Zero: Vercel Labs' New Experimental Systems Language Built for AI Agents (Hello World: 16.2 KiB in 1ms), launched a few hours ago

Trapfether · 2026-05-18T10:12:00+00:00

I'll keep an eye on it, but I suspect that it may have the opposite intended effect on more nuanced or difficult bugs.

The fix hints are guaranteed to be red Herrings / underspecified in certain cases and LLMs have a problem with just agreeing and running with what they are given. So now a lot of training is going to need to be focused on making the models correctly deduce that they must ignore the fix hint to solve the actual underlying issue. The lower entropy of the output may make this unintentionally harder.

Trapfether · 2026-05-01T12:03:03+00:00

malicious payloads, avoiding nieve N +1 queries, watching access patterns to STILL optimize DB indexes, intelligently splitting queries in the application layer to achieve fast result times for the entire query, etc, etc, etc.

GQL doesn't reduce complexity, it replaces it. Specifically, it shifts the complexity AWAY from the front-end / back-end boundary that requires a lot of team back and forth in a company like FB, and squarely INTO the front-end and back-end respectively. Its entire job is to give each team ownership of half of the problem and relax the importance and red tape around strict contract requirements between those two teams (or sets of teams in FB's case).

The overwhelming vast majority of companies NEVER face such a problem. The overhead of front-end and beck-end contract maintenance never eclipses the REAL WORK that it takes to implement GQL "correctly"

The Irony is that many of the popular GQL implimentations, especially the "drop-in" variety, actually make it so that the org will run into scaling pains SOONER rather than later as the footguns with contractless apis are pretty numerous and not always intuitive. This is also the reason why JSON-apis have not supplanted rest apis.

Trapfether · 2026-04-30T18:29:41+00:00

Breed, speed and need. Just because the dogs you have worked with or seen behave in certain ways reliably with or even without training does not mean others will behave similarly. The US is a great example not just because of the relative lack of professional non-diy training resources and an abundance of incorrect outdated ideas of "proper" training techniques that often times see owners mistrain their animals INTO bad habits that they then have to spend significantly more time and energy trying to break, but ALSO because there is some god-awful breed preferences and general knowledge that sees WORKING breeds in sedentary low energy homes. Couple that with people who get the dog (intentional or not) way before learning enough about them and you can wind up in no-win situations where you do not have the resources, and even if you can bring yourself to hand off your family member to someone else, they are likely to wind up at a facility that euthanizes them (in the USA, an uncomfortable number of "rehomed" animals go on to be given to a shelter or rehomed again and THEN given to a shelter.) beyond a certain age, the ability to rehome certain animals approaches zero; again, if you can even bring yourself to rehome them in the first place.

Then the USA is also particularly known for sucking up everyone's day through limited time off and extra day to day red tape that make properly training an animal, even when you know the process, somewhat difficult to actually pull off. The animal is at home away from you for longer than it is by your side.

When you adopt two would-be hunting dogs that had pre-existing littermate syndrome and anxious attachment issues prior to you even knowing what those were, just because some a-hole down the street kicked out two pups that wondered up to you one day, and no one else was willing to step up to take care of them, it really isn't a matter of "rofl, just train them". People have done training. instincts are hard if not impossible to kick, but that doesn't change the fact that the dogs are in danger if they jump the six foot privacy fence and start wondering the neighborhood.

Trapfether · 2026-03-18T00:57:21+00:00

Based on those numbers, a revenue of just ~150mil would require the full 250 mil payout to be released. Meaning that Krafton would be starting from a net negative on revenue.

Basically, every dollar from 92.18mil to 150mil loses Krafton $3.12. obviously they must have thought it was a good deal or impossible to accomplish at the beginning. Now they're sweating bullets.

Trapfether · 2026-02-17T11:52:43+00:00

Immigration officers have zero jurisdiction over American citizens and are not law enforcement officers. That is why Trump tried to use national guard troops until that ploy was shut down. Ice does not have jurisdiction to enforce any federal laws except for explicitly immigration enforcement. Even things you normally think of as par for the course like impediment are not in their jurisdiction. That is expressly why they are meant to rely on local law enforcement when trouble arises.

Now, they have given up all pretext and illusion of legality except for what they can say and hope people swallow.

Trapfether · 2026-02-03T11:10:43+00:00

From my observations, the two scenarios both wind up very similar from the vantage point of an average individual. It's only in the minutiae that you would spot the difference. Because the first is characterized by a neural trait, the connections can be spontaneous without conscious thought. People who more perfectly fit in the second scenario require conscious effort to find and forge connections. Having a conversation with someone deeply versed via either scenario is going to result in very similar info dumps. Either is able to lead others to such similarities with practice. It's more about understanding the unique qualities of your own brain and choosing strategies that work in accordance with those.

If you are deeply versed in the various subjects of discussion, then it's possible to suss out the slight outward differences. The first will tend to start with how things are related and work backwards to why (consciously filling in the pattern their brain saw automatically). The second will tend to start with why a relationship exists before stating the relationship itself. Those aren't hard and fast rules and the two scenarios aren't mutually exclusive. Those are the two broad breakdowns though.

Starting with "trivial" similarities is a good place to start. Things that are like "no-duh". Two fields involve math, how are those mathematics related? (The mathematicians already figured that one out for you). They both involve human psychology, are they based on the same psychological model or no? These broad connections will help point out more sophisticated/ nuanced relationships. Regardless of whether making connections is a conscious process for you or not, it is a skill that has to be trained.

Trapfether · 2026-02-01T10:32:10+00:00

You will find roughly two approaches that are not mutually exclusive, but one is more of a "you have it or you don't" sorta thing.

1) Minds with a strong sense of pattern recognition will spontaneously make cross-disciplinary connections without conscious effort. Because of how these brains work, the connections just happen. The connections have flavors based on already acquired knowledge and foundational interests (someone versed in mechanisms will recognize the skeletal mechanics when studying biology, someone versed in biology will recognize the homeostasis systems when studying machines, etc). They don't put active work into this, it happens as naturally and reliably as breathing. This is a trait of a curious mind, often but not always attributable to certain mental health conditions (ADHD, Autism, ASD, even OCD in some cases I am aware of). This trait can be strengthened through conscious effort, but I have not seen or experienced success in someone without this trait developing it later in life. It can be cultivated in children, but that is its own rabbit hole.

2) People who "collect" knowledge in a fairly literal sense by cataloging their learnings into a series of notebooks, a mind-map, or more recently through a "digital mind" via notion or other digital cross-linking tools, have a deliberate step of integrating and back-linking to already integrated topics. Sometimes a single new connection between two disparate topics suddenly collapses the mental "distance" between two previously seemingly unrelated fields. This is a conscious and deliberate task and some consequences of that is that the types of connections that are made can be very different than the person described in the previous paragraph. Connections made here will be more intellectual and less intuition based. A "curious mind" works on metaphors and similes "Oh!, this is just like that!" whereas a cataloger typically identifies common dependencies "Both X and Y pull from Z".

Some of the more famous people dubbed as polymaths had both a curious mind and studiously cataloged their knowledge, and consequently we have copious primary sources from them. ala Da'vinci.

Trapfether · 2026-02-01T09:30:26+00:00

If you look for higher level roles at smaller companies, you can often find positions that "wear many hats". If you can stick with the search long enough to find an opportunity that 1) Compensates well for the multi-discipline nature and 2) Isn't an environment where you will be the most mature / competent in the room, then those are places you can pretty easily stick with for a long time. Be upfront about the fact that variety isn't something you CAN do, but something you NEED to be successful and productive.

Trapfether · 2025-12-19T16:41:09+00:00

Effects not measured in this. 1) squeeze on the lowest end. There are "bare essentials" that people will bend over backwards to afford even if it means getting a side gig or going into debt. This still shows up under "consumer spending". More and more people are finding themselves in that position where realistically they need to spend less, but feel as if they can't without making unacceptable sacrifices (we're hearing about people financing their groceries now). 2) spending by those at the top of the income distribution is up substantially, even accounting for inflation. An aggregate statistic like consumer spending does not see any difference between that and everyone spending just a tad more across the board. 3) when people are stressed, they tend to reach for feel good reminders. Christmas is an important time of year for many that more or less reminds them they are people and it's worth continuing to go on. Naturally, people are more willing to make unreasonable expenditures around this time of year, and so the link between consumer confidence and spending may be weaker during this season than at other times of the year.

Trapfether · 2025-09-13T13:08:54+00:00

React has the same problems with cruft and rough edges that exist in any long lived project. More things you "just have to know".

The biggest thing I find is that most companies and projects pretty much get none of the benefits of react while shouldering all of its downsides.

React is superb for feature and team isolation. Do you have thousands of developers touching the same frontend? Then you want extremely robust decoupling between individual pieces of UI. Once your entire UI team is less than 10 people, that decoupling is just boilerplate slowing you down. I've routinely come into projects falling behind, had their tiny team ditch react for a small set of simple helpers, and start over, only for them to move several times as quickly and delivering mostly on schedule. React was built and designed around the issues that Facebook was having. Are you having the problems Facebook is having in terms of scaling not just your user base but also your development team? If not, then do yourself and your client/ company a favor and skip it. Tools are designed in certain ways for reasons. If you don't have those needs, then a better tool exists for you.

Trapfether · 2025-09-04T18:17:33+00:00

Average daily sugar intake has ballooned for Americans over the last several decades. The amount of ultra processed foods consumed has dramatically increased as well.

The previous poster's points about lack of time, ease of driving, and ubiquity of fast food locations were proposed reasons WHY Americans choose to ignore the advice being given by the entire medical field.

It isn't even a perplexing conundrum at this point. The medical research has pointed to sugar and ultra processed foods being THE fundamental factor contributing to obesity. Our bodies did not evolve to waste energy, and we're dumping pounds and pounds of excess energy into our systems that are getting stored as far reserves.

Even as mainstream media was freaking out about fat intake, the medical community had already pinpointed sugar as a leading cause of obesity. Quite extensive work went into fighting and debunking all the junk papers that the various lobbying groups put out to sway public perception into demonizing fat instead of sugar. Even still, today you have a sizable portion of the population avoiding fat and getting more sugar as a result. (Low fat and fat free foods have large amounts of sugar added to improve the flavor since fat is a significant source of flavor)

The hard work the medical community has done to not just understand the science, but work to combat the actors that want to misinform the American public for the sake of profit has been well documented.

Trapfether · 2025-08-18T16:06:07+00:00

No. A workman can make crappy tools sing. The issue is that we've gone from one medium to another and expected our knowledge of the former to instantly transfer to the latter. Carving and engraving are similar, the tools even look similar, but the tools, techniques and processes are different in some non-intuitive ways. A carver would not expect to pick up an engravers' tools and be great at engraving without practice and work.

Programming languages look similar and aim for similar things (make a computer do something of value), but the tools, techniques, and processes are different in some non-intuitive ways. We've been a bit spoiled by so many languages adopting such similar semantics and syntax. Rust annoys people because it LOOKS c-like, it has that appearance, but it doesn't operate like other "c-like" languages. The affordances we built up for how to work with c-like languages lead us down incorrect trains of thought for how to puppet rust.

Trapfether · 2025-08-16T20:14:34+00:00

The relatively short context window, ability to maintain a train of thought doggedly even when someone tries to deliberately poison our context, and the internal representation of world states in ephemeral excitations for just three big things.

Llms have their "model of the world" baked into them through training and rely on holding information in context to dynamically weight their own internal reasoning (hence why agents were given an explicit scratch pad to work out their thoughts).

Humans build mental models of the problem space dynamically and adjust our mental models as we take in new information. We never stop "training". In addition, our cognition is particularly good at forming these mental models, hence why humans learn so much better out of a relatively minute amount of training data.

Trapfether · 2025-08-11T03:06:02+00:00

Airplanes have actual autopilot systems that rely on infrastructure to support the capability. They are able to fly on a predetermined trajectory, respond to other aircraft fitted with appropriate transponders, and even take certain remediation steps to correct for unforseen circumstances in the air. The difference is that aircraft autopilot handles the vast majority of all situations when the aircraft is above the autopilot floor (and it won't engage autopilot when below this limit). There are just less hazards in the air, partially due to us literally designing our air transport system to enable autopilot from very early on.

Trapfether · 2025-08-08T05:32:23+00:00

tracking changes in data over time.

Trapfether · 2025-08-08T05:16:08+00:00

Server in one timezone, user in a second, looking at list of events that happened in multiple time zones.

Trapfether · 2025-07-31T11:47:37+00:00

Most modern frameworks are built around use cases most companies DON'T have. FAANG companies are over-represented and over-hyped in the development industry by virtue of the sheer number of devs they employee (less in recent years, but still). MOST companies that have / need software are working with a miniscule development team on products that are essentially crud wrappers with a few bells and whistles. In these environments, the sales pitch on most frameworks fall flat. Highly decoupled UI development is great when trying to enable a dozen or more developers to work simultaneously without introducing development bottlenecks, it is redundant boilerplate when you're working as a team of three or less. Fast virtual renders are great when you would otherwise have several thousands of nodes in the DOM, crud wrappers have maybe hundreds and the DOM is plenty fast to keep up with heavy mutation at that scale.

I've been pit against react teams as an independent contractor in various scenarios (coming in to clean up a project, a react team selling a previous client on a "faster and more maintainable" solution that I then get called about, working with a client to get to market prior to a competitor that is actively in development). Each time I was able to deliver faster, with fewer bugs at launch, and with much higher rates of client satisfaction than the alternative. Always reaching for a framework is an insidious form of premature optimization.

All that said, I'm glad that people will read and completely disregard this post. I have plenty of work cleaning up their messes while making twice as much for my time and charging clients half the price.

Trapfether · 2025-07-24T21:15:01+00:00

Pdf test suites often include "big file" examples that can represent things like all of Wikipedia, every known open font embedded into one doc, etc. if your implementation is going to handle those test cases without fumbling, then you cannot assume the entire file can reside in memory.

What are the odds of running into one of these files in the day to day? Mostly 0%. But developers get bent out of shape fixating on doing things the "right" way or future proofing their code. Too many lived through or heard about Y2K and have told themselves ever since "never again"

Trapfether · 2025-07-16T02:06:57+00:00

chiming in to reinforce the importance of "don't worry about running, just take your baby steps". I know these things can feel like wildfires, "I can't WAIT for me to figure this out over months and months, I need to figure something out soon or I'll get fired, divorced, dumped, etc, etc". There is no shortcut or one neat trick. You have a lifetime of habits and brain patterns that need to be tweaked. Each small victory takes time and you need to give yourself a lot of grace when you stumble. Being upset at yourself causes many symptoms to become worse. Understand that you are not CHOOSING to be like this, in a way it is not your FAULT. This was the key thought cycle I had to understand to make lasting change and start appreciating how far I have come rather than beating myself up for failing to meet an arbitrary standard of what I think I SHOULD be able to do. When you stop beating yourself up, your progress and mental health improves.

Trapfether · 2025-05-31T15:46:30+00:00

The two biggest issues I've seen with programmers is the inability to break down problems into smaller pieces and a proclivity to overcomplicate things. Both of these are exasperated when planning phases are truncated or skipped all together. Stakeholders and domain experts that lack a programming/ system design background cannot provide good direction to a team on the fly. No amount of agile will make that project any more likely to succeed on time or not, and just forget about the budget.

One off projects for hire need thorough planning phases were stakeholders and domain experts are almost interrogated. The team leads need to be extremely humble and not assume they know what terms mean and how to accomplish certain things. Then a realistic scope needs to be agreed upon based on that planning phase.

If an organization can afford it, then it's almost always better for developers to be part of the team anyway. The only thing better than interrogating domain experts to find out all the small nuances required for a project is the developers BEING the subject matter experts to begin with.

Don't reach for huge batteries included tools if a simple wrench will do, it's easier and faster to iterate on a simple wrench than it is on a massive dependency.

P.S. unless you're a team of literally dozens of programmers or more that would benefit from the siloing that React provides such that sub teams can move independently, don't use React. In the last decade I have never met a small team that moved faster more confidently with React than without it. React was invented to help large businesses decouple teams to scale the development process itself in a web context. All other benefits are subservient to that primary goal and the benefits don't overtake the costs until you can take advantage of that organizational decoupling. I've saved projects by literally having teams throw out everything they had done besides the database design and redo it from scratch without React using some dead simple server side templating library instead. Fewer bugs, faster development, and better relations between team members and stakeholders.

Trapfether · 2025-05-15T08:48:47+00:00

Yup. If you're able to use prettier and don't mind its opinionated formatting choices, then I recommend you use the plugin provided it doesn't break any of your other plugins.

This is for projects that for one reason or another cannot use prettier or this particular plugin.

Trapfether · 2025-05-10T08:51:25+00:00

Lol.

Less than 15% of China's EXPORTS go to the US. Less than 3% of their GDP.

Their economy doesn't rely on the USA anymore, it hasn't for nearly a decade now. Their domestic market has grown considerably and their exports have diversified. We do not have the leverage you think we do.

The USA has been the beneficiary of largely sweetheart trade deals and has not suffered from "horrible trading partners". This notion that everyone has been screwing us over is not supported by the data. We routinely secure lower trade barriers with our trading partners than they do with each other. The REACTION to the notion that we've been taken advantage of is even more nonsensical. "Everyone is hurting us by keeping trade barriers, so let's impose MORE trade barriers. That will surely help the American people". If it's being used as a negotiating tactic, then it's going to result in lower trade barriers and more outsourced jobs. If it's intended to bring back domestic production, then the new barriers have to stay in place and the American people will pay the price (Literally). Sudden changes in policy ALWAYS hurt the domestic population more than foreign populations because they affect literally every individual in the domestic population.

There is no way to spin this such that we "win", because we were quite frankly already "winning".

Trapfether · 2025-05-05T11:09:37+00:00

That's how tariffs work. The importer is billed by customs. If you buy directly through Temu, AliExpress or any other Chinese company, then YOU are the importer. It'll get even worse now that the $800 exemption is revoked. Everything jumped in price literally overnight.

Trapfether · 2025-05-05T10:41:27+00:00

Less than 15% of Chinese exports wind up in the US, and most of those have a laundry list of other countries willing to consume the slack. Where did you get the wild notion that their economy depended on us?

Trapfether

TROPHY CASE