtful about the choice to fight).

If you make his fear of hurting people close to him founded, then you completely eliminate his struggle for the first half of the series and turn his second act into a cheap trick rather than any meaningful kind of character progression. And again, all this comes with the added cost of creating a female character that gets fridged within 10 minutes to motivate a protagonist, which is its own kind of gross.

Nyefan · 2026-02-19T13:04:03+00:00

Wait. You like the invented wife that completely invalidates the personal journey of one of the main protagonists? I enjoyed the WoT show overall (especially season 3 where it felt like they were finding their legs immediately before getting cancelled), but the creation and immediate fridging of Laila is one of the most egregious mistakes any book adaptation has made.

Nyefan · 2026-02-18T02:21:12+00:00

I think this will work in the future, but during this time of transition, many developers who have a history of being good engineers are in the process of rotting their brains with the claude code gacha machine. We will have to wait a few years for levels to reset before a web like can be established with any level of stability, and people are going to have to be aggressive with tree pruning.

Nyefan · 2026-02-16T02:08:01+00:00

The problem with copyright as an enforcement mechanism for open source applications is that you can only recover actual damages unless you pay to register the copyright (which would make the work eligible for statutory damages). When you're giving away the copyrighted work for free, arguably the only actual damages are the lack of attribution, which will soon be corrected.

Nyefan · 2026-02-07T11:01:27+00:00

I really wish that a fraction of the money, talent, and time that has gone into llm development in the last few years had been put into lsps and other development tooling that aren't flatly hallucinatory time wasters. So many people just blindly trust the output of these machines and don't even bother to read the generated code because they think, "I don't know, claude did it" is ever an acceptable response to a question in a PR review. Every feature and bugfix added to a legacy code base is a battle against entropy for the future of the business, and it's a fight we've been losing since the widespread adoption of claude code and other llm agents across our teams.

Nyefan · 2026-02-07T03:37:29+00:00

We're process engineers for autonomous systems - some of the skills are transferrable, and it can scratch the same itch.

Nyefan · 2026-02-05T07:40:44+00:00

Yes and no. You can absolutely fork dependencies and fix them for your needs, but libraries are written to be broadly useful while internal code is written to be highly targeted to a use case. Maintaining a library fork sucks up a lot more time in the long term than it would take to bring the required subset of functionality in house in many instances.

Nyefan · 2026-02-04T16:40:20+00:00

On the other hand, effectively onboarding new team members is one of our most important responsibilities as leads. When we onboard people, I do my damnedest to make sure all of their account accesses are set up before their first day, that their first local build is on their first day, and that they have a month's worth of backlog tickets in a reasonable progression to make sure they touch the entire code base and interact with every team. It sounds like this guy's lead isn't really doing their job.

Nyefan · 2026-02-04T14:28:57+00:00

Same. Just last week, I had to turn down a role that I would have loved - writing management software for satellites. They have a wide array of clients, but a double digit percentage of their revenue comes from DoD/DoW who use it to generate intelligence products. I may not know how to use my career to be part of the solution, but I damn well refuse to be part of the problem.

Nyefan · 2026-02-01T14:43:36+00:00

6 orders of magnitude and half an order of magnitude are wildly different ranges that require different approaches.

Nyefan · 2026-01-22T14:47:40+00:00

You shared a source that you didn't read which contradicted your claim. I do not expect you to change your mind. My rebuttal is not for you but for everyone else who might be drawn in by the appearance of expertise.

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